New installation of just how ridiculously bad Photon UI and everything based on it really is:
Skinr window, colors list without scroll bar:
It is astounding how poor CCP’s UI coding quality really is, even for flagship money printer trainwrecks.
Please add the option to widen scroll bars.
This obsession with thin scroll bars is quite, quite crappy.
The whole UI is terribad now. Someone deserves an unpaid vacation for their UI work.
I was one of the few players who liked Photon and would defend it back in the opt-in days (I still had opinions on where it needed to do better ofc). That has really changed since I came back and saw all the new nonsense they’re doing. ■■■■■■■ around with character info window for zero reason. Making ■■■■■■■ everything open in fullscreen in a game where having many windows open to maintain situational awareness is crucial. Adding pointless text popups and outright malicious idiocy like grabbing and moving the camera around for us.
This is still a major pain for me. I had to chose between motion sickness from that stupid autorotation in stations that you can not selectively disable and loss of immersion due to deactivation of all camera movement.
So now i play EVE again without any automatic camera movement like in the early days of the game, killing of all added immersion, so i don’t have to puke on my monitor and desk.
It has some good ideas, no doubt. However, the implementation, level of needed compromise (when they said they’d have so much more flexibility and freedom with Photon compared to the old UI), number of persisting bugs, number of emerging new bugs, higher level of unclarity and obfuscation of information really thoroughly soured my opinion of the UI and whoever came up with it.
This is a major bugbear for me.
Sure I can uncheck the full screen box, but clearly this was not made by anyone who actually plays the game, there’s no chance they’d do this ■■■■.
Adding to this, while full screen, having the interface box size controls in the center vice consistent along the top right corner is quite irksome.
The Agency window rework, as well as the opportunities tab are especially bad as well. “mouse hover-over” causing changes other than a highlight effect to show where a click at the mouse’s current location would do are not good. Please stop looking toward the mobile development crapware sphere for inspiration for UI changes, and please stop prioritizing laggy UI animations and fancy icons over utility.
The new stuff that gets added or reworked in PHOTON shouldn’t also come with higher ram/CPU loads and additional server requests that make the game feel less responsive and add additional layers of lag to the UI.
Agree with most of this.
A "less is more* approach would have been better.
I also hate the close/fullscreen buttons being in the middle.
The industry screen particularly pisses me off because you have the double whammy of a big long awaited call then, when that finally returns the data, a bit of animated nonsense.
With a panel as heavy as the Industry screen, UI elements need to be as lean as possible, no animations except maybe a “loading” spinner instead of just letting it literally hang for 5 seconds before presenting the job list.
If only some windows were fullscreen with close button in the middle - the factional warfare window doesnt fit on my screen and the close button is offscreen to the right
I’d rather open one window with 20+ tabs at the top than 20+ windows to get all the info I’m looking for in a deep dive. All industry related info should be in one tabbed window. All exploration related info including maps should be in another tabbed window. All financial info should be in onewindow. Etc, etc. There is no reason for all the seperate damn windows for every damn thing. Everything should work like the fitting window. I open the fitting window, I don’t also have to open a seperate window to find all info I need on any modules to use. If anything, the ship tree should also be a tab in the fitting window. They keep saying they want to condense the amount of windows and yet in fact do the exact opposite every single time they monkey with the UI. The neocom wouldn’t need more than 5 or 6 buttons in total to cover every action in the game if they had an actual qualified UI designer. And that’s even with redundancies ( like some financial tabs overlapping with Industry ).
God no. So much of this game is checking the contents of one panel against the contents of another. If they’re all separate windows you can move them around and put them side by side, if they’re tabs the information from one is necessarily invisible when you switch to the other. This is exactly the kind of awful idea UI designers love and actual users hate, it’s a core component of the so-called enshittification.
Comparing what? Ships? Modules? Buffs? Implants? All could be done in a , wait for it, Comparison tab in the Fittings window. Condensing the amount of windows is not “enshittification”, it is literal Quality of Life. Perhaps you’ve never experienced such a thing? As much as you argue for everything being “unsafe” and “hard” around here, I’m guesssing you never have.
Why?
Probe scanner, by default, is merged with Directional Scanner and Solar System Map. Amost everyone separates these windows. Now you can have a small window with information on anomalies always present and you only have to open the usually bigger Solar System Map window only when needed. Same with Directional Scanner. Quality of Life.
Regional Market and Market Orders. You want these windows side by side when you’re updating your Market Orders. Click on the market order, Regional Market window displays information. You don’t need to read any data, just look if the blue line is above the green line. Done.
Now if these windows were merged… Every time one clicked on a market order, the tabs would switch, right? So now just moving eyeballs isn’t enough anymore… You’d need to move your eyeballs and move your cursor and do a mouse-click on a tiny tab button to go back to Market Orders tab each time. You also lost the visual track on which market order you were viewing because tabs switched. Does the Market order window remember the last clicked order? (There are many cases where it couldn’t, like if order was fulfilled.) Because if not, then you can’t remind yourself which order you were on because the market order is in a different tab now!
So, what’s the benefit in limiting the usability here? Now we can choose how much info we have on screen at any time. With tabs that would be impossible, unless you allowed people to spawn multiple instances of the same window, like opening four x Regional Markets. And then you have all these redundant tabs buttons littering the UI… People love multitasking in EVE and I doubt that turning the whole UI in to some tablet UI would really work well. I need to see Regional Market and Market Orders at the same time.
And why can’t you just stack windows on top of each other and use tab- … icons on the neocom to switch around? I think the main problem here is that Industry window doesn’t stack.
More #JustPhotonThings:
When hovering over a hold fill bar in non-compact windows, there is no tooltip telling you the exact fill level of the hold, even though the bar is clearly not fully visible. So straightforward, so cognitive-overload reducing.
I’d rather have 20+ windows than 1 window with 20+ tabs. All the financial info needs to be separate. Market orders, wallet, market window – all need to be their separate windows. I would go crazy if I had to start toggling between wallet and market order view.
Terrible idea. You can stack existing windows, that should solve the problem for you if you really don’t like so many windows.
#JustPhotonThings
