I know that I am excited for changes to the long standing user interface that we've had for decades now. Monitors above 1080p have been the norm for a very long time, and the price point has been enticing for many gamers to adopt. We've also come a long way since the 128mb ATI Rage cards were the best available. For me, UI scale becomes a problem at larger resolutions when text becomes quite tiny, and hard to read. I can only play on 1080 using my 3440x1440 monitor for this reason alone. So, I'm a big proponent for these impending changes. However, I want to raise a bit of awareness for those making said changes. WoW recently updated their original UI, and it wasn't met with as much adulation as I can only assume they had hoped it would be. There are a number of elements that can't be resized, modified, or moved to name a few of the sticking points for their player base. The only thing I would like changed about the current UI is the ability to scale up where I need to. I don't want to have to squint to read text, or see through non-contrasting colors like the white text on the hot buttons currently. If there is a way to change that, I haven't found it. Either way, it's just an example. My opinion is that small changes that give a little more flexibility to your aging customer base would be greatly appreciated without the need to rewrite the book. Too much change can impact the bottom line, so my advice is to proceed with caution when taking on this endeavor.
I would like some clarity as far as UI design vs. Graphics Engine. They are two different things. New "engine" sounds like they are either changing client graphics engine, which if so affects far more than the UI, or they are tweaking the current client graphics engine to accommodate UI changes. If I had to guess, which I do because I have not seen details, I would guess that the current client graphics engine is being adjusted to handle higher resolutions, along with some changes to the UI to allow for customization of various element sizes. But I really have no idea. Does anyone besides Darkpaw?
Only a new User Interface has been announced. Maybe it is based on an UI engine but it could be just a revamped and more flexible layout and the integration of missing elements like a pet tab and pet aggro values. The XML code format might be also outdated.
You can increase the font size on just about every interface piece currently, some are hard coded those like the tracking list of mobs. Of course you'll want to make sure you are using it in a custom ui folder. However doing so, you will probably need to increase the size of the windows that the text is in depending on if the text will overlap other info. You can open the interface xml files in an editor like Notepad++ and look for the xml tags <Font></Font>. Change the value in-between them.
I very much appreciate the author for this post. I've been praying for a new UI, updated graphics models, less text cast spam (I/O and CPU reduction), any combination of these would be FABULOUS! You're writeup echos my sentiments beautifully.
Remove the word 'Engine' wherever it appears. It gets us thinking 'how things are rendered', and then dreaming of things that will not be. This will be an update to the UI windows (maybe some functionality inside the window and better XML support) and visual pieces that make up the windows and controls, nothing more.
How do we know that they aren't actually planning to replace the entire UI-engine, rather than just a significant improvement of the existing one? I assume there has been a lot of new UI-techniques adopted by the industry since they made the current UI-engine? Maybe they want to make it more efficient, by offloading some of it to the GPU for example? There are lots of good reasons for a complete refactor. Can GPU-instancing be used for text-rendering? Can shaders be utilized to improve performance? Is XML-based descriptions still the best solution for EQ1? They could also simplify the functionality somewhat, and consolidate a lot of windows/elements. Currently we have a lot of different windows that are more or less doing the same thing. Each time they add new client functionality they add a new window, rather than see if it fits into an existing one(the main reason for all the UI-bloat). Which is why we have 3 different places to list currency or 5 different ways to list a quest(quest/task/ldon-adventure/expedition/flag-based-progression) that are all logically speaking almost the same thing. There is not even a good reason for all the different "key-rings", they could all be replaced by a single "clicky-item-keyring", at least at the UI-level.(thats 5 tabs less in the inventory window! Maybe toolbelt would be a more fitting name )
The UI system in EQ is very performant as-is. You can keep piling on more and more elements for it to render and see no real drop in framerate as a result. My UI, D3PDA uses 9 labels stacked just right to produce it's signature text outline effect. I thought for sure when I started to do that, that I would eventually hit a limit for the amount of labels I could get it to render but a thousand labels later and no such limit in sight. There are no real advances in rendering that will make for a more performant UI rendering, at least not in any significant way. I'm honestly horrified at the idea of the current development staff messing with the UI system any more than they already have. Everything they have been adding in recent years has broken from the conventions of the UI and resulted in hard coded behaviors. Just look at the target indicator in the ext target window. Instead of allocating a new element for it, they chose to make it appear based on the corners of two elements that are entirely optional to even have in the UI. It's a freaking hack and whoever coded that thing know its, a really hack. So we have to rely on a bit of a hack to manipulate it so that it appears correctly in our UI system. No thanks on whatever moron thought that was at all appropriate touching the UI system again, they stand to do a lot of damage.
