Star Citizen Live: All Things UI

19 July 201901:05:061,604 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

00:00:08
[Music] hi everybody welcome to star citizen live all about the UI I'm your host Jared Huckaby and joining us on the show this week UI people people from UI UI kinda had a joke about UI and I just lost it bad start bad start Simon Zane welcome to the show hey Jarrod are you good and now we haven't had we haven't had a a UI feature on for some time so let's take a let's take a few moments at the beginning the show introduce ourselves tell us who you are and what you do for star citizen will start with Zane Zane who are you and what do you do for star citizen so I'm the principal UI core tech developer here
00:00:56
CAG what I work on is the core tech for a UI so the kind of the fundamental system that drives the display of user interfaces in the game previously I was the UI director so I wanted to kind of get more neck deep into the code and the engineering and and to advance the tech much faster to kind of drive our development so that's been working out really good Simon here is is you can well you can introduce yourself yeah so so I I'm the UI director now but that means mostly I spend my time organizing things generally making sure the UI on our various teams is kind of
00:01:43
heading the same direction and making sure it's done on time that sort of stuff when I get time which is not a lot I do a bit of UI design so I've been been looking into the the FPS hood the visor can talk about later so it's kind of fun yeah it's it's hard when you when you get when you reach a directors level it's a lot of times it's more big picture stuff more oversight stuff I was like I was actually excited when I heard saying that you were jumping back into the fray and really get your your hands dirty with the UI stuff again UI is a I'm often quoted as saying UI is a department that affects every single aspect of star citizen like I don't think there's an aspect of start something that doesn't require some assistance or implementation from UI so it's a it's a super important department
00:02:32
soon super important discipline for game design and I'm really excited that you're here and that you're both here and we can answer some questions we can talk about this so thank you for taking the time out of your week now this is a Friday at the end of your week so thank you for being here and let's just get right into the questions here we take questions from a number of sources on star citizen life in case this is your first show you can submit your questions in either the twitch chat or in spectrum chat by posting your question with the word question in capital letters surrounded by brackets that'll help our team you'll pull it out from the rest of the conversation we also put up a thread earlier this week and started collecting questions throughout the week for folks who maybe couldn't be here with us live or folks we just wanted to vote up which questions they wanted to see answered most so we ran so as always we're going to start with the what we call the
00:03:21
pregame questions ones that came in throughout the week on spectrum that were voted up we're out the bat what can you tell us about plans to let users customize their various HUD elements we have been hearing this for a long time here things like prioritizing features and a resizing elements or changing the color stuff like that where our thoughts on this so I guess so I can start this one over in the deep end right off the bat so it's an interesting question really I suppose the thing that we would ask first is why do people want to customize things I get the impression in some cases just because the current UI is which needs a little bit of updating is not quite working for people so I think the first step for us would be to find out those
00:04:09
issues people don't want well the way it's set up that people don't like at the moment and that's the first thing for us to address so relating to that we're doing a lot of rework on the the hood and the MFDs and the FPS visor moment so a lot of those kind of questions it's great to it's great to bring up the reasoning now and then we can start to incorporate that into into these things as we move forward yeah I know a lot of the lot of discussion about this for a while has been either addressing issues like the glare though they want to change the color or something because whatever they're flying against matches the color and it's gonna be difficult to read sometimes people just like different colors like you know people just prefer it a different a different orientation
00:04:56
or sometimes it's an actual visual acuity thing like some people just have difficulty seeing you know certain colors on the spectrum and if you're if you happen to be you know we're if you have to have that weakness right there where the UI is I can be difficult to read so I know folks have been asking for the ability to adjust certain elements that UI for some time so yeah sure but I know that's something we're definitely considering something we we've talked about for a while and but like you said it's really important to get the building blocks and to make it as functional as possible before we start introducing customizable elements if we ever do well I mean the thing with building blocks and whoa Billy basically building boxes what it's like our internal term for the UI tech so the tool that we use to develop you is a new the new one not the old one so like a
00:05:48
lot of it is allowing for like flexible layouts or being able to easily reflow elements so they can rearrange themselves very easily relative to each other and it opens up so much more because we can make the UI so much more dynamic and responsive and flexible whereas before it's just kind of you know if we were to think about like maybe layout customization or you know if we had like a grid system something he can kind of plug into and rearrange on then it makes it so much easier than before because everything before was just hardwired it was very static in nature but you know if we have a fully data-driven and flexible system you know it kind of opens that up now that we can we can start asking like what makes
00:06:36
sense for customization like previously is just like yeah we could we could do colors but like it'd be very complicated to do you know like resizing and things like that when you have static a lot you know very very statically authored UI so implementation wise it's it's like much easier now so it's just basically like what are the kind of fundamental issues like you know we mentioned things about like you know the bright like you know how readable things are against you know bright backgrounds and you know you want to change colors but you know well kind of a lute to this later on I think but you know there might be a better solution for that that's that's you know not goes beyond you I yeah yeah you hit on a point that Simon made that I think
00:07:25
is worth reiterating right now it's while we're in development you know as we are we want to focus our work on making the best default standard UI possible and that can only be done if everybody's using the same thing so that we can see all the feedback so that we see all the you know how it's working if you were to introduce customization to early in the process then it skewers the feedback because we don't know what this person is using versus what this person is using versus what this person is using so it's while you're developing it's really important everybody has the same thing so that we can get proper feedback and we can iterate the way that you need to to make the best default standard UI we can yep that's that's very well put and definitely yeah wait so but if anyone does have suggestions
