Uh... so is everybody just OK with this?

There are mods that fix and make the UI more intuitive. But, these are not things that should be left for a mod to fix. UI should be the number one priority, and I've got a bit of a gripe with it's lack of love, or rather; insight, too.

New point: I can't help but notice that most of these features I was missing are in one place: the Tower of Buttons on the right side of the screen.

Let me propose that this Tower of Buttons, in its current state, is a direct threat to the usability of the game UI.

I'm going to start with some background assumptions: Humans are only able to process so much information at once, and specifically, only able to choose from a very limited list of about 9 options max (I'm basing this on the 7-give-or-take-2 number in psychology - it's not 100% accurate but it gets the job done most of the time) - obviously the less, the more comfortable the decision is. When we appear to make bigger choices, it's because we've learned that a majority of the options we can safely ignore. Let me illustrate this point:

In this photo, the tape shows covers up the options that an average user can ignore most of the time. For "Grandma", these options made it overwhelming and impossible to learn to use the parts that mattered.

Now, take a look at this annotated screenshot of the Tower of Buttons while a basic unit is selected (click to expand):


There's a lot of clutter here, and most of it is only useful in very niche situations. I file away those niche things for later and teach myself to ignore this interface for the rest of the game. Any options here are in my blind spot.

Now, here's a screenshot of the Tower of Buttons while a factory is selected:


Now, as far as I can tell, most of the options here are actually completely irrelevant to anything a factory can do! But look here at the bottom... here are two buttons that are incredibly useful, even bordering on necessary for optimal play! Do you see the problem with this? By grouping important options with useless ones, you make them invisible.

These buttons should be grouped near the build bar, like they are in Supreme Commander, because they're relevant to building. A player exploring how to build things will discover these buttons right away. The same cannot be said about the Tower of Buttons.

Moving on...
Let me address a few more arguments (I'm not gonna do exact quotes here because that's a pain):

1. "You shouldn't jump into a match and expect to figure things out. You need to play on sandbox for a while"
So, I'm a new player. I've heard great things about this game but I've never played it before. What am I going to do?
A. Jump right into the game to see how it goes
B. Do the tutorial
C. Navigate the menu to sandbox mode, which I don't even know exists

It's gonna be B (for a reasonable new player), followed immediately by A. If the sandbox option is so important, then it needs to one of the first things a player sees. Better yet, an interactive tutorial instead of a YouTube video could take the place of the sandbox in the first-time user experience.

Follow-up point to this: how the heck do I get to the sandbox? I actually tried to find it to take the screenshots above and I couldn't do it, I had to start a full game with an AI that wanted to kill me.

2. "You're wrong about how the game works, you're supposed to play it differently"
First rule of UX: If you have to explain something, the UX is wrong. Designers and pro players aren't sitting over every new player's shoulders to explain what everything means. The game experience needs to be self-explanatory, without anyone else explaining things to me. If I have to go outside the game - whether to the forums, the wiki, or an experienced friend - to figure out how something basic works, then something needs to be done about the UI.

RTS games are tricky because they're so complex and often the optimal strategies are unintuitive. But it's not impossible to make a good UI for an RTS, and the benefit of doing so (gaining a huge community of various skill levels) far outweighs the cost of taking a few weeks to improve it.

3. "You can find idle fabbers/factories with a keyboard shortcut"
First: keyboard shortcuts are even worse than obscure menu options because you have to already know they're there. You're hardly helping your case that the UI is secretly intuitive and I just don't know it yet. Second: the purpose of an "idle X" button is not just to help you find them, but to alert you that there is in fact something idle! A keyboard shortcut does not give me any realtime information.

4. "Of course you can always tell when a factory is active, either it's building a unit or a unit is rolling off of it!"
First, there's a big difference between when a factory is actively building something (it's glowing bright green, highly visible) and when a unit is rolling off the assembly line (a much more subtle effect). When I'm scanning my base for idle factories, I don't have time to zoom into each one that's not glowing green to see if there's a unit currently finished. Active factories should always have a prominent green effect.

Second: Take these two screenshots. In which screenshot is the factory idle?

Trick question, of course. They're both active. A factory appears like the 2nd screenshot (everything is completely still, no unit movement, no green spray) for about one full second before it starts building again. This means that I can't tell at a glance which factories are active or not. I have to sit there and wait about a second.

Let me just jump in real quick.

@dallonf – you are coming across as incredibly hostile. There are better ways to get your point across. I didn't want to jump in on this thread because it was just another brand new user to the forums being mad about things. Those threads are not fun.

