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Entropia Universe Unreal - Preview of HUD UI

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Pi- said:
I doubt changing the game look and active play style will bring in many(if any) new players. The reason we have very few new players is the cost to play, not the graphics / UI / play style.

Adding actual value a player could invest in over time should be the goal of the dev team. Changing core gameplay mechanics does the exact opposite of this. The things people have previously invested in become much less valuable or even obsolete by changing core game mechanics.

/shrug

EDIT: Most current players would like the exact same game but with a graphic and UI update, not gameplay changes, thats just absurd and makes me think they do not know their own product??
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I really hate “the cost to play” arguement. This game is f2p just like soo many other games. You chose your cost. We there it be nothing or a million dollars. Its entirely up to you the player to chose.

diablo immortal is f2p and the same thing is said there. Its costs to much to get better gems. Well a Ferrari costs more than a Toyota. They both get you to the same spot.

more money doesn’t make the game any different. It’s still the same game. Dose more money help? Yes. I can’t really think of any circumstance where more money is a bad thing though, aside from paying taxes.
 
Mega said:
As long as it is customisable, it'll be ok - many of us have adapted to various changes in look and feel - the [F] controls were not universally liked when you implemented them.

Your playerbase would probably like you to...

Make Entropia Great Again

If you can do that, whilst attractive eye candy is enjoyable and brings in the new players, it may not be enough for them to stick around.
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Is this what the mega in your name stands for?
 
I want something noncalculated :D something new! A not old restored model with new graphics.

Maybe introduce survival mode with frying steaks from looted meat that will give buffs and HP :D
 
I miss the look, feel, and sounds of this...
index.php
 
Dennis|MindArk said:
We are far from final and readability will be more in focus in future iterations. We will have UI customization to address the wishes you have as much as possible. In general, working with the UI in Unreal Engine is far superior in comparison with CryEngine.
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You say this, and while I do appreciate this is just concept work, some of us having been waiting years for you to adjust a single colour in the current UI to make avatar names actually readable against the background. I even sent full details of exactly what to tweak,what the current values were and what they should be changed to with illustrative examples.

The support ticket was ignored, the PM's to My were ignored. MA have a great history of not giving two hoots about accessibility, despite the fact that there are laws about this sort of thing these days. At least as far as websites but it wouldn't hurt to show a little faith for in game text too, especially when it involves only adjusting a single value.

Anyhow yes while the interface shown here looks very swank, it looks like an absolute readability nightmare, especially once you are looking at brighter colours in the background. Glad to hear you are at least purporting that there will be customisation options. Also please ensure that we'll be able to bind a key/keys to turn ALL aspects of the UI off. Many of us like to play clean with zero screen clutter.

Wistrel
 
Is there a chance you would think of updating the Event system while already updating some other appearance?

Some good suggestions are from Jack:

Suggestion: - Give Land Area Operators a Viable Tool Box.

Introduction In consideration of the recent castration of player run events for land areas it seems now would be a good time to remind MindArk of the absolutely pathetic suite of options available for running events on land areas. The Current System Right now there are only two viable event...
www.planetcalypsoforum.com www.planetcalypsoforum.com
 
thee pepe said:
I really hate “the cost to play” arguement. This game is f2p just like soo many other games. You chose your cost. We there it be nothing or a million dollars. Its entirely up to you the player to chose.

diablo immortal is f2p and the same thing is said there. Its costs to much to get better gems. Well a Ferrari costs more than a Toyota. They both get you to the same spot.

more money doesn’t make the game any different. It’s still the same game. Dose more money help? Yes. I can’t really think of any circumstance where more money is a bad thing though, aside from paying taxes.
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wtf :D

and no, im not enteirly sure the Ferrari and Toyota get you to the same spot. Not at all.

This is why we can't have nice things.......
 
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allready answered
 
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I think this is taking somewhat of a backwards approach.

Think of UI and UX design as the glue that fits everything together, if you have dogshit gameplay and mechanics, it doesnt matter how good your UI is, whereas if you have engaging and fun mechanics players will put up with much much more friction in their UX if its unavoidable.

With that in mind, it feels as though as this design work has been contracted out through a 3rd party agency, which is the worst possible thing you can do especially if you dont have all the mechanics and gameplay available for them to more dogfood the UI against actual alpha gameplay. As you then run a high risk of habing to pivot on mechanic decisions during development and you'll start to see bigger disconnects between the UI elements.

For all its dated nature our current UI shows this problem perfectly, look at loot window, skills, codex, inventory, soc terminal. There are a dozen different themes and levels of usability at play.

My personal recommendation would be to about turn on interface design, and probably look to keep this part of development in-house. I appreciate the desire to iterate and keep progress updated within the community, but on the other side: the wrong updates could be really damaging to the wider brand of EU and MA. I generally believe this thread might have been better served by showing some examples in isolation and polling for feedback on design elements. I.e. "Do you like transparent backgrounds in UI".

Also dont forget that there's a wide community here of players, interview some and get some hard (and hopefully measurable) feedback from a slice of players that can be used to sense-check future development.
 