00:08:14
like we really need to have this thing color changeable because of whatever reasons then do that as knowing we will will read the comments and we'll take that into account when we get to it I mean I assume we'll have like easily selectable colorblind options as well well yeah you know just change the color yeah things like we can't do all the things all I wanted son fortunately that's true all right so next question says currently UI elements like icons of station turrets or mission points can be very invasive sometimes filling the screen I've seen this I've come out of quantum jump and just my entire screen is littered with every single turn and everything that's around what can be done to make this more user friendly or diegetic so do I take this one or shall I
00:09:02
so this is one thing that I'm really interested in is looking at I'm not sure how soon we're going to get to it but what we would like to have is some kind of intelligent system so there's obviously loads of stuff that we could show all over the screen potentially so points of interest mission objective markers chips and so on what we need to have is a kind of an intelligent system that works on how far away things are and also a priority and of a priority that the design is set and then somehow works out which of those things to show and how many of them to show so it kind of picks and chooses from this massive selection and shows you the most important things from those so that's that would be the starting point to addressing this I think ok next question this is kind of a big picture one here as the universe becomes more complex
00:09:50
more in different kinds of entities are vying for space on the HUD notifications Pio eyes QT destinations ship's mission markers how do you manage all this visual information and can anything be done to give playtoy well the second part is can we give players the ability to customize so so what can be done to manage all this information there the answered the last board yeah so going off of kind of riffing off the stuff that I talked about the UI tag before when we have easily flexible layouts and things like that we can start thinking about making things much more I'm smart about when they display and contextual about when they display so for instance you know you have this big no target you know this is the example that I think Chris gave previously but you had like there's no target big box that's on the screen
00:10:39
all the time but you know if you don't have target know why not just you know not have that and when we when we apply that to you know maybe like the other feeds or you know the HUD it's like things can that you don't need can you know disappear out of view and reappear when they're needed so things can be much smarter about when they appear things can be a lot more contextual rather than just always being there all the time so I think one thing relating to this is I think as the games been built up over the years there's been a lot of things kind of added on top kind of little features out of here and there so now you want to take this step back and look at all the other stuff that we want to show and we're going to try and look at the best ways to arrange those on the screen as well so maybe we for
00:11:26
example keep the chat in the bottom left have the objectives in the top right that kind of thing so so try and work out a layout for the screen that works and where things don't overlap and don't clutter each other so that's that's definitely something we're looking into here the chat is like the most obvious example because you have this constant overlap with the ship FFT and that's actually because it's on two different contexts and they don't know about each other's sizes so it's you know if when we actually revamp the whole thing we rethink like we're creating like we're looking at the MFDs right now and we're creating like this whole new system that's this is just like much more systemic and you know there's a grid system that where everything kind of fits in to each other and you know you can create different sizes of widgets so like the chat should you know you know
00:12:16
you can have that like reflow with something depending on maybe how much you've customized your visor rather than just being statically placed all the time so it ties all of this ties into the functionality and the capability you would have in the new system yes and something we we're definitely aware of the the overlaps no like kind of thing and we definitely want to fix it yeah yeah it's a heck of a challenge and we'll get into it later a bit but having the the diegetic displays on the MFDs and then having the helmet displace you know you get into a ship you have it having both and building a system that can switch things out and realize okay when you've got this on the end if you don't need it on them on the helmet and vice versa and stuff yeah it's an interesting challenge ahead of you guys yeah I mean there's lips we're lucky you
00:13:07
have the you know you have the helmet you I present even though you've got like a you know a sea of screens so once we can make that you know enable the ability functionality to actually cast things your visor than you know the things that even you know automatically just become much cleaner we want that age what we want to do that to pull you know to take things and terror specific parts of the UI out and put it on your visor because they be it's more useful and you want that more kind of immediately in your view but it's building up that function I was getting kind of the systemic stuff and kind of a foundation define first for the MFDs how things display when should they display you know what goes where and and then building that into the
00:13:58
overall design so that's something like we're spending a lot of time now working on as the tech is being developed alongside that in parallel yeah one of the things we're doing because I guess the people at home don't really see it very much but we're kind of building the tools to help us as developers make really good UI and then once that's done then we start putting the good UI in the game so everyone else can see it and use it and give us feedback in that kind of thing well we're gonna work on the people at home seeing that stuff that's next quarter of ISC we're gonna get we're in exam on maybe something else and get a couple more UI segments in there so people can better see and understand the work that your team has been doing from the live chat got a question for you message spam that we're receiving the message spam that keeps popping up on the UI is that a bug or a design feature
00:14:48
well I think it's it's kind of a legacy thing from having so many features being out to the game and they're all kind of competing for attention and the way the current UI is it's not really well have its scale so this is one of the things we're we're planning on investigating the the visor to display generally and part of that investigation will be what do we do to this messaging messaging system to make it work for people so we can do things like for example we can give the messages priority so if something really important comes up that kind of overrides the other stuff that's there we could give things timers so they stay on for a set time and potentially just not show more than a sir number of messages in the same amount of time so there's plenty of little tools
