It’s time to fix the biggest UI gripe of them all (now with GUI mock-up)

[QuantumPion]

Now that we’re on QOL improvements I think it is time to address the elephant in the room, the most frustrating UI bit. That bit would be... the material selection box (i.e. the box where you select what material to build things out of). Why does it only have room to show 5 elements and make you scroll left/right to see the rest? It is one of the most used UI elements and is one of the most annoying on a regular basis. This UI box should show all of the material selections at once in a nice grid. That is all.

Also while I appreciate that they made the building tabs show more items, I think they should still go a step farther and have each menu show All of the available options without having to scroll. You should never have to scroll a dialogue UI item, that is a really annoying design. This applies to all of the sub menus as well, such as dupe food menu, jobs, research, etc. These should all be sized to fit. No more scrolling!!!

[ChickenMadness]

Don't know if this has been adressed in the new beta, but reducing the amount of clicks and general annoyance of storage compactors would be great.

Annoyance 1: you build your first storage compactor. You select sandstone but since sandstone is the only raw mineral you have, it ticks the 'all raw minerals' box. So any time you discover a new material you have to remember to go back to your storage compactors and uncheck them since they will automatically be added.
Very annoying if you forget about it and they start filling your base with 270C regolith, slimelung slime etc.

Annoyance 2: Just the massive amount of clicking and going through different lists trying to find different elements to check the boxes. If there is a way to simplify this system it would be great.

Materials need to stop being automatically used by default without your knowledge. This happens when you build things and run out of said material too. It default switches to a random material and you have to be extra careful that your ceramic tiles don't suddenly turn into sandstone because you didn't check.

[QuantumPion]

Oh yeah forgot to add - scrolling in checkbox lists for storage containers and such, get rid of that too. Scrolling menus must die!

[phod]

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm a huge fan of keybinds. I love games and programs that let me bind any key to any action. I'd like to see more flexibility in ONI. Some of the software I use at work forces me to click endlessly, so much so that I end up with pain in my hand. 

[ChickenMadness]

2 minutes ago, phod said:

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm a huge fan of keybinds. I love games and programs that let me bind any key to any action. I'd like to see more flexibility in ONI. Some of the software I use at work forces me to click endlessly, so much so that I end up with pain in my hand. 

I also get pain in my hand from too much clicking.

[Zarquan]

1 hour ago, QuantumPion said:

Now that we’re on QOL improvements I think it is time to address the elephant in the room, the most frustrating UI bit. That bit would be... the material selection box (i.e. the box where you select what material to build things out of). Why does it only have room to show 5 elements and make you scroll left/right to see the rest? It is one of the most used UI elements and is one of the most annoying on a regular basis. This UI box should show all of the material selections at once in a nice grid. That is all.

I think that the UI elements should be resizable so people can make them the size they want.  I personally like the material select for almost every building because there aren't very many.  I would like to avoid it taking up too mush space on the screen.  But other people want a larger grid.  I think of FreeOrion as an example, though I'm sure Klei could do a better job than they did.

1 hour ago, QuantumPion said:

Also while I appreciate that they made the building tabs show more items, I think they should still go a step farther and have each menu show All of the available options without having to scroll. You should never have to scroll a dialogue UI item, that is a really annoying design. This applies to all of the sub menus as well, such as dupe food menu, jobs, research, etc. These should all be sized to fit. No more scrolling!!!

But if you are playing on a smaller screen or in a smaller window, you might not be able to read the building names or tell similar buildings apart.  I regularly play ONI with a video or movie playing on the side of my screen.  The scrolling menus should stay, as they make the game more scalable in screen size.  But, once again, if they were resizable, people would be able to set it up how they like it.  If the food menus were changed in this manner, for example, I would not be able to customize the food unless I make my game full screen just for that because the boxes would be tiny.  Same with priorities.  I really appreciate that this game has scaling menus and scrolling with constant size buttons, as it makes the game usable while watching a video without detracting from the experience. 

