Photon UI - Compact Mode on TQ Feedback thread

Was excited thinking UI designers would listen to the feedback but oh boy I was wrong.
Lets talk about “compact mode”.
Here is ss of right half of my screen.
Imgur

compact mode for drone window is on the right side (it’s on for the rest of the windows),and only thing it does is reduce padding for about 2 pixels on each side and removes minimize button which on it’s own is next level of bad design.
I can imagine people on bigger monitors need to move their necks to look at 2 different drone group folders.

Why in the overview you can have compact list but when it comes to every other window element there needs to be 100% of empty space between two lines of text???

And it’s absurd that I must have drone window this wide in order to see what drones are doing when you deploy faction drones because otherwise their state gets hidden under hp bars. Couldn’t you put just different color dot in front of hp or drone names? You already love red dot so much why not add green and yellow one too.

Another thing that looks like you can’t get rid of is button overlaping.
Imgur
And speaking of PI, why every minimized window pops back up once you exit this view? It was inconvenience but it’s quickly becoming extremely annoying with removal of minimize button.

And final rant (for now) what’s up with fuzzy icons?

5 Likes

The Customs Office UI goes outside of the window

3 Likes

Dear CCP, please:

  1. Make the “Close” button back in the compact mode. It’s a cornerstone of a windows-based interface. There are still wide header bars (and the Options button), why the Close buttons shouldn’t be there?

  2. Fixing the option to display the inventory tree in compact mode will be greatly appreciated. I mean… please make this option work also in the compact mode:

3 Likes

With the new UI i was looking forward into new ideas of displaying and sorting data, so far it’s a reskin of old UI and this compact mode is just removed padding and options from the UI.
It might be just me, but when i think about compact mode i think about putting lower priority items under some menu/button, so it’s not there all the time but you can bring it up if needed. Also removing labels for things advanced users know icons by heart.

Eg. hide search, when press ctrl+F on active window search pops up.

Or for drones compact mode, remove all unnecessary text. instead of folders display icon of a drone and number in a row next to each other or multiple rows if needed. Unfold only 1 group at the time to not waste space. Also if we could get that if you drag a group it always launches drones with most HP so we dont have to even look into groups that would be great.
Something like this as and idea:
drones

It might be garbage, but the point is, we should not be stuck with old ways of doing things if we are trying to make modern interface

3 Likes

A few more bugs to squish:

  • Activate the new new player experience window, the map, or any other normally full screen object in full screen, then dock, and the internal graphics refuse to load, the station overview doubles in reference in minimize in the left dock, the selected item is double referenced and minimize in the left dock, and on undock, the controls in the center never appear, the overview is double referenced in the dock and begins minimized, and the selected item window is double referenced and starts minimized. Some sort of database timeout and network connection bandwidth problem seems to be associated with this intermittent bug. Logging off and logging in fixes the problem.

  • In the fitting window, there is no scrolling on the popup window for the ship cargo bay selection, causing long lists to appear off screen in extended fixed length lists. Moving the window mostly below the screen is a workaround.

  • The email composition window has a layout problem where the body overlays more than 50% of the subject text box. There is no workaround, but the text can be copied in or copied out.

  • Intermittently - somewhat but not always based on whether the selected window is selected in the previous ‘session’ - the selected items window will display the next object in the route (the unreliability is more the issue - it can not be relied upon). When the object is selected on load, the keyboard shortcuts are disabled until the object is also selected in the overview window (often a second or more load time and the target is not always in the first screen of the overview).

  • Normally, selecting the chat window disables keyboard command shortcuts (often with hilarious results in chat - if with disaster in practice). However, there is no documentation on which other windows have this key-grabbing feature of which inventory affiliated windows appear to do the same - blocking all keyboard commands for game control for no apparent reason.

  • there is a separate event queue between the mouse and the keyboard. Particularly in the event of a connection disruption, this permits the order of the actions to change between combinations of keyboard and mouse. This can cause disaster in practice such as unsuccessful cloak application or worse - slaughtering one’s own drones or allies as the remote shield boost target is attacked instead of the enemy as the switch in target via mouse reverses in order from the order to attack.

If I find more, I will post.

3 Likes

Opted in. Gave it a serious go. There are things I liked about and things I didn’t. Most of the things I didn’t like, I suspect I would have gotten used to. But there were two things that made it so I just couldn’t stick it out long enough to find out:

  1. The “Light Background” option is too transparent. I play with light background enabled on pretty much everything, and with Photon active, text that used to be readable is now mixed and muddled in with the stars, becoming illegible.