00:15:35
we can we can apply to that to make it work better yeah I think I think it's mainly just that we had that notification which in the center there and as more features got added on over time especially the mission stuff the new all the new mission stuff that kind of came in I kind of latched on to that and you know now it's spamming like 100 missions so I mean before is just yeah it had a few notifications but we need to kind of take that in account and have a system that's much smarter about what notifications should display there versus you know maybe the missions probably would be better served by you know just like a pulsing icon with a number on it you know indicating the number of new missions that you haven't read yet yep you know things like you you know when you get a like a new email and your
00:16:23
inbox says like one or this tears three black impulse on each new mission that comes in rather than just like boom all you know this this new mission is now available it's like taking up and present your screen ya know something that's much smarter more elegant yeah another thing we're considering is kind of splitting it out a little bit so you've got your you kind of messages in one place and then we're probably quite it's quite like we'd have a sort of mission objective area that shows you your current mission related stuff and we might as well have it have a separate thing for the kind of keyboard keyboard shortcuts and that sort of thing you know there's little hints that pop up so kind of move those things to different parts of the screen so they're not kind of always competing for the same space speaking of competing for the same space we have a question from the live chat here that speaks to those of us who have non-standard resolution monitors what
00:17:15
are we doing to support non 1080p resolutions star citizens many star systems are tend to be on the cutting edge of technology and have these 16 the 21 by 9 monitors or 32 by 9 monitors if you're my dad what are we doing to to help the UI play better on that you know every time I patch comes out sometimes the star map or the ship ID doesn't exactly work real well with the wider your screen resolutions that's a good one fishing oh yeah it's one thing is because again as I mentioned before is like all of our UI is authored in a very static manner so we you know we would be able to in our stuff that we have our flexible way out you know we're developing because we
00:18:03
have flexible layouts those can you know we can have that resize potentially depending on your your your aspect ratio it monitor so you know everything remains visible on screen but the challenge also is that things are in in world as well so you know wall may be the mobi glass might be in world we could also you know take what is your current screen resolution and be able to scale that UI even though it is diegetic and it is in the world also maybe block a combination of that and feel the view changes although that's something we're still kind of looking into in terms of getting that all to work yeah it's hard when you put if prioritization is I mean cannot be it cannot be understated how important it
00:18:52
is to prioritize the things that we work on does like we said before you can't work on all the things all at once and those widescreen monitors while there's certainly cool so like that they are generally edge cases in the overall population of star citizen so oftentimes we have to prioritize the things that affect the most number of users first before we start going to the the edge cases but it I was gonna say that's something that effects that the dev teams here as well because everybody's working on these cool new features so every every quarter or every few weeks even we get people saying oh we've got this cool thing can you do the UI for it and we have to we have such a big list to choose from we have to pick and choose the the most important ones are them kind of leave the rest a little bit later yeah I swear half of the game development is just prioritization it's probably a saying somewhere that they don't know about all right what's going
00:19:40
on let's see are there any plans to add keyboard integration in and navigating the various interfaces we encounter in addition to just the mouse like even just you know hitting the arrow keys on the keyboard to go up and down in a UI thing something like that yeah so we want to be old we want to design our UI to be like it's it's much more keyboard friendly so you know right now you can only use the mouse and let's just kind of rubbish I think because having that keyboard access like whether it's an MSD or even even when you're you're like in a shopping console having the keyboard you know able to navigate with that makes things a lot easier because you know even even if you have a mouse and you're and you know you're interacting with it you have kind of
00:20:28
those two controls at the same time and it's it's it can be much faster to go through different menus with the keyboard navigation but it also you know it allows us to kind of simplify a lot of stuff as well yeah I think we'd really like to be able to have any well people should be able to play the game with a variety of controllers so they can use the keyboard and mouse just the keyboard or joystick joystick or gamepad as well so I think of you in a way like Damon saying if your design for the most difficult thing which is potentially the gamepad if you make a UI design that works for that you're generally doing a kind of simple and elegant design anyway so it's quite often a good way to approach things generally and as we go through and redesign these various bits of the
00:21:16
screens so for example we're doing the we're starting to look at the MFDs at the moment we've got this sort of high-level design at the moment and as those start to get implemented that's probably one of the first areas where we start to have this more kind of uniform control method that caters for everybody most people yeah like like for example with here you know you're you're you're managing you know the individual items and an MSD but like there can be maybe three or four different actions that are you know that you can or take upon that when you're when you're when you have it selected you can be much quicker about doing that with with like shortcuts rather than kind of hunting for the button with your mouse but of course anytime you're dealing with keyboard shortcuts you're you're fighting for real estate at that point with other features everybody's ever looked at I haven't been a sexual about
00:22:05
what keys are available in what modes so if you're interacting with on FB you know potentially you might not need some stuff that's normally otherwise so I in a previous show this was a while ago we mentioned that we're moving away from the flash and Scaleform stuff for forehead UI in favor of a homegrown solution what can you tell us about that what progress have we made where we at so kind of already touched on a little bit on the previous questions but yeah we used flash and we're still using it now but we're trying to get away from it so we're kind of in this phase where we're transitioning away from using flash this kind of things this program
00:22:55
