Hi all!

I'm looking to start cleaning up the UI, and I'd like to hear from you all the little things that irk you about the interface. It can be anything from "certain text colors are hard to read" to "why do I have to click 3 times to do x?" to whatever else is an annoyance in the gameplay experience.

Gather up all your little gripes, all the rough edges, all the little annoyances, and air them out in this thread. I want to get a clearer picture of what isn't working with the current UI, and start making a plan to improve it.

Thanks!

Hm... Well, one thing that could make it a whole lot better was if you could resize some of the mini windows. A few such as the skillgem and quickbelt cant understandably, but things like the chat. Or consumables, or mail. Where a scrollbar is easily used. I think if they could be reshaped according to the persons needs it would make everyone happy

There's a small problem with Firefox 3.x.x as well - and I suspect other browsers, too.

I know Opera is the preferred browser for PQ, but let's face it: a lot of people don't have much knowledge about browsers, so they end up using whatever they have on their PC. In a work environment, it is usually just IE (if the IT people have been lazy) or FF (if they care about security). In many institutions such as schools or universities, it could be virtually any browser. My university is nice enough to have most browsers installed on all workstations, so it's just a question about choosing the proper one. At home PCs, people might have just about any browser installed, but what they usually use is something easy and simple.

The problem is, IE is known by just about everyone. FF is known by most users, while Opera is known by only most advanced users. While Opera is a really good package, it fell short just when the new wave of browsers appeared. FF came to the rescue and won the hearts of many. People have come accustomed to the large selection of add-ons and other stuff like that and generally like the customization options available. I know Opera is just about as customizable as FF is, but it is still the underdog.

As such, I suggest more work should be done to ensure PQ looks and works nice on just about any browser. Maybe have some sort of system alerting the user that their browser does not support PQ to the fullest and to have a better experience, they should use another browser or update theirs. Let's face it: there's a lot of computer-illiterate people put there, and they like stuff like Miniclip and Facebook's applications because they are so functionable with just about anything one can use to surf the web. PQ should strive to be in the same class, with at least warnings that something may not be all right with the current setup of a user; I'm thinking it might be too hard to ensure uncompromising functionality with every browser, but with proper warning systems and such at least the user would know that the game isn't ugly - it's their PC that's to blame.

Anyways, the Minor Gripe that I actually wanted to say was that with FF 3.x.x (mine is 3.5.7 at the moment, but this one has been around since 3.5.0 at least) the UI boxes lose some of their layout information, and scroll bars appear at least in the main window(which has HP, SP and XP information). Also, the character portrait is out of place and the HP, SP and XP bars block the special effects display, with only the two topmost showing. The Quests and Skillgems windows also have an unnecessary horizontal scroll bar. They do not interfere much with functionality, but they don't look too good either.

This turned out to be a rant of some sort, but this is how I see PQ could attract more players and succeed in the ways it is destined to be. It's a great game, after all.

I haven't taken a look at the game in FF in a while. I'm doing some other UI tweaks right now, so I'll make sure FF testing gets a good chunk of time devoted to it.

the only problem ive had with ff is windows occasionly being stuck at the top of the pq window which is irritating but can easily be cured vy logging out and in.

my minor gripe is the complete loss of forum avatars. not that that has anything to do with the game.

other than that there are some minor graphics inconsistenses, i.e when fighting in a stone area of the ufc the fightbackground looks like a more garvaelly earth thing, which is pretty out of place.



but chances are that'll get cleared up if all goes to plan i guess.

also while playing I by and large didn't get any more lag except for possibly the first loading screen.

I'll look into the forums avatars; probably something didn't get set up quite right when I transferred the server.

I feel like there was a technical shortcut I took surrounding the combat areas for the UFC, but I'll have to look into it to be sure. In theory it should be simple to correct.

As for FF, I've spent some time looking into it, and there are some really annoying bugs at play, though it's too early to say definitively where the problem lies. It seems that elements that get floated right inside a parent that has overflow:auto mistakenly causes the horizontal scrollbar to appear under FF, but I can't say for certain yet. If true, though, it's going to make correcting the problem incredibly difficult and will resign FF's rendering engine to the same status as IE7 in my mind. There also seems to be some serious problems with the way the character panel is rendered under FF that appear to be violations of the CSS spec to my eyes.

That said, before I finish up with the next stage of UI cleanup / improvement that I'm working on, I'll give a lot of extra love to FF 3.6 to see how much of this might be able to be worked around. For example, I've found a lot of extraneous horizontal scrollbars can be fixed by adding an extra 1px to window widths (which strongly suggests an off-by-one error in FF's rendering code), but that sort of thing is easy enough to work around.

On the upside, I'm starting to really like some of the new UI work. As a sneak preview of some of the new functionality, check out http://prototype-window.xilinus.com/ . Between this and some of the other UI re-arrangement, I think this will prove a great leap forward for figuring out how to interact with the game.