Improvements to visual effects and controls in windows

Feature Previews & Feedback Photon UI
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General

  • Borderless windows are just a bad idea, period. When I open one and see an acre of blackness that’s indistinguishable from all the others its visually jarring and makes navigating the interface harder. I hope this is just a temporary state until things get fleshed out more.
  • The glowing line we see under tab titles and along the top edge of the active window is too bright on dark backgrounds (and the moving reflection part seems very out of place). The effect works fine on the small control sliders but could be toned down a bit elsewhere. TBH, I think a softly glowing box around the tab name and a simple highlighting of the active window’s border would look much nicer. This is a time-tested UI convention that is hard to beat.
  • Shrinking scrollbars when their not moused over serves no real purpose and potentially covers up text when you’re scrolling. It also makes it much harder to grab a scrollbar when you actually need to.
  • Themes should have more options for customization. If each window type could have its own colors, transparencies, etc. the users could build their own look. Ideally, they would also be able to save and share custom themes as well. Build the tools into the game and let player creativity do the rest.
3 Likes
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I agree with all three points mentioned.

Especially the shrinking scrollbars: When I want to scroll a long list*, but have a rough idea to what spot I want to scroll to, it’s easier to click and drag the scrollbar directly - instead of first selecting the window with a click, then trying to grab the scaled down scrollbar with my courser and then drag it down to where I want to go.
Using the scrollwheel on the mouse is only an option on short lists.

*For example in the item hangar in the station window with ~4000 items.

1 Like
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I do agree with these points, and the window borders are just too thick overall. sometimes cutting off letters, even at the beginning of a sentence. just makes the windows seem clunkier, and takes up precious screen real estate, and I use widescreen monitors. Can’t imagine what normal screen width people feel about it. Even the pop-up for the hunt event’s graphic is wider than the internal window border.
Also, the tabs fade out and have no visible separation between them, although the underlined active tab is kinda nice.

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