Quality of Life Suggestion: The UI Needs to be Updated.

Discussion in 'Gotham City (General Gameplay)' started by AZPrime, Apr 20, 2018.

  1. AZPrime Active Player

    Hello everyone. It's been about a year since I made my first topic on this forum, where I chronicled several issues the game had at the time. And while some of them were addressed (in particular item limits, bank slots, inventory slots), there are others that are still not as good as they could be.

    This topic in particular is going to cover something that's been an issue for years now: DCUO's UI. That isn't to say the game's UI is terrible per se, but parts of it are slow, outdated and glitched in places. Fixing or updating it would go far in making our time using the broker, checking collections and doing other things faster and easier.


    But first, here's a quick snippet from Wikipedia as to what the UI is supposed to be for:

    Knowing this is important to the following points I will be making.


    The Broker is great for finding things you're looking for. Unfortunately, that's only absolutely true under two conditions; either if you know the exact name - partly or in full - of the item you're looking for, or you get lucky searching through what could amount to hundreds of pages. Take this item for example:

    [IMG]

    Some of you might know what this is, but if you don't know even part of it, it's difficult to find. You might consider putting something like "plant" or "rock" into the search bar, but you won't find this unless you know it's the Living Planet Stalagmite. Likewise, there's this item:

    [IMG]

    It's called the Nectar of the Gods, but nothing about its name actually describes what it looks like.

    To solve the above issue, we should simply be allowed to search by keywords. Either by what the item basically is, or by what theme it belongs to, or maybe from what DLC it comes from. If I put in "table" in the search, it should optimally come back with a list of all the tables on the broker, not just those that have the word "table" in their name. Even just adding the tags used to separate them in the base decoration menu would be a welcome addition.

    The above goes for other items as well, but collections would benefit the most. Being able to put the name of the collection and getting results from all the pieces within it would be a massive improvement.

    And as far as the broker is concerned in general, it's host to a lot of lag-riddled bugs that could be solved by updating the UI that fetches the results. This glitch in particular is fairly common in my experience:

    [IMG]

    Admittedly it doesn't happen every time I use the broker, but when it does happen the only way to fix it is to close the broker and reopen it. It's been happening for years, and from what I could find on the Bug Tracker, it's been reported since 2016 and tracked internally since last year (https://dgcissuetracker.com/browse/DC-2401).


    A different issue the broker has, however, is the inability to rotate items you're looking at vertically:

    [IMG]

    This is a Dynasty Rug. It's easy to find if you put "rug" into the search bar, as it has the word in the name, but it's practically impossible to see what it looks like because we can't pan the camera upwards.


    Now, onto the Collections page:

    [IMG]

    On the surface, it looks neat and organized. Or at least, it was back in early days of the game, when we didn't have 30 episodes of content to collect things from. The main Collections, Gotham and Metropolis sections are fine for the most part, since they haven't really been added to in years. For long time players who've been playing since the beginning though, looking for a specific collection under the Global Collection subsection to check if you're missing something takes a while, mostly because of this:

    [IMG]

    See how small the scroll bar is? Having over one hundred collections tracked in one section makes it difficult to find specific ones players will be looking for. Thankfully the system does highlight the last new collection you've updated, but that doesn't help when checking older collections for missing pieces; it's a slow and annoying process.

    The solution for this would either include a relisting to separate completed collections from incompleted ones, or organizing the collections by the appropriate DLC they drop from. As for the Time Capsule collections, as they are listed here as well, putting them under their own category on the Collections page would go far in helping alleviate the problem.

    On a side note, something like this could also work for some of the Briefing subsections, and especially so for the Headlines as well.


    My final point doesn't have any visual aids, but is important enough to mention: The UI needs synergy across the board. Here's a quick rundown of what I mean:

    - The On Duty menu doesn't list what collections drop from which instance. Something listing what collections can be found, and a link or something that you can click on to take you to that collection to see if you're missing something from it would be very helpful.

    - Likewise, checking a collection in the collections menu should let you highlight and click on the collection piece you want to search for, then instantly put it into the broker search for you, much like how you can search for stuff in your inventory quickly.


    That's all I have to say for now. Thank you for taking the time to read this, and hopefully it doesn't fall on deaf ears.
    • Like x 27
  2. SilkyPawz Bunny

    I have that issue with the Bank sooo many times, it gets annoying. The not being able to rotate I really miss from the base item tab we use to have before artifacts was the only way I could rotate or preview items.

    I am always helping league mates find or location collections that is a great idea :D
    • Like x 4
  3. velvetsanity Loyal Player

    I’d definitely consider fixing these issues to be a major QoL improvement.
    • Like x 6
  4. Heywiar Committed Player

    I have to agree. This game has the glitchiest and most inconvenient UI I have experienced.
    • Like x 4
  5. velvetsanity Loyal Player

    I know some people probably hope for a complete overhaul, but as for me personally, I’d be happy with just these bugs getting fixed :)
  6. LadyLightning Issue Tracker Volunteer

    Yes, yes, yes and yes.

