Collecting your interface woes - ИДЕЯ ДЛЯ РИЗОМА - Форум сообщества Райзом

Llana

If the content cannot be put in game then at least a npc or info board that says how to find it could be useful if placed well.

That would qualify as "more publicized", so it seems we agree.

Llana

I hoped higher level profession in armor making will allow to create more different armor designs rather than same armor with different numbers .. but maybe I had too high expectations of the crafting system.

I'm not sure how many more types of armor we need. Then again, this isn't a game where armor grants special abilities like invisibilty or enhanced regeneration either. Aside from enchants that allow for insta-casting on the move, anything a homin can do is something they are capable of with no gear at all. Gear may enhance abilities, but gear doesn't grant abilities.

With that in mind, what sort of armors would you propose? Something that would shift the focus away from the character and more towards their gear as well as alter the fundamental nature of the game plus require rewriting a large percentage of the code? Or simply a wider range, like Extra Heavy armor with stats comparable to what NPC HA has? (Of course, that would be a major slap in the face to those who went through the effort to get a full suit...) Please, elaborate!

Llana

This is a game so it is supposed to be about things you want to do rather than things you would rather script. So if you need anti-botting measures it is a design failure and you add an insult to an injury when the anti-botting measures get in the way of people enjoying the game.

In an ideal world where people behaved ideally, I would agree. However, I don't see how accounting for the fact that the really real world is not ideal is a design failure of the game. Is having seat belts in a car a design flaw? Is the mere existence of door locks offensive because it requires slightly more effort to get into your home? Most importantly, is it really that much of an inconvenience to have to use something other than the keyboard?

Llana

Because it is totally not true.
I am not a FPS player so I almost never have my finger on the mouse button
muticlicking is totally annoying interface - you either get unwieldy mouse that gets painful to use after a few thousand clicks or you get a tablet. And a tablet must be either resonably sized with no way to effectively multiclick with muticlick distance detection tuned for mice or huge, expensive, and taking up too much room to use comfortably with a keyboard.
it is totally annoying to have to grab a mouse to target on a mob when you have your hands on the keyboard

I have one hand on the mouse for many non-gaming things I do as well, including but not limited to CAD/CAM, multimedia editing, data entry (easier to click once than hit Tab 3-30 times!), and reformatting text (a lot of selecting and copy/pasting). The way most mice are shaped puts the buttons right underneath the index and middle fingers. If multi-clicking is annoying then you must hate Windows, OS X, and most Linux distros as well.

But since you mentioned it being painful, it sounds more like you probably just haven't found a pointing device with good ergonomics. Personally, I am rather fussy about my mice (especially finding one big enough for my hands; I can easily hit both SHIFT keys, so I find many mice uncomfortably small) and use a palmrest to keep my wrist from being forced into unnatural positions. I'm at an age where all my joints hurt even without getting within ten miles of a mouse, but I manage to avoid additional pain even when I spend half a day gaming. The only time my hands hurt from mousing is when I am forced to use a too-small mouse, especially one designed for a laptop. And you forgot about trackballs, joysticks, and vertical mice. I know some people with joint issues (arthritis, poorly healed injuries, or just plain old age) that use those. It's all about ergonomics.

If you always have both hands on the keyboard then I must wonder what other games you play. Most of the PC games I can think of that came out in the last 15 years require fairly extensive mousing, but that might just be a matter of me having different gaming preferences from you and thus being unfamiliar with "no mouse required" games. I'm not even a big FPS player, yet I wind up using keyboard+mouse simultaneously in most games in addition to the non-gaming stuff mentioned above.

Llana

There are surely more expressive ways to denote dig spots than green globs.

If you think of prospecting as a spell that temporarily highlights the location of mats then it makes sense. After all, the only thing prospecting does is locate mats; it doesn't extract them.

Llana

It does not make much sense for half of the stuff to be underground, anyway.

It does if you want a consistent mechanic for all foraging activities.

Llana

Especially the beginner resources you see without prospecting.

How do you learn about extraction if you don't extract? Most of the training I've had has been geared towards how things actually will be when I need those skills outside of a training environment, and almost all of it involved practice not unlike extracting mats in a pre-popped field in Silan the same way I now extract spots I prospect myself on the Mainland.

Also, you will find those pre-popped spots have their drawbacks. The first time you sit for a few minutes waiting for your Focus bar to regenerate, you'll understand. The only use for those pre-popped spots is for those who have a Forage skill in the single digits who have not yet purchased Basic Prospection.

Llana

So it would make sense to show resources as whatever they are if you can see them without prospecting or you used right prospecting skill to know exactly what resource you get and some generic dig spot markers for the rest.

For pre-popped spots, they are generally all the same thing. The only deposits I have seen with mixed mats are all spots that you must prospect to see any spots at all.

As for the right prospecting skill, there is Knowledge. Here I am playing with Knowledge 2. Any guesses as to what mats each spot is without having to start digging?

There is an easier way; Mat specs and the different grades of Find Better Materials. For instance, if I am going for armor mats for an overseer mission, I will set my propspection for "Only Fine" so that I can make Fyros armor from mats dug in Lakes, then use the mat spec for wood, resin, oil, or sap. The spots where those four mats are are mixed spots with 3-4 different mats in the same area, but I only pop the one I am going for. Since every spot I pop is, say, Fine Wood, there is no need for Knowledge

Llana

Finally there is another interface issue with the camera zoom control with mouse - as you move mouse a bit further from where you pressed the mouse button camera starts rotating like mad. This can be surely solved better and is in many games that use mouse for camera control.

While I can get the camera to spin like that, it takes a deliberate effort for me to do so. It's a bit easier for me to do on a trackpad as my Toshiba's trackpad is considerably smaller than my desktop's mousepad. It sounds to me like either your mouse has the sensitivity set too high, or you are moving your mouse too far.

For perspective, even though I can go from one side of my 1920*1080 screen to the other with less than 2 inches of mouse movement (just a flick of the wrist), it still takes me about an inch of movement to pan the camera 360 degrees. In order to spin wildly, I have to move from the elbow and slide the mouse a good 6-8 inches; far more than the distance it takes me to get the pointer from one side of my screen to the other. So unless you are dragging your mouse the same distance you would on a Wacom tablet (which would qualify as "doing it wrong"), it might be time to dig into your mouse settings and make some adjustments to the tracking speed.

Sorry I don't have the time or attention span to read 10 pages to see if my issues were already discussed but here they are:

Bugs:
If the client is in windowed mode and you set the viewable window to be max screen size, it resizes down on a relog. It does this twice on Windows but only once on Linux. If you do not catch the 2nd resize on Windows, all your UI elements are moved around. Please for the love of Kami get rid of the hard coded small window size on launch. Have it remember last screen size. This has been a bug since Ryzom was owned by Nevrax.

Ui positions and macros don't save unless you cleanly exit the client.
A crash or hard exit nothing gets saved. It would be awesome to have a real time save of UI and macro element changes.

Windows that a player may not want open are forced to close them on every relog. Mine currently is the mission window. It used to be the Home window as well.

Suggestions not bug related:
Allow a "snap to" window positioning. So one can slide windows next to each other and they snap to the edge of the next window (preferably without a gap).

A horizontal scroll in the skill tree window so one doesn't have to resize this window huge to see mastered skills.

A resizable macro window, as is it takes up too much screen horizontally.

A complete redo of the UI setup to allow for player made custom UI skins.
Think Everquest or WoW here. All based on xml and/or lua.