Plus, I found it easier to find things on the old building menus than the new ones, as I only had to parse 9 things in my head and then scroll as opposed to 18.  Determining that your thing is not in the 18 things is much harder than in 9 and I find myself not seeing the building more often.

I prefer small menus with scrolling.

1 hour ago, ChickenMadness said:

Annoyance 1: you build your first storage compactor. You select sandstone but since sandstone is the only raw mineral you have, it ticks the 'all raw minerals' box. So any time you discover a new material you have to remember to go back to your storage compactors and uncheck them since they will automatically be added.
Very annoying if you forget about it and they start filling your base with 270C regolith, slimelung slime etc.

I agree that storage compactors should either show all resources or have an option to show undiscovered resources.

1 hour ago, ChickenMadness said:

Annoyance 2: Just the massive amount of clicking and going through different lists trying to find different elements to check the boxes. If there is a way to simplify this system it would be great.

But with the Copy Settings button, you only need to do that once.  I would like to have an option to have an alphabetized list of all materials on the storage compactor instead of categories sometimes.  I do love scrolling!

[QuantumPion]

Ok if you are playing at lower than 1080p than UI items scrolling to fit is fine. But they should be designed so that there is no scrolling at 1080p full screen and above since that is probably what the vast majority of people use.

[Zarquan]

1 hour ago, QuantumPion said:

Ok if you are playing at lower than 1080p than UI items scrolling to fit is fine. But they should be designed so that there is no scrolling at 1080p full screen and above since that is probably what the vast majority of people use.

Why should it be designed without scrolling?  Of all the UI decisions that exist, scrolling seems like a strange priority to remove.  I like scrolling when there are a lot of options.  I strongly prefer scrolling on small menus to large menus that don't need scrolling that take more screen space.  Scrolling is easy, you just use the mouse wheel or the trackpad scrolling gesture (if you are on a laptop). 

Humans can work with 7 +/- 2 pieces of information at a time. Determining your building is not in the list of 9 is almost instinctual if you know what you are looking for, and then you only have to check 3 at a time, which is also instinctual, as you scroll to find your building.  Finding your building in a list of 25 is much harder, as our brains are not designed for it.  Of course, if you know where everything is, then non-scrolling would be faster, but not that much faster.

But if we could resize the menus ourselves, then that would be optimal.  I could have my small scrolling menus and you could have your giant menus and we would both be happy.

One example of where scrolling is important:  Think of the temp shift plate, which can be made out of almost anything.  When you select it, will half the screen be covered in a list of materials?  Or will be buttons be tiny and hard to distinguish?

[QuantumPion]

5 hours ago, Zarquan said:

Why should it be designed without scrolling?  Of all the UI decisions that exist, scrolling seems like a strange priority to remove.  I like scrolling when there are a lot of options.  I strongly prefer scrolling on small menus to large menus that don't need scrolling that take more screen space.  Scrolling is easy, you just use the mouse wheel or the trackpad scrolling gesture (if you are on a laptop). 

Humans can work with 7 +/- 2 pieces of information at a time. Determining your building is not in the list of 9 is almost instinctual if you know what you are looking for, and then you only have to check 3 at a time, which is also instinctual, as you scroll to find your building.  Finding your building in a list of 25 is much harder, as our brains are not designed for it.  Of course, if you know where everything is, then non-scrolling would be faster, but not that much faster.

But if we could resize the menus ourselves, then that would be optimal.  I could have my small scrolling menus and you could have your giant menus and we would both be happy.

One example of where scrolling is important:  Think of the temp shift plate, which can be made out of almost anything.  When you select it, will half the screen be covered in a list of materials?  Or will be buttons be tiny and hard to distinguish?

I dunno what kind of potato of a machine you play on, but on mine there is TONS of space available to make UI elements large enough that they do not need to scroll. See OP for GUI mockup. My screen is at 1440p with 100% GUI scale.

