Sensuki's Suggestions #005: Item Descriptions and Contextual UI Rant

[Sensuki]

Currently when you right click on an weapon to get it's details it displays all the information about the "fine" quality of weapons, rather than what it gives to the actual weapon. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not and perhaps relevancy should be applied - such as only displaying the melee accuracy and damage multiplier on a battle axe, instead of including ranged accuracy, as that would especially be confusing to new players.
 
The parchment itself could do with a solid border. I'm really not a fan of these small screen UIs and much preferred the Infinity Engine style full screen UIs so you could see ALL of the information about an item on the screen rather than having to scroll down.
 
A compromise would be to make this window much bigger, perhaps taking up the whole inventory screen, or most of it.
 

 
The "On Attack" is something that is also confusing as it implies that the weapon only applies those values "on attack" (even though it probably does). I understand that this is probably a straight dump from the Unity design tools, as I have seen a screenshot that Josh Sawyer put up on his twitter showcasing them.
 
I think the Item format should be laid out in a more intuitive fashion like the IE games items were:
 

 

 
So far the Infinity Engine games absolutely rape Pillars of Eternity as far as UI uniformity goes. Every menu works exactly the same, and all of the screens work within a sensible screen space unlike Pillars of Eternity, which uses a mess of small different sized windows that require different methods of interaction.

Previous Suggestions:
 

Area Map Functions
Main UI / Tooltip Stuff
Selection Circles, Targeting Indicators
Disable Vertical Sync
 
Previous Discussions:
 
Combat Feels: Activness, Speed and Pace

Edited August 19, 2014 by Sensuki

[C2B]

100% agree.

[Caerdon]

I totally agree with this. I can't understand why there are so many tiny windows with scrollbars instead of large windows with no need for scrollbars. And yes, listing the effects of the qualitiy of a weapon is confusing. Has that damage muliplier already been applied to the damage listed below, or do we need to calculate those things ourselves?

[mrmonocle]

+1, keep it up. Is it hard to hire a professional GUI designer with a 4mil budget nowadays?

[Caerdon]

+1, keep it up. Is it hard to hire a professional GUI designer with a 4mil budget nowadays?

 

No need to be rude.

[Sensuki]

Kazunori Aruga has actually done a very good job with the UI Art style, but their UI Programmers are not very IE-experienced I don't think, which is likely one of the reasons as to why there is a discrepancy between the functional designs of the UI in Pillars of Eternity and the IE Games and why there isn't much uniformity.

 

That is however just my speculation.

Edited August 19, 2014 by Sensuki

[mrmonocle]

Kazunori Aruga has actually done a very good job with the UI Art style, but their UI Programmers are not very IE-experienced I don't think, which is likely one of the reasons as to why there is a discrepancy between the functional designs of Pillars of Eternity and the IE Games.

Could be true if there were no examples to follow. It's not like they have to invent something here, just going by the book whould have been fine. Also there is an issue of not being able to see ANY stat change (except maybe for DT) when you equip something, you can't go 1 ckick to "character" menu from the inventory menu too, you have to close the inventory first, in BG you could.

[Sensuki]

Yes the Inventory and Character Creation windows could present a lot more information - more like what you would see in an ARPG. Might do a suggestion video on that another day.

[C2B]

+1, keep it up. Is it hard to hire a professional GUI designer with a 4mil budget nowadays?

Yeah, UI design not as easy as you'd think. Especially due to the vastly different preferences of the player base.

 

All them previous discussions.

Edited August 19, 2014 by C2B

[Headbomb]

I for one like the feeling of these description scrolls. They could be improved, sure, mostly in that I don't get why a melee weapon has a ranged accuracy (unless you can throw it?), and for that battle axe, why isn't the Bonus Crit Damage listed under the other "Fine" attributes?. If you see all the "stats" in the scroll, I don't mind scrolling to see the description (and maybe a bigger scroll would be better). And there needs to be a "close" button on that pop-up scroll.

[Sensuki]

Nothing wrong with the feeling of the scrolls, as the IE games used a parchment anyway. However the scroll could be bigger, and perhaps have a border - and all UI elements as such should be closed by the same method.

 

In this case you just click off the screen, whereas the other ones have an [X] in the corner.

 

I think a big obvious CLOSE button down the bottom would be a better option, and for the game menus they need OK, Apply and Cancel.

[Caerdon]

Yeeessss.

[GreyFox]

I have to agree with this as I don't like the tiny windows either...

[Ninjaen]

Yeah can't tell you how many times I've already clicked that enchant button beliving it would close the window

 

I would also like to see some more stat descriptions on weapons and if they are one or two-handed.

[PrimeJunta]

I don't know if I'd put it quite as harshly as that, but on the whole yeah, too many floating panes. 

 

Using UI screens instead of panes would also make it easier to port to tablets. :troll:

[Trodat]

Looks like a placeholder IMO. I hope we will see BG / IWD style drawings and not those little weapon icons.

[AdaMusic]

I agree. 

 

I don't think PoE will be on par with BG2; it is just too much to ask.

 

The GUI looks great but the GUI programming could need more iterations.

[AdaMusic]

Looks like a placeholder IMO. I hope we will see BG / IWD style drawings and not those little weapon icons.

 

Yea the icon looks really placeholder but I doubt it is.

[Helm]

^This....

 

^Is so much better than this.

 

The aesthetic of the former is absolutely perfect with the hand drawn sword on parchment paper, now we just have a little sword icon on the description and a tiny little window to scroll through.   It's fugly.

 

Also, there is so much screen space, so make the pop-up window with item statistics and description a bit broader.

Edited August 19, 2014 by Helm

[nikolokolus]

I'm fine with the "scroll" popping up, but it does need a big fat "close" button at the bottom and they really should increase its length top to bottom. The Width is fine, as a really wide text blocks can cause eye strain over long periods of time.

[AdaMusic]

 

^This....

 

^Is so much better than this.

 

The aesthetic of the former is absolutely perfect with the hand drawn sword on parchment paper, now we just have a little sword icon on the description and a tiny little window to scroll through.   It's fugly.

 

Also, there is so much screen space, so make the pop-up window with item statistics and description a bit broader.

 

 

Yea its more aesthetically pleasing and also more intuitive. Though I am not sure if I'm biased by loving Baldur's Gate or not.

[Quetzalcoatl]

+1, keep it up. Is it hard to hire a professional GUI designer with a 4mil budget nowadays?

Considering even games with 40 million budgets have significant UI issues, I'd say yes.

Edited August 19, 2014 by Quetzalcoatl

[Helm]

Yea its more aesthetically pleasing and also more intuitive. Though I am not sure if I'm biased by loving Baldur's Gate or not.

I don't think so. Baldur's Gate just did a lot of things almost perfectly. So much love and passion for details went into that game.

[Kaz]

The item description window was one of the last things to make it into the game before we sent off the beta build, so yes it's a bit rough unfortunately. We've already done a pass on the text to simplify it, including the removal of irrelevant strings like ranged accuracy bonus on melee weapons. Also made sure primary stats like damage are being listed at the very top of the list. I agree with the comment about the size of the window being too small. Brian who is one of our coders working on UI implementation showed me how the screen looks when opening lore books in the game, and it was not pretty. Having a bigger window will definitely help with that. And yeah, I do miss the item sketches from BG and really wish I had the time to bang them out, but we have to pick our battles given the time and man power available to us.

[Sensuki]

Yep as I posted in another thread, you 2D artists appear to be too little butter scraped over too much bread, if only there was more of you <3.

 

Perhaps for PE:X / PE:2.