The new Feature Preview system is live on TQ which means you can now opt-in to try out the Photon UI there. Big thanks to everyone who spent their time on providing their feedback in the Welcome to Photon UI thread. This is invaluable and we are looking into expanding on the design aspects that were highly pointed out.
The Feature Preview system can be accessed via the Settings Menu (by pressing ‘Esc’), under the ‘Feature Previews’ tab. Any features available for preview will be listed on the left and can be opted into by selecting them and clicking the ‘Enable’ button. Enabling (or disabling) these features will often require a restart of the client, after which the selected features will be part of your EVE Online experience.
Check out the full blog on the Feature Preview System for all the details.
first of all I personally like the new kind of design but there are a few things that don’t go well actually.
The active window beeing tinted to a blueish/purpleish color seems to be completely off while all other windows are grey/black
The constant noise effect in the background of the windows is completely unnecessary and doesn’t add any value
The top yellow marker for an active window is too much. Just make the borders of the active window a little brighter and most people will know which one is the active one
The module icons and the capacitor/shield/armor gauge still have the old design which doesn’t fit to the new windows
The buttons for the “new location” window are overlapping the expire radio buttons
The compact mode doesn’t actually stay in compact mode after docking and undocking (it say so in the menu but the window clearly isn’t)
Apart from that I really like it. Especially the new right-click menu is way more accessible than before. The bigger and colored buttons are a nice addition and the overall unification of the UI is good. Just overthink the points I mentioned please
UUUUUUGE window headers. You reduced the size of buttons but you left the UUUUUUUUUUGE headers as they were, wasting a crapload of space.
I lost about 40-50% of window content space. Instead of seeing up to 3 rows of items in my cargohold, I only see 1.5 now.
Windows themselves got bigger. I had the header portion of the Probe window hidden behind the overview in the old UI, so that I could still see probe launch buttons. That’s now all hidden down to the column headers
Colum header style between Probe window and Dscan Window is completely different. Why are the column headers in the Probe window a box while they are a hard to distinguish row in the Dscan window?
Standing Tags in chats are huge now, but the + in the tag is tiny.
You changed the LAUNCH to Launch in the Probe Scanner, which makes it harder to read.
The icons in the probe launch buttons are smaller and much harder to differentiate
The Probe radius slider is so bright when no probes are launched that it appears as if you could use it. But if you click it, it only moves the window.
The separation between content areas and of windows is completely gone. It is impossible to see where one portion ends and another begins
Nice idea with the button row in the Station services tab or the Fitting window. However, why are you not using the same nice feature in the market window where there are also many buttons in a row in several places? This creates UI discontinuity noise. Didn’t your science tell you about this issue?
The Create Bookmark window now does not show the notes text input field at all. There are only 3 white dots above Folder. And the button still clips into the timer window portion.
Buttons at the top of the Probe window where the scanner probe stats are are squished directly into the active tab light strip and not separated at all.
Why are the buttons in the Dscan window for Stacking the window into the map, showing the scan cone and opening the system map in different styles?
Pre-selected buttons are still not highlighted at all so you do not know at all what happens when you press Enter.
What are the “<<” and “>>” buttons (previous and next) supposed to do in the cargo hold? They just waste space and have no function unless I used the tree view and switched between items in that list. They should not be visible unless I used the tree view to change content in the window.
I just stacked a new cargohold window into an existing cargohold window. The first CH shows the ship name, the second just empty space after the arrow to expand the inventory tree view.
When I click on the “Did You Enjoy Playing today” thumbs, they do not give me the option to give feedback why I enjoyed playing or why I didn’t. Intentional?
Oh god. I started a convo to test if the auto light background enable bug was fixed. In the Photon UI it sorta was. However, I am back in the old UI now after a restart and there the window is in light background but the option to turn it off is gone. I cannot turn off light background in the old UI. Screw this!
AND HOLY SCREW UP! WHO THE HELL HAD THE IDEA TO MAKE THE RESET QUICK BAR BUTTON A GOD DAMN RELOAD ICON?! WHAT IN BOB’S NAME ARE YOU SMOKING?
12 minutes into this UI and I am totally convinced that this needs a lot more work. A whole lot. And a whole lot more explaining why you did certain things the way you did them, so that we can actually discus what a good UI is. For now, this gets the same treatment as the New Star Map: ignored and turned off.
Besides: Why do I have to manually restart my client when I want to turn this stuff on or off? If I enable it, give me the option right away to restart my client. Don’t make me move my mouse down and about to the quit game buttons.
