3.0 Thoughts

Riamus

Riamus

Hunter
Okay, so I've taken a look at the 3.0 game options and startup. I'll have more comments after playing a 3.0 game, but that won't likely happen until after stable. But here are my thoughts about the menus and the options.

  • The main menu of the game looks great.
  • The settings menu looks atrocious. Whoever thought that was a good design really needs to be shown decent UI work. Huge, wide settings look ridiculous and you don't even fill the screen width, making it look even more poorly designed. The color scheme is ■■■■■■■ the eyes.
  • Other menus look just as bad as the settings menu.
  • New game options... sadly, not much of note for me here. No real surprise since I enjoy vanilla, but I see myself making only a few changes from default: No jars required for the dew collector (surprised and happy to see that option) and the intro challenges and quest disabled since I don't need them and don't see any reason to have to jump through those hoops since I can still get the 4 skill points when those are disabled. I *might* also set traders to 24/7, but only as a way to give me a reason to do the night quests that I normally ignore. And maybe I'll play around the with zombie density and spawn settings to see how they work, but those aren't game changers by any means.
Not much, I know. But it's what I think so far. The biggest issue for me is the UI for the various options menus. It looks like a student did it in the 90s. I get that the game has kind of an old school feel to it, but that UI takes it way too far, imo. I don't want "modern" UI as that usually looks awful as well (though better than this), but at least start by fixing the colors and making the options not take up half the screen. And if you're going to leave a lot of blank space on the right side, then at least center things so it doesn't look so lopsided.
 
I also don’t like this UI. Everything is too big, it blends together, and it’s hard to read. The colors are also not very well chosen. I liked the UI from version 3.0 that Jawoodle got.
I hope the whole UI in the game won’t look like this either, although judging by the first message from duke which already looks just as bad, I’m worried it might be like that. Besides, I’ve seen screenshots of what the in game UI is supposed to look like, and it actually looks like what we’re seeing now
 
It´s actually amazing coming up with a UI borked like that after over a decade of development. My favorite is that you have to scroll trough the settings in the world generator menu even though there would be easily enough room for all the settings.

Overall i like the sandbox settings, we can nearly have the full romero experience, even though i need to pump up the numbers of enemies spawning a lot for that. Would be nice to see a insane option after very high that doubles/triples the enemy spawn compared to very high.

If you play on warrior or survivalist i would say very high spawn rate with default settings is quite the difference. At least very early in game it´s way harder then. Didn´t play a lot like that though, just to test the spawn rate a bit.

We need to be able to adjust wandering horde frequency and size though with the option to get zombies according to your game stage up to elites. That would be neat. Same for screamer horde size.
 
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Maybe the new UX/UI director, was trying to make their bones, but has never come to the
forum. Generic drag and drops, that worked on Wolfenstein, probably would not fit here.

Opening the options, is great because it cut down on my personal modding time. It also
has given me options to test first hand, instead of theorize and mod. Now I actually like
playing Dead is Dead lose it all, and deservedly so, because I have the spawn turned up,
spawning in the wasteland, and have only 2 entity groups. The regular includes all up to
feral, all animals including vulture.

The second is all of the higher specials, So I either spawn in the wasteland, or 500meters
off the shore. There are 10 islands connected by land bridges, Forest is only large enough
in each area to cover a courtyard, all else is governed by the biome timer. Good Times.
 
Riamus said:
The settings menu looks atrocious. Whoever thought that was a good design really needs to be shown decent UI work.
Click to expand...

I strongly disagree. The settings menu IS exemplary UI/UX.

It presents to the player 150 individual settings without being daunting. For the most part it's intuitive for "where would I find a setting to accomplish X?". It's still a lot and players can miss things easily, but all of that in and of itself is a solid accomplishment.

A more compact layout, fitting more on the screen at once, runs the risk of overwhelming the player with too much information at once. So again, solid work there.

The color scheme? Eh. I could take it or leave it. It's not straining on my old man eyes, so I'm not going to complain.
 
Sapient6 said:
I strongly disagree. The settings menu IS exemplary UI/UX.

It presents to the player 150 individual settings without being daunting. For the most part it's intuitive for "where would I find a setting to accomplish X?". It's still a lot and players can miss things easily, but all of that in and of itself is a solid accomplishment.

A more compact layout, fitting more on the screen at once, runs the risk of overwhelming the player with too much information at once. So again, solid work there.

The color scheme? Eh. I could take it or leave it. It's not straining on my old man eyes, so I'm not going to complain.
Click to expand...
UI and UX are not the same thing. I am talking about UI. They can make the UI look good while keeping it just as easy to use.
 
Sure, they aren't the same thing, but User Experience directly flows out of the design of the User Interface.

I've met an awful lot of code monkeys that think they are good at designing UI, most of whom can create a really nice looking UI... but most of them absolutely fail at creating a UI that is intuitive to use and navigate. If someone gets the UX right then that's they've won a hard fought battle. My expectation going into v3.0 experimental was that the UI to update 150 settings was going to be a horror show.

Is it to your taste? Obviously not. Can't please everyone. Doesn't mean the person/people who worked on this did a bad job at UI.
 
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