Friday Facts #246 - The GUI update (Part 3)

[Klonan]

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-246

[Satis]

Wao the new UI looks amassing and the preview map is easier to read as well now

[DanGio]

Cool !

Setting the frequency to minimum gives you very few ore, setting the size to minimum gives you no ore at all. How does one makes the difference between very few and none at all with the new sliders ?

[Thorambar]

The new UI looks really good. The style is super fitting for the game and it's so much more polished than before

[ThaChillera]

This is looking amazing! I always forget what an impact good UI can have on the end user experience.. but this looks like it would function very nicely

[pingger]

Guys ... nice work, but the Ore Mockup shows 5xx% (percent) copper ore and 600k oil ... (at about 30% from the left and 40% from the bottom)

[Sigma1]

Very nice! I like that you got the button order the correct way.

The exchange string window looks a bit off on top of the adjustments IMO

[Saint]

Thats Amazing. I will test it now XD i will not wait longer

[Bilka]

I'm calling it now: With the new GUI tileset, nobody will know if a value can be changed because the button and editable field look exactly the same. Notice the seed field for example, it looks exactly the same as the other buttons, making me wonder if it's a button, or a text field.

[ledow]

The red and green do more.

"OK" and "Cancel" direction don't matter as much as the flow / which-side / the arrows / the colour.

I imagine most RTL language users would prefer the exact opposite anyway.

It's not hard to make a nice GUI flow. It's keeping it there when things change. "Oh, just another box".

And things like "there is no close button" drive me insane whatever the GUI.
Not to mention things like "Are you sure you want to Cancel? OK. Cancel."

It's all good work that needs doing, but keep it LTR (with the option of reversing, it can't be that hard if you've factored out the GUI), obvious flow (arrows) and obvious dangerous actions (Red/Green). I keep wondering what the red button at the top of some of those windows does, and why it needs be red. Reload?

[Omnifarious]

My main use of preview is to check out the starting area to make sure that it won't be really annoying. I sort of don't like that it shows as much of the map as it does.

Maybe there could be a way to preview just the starting area, just a tad bit more than what would be visible to you when you first entered the game. I thought the original purpose of preview was to prevent the 'generate, start game, abort game, start over' cycle people went through to find a starting area they found playable.

I don't know if I really like the "We do it so differently that you won't be messed up on any system." method of GUI design. I do know that the two biggest issues I have with the current GUI is that I keep on accidentally forgetting to preview when I meant to, and that I frequently forget to press return when giving blueprints names, or forget to press the checkbox and destroy my blueprint accidentally.

My personal sense of aesthetics is not nearly so refined, nor as OCD as most of the people who comment seem to be. Just about everything you've shown me looks nice to me, except that I questioned your use of orange as an indicator for certain states in the tech tree. And then not because I thought it was ugly (I didn't think it was ugly or pretty) but because it didn't seem to follow a natural progression of color -> state mappings.

[ledow]

P.S. "Play" button far too large in the final examples, and please capitalise things consistently (look at those hide/show preview buttons).

[Divran]

For the map generator UI, I have two suggestions:

In the lower right corner, the button always says "Play >". I suggest changing this to display the name of the next tab. So at first it'd say "Terrain >", and then "Enemy >" and so on, until you get to the last tab, where it says "Play".
I am not sure myself if this is better than your current solution. It all depends on how often you expect people to click into the other tabs. Maybe you've found that 99% of the time, people only bother with the first tab and leave the other tabs alone?

Second suggestion, for the "Real time update", I suggest making it enabled by default, but giving it a delay. So after the user changes something, it will display an overlay on top of the map saying "Waiting to update...", and it'll wait for perhaps 3 seconds (or some other time that seems good) before actually updating. That way, you can pull the sliders back and forth all you want and it won't update the map until after you stop moving the sliders.

[SHiRKiT]

Since we are at the discussion of GUI, I must remember that when anyone slides a slider all the way to the left, if there's no indication, one would assume that it would disable that specific setting, which is clearly not the case here.

[Ojelle]

Enemy richness was the amount of purple orbs a base dropped in the past. Its a legacy option wich can be removed
But Im pretty sure you guys still remember if even I do

[SuperSandro2000]

Will the preview square or rectavle? I think squared would not suggest one exploration direction.

[Deadlock989]

Loving this new redesign. Can't wait to see it in-game.

[looney]

To join the chorus, the preview should start with just what is currently called the player "Starting Area". Perhaps with zoom in/out buttons to generate more of the map.

When I'm starting a game (and I've started far more than I'd like to admit), I want to know that there is enough of everything. Then I want to know how far apart the stone, iron, coal and water are. Then maybe I want to know where the nearest oil is.

Nothing slows down the early game more than having to hike between stone coal and iron. The distance to copper isn't really a concern. A short walk to water is bearable. Oil and uranium are a much later problem.

[RocK3ru]

The UI looks really nice, it really gives factorio the uplift it needed. Altought even the current GUI is not bad its just a little buggy and stuff gets out of the screen. But for the most part its doing its job.

The one complaint however is the placement of the Play/Confirm/Green button. I think it should be in the middle of both other 2 buttons being cancel or back.
Why I have this complaint, I don't really know, I don't have a clear argument but from other designs the focus of something should be in the middle especially if its color coded.
If the buttons would not be color coded, then it would make sense to have the from right to left or left to right as you showed with the windows/linux GUI. but if you have 3 or more buttons and color coded its more sensible to put the most important button in the middle. (Like the play button on a radio/mp3 player/movie players etc.)
It just makes more sense from a estetic perspective.
I've made a example with the images you guys provided, and the button placement. its the border button arrows that need to be adjusted so that the "confirm" and the other to have the proper directional pattern.
Also the Load/Green/Play button that is half of the map in length does not look that good either. Make it smaller or put it into the left panel (Map generation preview).

Thanks for the Friday facts. Keep it up!

[UPS_Eater]

I'm loving it! Can't say that about the spegetti in the first image though!

It would be useful if there was a dotted outline of the starting area when viewing the preview and knowing how far bitters might expand in the first hour would useful to know. It would help new players get an idea of how quickly they'd need to setup a base perimeter.