User interfaces

Yggdra Union is shit.

i bet you think dwarf fortress' interface is the epitome of game design

of course theyre a negative thing, youd have to be retarded to think clutter is good design, the only reason that shit flies is because hipsters think it makes them smart when people call them shit

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why do you fags always assume that someone who thinks the interface is shit cant figure it out?

You're about as retarded as that brain damaged user who spent months trying to leave the house in Gen 1 Pokemon.

because it is objectively the best for what it's supposed to do. hence, when people dislike it, it must be sour grapes

I bet you liked Doom 3

They are heavily invested in the idea that playing DF makes them "hardcore", even though the game completely lacks depth and challenge.

Hah, no. It's a clunky pile of shit that doesn't even make much use of the fucking mouse, and asks the player to actually spend time learning the fucking controls instead of playing the game. A GOOD interface is one that's so intuitive that the player (assuming this isn't his first game ever) doesn't need to spend any time with it because everything comes naturally. He can focus on important shit such as actually playing the game, rather than on "Shit, which keyboard shortcut was that…?"

Maybe you should try to refute my claims faggot.

physical interfaces with many buttons, knobs, and slider thingies are awesome, the same thing as GUI not so much

Opps, wrong fallacy.

Deja Vu has a pretty cool interface

This could've been a pretty nice thread but it has already gone to shit

I liked the small touches in SMT:SJ. The menu plays a special sound effect when the cursor moves to the upper screen. The character's status bar shakes when they get hit. Items are not arranged in alphabetic order (more useful item like healing items are on top, crafting items are grouped together by type) unlike in Fallout where a large book and a small book are far apart.

Dark Spire has a very straight forward UI where there is no warning or select target prompt in the inventory screen. You press X, it throws the item away unless it is a key item. Use an item, it immediately uses it on the character selected on the top screen. It is quick but easy to fuck up.

I love me some big cluttered GUIs, i have been planning to put one on the game i'm working on because they are pretty much dead due to consoles and i want to make something about it even if its shit.

Shit, I should have put that up instead of Diablo. How could I have been so stupid? Playing Descent without that interior is just not the same.

I wonder how that GUI style with the small screen for the game world came about. Probably has to do something with performance.

I also love how those types of ui can really reflect the theme of the game, like the detective vibe in Deja Vu. (also pics related)

I've barely played DS games but the screenshots always make me exited for that sweet dual screen action.

Me too, user. That's part of the reason I started this thread. Good luck on your project!

I always hated this shit. Not enough for me to hate the game but why? Because it looks pretty?

I love Dwarf Fortress and its ASCII charm that it brought into every aspect of its design, but it is pretty unintuitive. When navigating menus constantly switches between the arrow keys and plus and minus. Navigating switches between UMHK and arrow keys. Using UMHK instead of WASD or ESDF. Making you go into a different menu/mode when you hit N while using UMHK. Using x to escape sometimes, esc others. Having enter be the confirmation button sometimes, shift+enter during others. Et cetera, et cetera. It's like you can never really get used to the controls.

This guy, however, is just a salty pleb.

This thread is only indicative of the state of 8/v/ in general. Welcome to September.

Pretty much, yeah, I hate it too. I like horizontal health bars with numbers, like pic related, or just numbers like most FPS

But it's july

Actually I have something to add to this thread.
I fucking love nintendo DS because of its lower screen. You can just go and place all info or menus on second screen while game is on the other one.

I like them they looked nice being hold by something. I also remembered them working quite well in Diablo 2 because of how big UI was back then.
Now when I play PoE health bar above head is a must and I must say the other two you posted look fucking awful.

Pretty much.

When I look at the orbs, I'm not sure if I should judge by height or volume.

see picture

The interface is shit pleb. Without even getting into how inefficient it is to use, you can already start shitting all over it's hogging of screen space.

You must use linux.

Dual screen UI can be pretty cool.

Kill yourself kiddo

It's not too late to take a lead aspirin. And honestly the clutter and expansiveness of the UI in System Shock works for it. You're some nobody hacker faggot who was given a job and, in return, had a fucking Home Depot worth of hardware jammed into your skull. Then you wake up. Would you know what the fuck you were doing with yourself if that was suddenly your existence with no attempt at therapy or chance to adapt? Itd be like hacking off your legs and abandoning you to figure it out after the stumps are all healed up. It's supposed to feel difficult because it matches the character's perception of his situation. There's a term for it, actually I believe they call it "immersive gameplay".

I'm pretty sure that all that pretty stuff that surrounded the actual screen where action happened was required because of techonology limitations.

Pics related, notice how the world screen got bigger between Ultima Underworld 1 & 2.
Third pic is Arx Fatalis, made by some guys who tried to make a proper Ultima Underworld 3. Naturally, the action takes over all the screen. There are screens for the inventory & stuff but you open them when needed (2% of the time).

Here's the question: let's suppose you can actually go back and use the old interface as an optional mode. For how long would you use it? Would you leave it there for the whole game? I don't think so

Whatever happened to just using the native GUI and widgets of the OS? Aside from the fact that it's a lot easier to theme, it's also FAR easier to shuffle things around on a multi-monitor rig and when shitpostmultitasking.

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This is a fucking bait post.

For all the stuff that you are trying to do in game, SShock's interface is pretty intuitive.

Also the "rear view" mode is fucking useless since it updates once every 2 seconds until you get the next upgrade halfway through the game.

Post the WebM next time.

Apples to oranges, different rendering engine and gameplay flow. Arx's interface likewise would be useless for Underworld engine games.

Unrelated but SC2K had a sweet interface.

I win.

Easily the best UI out of the ds.
I'm a huge technophiliac and having a power suit like demonica with lots of scanning and info makes muh dick hard.

But Rs3s UI is so much better and less confusing:^)

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System Shock's clunkiness isn't primarily the fault of its GUI, but its controls. It has movement, jumping, freelook, freeaim separate from looking, leaning/stance in TWO dimensions, and multiple triggers, all with (non-rebindable) controls clearly straight out of a flightsim or arcade game rather than something designed specifically for on-foot action.

Now if you want something with a clunky UI, I'd pick the original Fallout games and their contextual popup menu obsession. ToEE's pie menu-mania worked a lot better.

I really liked the 3D canopy in Descent 3, I'd love something like that, but combined with reflections like the Metroid Prime visor to make something like the vaporware Robotech 64: Crystal Dreams cockpit.

Well, I meant the System Shock interface in general, which does include the controls. I'm and idiot for not reading the OP properly where it says graphical user interface. Ultima Underworld had a decent interface because the controls were really simple (forward/backward, turn and strafe), System Shock just took that and bolted on more to it. I wish Night Dive would just release the source code so someone can make a proper source port instead of the half-assed Enhanced Edition we have now. The EE is quite impressive when you consider that it's a one-man hack-job without the source, not now that Night Dive has the source we could do better than that.