Feedback After a Week of Use

Feature Previews & Feedback Photon UI
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Feedback based on 2020 Intel MacBook Pro from a 45+ individual with aging but healthy eyes.

  1. Previous “button” in the Information window is very hard to see until hovered over.

  2. Scaling is flaky. Will look correct initially. Eventually “buttons” like enter or exit simulation cease to work and will be partially covered by the round ship fit graphic. After changing the scaling the Drone window (in space) stopped working (froze), and required a game client restart to fix.

  3. In general clickable “buttons” are harder to see or only appear when hovered over. The whole UI appears less “sharp”. There’s a lack of contrast in some areas (in docks e.g.) and over contrast, such as bright nebulas in space relative to old UI.

  4. Can’t see the cursor in text fields, but can in old UI.

  5. Brightness can be overwhelming relative to other graphics and GUI items when in space (similar to comment #3).

  6. The old UI feels “cleaner” and “sharper”.

  7. The star map is WAY better and easier to see in the old interface.

  8. Why introduce a new UI with a whole set of new bugs when there are still plenty of bugs to fix in the existing UI? Maybe the current developers don’t want to work on the existing codebase and would prefer to work on their own? Just wondering.

  9. If I had to choose right now the old UI would be the choice hands down. It feels like the push to a new UI will provide a benefit to the CCP software engineers perhaps by unifying UI codebases. Though it is clearly inferior, mechanically and visually, from a player’s perspective to the original UI. What are the benefits of the new UI to current EVE players? None that I can see. A large UI swap, a major development endeavor, should have new features above and beyond the current UI.

  10. As a seasoned C++ software engineer and technical leader, the sense I get is there’s some sort of “API purity religion” going on at CCP. Experience and history suggests that will result in overall performance and quality that’s only as good as the least common denominator from each platform for the end user. There’s nothing wrong with separate codebases that showcases the best aspects of each platform, in this case the PC, web browser, and mobile platforms. Though I could certainly be wrong about the motivations.

Appreciate the efforts of the Dev. Team but this UI feels like a step backwards.

Be well,
Feji.

1 Like
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Not to weigh in on the other points, but a quick comment about something you mentioned in point 10, that as a fellow software engineer, you may be able to understand…

The old UI used Python 2.7 which is over 2 years beyond EOL even for LTS. It’s ok if we disagree on this but I’m personally ok with growing pains if it means not using something past its technical support date. Sometimes you just gotta pull the bandaid off; I just hope they’re able to get all the bugs worked out quickly.

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Thank you for the extra information. Yikes, even a well written and modern python API isn’t a good choice for a game of this caliber. I would wholeheartedly push for a modern platform given that’s the case. That does provide insight into the birth of Eve, interesting.

Though, I wouldn’t advocate for a unified GUI API engineered to be used over multiple user devices (especially PC, mobile, and web).

There’s a very good reason the C++ language and standard has no support for a unified GUI. Java, python, Gtk, Qt, Fltk, and others have tried it. All those GUIs suck for the user next to the native counterpart.

If anyone doesn’t believe me (and why would you) just consult the man himself Bjarne Stroustrup on C++ GUIs.

An additional quick web search should convince reasonable software engineers it’s a fool’s errand to think they can do it better than the fine engineers before them. Use something like the MVC (Model View Controller) pattern, there are other options to consider, and everyone wins.

Kindly,
Feji

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EVE is an extraordinary game. One of the longest surviving MMOs.

It’s a certainty that an enormous amount of development effort went into the Photon UI, Valiant Marketing Effort, and yet it looks and feels worse.

What happened?

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