  2. The dscan sliders have been moved for no reason, and have been placed in such a way that range and angle look like a single long slider. This became unusable for me, which is a pretty big deal if you do any PVP. Why would you rearrange the UI elements of such a fundamental tool for no reason? And I know that “old UI as an option” is something you’re tired of hearing, but I think it’s necessary if you’re going to move the dscan sliders.

3 Likes

I tried to write a happy letter to CCP Falcon and unfortunately now it’s going to have to be a sad letter. The subject box is cut off for me. I adjusted the size of the box, attempted to put it in compact mode, changed every setting and clicked every button I could think of to see if it was something I broke and nothing I did fixed this.

edit: I just now realized he no longer works at the company. I was writing him to see if he had an explanation for why his devblogs “CCPlease” had been discontinued even though the original devblog announcing them indicated they would remain a long term.

1 Like

Compact mode allows L to toggle the Locations Window ON but does not turn the Locations Window OFF as it does in the normal mode.

Someone probably mentioned this already, but the tab flash when someone talks in a channel I am not directly looking at, is invisible to me (although I gather some people can see a faint flash). This means I have to click on every intel channel to see if anything happened. I’ve had to switch back to standard.

2 Likes

Did you also notice that you have to recall each drone by itself. No group recall.

2 Likes

i tested the photon UI for some minutes DX12 and DX11. after deactivating it i get a nice notification that there is a thread on forums to post my opinion. i click it and notice thread is closed with a link at the bottom to the next thread which is also closed with a link at the bottom to the next thread which is this one here.

Photon is clonky and line spacing is too high (i always set font size to 11, text only, in chat windows and all clients run with “small fontsize” in general settings) and in general padding is to high. But that is only compared to the old UI. If the people wouldve to use photon for the past 13 years maybe noone would complain or say anything negative. I even had a hard time getting used to the UI back then when you removed all old icons oon the NEOCOM. I didn’t like it, but now im used to it.

Space or room for information was always a problem in eve. I bought my first ultrawidescreen 3440x1440 (34") in 2014 just because of that! I am still using that screen as my main. But maybe my resolution is too low now. A higher resolution or pixelpercm/inch would maybe fix all problems.

What i would like to see tho is the ability to make all my clients look the same without dealing with files in explorer and copying IDs and renaming files.

  • Compact mode often removes some features/buttons. So its in my opinion not a valid way to deal with the clonky layout. Make the captions thinner or the icons smaller, whatever makes them (window titles/captions) so big. I would have to resize some of my windows that i get the information i got before.

  • Min/max/lock buttons too big

  • Standing icons are not that crisp and clear like the old ones. Or maybe it are my bad eys starting to blurr things. The ration of color and symbol in these icons did change for sure and maybe that causes to blurr in my mind.

  • Many things appear to be bigger and/or take more room but the buttons in station to undock etc., which were always big, are now small

  • The font seem to have ClearType / AA in some places now which i dont really need. Or lets say, it gives eve a different feel what i have to get used to at first.

  • Broadcast buttons in fleet window are huge, which can be a good thing, maybe toggle size somehow

  • Line spacing too high - that includes spacing between lines in fleet window memberlist or folders in drone window

  • Fitting window is okish - some buttons are semi covered by the fitting circle but i can still press them

DX11/12
could not tell a difference regarding photon apart from one thing
text shadow in space
in dx12 the sun seems to be brighter and adding more shadow to the text seems legit. especially when white text. the rules when shadow gets applied maybe should be tweaked.
a single ship for example has no or little shadow while objects that appear as a list because they are stacked in space get a bigger shadow.

using a gtx 1080 Ti

2 Likes

Just wanted to chime in and say that the Compact UI thing is awesome. Please introduce it to more windows, like… EVERY window. I’ll be using it in no time.

In potato mode (opt for performance), popout menus are too transparent for my linking. I can barely see what I want to click. Maybe in potato mode, for big fleet fights transparency settings need to be adjusted.

maybe amend something about the Shader Quality settings for the photon UI ? If its low, then reduce the transparency?

2 Likes

I personally like and need the drone groups as is. I just dont understand why drone types cannot be mixed.

1 Like

Switched on the Photon UI for the first time today and it’s really schnazzy! I like it, but the two things which bother me the most, are:

  1. No compact Chat Channels yet
  2. I want a compact mode for the inventory which also displays the sidebar so I can quickly scroll through my ship hanger and item hanger, without opening loads of windows.

I’ve also just noticed there’s a pretty significant lag when trying to use the drop-down menu to invite someone to a channel,

Thank you for fixing this…

“Search New Eden” and “Daily Campaigns” Icons not displaying correctly (refer pic).
01

“Total Isk” Value not shown in cargo of Active ship window when in space. Would like to have this back please.

Compact mode is ok, but there are almost no space savings.

A carry over problem from the last patch in the 3-dot menu is nearly invisible as is the search box.