where we're baking our assets and into a much more or fully data-driven system so and previously in flash you kind of set things up it's very static you don't see what it looks like in game until you actually export it and reload the editor so also the actual interface with the game code is much more simplified so before we actually had to write classes for each individual feel that you wanted to modify and you had to then create a class to manage that field from on the flash side so you kind of in a lot of cases we got had like artists filling with code which is just not ideal it's just rubbish so in our new system we have like the standard
00:23:46
API where any game program in any team could actually expose some variables what we call bindings variables so the example is like an ammo counter on a weapon you know game program just kind of register a variable ammo count and then in our UI tech we can actually create a node and then specify the name of that variable or select from it from the list of available variables and then just plug it straight into a text field it's that easy and we see it why we update we updated live in the game in fact we can actually be another editor and you know be in-game you could be like a character and have health and everything and work on a UI so it's
00:24:36
quite cool it's it's it's too much it's it's taking so it's it's still using scale form as a renderer so we boil we we kind of cut out the the process of actually authoring the UI in flash and the socks are our own tools and our own data-driven system but we still were still using scale form to to draw the B vectors so it's we boil it down to just the renderer so you know things like when we're when we're drawing borders we're drawing backgrounds we're drawing like curved corners and things like that and we're rendering text that's all this really does and everything else on top of that is our own code and our own system so at some point we will take that render and
00:25:28
we will build our own so it's almost like an abstraction layer between our own tools and our own development and the renderer and then at some point we switch that out for just be completely rid of it since I started the company one thing that's really we're finding as well is because we kind of owned this tech and we've got a team working on it we can say I suppose just going back to flash flash was originally designed as an animation system for web stuff so if you wanted to make a make a bar on that you can do it it takes a little time but if someone goes yeah don't like that kind of bar key turn it into a dial that's gonna take loads of extra work
00:26:16
whereas with the building block stuff we can just swap those over and also if so for example if the dial thing didn't exist yet we can just go to the programs and say we could really do with the dial widget once that's made then we can reuse that wherever we want to within the rest of the UI so because there's a lot of control this developers yeah and also because it's fully data-driven everything in the UI is programmatically drawn and driven from data so you know we don't we don't have to really worry as much about other artists stomping over each other's work because you can merge it in right right that's one change can be merged another change without having to fiddle with two in resolve conflicts over two binary files that's change and hunting for okay whatcha library symbol was change and it's just it's so much much much easier
00:27:03
and so many different ways that maybe you know I can't list all of them right now all right let's uh let's get into some of the more in-game stuff the the experience that people are having with with the UI got a section here for personal UI and helmet stuff what are your thoughts on being able to nope where'd he did that one we covered that one already has there been any discussion about adding a compass ribbon giving us cardinal directions on planets or moons so well I suppose that's another of those is what's the reason for wanting it so it's yes but there are other ways to solve that potentially so
00:27:54
it doesn't necessarily have to be a compass widget one thing we're looking into you probably saw it on one of the earlier videos you know and we showed the area maps this interior map I think we had it on there we had a little mock-up of a personal radar that kind of shows you like a mini map by essentially something like that could show you you direction for example so having a little compass is not necessarily the only solution but if when as we revise the head the visor stuff which were we're starting at the moment then if it seems like that's a compass for example is really necessary then we'd certainly consider that an investigator yeah it's probably not out of the questions just you know you also have to take into account that oops planets are procedurally generated and you kind of have to have a way to define what's north west east south exactly how to
00:28:44
create polls so we have to create polls for the planet you know simulate magnetic poles is a word and then you know be able to position you yeah and you can solve some of the navigate and problems with things like if we have some kind of sat-nav like system in there which I know there were some questions about in the in the chat something like that could also solve the problem in a different way so this yeah it the Cummins ribbon is more than just a UI question because again you can't just programming you I think and have a work that there's there's system design that has to go into it in order to build a build a relationship on that planet that lets you lock to it and then of course they'd have to be different ones for every single planet moon and it would have to know when you're transferring from one to another so you don't want to be on yellow and have it be pointing you towards north fun Hurston yeah that's a lot of these educators make UI
00:29:34
complicated sometimes we think we've got something really easy to do and then you know there's these five things that we hadn't thought about there are a lot of things that sometimes seem like they're a UI issue and it's not it can be it can be a system design issue then it's its UI in its basic in the most basic sense exposes information that's that's built by other system designers and game designers and stuff so if that system hasn't been developed there's no way for the UI team to expose it yeah is it possible to have a button to hide the HUD or a button to reactivate it when needed these are probably from screenshot folks who just want to you know clear everything from the screen and get this clean image they can we get a lot of developers asking us that how do you hide the HUD
00:30:22
what's ivar do I need to invoke to hide it right so especially for you know the directors cam and and being able to record stuff that's yes we'll definitely be improving that system as we you know overhaul our UI so we'll take that and count the same thing that we do there will also help us developers also you know hide HUD for screenshots we take internally so like we can specify certain sections of the UI like whether that's the just the ship HUD but maybe not the visor right or I want to hide all UI but I don't want to hide the UI what that's just in environment that helps kind of bring it
00:31:09
to life like background fluff screens so things like that we need to have like differentiated C VARs so we can kind of leverage that when we're building the system to maybe expose something to the players as well to kind of hide the UI like when you're trying to record court stuff and you don't want all these markers on your screen that's just that this is drawing the scene yeah there's one thing that relates today this which is for the general UI especially for the visor for the FPS so if we want to have a system where it only shows you the UI that's relevant at the time so for example if you put your weapon away you don't really need to see the weapon display on the corner of the screen or potentially you wouldn't show the health until you actually get injured that kind of thing so it that should as well help with this kind of perception of so
