Coherent UI

The largest drawback pa has right now, in my opinion, is the laggyness of the UI. From the system editor to gameplay, using any of the buttons and even just moving the mouse can be laggy. Since these are our main ways of interacting with pa, there is this constant underlying frustration with interacting with it. Even if you are used to the lag now, going back to a game without such an issue is like a fresh breath of air. From what I understand this is a drawback of coherent and is unlikely to ever be fixed (correct me if I am wrong on this).

With that said should coherent be replaced? I personally am of the opinion that it would be worth the technical trouble of replacing coherent ui just to get rid of the lag. Unless the lag can be completely removed, interacting with pa's interface is alwase going to be an annoyance at best and a gamebreaker at worst.

[X] Removing coherent UI not only is completely unreasonable from a financial standpoint but it would also completely break all modding possibilities that the PA UI has.

No way. Coherent UI is awesome and I want all games to use it. Screw resource usage.

I do not see any general UI lags. Yes some specific functions are a little slow depending on cpu load, but those are specific occurrences that usually are linked with ineffective implementations of that specific function. Those need to be fixed.

Well if those can be fixed then that would be awesome. I had read in the modding section that they would never and could never be fixed.

The lag must go---of cause!
LagWise the server-UI is a whole disaster---but as the Ingame-UI is just fine I don´t see why one could imagine that Coherent would be the thing that causes the lag!

I´m pretty sure that Uber got plans on enhancing the Menu-UI to make it finally lag-free, but it doesn´t seem like they wanna prioritize on it!

The UI lag isn't the (or even a...) problem, it's the sim and other things which slow down the actual gameplay.
The only UI problems I have are occasional crashes. Once those are fixed, I'd have no complaints aside from memory usage.

Yeah I pretty much agree using Coherent was a mistake. The UI never really felt fast and responsive, even after all those updates.

Coherent is the future for game ui's. its either Coherent or scale form, Coherent is very new, so there will
be a issue because of that. I'd be interested to see Coherent used with a different JS library, i personally haven't experienced this "lag".

I also dont think you understand how much work it would be to "just replace coherent", plus mod'ing support would be as good a gone, the reason there so many mods is because of coherent.

I understand the awesome moddability of Coherent UI - but it really is quite frustrating for us lower end PCs with the lag.

You higher end PC folks ($700 Desktop) probably dont have any issues, but I've always had lag. It's gotten much better, but it's always been there.

the UI has always been noticeably sluggish compared to other game UIs - although, it's pleasing the look at.

I suppose there is some chance performance will increase a lot once Coherent upgrade to Chromium 40 (current version based on Chromium 28 that was released about two years ago) and will have 64-bit builds for Windows. I never noticed a lot of issues with performance on Linux, but we have some huge bugs instead.

Of course memory usage will be even higher with 64-bit builds, but It's cost for modability and PA use a lot anyway so it's shouldn't be problem for anyone who like the game.

I wouldn't say "Coherent", but "web-based UI" instead. Flash is slowly dying over many years as even Adobe abandoned it and eventually there just won't be anyone who will target it. Though pretty sure it's possible to create something better for HTML-UI renderer than Coherent.

@SXX
Do you know if Coherent is using skia as low level drawing library? I know that the current version of Chromium is using skia, but I never looked at the older versions.

Do you know if they are working on that?

Coherent is basically Chromium without any differences. They only applying very minor changes on how it's work if at all, but of course they have their own IPC, sound handling and possible input.

So of course they use Skia.

Yes they working on it since summer of 2014, e.g this post.

PS: Though it's just my guess about 64-bit version.

Actually I just think it's would be cool if there was benchmarks for different Chrome/Chromium versions.
If there is none available I think I'll do that one day as changes should be huge.

PS: Actually google does have some, but it's not really user-friendly:
https://chromeperf.appspot.com/
Trying to find interesting benchmarks for GPU rendering performance.

Just imagine if reactjs had been around when PA started development.

Yeah I suppose it's would be faster than Knockout, but I suppose there is still would be huge boost from Chromium upgrade. At least I think this way: most important thing is not overall performance which may be much better with other library, but amount of bottlenecks as there is few exact things that make UI "laggy".

After all developers of JS libraries are mainly target to make them fast on some tablets that have no CPU/GPU power at all compared to desktop PC. Though for game UI main goal it's to work with a lot of data effective and it's only important to utilize tons of resources PC have.

I don't feel that knockout's performance is bad?

There are ways of making a moddeable ui without lag, I do realize this would be quite a lot of work, but if there was no other way of improving the latency of the ui, then I would say it would be worth it to have a custom implementation.

According to some of the posts here though, it seems that coherent is improving, and there are ways of fixing the lag on pa's end, so if this proves sufficient for most people, then coherent may be, "the future for game ui's". We will just have to wait and see I suppose.

I am pretty sure in 99% of the "UI is laggy" cases coherent itself is not at fault. Coherent improvements could help to improve to deal with the real issue better, but most cases of UI lag are caused by conceptual issues with how the UI handles a specific task. I am 100% certain that a quickly done own UI framework would create similar issues. Like it does in SupCom for example...

Coherent certainly is not the most effective way (from a pure performance standpoint. If you add in a factor called "time" it suddenly makes perfect sense to use it) to implement a UI, but that seems to cause people to push all blame for lags onto coherent when in reality the issue is just bad UI code that could be written as part of any other framework as well.
What are the exact instances of lag that you are referring to? The game lobby while planet loading? Ingame stuff? The uberbar? Out of my head I can remember a bunch of specific very inefficient things in those parts of the UI that create lag. All of them are not the fault of coherent, but they are just badly optimized code.