As for the factory – all of those buttons are useable. Those aren't commands for the factory itself, but for the units that come off the factory. I use the area patrol for a factory every single game.

That being said, the UI could use some improvements. But guess what, the game isn't complete and the UI isn't complete.

Uber only has so many hours in the day.

I generally agree with you, the game does need a better UI and I'm sure it's on its way and we'll get it "Soon". For me the most important feature is to be able to modify orders after you've given them.

Part of the reason for this forum is so that we can influence the development of PA. Suggest how to fix these problems and maybe it'll be in the final game. What do you think should be in the contextual menu of a tank?

Oh and one more thing: Why do factories have move/attack/... orders? The factory can give a unit an order as soon as its built. A very useful feature.

I apologize for my hostile attitude. UX is one of my passions and it pains me to see it done badly. I've seen it done badly in this game for so long that I've started to wonder if anybody even notices there's a problem - as I mentioned in my first post.

The fact that so many people have jumped to Uber's defense with a "learn2play" attitude only confirmed my fears that the community (or at least the vocal part of it) doesn't care about a good UX. This frustrates me: "Good Enough" is the enemy of Great. I wanted to be a voice of reason to show that there is in fact a problem, but you're right, I've been hostile and that opportunity is now gone.

Really, all I want to hear is that Uber is working on these problems in the UI, or at least planning to.

That said, I appreciate the suggestions that have been given. I'm actually having some fun in Galactic War now that I know I can pause and loop factories.

The reason why everyone has jumped to Uber defense is because the game isn't finished and every day we have people who hop on the forums and complain and whine about things that have been discussed to death and are being worked on.

We do care about a good UI. We've had MASSIVE threads talking about every little detail.

We're just tired of people rehashing things without searching.

Everyone knows the UI isn't finished and this is the "first pass of the second pass."

Uber hasn't even focused on finishing the UI. They're working on adding all of the core game mechanics before they finish and polish the UI.

Just hang in there. Uber is good at what they do, and they aren't finished yet.

as the OP has said multiple times himself (and I'm going to repeat) the main thing is as long as they are aware of it and going to address it.

he's pointing out however it seems more like the case that everyone has simply 'gotten used to' it and doesn't actually think it needs to be made better. this whole thread probably could've been summed up to 1 page had you simply said that in the first place, that this is something that will be worked on, lol.

that being said: UI development is always going to be on the backburner in any game while features are still added, because you are going to wind up having to redo the whole menu anyway.

also: 'learn2play' should NEVER be an acceptable response to questions about the UI. if there is something wrong with the UI, something is wrong with the UI. you should just be grateful that the person your saying 'learn2play' to is even -bothering- to ask in the first place, as for every one person that does ask, especially on a forum, there's probably 1000 people who ran into the same issue, and just said forget this game, without looking anything up, or even asking.
from experience I can tell you, the vast majority of people are going to be limited to the knowledge they get from 1: the install screen, 2: any loader or splash screens, 3: the tutorial, and 4: the ingame screen and menu's and 5: whatever info they got from how they found out about the game (whether it be a friend, a trailer, or review). -sometimes- you'll have the person that goes to a controls menu to look stuff up, but the majority is going to be those 4 things. if it's not there, it doesn't exist to them.

--edit: I'm not saying you shouldn't -teach- people how to play. I'm just saying yelling 'RTFM' to someone, isn't going to make them want to read the manual. it's going to make them go find a different game.

I do apologize again for my hostile attitude. It seems that Uber prioritizes UI much lower than I expected - not a bad thing, just different than what I would prefer. Now that I seem to be more in alignment with the views of the community (the UI needs work and is known to be unfinished), I feel like I should give some constructive feedback instead of just ranting:

1. Scouted enemy buildings should have strategic icons - that seems to be the least controversial of my points
2. The tutorial should eventually be more in-depth about optimal economic behaviors - ideally, it would even be interactive. Remember: PA is a very different RTS, it's not enough to simply tell players the controls
3. The builder pause and loop buttons should be closer to the build panel, not in the Tower of Buttons. The Tower of Buttons should be reserved for things that only hardcore players really need to worry about.
4. The Tower of Buttons itself could use some more detailed tooltips, especially to explain odd things like factories having Move orders.
5. The amount of resource drain per builder should be more prominent:

5a. In a tooltip before you build it
5b. In the mouse-over panel in the bottom-left (in fact, maybe this planel could move to be closer to the mouse/unit or closer to the economic panel at the top of the screen. Right now it's not very readable - not least of which because I'm currently seeing a bug where there are flashing white squares instead of resource icons. I assume that bug is known though)
5c. Optional, but very nice: Somewhere near or in the build panel, even when the builder is inactive and not currently drawing any resources.​

6. Idle fabber/factory icons. Supreme Commander 2 (*dodges tomato*) has a really clean UI for this that would be a good example.
7. Ping should also be moved out of the Tower of Buttons
8. A paused factory/fabber should have an icon over their head to show that it's been paused and should be re-enabled when the economy is doing better (see Forged Alliance for a good example of this)
9. Factories shouldn't have nearly as much downtime in between building units. At the very least, they should also have flashing green lights during this downtime to indicate that the factory is indeed active.