00:31:58
cluttered screen there cluttered screen in a way so if we only show things when they're really needed then that's gonna also feel a bit nicer just for the day-to-day players as well yeah that ties into that kind of contextual could actually driven stuff that was talked about before is there any are there plans to allow a chat UI to be viewed when we're not wearing a helmet I think we've mentioned the possibility of a special like contact lens or something I just see it to see our chat when we're when we're in you know player clothes down on area 18 or something yes is the answer so yeah it's a it's a multiplayer game so you need to be able to see what your teammates are doing and talking to you about and so on so we definitely do have plans to have that visible pretty much all the time so if
00:32:45
you if you got a helmet you just got your lens which is the state without the helmet in the ship third-person view as well potentially so yes we would like to have that in sometime soon actually actually actually touched on this a while back the next question is about that interior map that we showed a while back and you know the little like the mini map or the 3d map have we happened what progress have we made was that at this question is asking you really want it please it literally says I don't have a question I'm gonna read actually a couple years ago we were shown interior maps in the player heads years I don't think was ears but I don't have a question I really just want it please it's what the question says I think that's one you can answer yeah yeah I know I really want it to I mean I was one of the first things that we we
00:33:32
started working on when I when I started started here and it's going to be a really cool addition so we kind of got a development version that's halfway there I suppose at the moment but we made a decision fairly recently that what we were going to do is focus on getting the shepherds and the the player the FPS hood sorted out first so as they're kind of more integral to the overall gameplay you want to get them right get them playing well and then we're going to go back to the area map stuff later on hopefully really soon it depends a bit on what else comes up but yeah we'd love to get that up and running and also that's going to tie into this well you'll have the full screen version where you can look around the whole area and also this little mini map that you get on your visor as well so it's going to be useful to players especially as they're exploring interiors you said
00:34:21
ship head let's move into the ship had questions hi ship hug right off the bat why does quantum calibration mode scanning mode mining mode in any other sub UI mode take away or hide crucial flight information such as speed altitude attitude and any other useful information needed for basic flight so they're basically developed in like in under the hood as different contexts the in our overhaul of the design we're factoring that all that flight information so it's it's all available to you regardless of whether you're kind of in scanning or in mining mode or whatever it is because it is still relevant you can still fly so therefore you should still retain all your flight
00:35:08
information that you need so in those modes we're looking at potentially contextually changing out the screens of cells so rather than just having the HUD change for these different modes we can leverage the screens in some capacity you know potentially changing some of the elements shifting elements around so that certain information that's relevant to that mode displayed rather than just kind of taking up your entire Hut as well so something that has happened over the course of development but not in an intention to take away crucial flight information when you're trying to spool up your quand right yes that's right I mean sometimes with these things you don't realize that it's going to cause
00:35:56
issues until you try it and that's just one of those cases integrations are a family most bugs come from you know everything works fine in your own little you know you know your branch and then it's integrating it in with everything else we're we're bugs and all the users come into play yeah all the outside factors they didn't quite think of start to you uh yeah yeah there's a thing your team is working on here and then there's a thing somebody else is working on here and in their own little universes they work great and then it's when you integrate them into into game dev and you know that's where all the collisions and and stuff happens so yeah that's how bugs are made that's the story of the birds and the bugs they remind kind of off today it's weird all right can you update us on plans for the
00:36:47
landing UI improvements needed for the implementation of hover mode people it's hard to land and hover mode basically what they're saying so when we we actually a while back we changed the the method that we actually use to render the UI from what was called 3d I to render to texture so it's actually rendered as part of the screens and it actually takes you know all the kind of post effects and everything so the original landing UI that had that replaced the radar what it built on was was the 3d eye tech and that didn't what just wasn't compatible with the render texture so this is kind of how we lost is so we're looking at bringing that back in some capacity but maybe with
00:37:37
just as a better design we were just focusing mainly on the structure and the layout of the MFDs right now kind of defining as I said like you know what contexts are available what things should be displayed where when how but yeah there's definitely something that we need and as part of that also potentially having some kind of like guide system as well so in having some AR element that is displayed in conjunction with that widget we touched on this a little bit before when we talked about the customization thing and how we want to you know build our own default stuff so first so one of the big problems here let's get into it when you
00:38:26
how do we intend to improve the legibility of UI elements that tend to sit over the environment an environment that can sometimes be very glaring I mean everybody's played star citizen has experienced this you if you point your ship anywhere remotely near the star at the center of the Crusader system all of your UI elements washed out what are we intending to do about that so there's there's a few kind of more in world solutions that we're looking at I mean the obviously obvious thing you can do is you know potentially add a drop shadow of the UI or just make it black or something but that just kind of destroys the aesthetic of it of what we're trying to go for so one thing that we're looking at is and we started this a bit with the Claudio side although it's not completely there yet is having some system where it's contextually most
00:39:17
dynamically taking the brightness in the environment and adjusting the brightness of the UI in response to that in addition you know to make things look and feel much more in world we want to kind of have the huts displayed on actual geometry that you can that you can see so it kind of grounds it in the world much better but it's part of that we can kind of leverage that to may be dynamically tint that in addition to brightening the the UI based upon environmental conditions so it's a much more or thinking that has like a much more like in world and it uses the you it leverages the in-game Ella it's in a way that's kind of it's it's more convincing than just kind of making
