Game UI

i read the dice paper about 30 mins ago it was very very cool, which UI's do you find to be the worst offenders patsu?
 
Took a look at that, and I have to say it varies by game which is better and more appropriate.

About the only thing I can say concretely however, is that the UI for Farcry was horrible from a gameplay standpoint, but interesting (for all of 5 seconds) from a reality standpoint.

Classic UI's are still the best with regards to presenting the player with information that would generally be blatantly obvious in RL without having to find a button to look it up or find some in game analog to determine the information.

Using the mini-map/maps as an example. In real life once you have yourself oriented by looking at a map, you can easily glance down from time to time to maintain orientation. Farcry 2 attempts to do that, but it's often clunky and slow.

Additionally, until ultra wide screen gaming (TripleHead or Eyefinity on PC) becomes commonplace, a minimap/radar is the best way for a player to maintain some form of spatial awareness which can be critically important for any game played from a first person perspective.

But for some things an in game analog is much better and more immersive if you can pull it off. Information on an in game monitor/display which is zoomed into your view, rather than a "mission window" popping up. But in this case you end up trading gameplay functionality for realism if you don't also provide a convenient way to keep track of that information without having to seek out a computer (as an example) everytime you want to see a list of objectives you currently have.

As I was saying, it's going to be hugely game dependant as to what would be best in any given situation. Borderlands has arguably the least "realistic" UI, but it also happens to be one fo the most fun.

Regards,
SB
 
I loved the diegetic interface in FC2 and still play this game today partly due to its immersive qualities. Dead space has the advantage of having a 3rd person view and space suit to render on which does suit the process better. I applaud FC2 as one of the few games on consoles that made an effort to be realistic.
 
I like maps that are zoomed out views (Spider-man 2,) but if the in game character has a map for story reasons that works. The mini map in Infamous was good. You need something always there when you'll have to check it in a split second every now and then. That it wasn't cluttered with none primary targets was good as well.

The original Getaway was interesting in it's zero HUD approach. The cars indicators showing you a possible route to your next destination, but now you can use GPS.

I can't decide whether I prefer limping animations or obscured vision for showing damage. It's interesting seeing new animations when hurt but then there's magic healing. If they have a force field shield then you can have the colour or transparency change depending on how damaged it is even if the shield is only shown when hit. If only seen when hit then you need an animation or effect to happen when fully recharged again. You could do something similar in a fantasy setting with having the characters soul being separated from it's body per damage.

I think interesting things can be done with memories overlaying the game world.
 
A lot of games I've worked on, have started with the designer declaring that there will be no HUD, and ended with a mad scramble to design something that works because otherwise the game is unplayable.

Most game UI gets foisted on the most junior engineers, because no one else wants to do it.
 
Shame. It should be as important as core interaction. Where would street fighter 2 be without a health bar.
 
deeFive said:
which UI's do you find to be the worst offenders patsu?
Click to expand...

I can't remember anymore. I just know that game UI sucks most of the time from countless past experiences. I am digesting my thoughts, will post in this thread again one day.

ERP said:
...and ended with a mad scramble to design something that works because otherwise the game is unplayable.

Most game UI gets foisted on the most junior engineers, because no one else wants to do it.
Click to expand...

Yes, these are the impressions I got from playing games. ^_^
 
ERP said:
Most game UI gets foisted on the most junior engineers, because no one else wants to do it.
Click to expand...
That was in the ancient past - before game companies discovered the black-magic abomination called Adobe Flash.
You have no idea how good you have it with junior engineers until you've worked with an artist-programmed UI.

Anyway On topic, I for one really enjoyed DeadSpace UI, it looked good, and actually enhanced experience (one of my favorite moments was turning off a store window and ending up face to face with one of the enemies). Pretty much every other horror game uses UI as a glorified pause menu which ruins the suspense and is typically also incredibly clunky to use (Except for RE5, which is just a clusterfuck alltogether).

And about 3d map being disorienting - I've yet to play a game where that isn't the case, 2d UIs or not. The whole 3d wireframe thing didn't work 15 years ago and it still doesn't.
 
Fafalada said:
That was in the ancient past - before game companies discovered the black-magic abomination called Adobe Flash.
You have no idea how good you have it with junior engineers until you've worked with an artist-programmed UI.
Click to expand...
Well, that and the horrifying overhead associated with running a Flash lib in the background. Problem is that artist/designer-oriented systems for creating in-game UI is still something that studios tend to want 1) because it makes it easier to shift and modify the UI on the basis of aesthetic shifts, without having to pass from designer to programmer back to designer and so on... 2) because reducing iteration times is always something people want in all things.

