*Player Suggestion*..->..*Developer Community Request? (UI's)

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Sokon, Jan 20, 2022.

  1. Sokon Augur

    *Suggestion/Suggested*(announcement from the Devs/GMS): "We are hosting a community event for the coming months: Submit Your UI's!"

    Hero Forge and player studio and designing items for the marketplace that were open source from the entire Everquest community was a pretty interesting idea and activity for some.

    Was having a conversation with someone the other day about Everquest being fun, back in the day, really a good time, lowering playerbase over time but obviously the best game ever made.

    What is the problem? Why isn't as popular as it should be, we discussed many things and the person I was talking to had many ideas and thoughts about that is how it is...

    But, you know. For someone, anyone new, that ever tries this game for the first place, just logs in for the first time ever...

    The second they take a look at their screen.... and see the UI, it is going to look more complicated and unlike any video game they have ever looked at, especially if they aren't in their 30's, 40's or 50's

    How much time it takes to set it up. OMG I played for years, got a new computer, lost my UI, OMGZ!!! I gotta spend 3 hours to set one up again! <- I've heard dozens of people say that type of thing over the years.

    Well, what if the management collected a large set of in game designed UI's nothing from another source or website, just something using the base in game functions?

    If a large set of them were collected, so many character classes, so many different respolutions and if you like playing non-windowed or change something like that, it completely jumbles all your boxes...

    What if over time the management collected a large data set of UI's from the community? For all classes and of popular/common resolutions that most monitors have..

    So when any new player first logged in... They atleast had something that look halfway decent?

    They could even have a competition and name those UI's that could all be selected in game or on character creation or included in downloads as far as the layout of what your screen looks like.

    The files could be named after the players that submitted them, it could be a cool community event.

    But, most importantly.... When a new person looks at their screen for the first time after one of us gets a new person to play... through word-of-mouth advertising, which would be free for the company recruitment wise.

    Atleast, that new person wouldn't quit or never log in a second time, nearly instantaneously based on what they are looking at...

    If you collected a very, very large set, asking the community to send in UI's with common spells, UI's for all classes, frequent resolutions AND

    Level? 85, 90, 95, 100, 105, 110, 115, 120...

    If you have any character at these levels with a UI you like! Submit it!

    If they did that... well...

    A new player: They might be able to easily hop into playing this game and having fun. And our word-of-mouth advertising would be worth OUR time.

    Just an idea!

    Thanks for your time.
    Ulrin likes this.
  2. Sokon Augur

    I've seen a lot of threads over the years about showing your UI's and just sharing photos on the forums.

    But what if the game collected files from many of us for many possible combinations, and incorporated the layout of how the screen looked, so all new players had a good base to start with, as soon as they logged in, and could select it in game, all in game functions, without needing to be directed by someone to download a file then where to put it, etc etc etc

    Mine's aesthetically pleasing to me and I sat down for about 8 hours one day over a decade ago making it look this way with just in game commands but what if there were several styles for every class and maybe even each level if the collected an open source set of the files from the Everquest community?

    I'd definitely submit my file into the competition for it! And it wouldn't be hard for me to spend an hour of my time changing all my hotkeys down to stuff every previous 5 levels and submitting them as well going back 20 or so levels...

    Maybe you like the way mine looks, maybe you don't! Who cares! Let's get 3 for every class allocated to the games basic downloaded and included files!

    We can do it!

    Mine... if you were curious. Only in game functionality....

    [IMG]

    Looks like the uploading I used cut off the bottom off several! pixels from the bottom of it, but you get the picture

    Many many many many or for some new players....EVERY video game they have ever seen, atleast has something good to look at when they first see it. Maybe interesting to look at... but Everquest's? If you can imagine what people think about it now, not from 20 years ago... well

    It doesn't initially look interesting, nice, pleasant or even cool at the first look.... by anyone.

    Cause we got UI 2.0 now. I made my own personal version of the first UI where everything is off the viewing screen with the /viewport command... that was my look I was going after so nearly all my ui boxes are actualy off of my viewing screen, never overlapping nearly anything i ever look at or want to click on except for the HoTT window and the two hotbars at my feet

    Everything else is on top of black space.

    Many players I have talked to about that over they years.... Don't even know what I am talking about...

    Anyways. I'm sure there are many many many UI setups out there given the player base as a whole. We've only had how many years to work on them in game since UI 2.0 was rolled out?

    Quite a few. But what about those new players... what will they think... when they first look at their screen???

    Well... I've heard what some of them think over the years and it's nothing good. The above comments, writeup and discussion was about a problem, and a proposed solution. I hope I explained it well enough, and I hope you all think it is a good idea!

    Because I know it is :) Cheers! lol
    Scornfire likes this.
  3. Windance Augur

    You have some good points.

    The other thing that would be nice ... advertising.
  4. Jumbur Improved Familiar

    IF they end up asking for suggestions for UI setups, then you shouldn't limit those suggestions to what is possible now!
    Go waaay beyond that!

    Now is the time to submit "mockups" and "prototypes" of previously impossible UI's.
    We have this single chance of innovation, don't just post your "current UI".