00:40:07
it like black or something is there is there something we can do beyond just frightening well so I can come like like just taking the HUD for instance it's like a combination of tinting that that physical glass plane a little bit but also brightening the UI that's honest so it's almost like you know when you have your phone on automatic brightness you go out in the sunlight right you know it can automatically adjust to to you know make it more readable because right now if you notice it's actually an issue with the eye adaptation where if you go down onto the planet the UI even on yours you see it on your screens as well it's actually compared to when you're in space it's very dim in in the in in sunlight so it's about kind of taking those environmental conditions and then
00:40:55
using that to potentially brighten write stuff up but it's something that we're looking into and and and kind of you know we talked a little bit about with our graphics team so that as well as also potentially having some kind of effect in the in the UI tech in the UI rendering tech to like like things like like the health widget for instance like maybe maybe maybe it's not just the stuff in your visor having like a backdrop that's that's not just a black square but it's it's a little more elegant it's like you know a like a blurred frosted glass effect that helps with readability but and also not just against bright backgrounds but also you know busy backgrounds you just have a
00:41:43
lot of you know dark it's like a fence or something you know you kind of get that it gets lost yeah kind of a camouflage effect yeah visual noise kind of disguises the UI on top they are being out speed out what would should it should help with them a lot of the suggestions you know the community offers no shortage of suggestions a lot of suggestions that come from the community often focused around adding a small black stroke around letters or putting a drop shadow behind text or stuff that stuff and not something we can consider or definitely some I mean we can definitely consider things along those lines it depends how subtle you are about is well if you have a really obvious doubt line a blur or drop shadow like like Zane said that's not necessarily going
00:42:31
to fit with this of sci-fi look that we're going for there may be ways to to do something very subtly so it's for you I wouldn't say it's like a question or anything but like you know it's not not just overbearing too strong that it just looks you know cartoony yeah sure yeah right you don't want it to look like a cartoon yeah so we want to just explore the ideas that I've described before and then we'll just see where we're at with that yeah but ultimately we want to we want the UI to be readable yeah how's this as much as people want the who I didn't readable so yeah one of those things like like a lot of the UI where we basically want to try it try out a few different options so we concept different ideas like we could do this way or this way and then and step back
00:43:18
and look and decide which is going to solve it the best way and then then pick pick that and go and put it in currently the MFDs on ships have a default configuration that must be changed each time the pilot gets back into the pilot's seat I know are their intentions to add the ability to save custom MFD configuration presets for individual players preferences oh yeah I mean that's gotta persist at some point it's just it the other issue is now is just it doesn't persist right so the in our while stay in our new UI tech the UI will be with what we call stainless so it won't store anything it won't store any state about itself it takes
00:44:05
everything from like an entity or what's on on the server so basically when we go to develop our the the MSD or implemented the new design that we're working on by that point hopefully we'll we'll be able to persist like you know as you you know enter and exit the sea you'll see the same screens that you were on before even if you've tabbed over you shifted things around so it's you know it's definitely something we wanna yeah another thing relate to that we want to when we do this pass on the MFDs we want to make sure that the we're showing the most important important information by default as well so I'm sure people will be able to change things and so on but it would mean that there be less need for the the kind of the first time
00:44:53
player for example to swap things around hopefully it'll be set up in a way this that's good for the general players potentially presets as well that you can they can quickly activate you know you may you may want something that's a configuration a screen configuration you know when we go to kind of enable the devisor configuration as well having preset presets associated with those that you can quickly access is something we can look at as well yeah plenty of things to consider yeah yeah the the the ship the ship MFDs put it diplomatically can be a bit cumbersome having to drill down from one menu to the next menu to the next many of the next one or to finally get to the thing that you're you're looking for and in a combat
00:45:40
situation that that those seconds that can be deadly I know we're in the process of working out and a complete refactor of the ship FF DS right that is correct about that so how do we stop yeah where do we start I mean already already kind of touched on a little bit a little bit but I mean yeah so I mean right now and I guess the most obvious thing is that like they're they're just small and they're scale down there now readable and I mean we used to have what's called what we call these support screens where we kind of have the this screen that had minimal information on it but its font size was made in a way that was legible so we're kind of
00:46:28
looking at this system we're in by default you have a kind of a potentially a different set up on your screens a set up I mean a more minimized display so it's it's like showing you really only what you need to know but in a I know where all the font sizes are very legible so we take it's really just about how much pixels the screen is taken up on your screen on your monitor when you're kind of in the default view but when you're focusing on a screen what I can do is it can contextually change to something that's more in depth that we want on the end of these so whether you're going you're focusing in on MFD or you're in flight mode that will contextually change to present you
00:47:19
with always readable information yeah so so when you back when you're sitting back in your in your seat the way that these will change and it'll be only the most necessary information big legible and then when you zoom in and look into it it'll sense that and it'll change and reformulate and show you more information yeah actually the cool thing about the UI tech helping develop is that we're kind of taking keys from the area of like web development because you know that's my background too so I know a lot about of it but you know you have this thing called responsive design so you can have rule set up where beyond a
00:48:08