Everything mentioned here is just UI. Which they will work on. They won't be changing anything about the world, characters and mobs we see through the viewport, or the Rendering Pipeline. Only boxes, controls and textures for the UI, and possibly some code functionality with the controls.
The current UI is a big collection of many yearly added elements. For sure there will be consolidations (merges) of many elements into one window and rearrangements. As the game does lack a good basic UI that is compatible to different screen resolutions, this for sure will be also added. It will be a big cleanup which is necessary after 21 years. The last one was done with the release of TSoL.
Maybe they allowed those hacks because they were meant to be replaced soon anyway? The technical part of the client that transforms xml-input into clickable UI-elements on the screen is also an "engine". "Engine" can mean many things, it is not always about world-rendering or 3d. Everquest probably have lots of "engines", hopefully they are not too entangled and can be replaced one by one. Or is "module" a better word?
You can call it an engine if you like, but it's nothing of the sort, in the modern connotation of the word. EQ's Rendering Pipeline (the term I prefer to use), was 'hand rolled' without the use of much 'middleware'. Forgelight and even EQ2 have a more 'modular' system, and usage of middleware, that allows replacement of entire systems. What you see through the viewport ain't changing anytime soon, or anytime fast (in EQ). All moveable UI elements were added after the classic interface. It's built on top of the game and graphic rendering. In that sense it is more modular than much of the underlying code, and more 'replaceable'/modernized.
I think we are talking past each other now, or have different understandings of the word "engine". What I see through the viewport, is 3d-graphics(textured polygons, particles, and post-effects) made by the 3d-engine, which take the zone-file and player/monster models, and show the content of the world around me. That part is not related to the topic here. No future changes to the 3d-engine has been announced, afaik. The UI-engine makes the 2d-overlay(separate from the viewport) with graphical elements, based on xml-files, that can show the statistics of my character and my hotbars, inventory, maps, menus etc. All the windows basically... Thats the part, this discussion is about. Those are 2 different engines, no? Otherwise they wouldn't call it an UI-engine? If they just wanted to improve the current UI-engine with some new xml-tags(for example for scaling elements in size), then it wouldn't be a "new" UI-engine. A reason to replace the UI-engine, could be to get rid of all the ugly "hacks" and bloat that has accumulated over the years. Or maybe they want to add functionality that was too troublesome with the current UI-engine. Maybe we can get a snap-to-grid feature, or the ability to attach UI-elements to each other at will, and move them in groups(attaching all the bags to the inventory window would be neat).
Is the point of a UI engine upgrade just to make people's UI not look an air traffic control panel? As was stated above, EQ's UI upgrades just fine over time and doesn't cause any performance issues of note. If the air traffic control panel is the reason, you'd really need to revamp classes to get rid of ability clicks to shrink things down. We've collected way too many clicks and abilities in 23 years that we all like to have at the ready for when we need them.
I have spent many many hours over the years fixing my custom UI every time they modified important UI files. Breaking my UI permanently would be a deal killer for me. No rage quit, but I am tired of the development team wasting my time with silly UI changes...
An EQ where custom UI are not needed to make up for the clunkiness of the default UI would be the goal.
You will always find people that will think the new UI is not what they want, no matter how DB makes it. So you can never please all. I use standard UI and it works for me.
It's not even just the clunkiness. For me what lead to me developing my own UIs was due to how much space the default UI waste. The default player window for example has 2 to 3 gauges worth of space between each gauge. That space also has a very opaque background texture that occludes whatever is behind the window. That's really what the current dev team needs to focus on. Just replacing that default UI with a new UI. We don't need an entirely new UI system to do so, the existing system is incredibly flexible in what you can do with it. Well worth looking through the catalog of old UIs on EQInterface, even though a lot of them do not load anymore, they were all built on this current UI system.