Working on a sort of Flash-like system for TR:U, I basically ran into the problem that for every design goal that was set out to be there from the beginning, nearly every one of them would have to be violated in order to accomodate a specific need. What started out as something that could have run in a 20-30 KB memory overhead ended up needing 140 KB, and gave scripters really really dangerous powers (e.g. pointer typecasting, thread spawning)... Lots of things that should have been black-boxed couldn't be because people wanted explicit control, and nobody had a good way of dealing with the pain. What started out very strict and simple becomes extremely obfuscated and twisted to the point where I was the only person who understood it. Doing things from the ground up does mean that you have the freedom to mold the API in exactly the image you'd like... however, you can't escape the reality that UI is one of those very granular things where feature demands so often tend to be "little" things in large quantities.

About the only thing that makes Flash and APIs like Scaleform attractive for this sort of thing is that someone else has gone through all this hell before you... at least, that's the idea. You just have to suffer the cost of using something with all the ballast that Flash has, and getting all the load that comes from its generality. Oh, goody.
 
Fafalada said:
Anyway On topic, I for one really enjoyed DeadSpace UI, it looked good, and actually enhanced experience (one of my favorite moments was turning off a store window and ending up face to face with one of the enemies). Pretty much every other horror game uses UI as a glorified pause menu which ruins the suspense and is typically also incredibly clunky to use (Except for RE5, which is just a clusterfuck alltogether).

And about 3d map being disorienting - I've yet to play a game where that isn't the case, 2d UIs or not. The whole 3d wireframe thing didn't work 15 years ago and it still doesn't.
Click to expand...

I agree. I thought the DeadSpace UI was excellent - it definitely enhanced the game. The 3D map was pretty useless but I still used it now and again, and as you say, every similar map has been just as bad throughout the years.
 
Don't get me started on Flash in games......

It's a fundamentally bad idea, anyone who understands how the original flash renderer works, would immediately understand why any level of real compatability is hard to accomplish. That coupled with flash specialists using usage patterns optimised for that implementation (rather than one that actually draws polygons), and the fact that actionscript requires runtime closures don't add up to performance.

We implemented a player by reverse engineering flash at Boss, but we only used it for title screens. After Boss I was forced to use an implementation several times.

When your HUD has perhaps 5 elements in it and takes >30% of your total CPU budget to update because of the flash implementation ugh!

Naming no names or companies, I once spoke to a studio tech director who stated that he thought the real value in the company dictated Flash player, was that it was so poor that it had forced his studio and another to work much more closely together to get reasonable performance out of it.
 
Indeed, Flash is retrograde in implementation. Still, a proper optimised vector UI engine makes considerable sense. Is there nothing like this available?
 
Didn't Metal Gear 4 use flash for the "exposure" scenes? At least I think they did and Adobe Flash is mentioned in the credits.

Not that it is good to use it, though^^ I usually hate flash (esp. on my 5 yr old laptop).

To me, a UI must be ONE thing first and foremost... usable. And that means snappy, fast but still good looking. Some games have "longer" loading times when pressing start (meaning like more than 5 seconds sometimes), which just isn't worth it anymore (this is also what pisses me off a bit about the in-game XMB... the extreme long loading times of the icons and whatnot...)

Plus, even the slightest touch of a button must process. In some games (pc mostly, though) you have to hold a button longer than a split second for it to be recognized by the game. I find this unfuriating (esp. in RPGs and such, where you often interact in the menus).
 
zed said:
http://www.scaleform.com/
Click to expand...
That's.... still... Flash, and still tends to be a huge resource hog... particularly in terms of memory footprint. At least, that was my experience with it, which was admittedly over a year ago. But then, that's also why I took it upon myself to roll my own library for TR:U, and the same lib could be used not just on PS3 and X360, but on Wii and PS2 as well.

In the end, projects on the same backbone like Deus Ex 3 still decided to go with it because they figured it's a bigger hassle to train people to use something other than Flash. That, of course, is the obvious advantage of Flash -- it's well known to a large number of people, and a person who knows how to use it well could be found just about anywhere.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
Still, a proper optimised vector UI engine makes considerable sense. Is there nothing like this available?
Click to expand...
WoW uses something that is decently scaleable and flexible, although it's not as much a vector engine as it is a textured polys one I'd think... Not sure what's the foundation for it, probably something they cooked up in-house.
 
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