certain point like if there's a box in our UI that goes beyond a certain point then you know you shrinks down beyond a certain point that you can actually have different styles or visual descriptions applied to that and conditionally depending on maybe how how much it's sized so we're kind of leveraging that to help with the reformulation of the UI on screens as well as you know when we were laying things out and when we potentially opened up customization that can be really helpful as like a tool to help us manage and maintain the UI because we even on like different sized screens in the game you
00:48:56
69 you have four threes you have one ones currently we have to maintain three different binary files for those and if you want to make a change in one well you have to go into each binary file and make that same change but if we can just maintain one UI and then just have these different style rules applied to it then it makes it much easier to maintain so you just change one thing and a change changes for every different manufacturer every different kind of configuration and it all works so yeah it's a bit of a tangent might be interesting is the actual process that we're going through with those we've got mark colorin who's he's quite famous for UI phones out there he's looking through the he's
00:49:45
looking through the designs we've already got like what's in the game now and also working very closely with the vehicles team talking to them what do you want to show on these screens and kind of trying to find out generally what's in all the MFDs and then going and redesign each screen to kind of get the best out of it so we're at that stage now and then when as Zane's team progresses the UI tech eventually will get to a point where that the screens are redesigned the techs ready and then we'll start to put those in the game I was just googling my car around now cargo UI just I'm a car UI right now players have to go back to chaos just to see the inventory of what they're carrying on their ships do we have any plans for implementing some kind of shipboard cargo UI so that we can see
00:50:34
what we're carrying without having to get to a destination first yeah they definitely should yep this is something something that we will look at yes so we know that's needed in yeah where it comes taking the timeline I'm not sure but at some point yeah that wasn't on the list that was just when I put in there myself are there any plans to allow us to prioritize the use of missiles or torpedoes through MFDs nothing that's another another thing that we're we're going to look at as well so I believe we have that previously I think it broke yeah I think John John crew coming here this one I think the way the way is in the
00:51:22
moment the UI actually supports that but there's a bit of refactoring these doing in the background to get the the weapons set up to match up so yeah there's something we do want to do and it will be there in the future at some point yeah and and a better design for it rather than just clicking up yeah are there any plans to allow us to see points of interest in other UI modes right now we only see them in I think the quantum drive mode yeah so I think this is definitely something I'd be interested in it's one of those things it kind of relates back to that thing we're talking about before with managing how much information you show so if we get it to a point where we can I suppose cut down the amount of icons and things to a sensible level then we can consider whether it's worth putting those in other views as well so it's definitely
00:52:11
something that we should look at whether which views it goes into and how much and if it even goes into certain ones I don't know at this stage but that's one of those things where you have to get a system in try it and then then decide where is the best places to it's very much iterative yeah what about an EPA marker you know when we go to quantum travel we see the distance ticking down but based on the capabilities of our ship and the type of quantum drive we have something that tells us how long it's going to take so I know if I can get up and go to the bathroom or not yep I think that's a good idea I think we were looking at that question earlier in saying hey what do you think about this and then generally friends like yeah we should do that so yeah that's definitely something we look to you to adding at at some point yeah yeah we have an ETA for when your
00:53:00
oxygen runs out so I don't see a reason why we would have fought in the in the current file system they're floating menus is that closer is that what are our thoughts on the intern thought that look what I'm trying to reword the question of it it get kind of but this person is asking about if inner thought if we're happy with where inner thought is right now or if we're if we've got plans to continue to iterate on it well I know there's a lot of cases where era thought kind of appears where ideally it shouldn't so like things over screens like when you're I guess the obvious example is when you're in an airlock you'll get a you get an inner thought saying press the screen whereas why not just just you know we should
00:53:49
just have the press to screen and that's something our UI tech allows for now so we can actually have like buttons in the UI so when you're specifying maybe like what floor you want to go up to like an an elevator or something that can be buttons that you click on in actual UI rather than you know having this inner thought option that's kind of doesn't really make sense in the world so before we look at the visuals a bit as well yes it's okay it's usable and so on but I'm sure we can make it look a bit prettier we do have some other interaction stuff going on at the moment that we're we're kind of figuring out which could be quite cool that relates to that but that's probably something you want to we want to save to a little bit later till there's more to show thank you a long time ago or the live chat here we
00:54:41
talked about the potential of manufacturer-specific you eyes like you get into an anvil in the UI is anvil you get into an Aegis and ship in the UI is a just are we still is that still on the planets I still am about that don't look yes and it's much more possible now with the UI tech because we have the style sheet system so you know as I was just kind of describing before everything had to be baked into binary assets so if we wanted to have different manufacturers styles this would require one file form envel one file for RSI one file origin oh we want to change you know this thing and that thing and you know what you know let's add this feature in and we got to display it so you know that's that's going into all these different
00:55:29
binary files adding that UI adding the code but with salaries we just have one kind of white box you line and we just the visual description is defined and applies to that so you know we actually have this example now and our kind of rough initial implementation in the UI tech where we actually select from a drop-down first have like RSI and that that applies a set of rules like oh well you know the the corners are maybe ten pixel chamfer and the font color is this and so forth and so on but then we switch to origin and then and everything's kind of a more elegant you know it's it's all the style has changed just on just your drop-down because it's not it's data-driven so it's not like
00:56:17