I think we just need usual interface with some upgrades....
1. Decay of weapon progressbar 100% full 0% repair or trash (L)
2. Pill buff progressbar
3. Arso progressbar
4. resto progressbar
personally i would put 3 and 4 on another Global cooldown so that there is NO NEED TO SWAP ITEMS (no swap time loss... RDI scientist should know how to do :)

(WOW "Weakauras" is what i refer to)
 
I believe no matter what the end UI will look like , there will always be those who like it and those who hate it.
Thats why , imho , the UI should be modable as much as possible.
Even better if we will be able to code our own styles and store somewhere in the documents/eu folder.
All we need is a standard UI file (to serve as example for moders) and a list of functions. The rest people will make them selves.
The more modification the game allows , the longer its community can keep it fresh.
All i am saying is we need functionality , the looks we can decide our selves.

(optionally it would be nice to be able to switch between UI for hunting and a separate UI for mining , so that miners get a radar similar to LBML map)
 
Information is paramount. Readable, accessable, manageable, customizable data windows. UI builds that can be saved and shared with other players.

"Look and feel" has no place in tactical game play. Let them eat cake.
 
I do appreciate the communication aspect of this post. The original post and following replies makes it sound as though "How we want the game to play" is not quite finalized yet and as such making any comments on the proposed HUD is both futile and extremely difficult. Any response you get is going to be on "appearances" and they are going to highly subjective.

If I was going to make a HUD for a game, I would go about it this way:

1. Play the game without HUD.
2. Find the things that are crucial for gameplay. Things that the player needs to see, all the time, or often enough that it makes sense to place the information for it close to where the focus it. (disregard any and all design at this point, just provide the information)
3. Play the game with the new "Minimal Viable HUD".
4. Repeat 2 and 3 until decently satisfied.
5. Figure out things that the player needs to see occasionally, Make a list of all the things.
6. Place the occasionally needed information away from focus (or have it hidden entirely and provide a way to access it on demand, some games do this very well)
7. Play the game with the occasionally needed information, provided or on demand)
repeat for a while.
.
.
Step 99. Figure out how you want the base game to look and feel, iterate a few times until satisfied. Make focus group of non-eu computer gamers to help with the process.
step 100. Make sure you leave room for end-users to customize anything they could potentially want to customize. Be it location, size, look, colors or textures or what have you. There is no way of pleasing everyone with something as subjective as how interfaces look or act. Focus when designing should probably lie in making it look unique and attractive enough to the customers you don´t already have. Make a game you could sell.

As long as the game plays well enough, you´re likely not going to lose very many of your current customers because you change how it looks.


TLDR:
It´s impossible to give any constructive feedback on a HUD for a game that we (and you, it seems) are not sure how it will play and anything said will likely be very subjective. Figure out what information the player needs and provide it, along with the means to customize it to their liking. Design base HUD however you feel it would look best to potential new customers and use that target audience to give you feedback.
 
Bravo on getting the conversation ball rolling , this might help divert the nightmare that occurred when rolling out the locking system.

I personally am not bothered by any of the design elements you have suggested , and only ask that you give them On/Off switches and contrast adjustments.

The outline that is put around the mob is quite annoying to me , but it already has a switch to turn it off.

The giant target triangle in front of the mob is quite annoying to me and again , can already be switched off , though I would like to have an adjustment to make it just a single dot as a marker , while retaining the On/Off option.

The radar is something that should get a complete design overhaul , as it could be much more useful than it is now.
Adding functionality such as markers and scalability , would give it an entire new scale of usefulness.

Lastly , I realize this is not something you are displaying here , but.
Since this is a UI update , please give the mouse-over some functionality by adding a checkbox on what is shown as far as information.
I would like to have fuel TT level shown when hovering over my vehicles in inventory.

And please do not take any of the critique as a negative , it brings great pleasure to see someone listening.
 
...it brings great pleasure to see someone listening.
I guess I have been listening, but how to visualise that? - the pulsing active icon of an ear, maybe? ;)

Sorry for the joke there, but the subject is about accurate and easy representations of whatever is important.

As commented already, we don't know about new functionality, so we don't know what would be desirable there, but we have loads of experience with what we currently have, and hopefully the gameplay won't be massively different in the basics.
I don't think it helps us much to see 'bought' HUD stuff that is just initial thoughts and mashups... except to highlight what we think is important maybe. I also advocate a basic approach - mouseovers are usually on purpose, so provide info respective to that etc... Thanks.
 
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Dennis|MindArk said:
We intend the combat will be a bit more reactive.
Timing of abilities, avoiding certain enemy attacks, positioning etc is some of the things that we plan to test to give combat a bit more life. Today you are very limited that also reduces the possibilities to create fun second to encounters. Worth mentioning is that we are aware that we cannot take this too far, so it alienates our current Playerbase.

Thanks for all the feedback !
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Hi Dennis.
Lots of Changes await present and future Playerbase : Graphics changes and some Game-Dynamics changes...