    And everytime I remember the video about the UI revamp that probably will never come :(
    • Like x 2
  7. SheerFaith Committed Player

    So the UI has the same quality as the game itself?
    • Like x 1
  8. 1 ncmike Dedicated Player

    They had planned to redo the UI and the auction house too if you go on YouTube you can find the video's showing what they planned but they stopped working on them so I doubt it will ever get an upgrade.
  9. Knarlydude Loyal Player

    :)
    ingame looking up feats


    [IMG]
    • Like x 1
  10. AZPrime Active Player

    While a brand new UI would be nice, it's likely they may not have the spare manpower to completely redo the system all at once. Maybe in the future if they work on it on the side or something. The changes I proposed in the post above are minimal at best, and hopefully within the scope of a quick side project or something for them.


    I assume you mean this one?



    I posted it once before in my original QoL thread last year. It's very nice, and has lots of different things that would make vast improvements for everything, but as far as I can tell it was under development while the game was under SOE. Granted I think the team at Daybreak is more or less (if not outright) the same, and I'm sure they probably still have the data from back then and could theoretically go back and finish developing it, but I'd still just be happy with them making the small changes I mentioned in this thread.
    • Like x 6
  11. majosea Dedicated Player


    yes we all want this ui .
    no more ps3 , so there is no reason not to push for it
    got to drawn new players into the game. cant do that if the looks outdated
    • Like x 2
  12. Proxystar #Perception

    I fully support this.

    The game needs a new ui the current one compared to other mmos can only be described as utterly archaic.
    • Like x 4
  13. Knarlydude Loyal Player

    It never hurts to try & have someone look into it.
    Maybe this is part of what was scrapped when looking for room to make the 3 new powers mentioned at SOE 2015.
  14. AZPrime Active Player

    That might be a bit strongly worded, but it's true. If there's any part of the game that feels like it's showing its age, it's the UI.


    Is that true? I haven't heard much about scrapping stuff in order to make room for more powers back then. At least, nothing system related like this.
  15. FoolsFire Devoted Player

    The main issue with the current UI is that it's hard coded. A good example to explain this is the Apple iOS phone interface.

    Originally it was all bitmapped. When they decided to come out with the iPad they had to change the size of everything. This meant two sets of artwork.

    The workaround was to change things to vector based. This way things would automatically scale.

    I believe this is what they were trying to do with the new UI. Make it so it would be more flexible and easily expandable.

    With what I've seen so far, I think it's less about. 'Let's finish it" and more, "Let's make sure we've covered all the bases so we don't have to do a complete overhaul again."
  16. useless Well-Known Player

    yes,just fixing these bugs mentioned would be a great Quality of Life improvement but for now i can live with that although it pisses me off some times (especially not able to see the name of missing collection on PS4)....
    what really would make me happy is a list of feats to be attached to on duty instance description....
    like i choose on duty League of Assassins and in description of alert along with loot and catalyst you get it has a list of feats associated with that instance and green if done...would really like that
  17. Tilz Loyal Player

    NEW UI! NEW UI! NEW UI! NEW UI! NEW UI!

    And yes.. those changes would be a good solution until the new ui.
    It makes me said thinkin about the UI :(
  18. Dwild50 Well-Known Player

    It would be nice to be able to see what a floor based item actually looked like. After buying certain rugs I thought would be nice only to find out they were totally unsuited to my base I started to habitually look them up on the internet before I bought them. At least you can get something more than a horizontal line view. (Shades of "Flatland") I also noticed that you get the same horizontal look on the Snow mounds and broken rock or such ...Vendor has a white line but when you drop it in your base you actually have a pile of snow or rubble.
  19. Jade Rebel Dedicated Player

    I agree with these. Also be nice to also do the R&D table. Idk if PS has it like PC, but selecting a item, hit create, go back to item, select create and keep repeating that back and forward kills. Be nice to select the item once and hit create the amount we can create that selected item
  20. Carp Developer

    Hello everyone,

    There are some good points and several good ideas in this thread. Some are easier than others to implement, however. As I get some time, I'll try to chip away at some of the smaller issues, and for the bigger things, we'll have to put them on the list to work on when I have a big chunk of time to devote to it.

    In the meantime, I'll mention that I just added the ability to rotate Base Items up and down (the pitch) in the broker preview window (so you can see the tops of rugs and stuff). It's still got to go through the pipe, but I expect that to be out with GU 83.

    Thanks again for taking the time to make these suggestions, everybody!
    • Like x 31