 

Here's an even better idea: arranged in a grid, but sorted by material type!

[Zarquan]

1 hour ago, QuantumPion said:

I dunno what kind of potato of a machine you play on, but on mine there is TONS of space available to make UI elements large enough that they do not need to scroll. See OP for GUI mockup. My screen is at 1440p with 100% GUI scale.

I play on an ASUS ROG GL752VW laptop.  I have a 17.3 inch at 1080p.  A large laptop from 2016.   By no means a potato.  But people should be able to play this game at lower resolutions.  Plus, some people scale up their GUIs to make the text bigger.  You might not, I might not (I actually scale mine down to about 85% so my stuff doesn't overlap), but it is a thing people do.  Show us your mockup at 125% at 1080p or even 100% at 720p with all the temp shift plate materials.  How about at only 3/4 width?  And it doesn't matter that you have a better monitor than this or if you always run the game fullscreen, other people don't and ONI should work for them.  ONI shouldn't require a high end monitor.

I also like my screen to be almost empty of menus and UI elements.

1 hour ago, QuantumPion said:

Where are the other 17 materials?  There are 37 materials you can build it out of.  Some of them aren't in the game, but they are in debug mode.  And debug mode should still work.

But that still doesn't answer the question of why you hate scrolling so much.  There are many things I would rate as the "Biggest Gripe" about the UI over this.  If I select something while trying to build, the building menu closes immediately and I have to open it again.  Or the fact I can't hotkey buildings or materials.  Or the fact that I can't look at how big a building is before I research it or see where the pipe inlets and outlets are.  Or the fact that I can't see what kind of gas is in my airflow tile in the oxygen overlay.  Or that I can't set subpriority for only one of three jobs on a tile.

One thing I love about ONI is that I can play it at a bit more than half width and it all still works (with a reduced UI scale) and have a video on the side.

But, once again, we could both have our ONI menu utopia if we could resize the menus our selves.  You can make yours big (so you don't have to scroll), I can make mine small (the way it was before the preview), and we can both be happy.

[Yoma_Nosme]

No more scrolling! Especially if you're on a laptop on the touchpad with no mouse (couch-mode activated)

[QuantumPion]

4 hours ago, Zarquan said:

I play on an ASUS ROG GL752VW laptop.  I have a 17.3 inch at 1080p.  A large laptop from 2016.   By no means a potato.  But people should be able to play this game at lower resolutions.  Plus, some people scale up their GUIs to make the text bigger.  You might not, I might not (I actually scale mine down to about 85% so my stuff doesn't overlap), but it is a thing people do.  Show us your mockup at 125% at 1080p or even 100% at 720p with all the temp shift plate materials.  How about at only 3/4 width?  And it doesn't matter that you have a better monitor than this or if you always run the game fullscreen, other people don't and ONI should work for them.  ONI shouldn't require a high end monitor.

I also like my screen to be almost empty of menus and UI elements.

Where are the other 17 materials?  There are 37 materials you can build it out of.  Some of them aren't in the game, but they are in debug mode.  And debug mode should still work.

But that still doesn't answer the question of why you hate scrolling so much.  There are many things I would rate as the "Biggest Gripe" about the UI over this.  If I select something while trying to build, the building menu closes immediately and I have to open it again.  Or the fact I can't hotkey buildings or materials.  Or the fact that I can't look at how big a building is before I research it or see where the pipe inlets and outlets are.  Or the fact that I can't see what kind of gas is in my airflow tile in the oxygen overlay.  Or that I can't set subpriority for only one of three jobs on a tile.

One thing I love about ONI is that I can play it at a bit more than half width and it all still works (with a reduced UI scale) and have a video on the side.

But, once again, we could both have our ONI menu utopia if we could resize the menus our selves.  You can make yours big (so you don't have to scroll), I can make mine small (the way it was before the preview), and we can both be happy.