    Only the imagination is the limit, when it comes to brainstorming. :)
    Treage_Imminent and Khat_Nip like this.
  5. Treage_Imminent Elder

    I agree with Jumbur. I hope they make an entirely new UI, from the ground up, that reflects the standards players have from this century. The user interface is a key component in every game, and this one has been neglected for far too long.

    I also hope that they spend the small amount of time to make the default UI look good in all supported resolutions. Currently the elements are haphazardly thrown on the screen. They should've had an intern, or player volunteer, spend a couple of hours fixing this easy to resolve issue over a decade ago.
  6. Nennius Curmudgeon

    And allow us to junk it and use what we like.
  7. I_Love_My_Bandwidth Mercslayer

    Minimalize, minimalize - I should not need 17 windows to play the game. Give me layers and the power to decide what to display and when. Am I tradeskilling? My UI should adjust accordingly. Am I raiding? Again, my UI should adjust. Am I grouping? Grinding? Questing? My UI should allow me to see precisely what I need at the press of a button.
  8. I_Love_My_Bandwidth Mercslayer

    The nature of the current UI is what predicates the need to junk it. As long as the new UI is customizable, there should be no need to junk it.
    Treage_Imminent and Coagagin like this.
  9. Coagagin Guild house cat

    From the desk of Captain Obvious,

    JChen has brought this up and been quite verbal about trying to find an EQ player with solid UI expertise. Problem is good UI people are in high demand.
    CrazyLarth likes this.
  10. Angahran Augur

    1. No frilly window borders!
    2. Ability to 'snap' windows to each other.
    3. Nothing hardcoded to specific windows.
    Jumbur likes this.
  11. Smokezz The Bane Crew

    The ability to use multiple monitors would be nice. Have the raid window sitting on the second monitor, map on the second monitor... that kind of stuff would be cool.Though I don't think any game really supports that kind of thing.
  12. Jumbur Improved Familiar

    I don't have multiple monitors myself, but what prevents you from using multiple monitors with the current UI?
    Can't you extend the EQ game to multiple monitors already? In winXP you could have a setup such that windows recognized all monitors as a single "virtual desktop". Allowing games that could run in windows, to fill out all the monitors. If that still works, you should be able to place the viewport on one monitor and drag UI-elements to the other monitor.

    Fun fact: Serious Sam and early versions of Doom(93) supported multiple monitors.
  13. Sokon Augur

    1. The already in game functionality of the current UI is amazing.

    2. Scrap it?

    You'd either have to know how to use it(1) or have read the title to this thread but not the thread itself(2).

    The idea posted is for a collection set to be made from the community of all classes and to take 3 or so of each class in the most popular resolution settings like 1920x1080 and incoporate those layouts to the game for new players to automatically chose from regardless of what class they select.

    Scrapping the UI system? You'd have to mad. That would take a lot work to come up with something new and the reality of the situation is some players have already put a ton of work into their own, or most all players have put in atleast an hour or more.

    A community event and collecting a high number of layouts would not take a lot of work, nor any rework from any current players. It would however eliminate the need for most new players to have to figure things out from scratch and atleast give them a base to start with.

    All they'd have to do is look at each layout and select the 3 most aesthetically pleasing ones for several of the most frequently used resolutions.

    And just like player studio was... they could have a little fun with it and make a community event out of it.
  14. Jumbur Improved Familiar

    Well, they do plan on implementing a new UI-engine. Im guessing the current UI-engine have some limitations that are hard to work with. They will obviously take into consideration what they have learned from the current system.

    Personally I think the idea to have it based on XML-files is a flexible solution, but maybe some "under the hood" aspects means that certain needed features are difficult to add to the current system from their side? Like scalable UI-elements, for example.
    The current system takes "quite" a bit of fiddling from the end-user to look good on 4k monitors, afaik. Having resolution dependency is not practical when monitor-sizes can vary that much from system to system.

    Another idea could be to "consolidate" different UI-windows into one, there is not really any good reason why "tasks", "ldon-adventures" and "quests" are separate UI elements...or to manage raid-expeditions directly from the raidtool. Replacing the "center class logo" in the inventory. with the character-preview-window(the one we use for ornament previews) could be another suggestion.

    Or add completely new UI-elements, like a permanent mini-map for one of the screen-corners.
    A "snap to grid"(or "snap to element")-feature would also be practical. :)

    Another aspect could be that handling of UI elements doesn't take advantage of modern GPUs. Maybe the current engine is more CPU dependent than it needs to be?

    Is backwards-compatibility that important, that we want to limit the future possibilities?

    UI-engine can mean a lot of things...


    A completely different approach, could be to turn everything into hyper-modular hotbars, and let every single client interaction be added/edited with the ingame macro system, no need for editing files at all...
    imagine if you could build your own inventory-screen ingame, or if you wanted to add various raid-exped-macros to the raidtool yourself, or even just put everything into a big grid on monitor#2(if you happen to have a touch-screen), just with drag-n-drop...:eek:
    A bit like how visual studio works for editing UI's...