It's widely known, and useful to remember, that "any Change is a source of Stress" : as Basic-Psychology knowledge.
Let's also consider that the Average-Age of the Playerbase is 40+ : so this Theme, "any Change is a source of Stress", becomes even more true...

This means that, after the Graphics Changes -that "Physiologically" will require quite some time for the Playerbase to adapt- then any further Change in the Game Dynamics should be introduced VERY gradually, and also with the constant-Awareness that it's a Risky Choice that could Stress/Disappoint a Large Part of this 40+ year-old Playerbase : making them leave the Game, as in the transition from GameBryo-Engine to CryEngine. Or even worse than that...


Plan your moves very very Carefully, this is a minefield .


Paul
 
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Ferial said:
...
As long as the game plays well enough, you´re likely not going to lose very many of your current customers because you change how it looks.
...
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I've seen games die out because of tuning to gameplay, you are balancing on a knife edge here. EU has relatively few but also very loyal customers.
Please be careful and keep as much of the current game as possible.
 
Ted said:
I've seen games die out because of tuning to gameplay, you are balancing on a knife edge here. EU has relatively few but also very loyal customers.
Please be careful and keep as much of the current game as possible.
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Most people i see today are new starers, or relativly new joining in the past 2-5 years only. the amount of players i run into that are as old as me ingame (same year as you), we seem to make up a minute amount of the population.

Guestimates of player numbers i saw in another thread i don't recall now, i believe it was draniie and someone else who where discussing about it and the ca amount was at about 9000 - 13000 concurrent average users.

is it a lot? no. But without innovating or trying to renew, without ever taking a risk, you keep the loyal players, but you never gain new ones. to keep as much as possible is what we all want, but realisitcally allow yourself to think critically as well and think "lets hope to keep some things" and instead try to cherish what the new will be instead.

it will be new, it will be weird, older folk really do not like change, and that is fine. But if they keep everything borderline identical to what it is today (yes, in UE5 they could carbon copy the game if they wanted to) the game woudl inevitably fall and die most likely unless we get another pandemic of force people at home to help explore mmo's etc.

I personally hope to see a lot of things kept, but at the same time, i really do hope that more or less everything is changed, completely. And in some aspects aside of what EU is, the concept of EU, i hope they keep as little as possible. (We will still have all the old familiar mobs, they will look different, we will have the tools but looks different, so don't worry to much about that.)


BUT, if Ithaca does not have atrox spawns after UE5 update, there will be riots.
 
Well, that screenshot could be from any game out there, it's basically just an game engine shot, rather than anything Entropian :)

Will the little plug in you made for CryEngine for additional display status on keyboards work still. (For those who have no idea what I'm babbling on about, my Logitech G19 keyboard has an LCD display, and Entropia shows the map, your current health as a numeric, decay on items, tt value etc.)

Such a small thing, with a great feature, make sure to get your coders to add it on the new engine :)
 
San said:
Nice :) The clean radar reminds a bit of the old PE. I'm no artist and not sure how to express this but if there is any way of keeping an air of nostalgia while being all modern, that would be great. Like, subliminally transmitting that your product is really mature in years and has history under its belt.

For user customisation options, it would be good if all elements were individually switchable on or off, like now you can only show all or nothing. Streamers may want to hide PMs, or at least make them not popup in the middle of the screen if you ever forget you're live (I suggested earlier to enable directing them to a different terminal connection so you could communicate using another screen or device). Or one might want different sets of information on the screen in various situations which you can't all foresee. Make these settings saveable similar to the current item sets.

If the old loot window is kept as an option, it would be cool if it could aggregate the stacks and display a total, too. Would make most of the 3rd party loot trackers redundant.

API, Linux and other unicorns... but they're outside of the UI ;)

Bra fortsättning :thumbup:
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Thank You for the peek and communication.

I hope the text/colors/chats and other options will be customizable to players, as the font size as well.

My personal hope is plates button switch to other armors added. lol I hate adding 1 by 1 and removing. Could be like the 'remove attachments/enhancers button. Just a thought :)
 
Adding directly to the last bit...
I think having functions in the first place beats how they look in most cases. I know I can set up armour and clothes sets, and I generally have the same plates on the armour. It'd be great if we could 'plate all' of one armour with a plate type simply and in one (if carried). More complex would be a preference list of priority tt of plate to which piece, but I doubt we'd get that from the devs tbh.

I happen to think that functionality tutorials would be worth doing, especially given the huge changes coming.
There is a thread somewhere about how long it took some people to find out about various things - functionality should not be something most don't know about for ages!
 
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Thorns Rose said:
Thank You for the peek and communication.

I hope the text/colors/chats and other options will be customizable to players, as the font size as well.

My personal hope is plates button switch to other armors added. lol I hate adding 1 by 1 and removing. Could be like the 'remove attachments/enhancers button. Just a thought :)
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I like this idea alot
 
i have a single comment. All text needs to be on a plain black background with no bleed from the game screen. The average age of players is much higher in this game than most others games, that is why we are here. I like many other players, am short sighted and I struggle with the current UI. I know you wish to attract a bigger audience but please don't alienate the long term players whose deposits keep this game alive.
 
removed
 
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