... I think that's it, I'll update this post if I have more. Linking to this from the main post as well.

The game needs a manual, or a better tutorial.
But the problem with it is that things are still changing so wasting time on a tutorial that is later absolete is not a good idea for a developer to spend resources on.

I didn't know there is now a button for idle factory's but not really important as I never hacve idle factory's ;P
I still have no clue what the disabled icon at the bottom left of the sceen does

A popup text with a discription when hovering over a button would be neat.

I also mentioned the scouted stuctures icons to be visible in the fog of war in the past.
Its planned as far as I know.

And as I keep on saying, it is abundantly clear that the game isn't finished. And Uber has said over and over and over that the UI isn't finished.

People haven't 'gotten used to it' we simply understand the concept of "early access"

You can't design a UI for features that haven't been implemented.

Uber needs to finish the main functionality of the game before they finish and polish the UI.

Wait, who was "incredibly hostile" in this thread?

Read some of the OP's earlier posts.

I'm not seeing anything that is indicative of hostility. Unless he's edited out a whole bunch of stuff, all I see is him listing off various criticisms of the UI and then responding to a few comments -- but there aren't any insults or derogatory remarks, simply differences of opinion.

Is disagreement considered hostility around here?

The UI and the supposed Advanced Command and Control they promised still need a lot of work. The basics are there but there are so many more things they could do to make a game of this scale much more manageable.

That's what I was wondering, but I figured he probably edited it. In the end, though, I decided that doing damn near anything else besides caring about that was a better use of my time. It's a beautiful day and I chose beer.

The ui of pa isn't bad imo. It isn't the shortcut button mash frenzy of other popular games. Everything can be set on repeat (works on factories and units) orders can be given to factories that are applied to units upon completion (eg go through teleporter, patrol over there, assist x), area commands automate allot of the building work. Area orders can be applied to whole planets. Custom line formations that automatically sort your units plus all the standard stuff like control groups, cam locations and so on.

Please tell me a strategy game (other than spring rts) that can match pa's base set of command features?

The main problem is many of these features aren't covered in gui, or aren't apparent at first (as they are complex interactions) which need introducing to the player with an in depth tutorial. That really isn't possible until we have a full, stable unit roster however.

yeah me neither I didn't see hostility.

seriously though, take this to @Culverin's threads

they have much more info and are much more constructive.

these three are the best :

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/community-requested-ui-features-0-1.53170/
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/gui-mock-up.52739/
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/unofficial-official-gui-discussion-thread.52055/


https://forums.uberent.com/threads/ui-ideas-from-other-games.55396/
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/...ures-section-4-panels-not-56k-friendly.53659/
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/ui-discussion-improving-the-feel-of-orbital.54611/
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/principles-of-ui-design-the-4-cs.52756/
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/ui-discussion-notifications

This is something that a lot of people on the forums have a problem with, you especially. The game being incomplete and some things being worked on is no excuse for shutting down discussion on that subject. Just because Uber is redoing or will be redoing something doesn't mean that we shouldn't give feedback. That's the whole point of transparent game development. Devs look at ideas and implement them. People give feedback before implementation and after implementation. As far as I'm concerned, if Uber's redoing the UI, then all the more reason for us to give them ideas as to how things could be organized so we don't get the same problematic UI with a new coat of paint.

tl;dr If it's incomplete, then give feedback. If it's "complete", give feedback. If you have no idea if there are plans to work on it or not, then still give feedback.

Also, for the record, the use command is for making units travel through a teleporter or be loaded into a unit cannon.

I never once attempted to shut down discussion.

People are just asking "why isn't x?" or generally expecting things to be more complete.

Reminding people it's not finished does not mean shutting down discussion.

If you read my comments on this thread, I have contributed to the thread and participated in discussion.

There's also the question of how close the "final" the UI is. We know it's still being worked on and that it isn't finished, but I'm sure the devs already have an idea about what it will look like and what it will do (a mockup would be nice).

The point is: We don't know what the final version will look like, but we can guesstimate the direction pretty well.