it's baked in as well is it once the system is in place it gives us more opportunity to hand it over to the graphic designers so you've got a guy who comes with a really cool retro design for one of the ships for example it's a lot easier for us to kind of drop that into the game and have it working out so it's less dependence on someone going into flash and knowing how to code in flash and then use it's kind of slightly outdated interface so it should really help when we get to get to that stage yeah there's a lot of properties now that you can that you can modify with these style rules so a lot of possibilities and a lot of ways to differentiate between manufacturers but also it's not just just styling as well it's also you know when we get to it it's also kind of the way you lay things out as well so things like ships like
00:57:08
origin mask will you know have more holographic UI and in our it's part of our tech and actually we're starting to I think we're investigating the initial engineering requirement for this but making it so you can have 3d UI as well so being able to in the tech and the tools to for a developer to build a UI or they can manipulate different planes and z-axis so make a 3d UI and have it be and it looked really holographic so having that kind of style for the more kind of what you say technically advanced ships versus more once I think we have just the retro one just fitted in every every ship right now that'll eventually be something we definitely want we want to differentiate
00:57:58
quite significantly between like the different tech levels of the ships I guess you'd call it you just gave every VR enthusiasts heart palpitation saying we're almost out of time let's talk about Moby glass we haven't really touched about Moby glass two questions really one the responsiveness of Moby glass can sometimes be a little slow is that a engineering thing is that a UI thing you do we have any thoughts about that you might not be the people to ask I don't know no I mean I think the usability of that I mean the the time it takes to get out you know the animation and the whole boot up sequence can be vastly reduced it's just were you know we're not focused on mobile glass at the
00:58:46
moment actually the whole UI we're looking to overhaul on that as well but I mean it's really just got to set a target time like 0.6 seconds or something like that yeah and they'll have as long as we have that then you know we can fit the animation around that whatever it needs to happen yeah one thing with it I guess it's the mobile glass is this holographic holographic display that projects out of the device itself so there's no reason why we couldn't have that start to appear as the arm comes up for example right I'm waiting 15 right now it's right now it's very sequential yeah there's no reason you know especially with the new Tech's we can we can actually start start it up now without you know without having the wait for the animation to complete okay you know you just said that mobile glasses and a
00:59:33
focus right now and that's what my second question was is there anything you can tell us about the future of more.we glass eye after so having said that it's not the focus right now I suppose is this is similar kind of thing to the I suppose what we're doing with the ship MFDs will once we got those the ship stuff and the visor stuff sorted out then we probably start to look at that so we will and I will look at everything that's that's in there now and also talk to the game designers find out what's the what's their overall overall intention for the game design as well and try and kind of rework it to match those and also incorporating the new tech so it's definitely do an overhaul I think and we can make it a lot better so quite looking forward to that yes because because it's also like holographic in nature it sort of depends on the UI tech being able to do 3d as well so before we even implement that we
01:00:23
need to have the foundational tech to you actually do the 3d effects that we want in the mobile glass to be there so I mean the 2d all the 2d stuff that that goes on like a flat plane it's that's all quite far along there's still some work some engineering work to make it sleek and kind of slice things up and make even world panels out of that and be able to position that anywhere in the world I have last question gentleman over let you go this came in from the live chat it's legitimate I didn't ask is the UI team hiring and what skills are needed most well yes I think at the moment probably the the job specs are
01:01:12
slightly out of date on the website which will update soon we're definitely looking for at least a programmer on the UI team at the moment we've got so much stuff that people want to put in this it's kind of sad when you have to say no to everything so who getting someone else on board to help help help do that is good at the moment we're not really looking for artists and graphic designers although that may change in future and I guess if people are interested in applying what's the essential things we're looking for I suppose for programmers it's the case of being able to show your experience and also having a knowledge of what makes good you I really like was why why do things work that you see in other games all that kind of thing for artists we tend to look at
01:02:02
I suppose quite a lot of graphic design stuff because a lot of our job involves come up with cool logos and buttons and that kind of thing so if you go sends for art that really helps but also this kind of it's quite hard to teach you but this understanding I know if you take a particular screen why is this screen good on this particular app or what could I do to improve it sort of thinking about that kind of thing is it's a really helpful skill one thing is part of the also the UI tech team that we have it'd be helpful to have should have a tools programmer as well so right now what we're working on is kind of a low-level stuff where I've mentioned a lot of times in this that everything is now data driven but that's actually raw data so when we're actually implementing this stuff were kind of poking into raw data
01:02:51
so one thing that we want to do that I kind of tempted to make a head start on this quarter but is is is the editor for it's kind of the we there's a low-level stuff and then there's the layer that the designers and artists will winter facelift so creating in a UI editor that's intuitive and is easy to use is something that you know we're hiring for as well so like a tools programmer that could help build an editor would be very handy yeah you make a good point we don't just develop things for for our backers we actually there are several members throughout the company whose
01:03:39
purpose is to develop tools for us to use to develop stuff for the backers like that so so yeah any any developing those tools is an essential part of any game design and but I don't think we cover it nearly enough on SC on ISC or anything like that so you just gave me an idea for another segment so thank you saying awesome all right that's it that's all we've got time for this week saying Simon thank you so much for taking the time to be here thank you I think you know we've obviously had Zane on a TV acceptable but I think this is both of your first live Friday show how was it this for me yeah I've done this before have you done the Friday show you okay yeah it was surprisingly easy yeah so yeah good job all right thank you you're not gonna write a letter to Chris and like I hated this not today alright thanks guys that's it
01:04:29
for the show we'll see you next week take care wait thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star citizen squadron 42 you can subscribe to our Channel or you can check out some of the other shows and you can also head to our website at

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.