Even with the brightness setting at its lowest possible setting the UI is still to bright. I have photo-induced nausea and the previous UI look didnt bother me. If you could include a seperate brightness slider for the UI itself, this would solve my problem. The other option if it is easier is to allow us to continue to use the old UI if we prefer it or in my case actually need it to be less bright.
I don’t think the current brightness changes the UI brightness but playing the rest of the game at 35% of maximum brightness allows me to play as often as I want with a minimal nausea level. The new UI makes me sick in about 90 seconds and even turning the brightness of the game to its lowest setting does not do enough to off-set the nausea induced by the new UI.
I tried the new UI on the test server for a few hours before being forced to stop by the nausea but my problem is cummulative over days, weeks and even months. So, If i could play 3 hours the first day, the next might be 1 hour, the next 5 mins for a few days to let the nausea drop back down or do something like mining and look away from the screen except when mining adjustments need to be made but serious game play ends for me if this situation cannot somehow be resolved.
I reallze I am just one person and understand that sometimes you have to leave a certain percentage of the market share behind because feasibility demands it, I hope this is not one of those situations.
First, I appreciate the time and effort put in by the devs to keep Eve looking fresh. I like the way the new UI looks overall, and some of the windows (Dscan, Probe Launcher, Overview, Skills, Agency, Wallet) look really good. However, there’s been a few “yikes” moments that I’ve had while trying it out:
The various window headers have different sized fonts: Overview, Directional Scanner, and Selected Item all have smaller fonts than People and Places, Saved Locations, Planetary Industry, etc. I think the smaller font looks better (and takes up less valuable space) than the larger fonts.
The slider for the Planetary Industry Extraction Program is broken - the program duration number does not change when the slider is moved either with the cursor or with the -/+ buttons (which are way too big). The Planetary Industry windows in general suffer from the too-large window header font as well.
The Deliver All Jobs button for the Industry window is an amazing QoL improvement - except if a job can’t be delivered, neither can any other finished jobs below that one.
The Simulation History and Save State buttons in the Fitting Window are buried underneath the ship fitting. This was a big yikes moment.
The Project Discovery window looks bad: the header clips significantly into the body of the content in the window.
I really liked the Undock button being a different color and larger than other nearby buttons in the old UI - that helped draw attention to it and make it easier to see (and click). With the new UI, it blends in with the other buttons and makes it more challenging to find it quickly.
The white colors in the new UI are SUPER bright and jarring - if there could be some way to adjust this, that would be fantastic.
First of all, well done CCP on introducing this preview feature into the live environment. Coming from a software delivery background myself I can imagine some of the challenges of delivering a feature like this, giving customers (pilots!) an option without messing up the game.
In terms of initial reaction, overall I like the feel of the UI and have a few observations:
Right click menu feels more solid and organised
Tab and window highlighting is good and makes clear what is active
The visuals of sliders and buttons can appear too bright and imposing
Don’t like background noise/grid on windows; I want to see the beautiful graphics behind
Looks cool. I like transparent interface. Bad thing is the frames of the interface windows has become thicker so i have now little bit less of useful space
Only a few things stood out, I sleepily detailed them below.
In the simulation window, changing number of drones is a bit bugged. https://i.imgur.com/wLQnxp2.png Using medium font size, and on a 3440x1440 monitor.
Creating a fleet is also quite small, needing to click the 3 dots instead of the relatively large hamburger menu in the top left. https://i.imgur.com/4CsJ8Vy.png
A few great things, the new jump clone menu is PERFECT, The highlighting of clones in station with you, and colored buttons is very nice, https://i.imgur.com/QmSOT5y.png new / old https://i.imgur.com/psQDrAc.png
Not sure if this just because my alt has remaps available, but the renamining in the Attributes tab of “Remap now” to “Attributes Overview” is very nice, as seeing a “___ now” button and not knowing what it does as a newer player is something you never really want to click…
How did you enable transparency without blur?
For some reason, I have no transparency at all (wheter light background is enabled or not) while “Blur effet” is unchecked.
I can’t see any blur effect on your screenshot.
I think it’s something they can improve upon for future feature previews.
At the very least, not a full client restart but a relogin from the character selection screen.
We’re not running Windows NT (in fact some of us don’t run Windows at all, so we’re also boot.ini immune, and even then, we’re root permission walled unlike Window’s boot.ini).
I’d love to try this, but after enabling the feature preview it just simply blacks out all of my UI windows and prevents “enable light mode” from working… Anyone managed to fix this little issue?
