Yes to labels. No to cyclopic radar screens ;)

along with the wonderful HUD-label idea, could the interface toggle also affect messages like "Press Activate to Jump"?

Would it be possible to have the new alert icons change color as opposed to jumping around whenever an update is recieved?

They draw more attention when they bounce, and it's sort of cute.

Aye, the whole cute thing was the reason I wanted to know if it would be changed =P

I don't know if this has been mentioned, but when you're BPing since the M icon bounces after every kill...it gets really annoying in large groups. Is it possible to turn off the repeated-bouncing in the missions with lots of non-essential updates?

That's another spot just having a color change could come in handy. If you have a new mission update, the icon could just change to a light green or something. From then on, new mission updates would not change anything on the hud until you check it.

Smittens, from my original HUD thread:

'The only really critical part of it is the new "attention icons" concept, since we're completely doing away with "mission chat". So, we need to tell people to look elsewhere for updated mission text. I'm aiming for this to not be a constant sort of thing, but rather a "next major mission stage" kind of thing.'

The missions are updating the HUD attention icons way too often right now. This is a known issue, and is not part of the design.

I have it bouncing because I *want* it to get attention, a color change is too subtle for my purposes. In the long run, we could add an option for that. But I imagine Ghost and such may just want to disable the area entirely, which should be possible soon.

I think its really cool and not something I would want to turn off, but in a 100+ BP mission the constant bouncing is incredibly distracting. And I don't think "90 Serco scum left" "Good job, 89 Serco cowards to go" are really significant updates. It seems like the bouncing would be for something that the player needs to see, or else the mission won't make sense/they'll do something wrong, not for every update given.

I think I see your plan inc. Thx for the reply.

smit: yes, that's why I said: it's not supposed to do that.

A very small and rather superficial suggestion: I'd like to see the Ship tab in the PDA renamed to something along the lines of "in-flight" or "systems", as this seems to be the most suitable choice for a meny that covers in-flight controls. To group cargo, sector scan and the map together under "Ship" break immersion for me. Somehow. Canna quite explain why.

A few things that are still missing from the new UI that would really make it shine:

» The ability to hot-swap UI skins. A /load_skin path/to/skin/ or /set skin=path/to/skin/ command would be sufficient, and I think everyone would put up with the wait to reload the skins from within the client instead of having to quit, open config.ini, change the skin= line, open up the client again, etc. etc. This would allow for much faster testing of user-developed skins. As far as I know, this should be implementable, and I would assume switching skins would take much less time than changing texture resolutions, as an example.

» An ability to scale individual HUD elements. Yes, I know this will (most likely) come when the Lua API is opened up, but if we can turn individual elements on and off, it'd be nice to be able to resize some of these individual elements instead of using the rather kludgy (and often eyesight-killing) /set rHUDxscale # and /set rHUDyscale ###.

» As nioubi posted, it would be nice to be able to manually set the alpha for the HUD, either by element or as a whole, from within the client.

...this is getting pretty arcane, but I've successfully changed skins in-flight by copying over the component files and toggling texture compression

that said, it's a pretty messy hack; I think we'd all benefit if Miharu's suggestion was implemented...

*edit*: oh, and the in-game transparency controls are a pretty mind-blowing idea; I somehow misinterpreted the original post to something more mundane... I imagine we'd all welcome a solution to all the nasty premult-hacking

I SUGGEST....!

That the UI be done soon so we don't have to update skins every week...

Or have a list of said new files with each update -_-

Thanks, thurisaz ^^

A clarification of what Thurisaz suggested, for those of you who are making skins (as far as I can tell, without a second computer to modify the files on the first over a network, you must be in window mode for both of these)... let's assume the line in config.ini reads skin=skins/awesome_kickass_skin/:

To change a skin entirely:
1) Rename the current skin folder to something else, say... "awesome_kickass_skin2".
2) Rename the desired skin's folder to that of the first. ("awesome_kickass_skin" in our case)
3) Toggle texture compression (Options -> Video -> Texture Compression).
4) Enjoy. Remember to rename your skin folders to their original names when you're done.

To change a number of components without changing the entire skin (useful when testing a new skin):
1) Copy/paste the replacement files into the skin folder (this should be "skins/awesome_kickass_skin/" in your VO directory) and rename them if they aren't already named correctly.
2) Toggle texture compression.

Any reason to toggle texture compression in particular? Becouse toggling Interface options that cause UI to reload also works but doesn't reload textures, making switch faster.
Unless there's a reason to reload textures?

Toggling the individual elements (as far as I could tell) doesn't work because the game client caches the individual skin components on startup. Toggling texture compression causes the client to recache the files for some reason, which has an end result of it seeing the altered files.