Ok since you are being such a negative nancy, here you go. The first shows what it would look like at 1080p, and I've doubled the number of material options (i.e. double the number of actual in-game materials). It looks a little cluttered because it's just cut & paste but if the materials were sorted in order it would work great.

And if you are really concerned, here is what it would look like at 768p for all the potatoes out there.

[Zarquan]

On the first image, it takes up a lot of space.  I boxed the area that would be open enough for use naturally.  The area on the right empty area on the right is where the resources would be.  If I wanted to build a floor or a bunch of temp shift plates in a row to transfer heat, I would either have to be significantly more zoomed out than I want to be or I would have to build on the little sliver at the top that is left open or I would have to move the camera a lot. 

My rule for the boxes is that I should be able to draw a vertical or horizontal line from any point in the box to any other without crossing a piece of user interface.  I did yours first, you can have that notch at the top if you wanted, and maybe go off to the side at the top a bit, but that doesn't feel natural.

This is in opposition to what the game currently has, where you can easily build almost all the way across the screen.  But this has the merit that if the area you want to build in is in the normal usage area of the screen, within 2 inches from the sides of the screen (on my screen), and you open a menu, the menu will not be covering the place you want to build.

Now, they actually made this worse by making the menus larger, as I no longer have that notch on the left if you are building a floor.  I notice this and regularly have to move my camera or zoom out to build, and since middle click panning is unreliable, I sometimes right click, which closes the menu so I have to open it again.  UIs are best left in the corners and edges as much as possible and the playable area should be in the middle and be as open as possible.  Open almost any program and you will see this setup. 

Your second image has even less space to work with.  Especially since you can't close them while you are building.  Also, if you were to expand the menu (removing the scrolling) with the category "Base," it would go off the screen.  I don't think ladders would be buildable anymore.

2 hours ago, Yoma_Nosme said:

No more scrolling! Especially if you're on a laptop on the touchpad with no mouse (couch-mode activated)

What kind of masochist plays any mouse heavy game with a trackpad?  I play on a couch with a mouse on my laptop and it works fine.  Most mice do decently on a firm fabric surface.  Worst case, use a clip board or a notebook (the paper one, not another computer) as a mouse pad. 

But I am biased against trackpads.  Probably more than either of you hate scroll bars.  I used mine a few times, got angry at it, and turned it off.  I mean, I wanted to click and drag something and some gesture assumed I was moving 3 fingers down or something and all my windows were minimized.  Every time I have tried using a track pad, random gestures happen all over the place.  (That does include Mac trackpads by the way)

[Lancar]

Honestly, I'd be fine with a little scrolling. If they make the materials box have 3 rows just like the buildings box and have it scroll the exact same way (vertically), I'd call that a definite improvement.

I suppose it could also be a single materials button with a popup, but I'd rather have the 3 row-scroll example above, tbh.
It's just the current sideways single-line-scroll in the game right now that's a bit awkward.

[Cairath]

As much as I agree with the left building panel (and there is actually a mod that makes that panel larger for way less scrolling), your mockup is pretty bad and wastes screen estate. It's not the point to open the menus to cover the entire screen to not be able to actually see anything behind them

[Yoma_Nosme]

6 hours ago, Zarquan said:

What kind of masochist plays any mouse heavy game with a trackpad? 

Well this one right here and it works quite fine (on my mac) left hand for wasd and 1-9 and the right on the trackpad.

But the scrolling is a b****

And( oh my lord, this kills me the most) there's no ''eyedropper-tool'' for a smoother workflow 

[Nitroturtle]

If the camera movement allowed you to scroll past the edges of the map a bit, it would be a lot easier to work near the edge of the map without the UI covering your building area, regardless of the size of the selection windows.  I always hate working near the edge because of this issue, since you have to zoom all the way in to be able to see anything.  The right side of the map is especially annoying since the material list takes up nearly the whole right side of the screen.  I can't be the only one with this issue.