Photon UI - Now in Beta (Opt-Out)

[Moonlight_Mernher]

Splitting the contacts and places into separate windows is actually sensible. The default keybinding is not. All the main windows used to have alt + wqertyasdfc keybinds.
Why make the new keybind “L” All of a sudden?
Why not Alt+q?
It’s not a matter of “BUT LOCATIONS START WITH L”. Yes, and industry starts with I, yet the alt+s is the keybind, as it makes sense in terms of ergonomics.
As a bonus, using a “modified input” as opposed to plain letter, allows to the UI to actually cycle the window on/off; as opposed to working like that:

• First keystroke of “L” opens the window
• Second keystroke of “L” searches the window for bookmarks starting with “L”
• You need to deselect the window to close it with “L”

[Moonlight_Mernher]

The design of buttons that have a long string of text is simply silly.

compared to the old:

There is absolutely now way for that UI elemnt to display the whole information. No resizing does that. Not even changing global UI scaling.

And sure I KNOW THERE’S “NUMBER OF JUMPS IN THERE” but ffs, then either shorten the name to “jumps” or have the button designed so that IT CAN DISPLAY THAT INFO.
You have the space for more lateral pixels.

[Moonlight_Mernher]

The “assets” window rework is questionable as well. You used to have 6 global tabs:

Now, we have 3:

With the first one now having an addtional button for filtering all/region/constellation.
So, in the old UI, i could’'ve had the “system” tab set to current/my main staging; while the region to something else.

Swapping between those tabs would REMEMBER that setting [so i did not need to re-apply the filter for the system/region]:

Now that functionality is gone. You need to re-sort everything de-novo every time you want to swap from looking at “all assets” to a specific system/region, as it default to “current” every time.

Not only does that create more clicking on the user side, it also potentially creates more queries to the database.

And you have all that space at the top:

[Moonlight_Mernher]

Why on earth does the Wallet window have a different color pallete for transactions between the “Transactions” and “Market transactions” tab?

[Vjorn_Angannon]

@Al_O_ehI

I see we’re about to lose the opt-out of Photon.

Link source for this statement please.

[Cade102]

Photon UI Leaving Beta on February 14th

First and foremost, we want to thank you for all the amazing feedback these last few months. With your help, we feel confident that Photon is an improvement across the board! Using our new technology, and following your feedback, we were able to add features like anomaly lists and multiple overviews, while improving and unifying the user interface. As discussed on our Producer’s Letter livestream, starting February 14th, Photon will no longer be in Beta, and will fully take over replacing the …

[Vjorn_Angannon]

Thank you…gives me time to consider giving my stuff away and biomassing quitting.

Now, to be fair, I have gone back to Singularity to look at all the changes since Oct '22 and do see that a lot of work has been done. It seems that I can actually have the same window-sized layout in Photon that I have with the classic UI. However, because of all the wasted space -even in compact mode- the fonts are so small that I will get some bad eyestrain thus cutting down my playtime.

A few things I noticed relatively quickly…

1. https://i.imgur.com/h6H3ebX.png Why the idiotic redundancy in Local [2] and Capsuleer in Channel [2]??? The latter is not needed AT ALL! Removing that will give us an additional name in the window. This seems to occur in all chat windows except for private convo’s,

2. Is there not a way to reorder the columns in the overview and have them apply to all tabs in the window???

3. https://i.imgur.com/1v0OiaM.png This has been mentioned a ton in the feedback. Why oh why are there space wasting icons in compact mode resulting in me not able to see the 5th drone’s health??? Why hasn’t this been corrected???

I will try Photon on Tranq and hope that more wasted space will be deleted SOON; I mean that is by far the biggest complaint mentioned in the feedback over the lifetime of this project…

[blathering_idiot]

This issue was caused by Windows 11 handeling of HDR with the two monitors. I turned it off (looks better without actualy) and now all is good.

[Moonlight_Mernher]

Scanning window ui is terribad.
These are the most use buttons any explorer pushes on a constant basis:

[the slider and center on my position is mosltly only used for on-grid combat scanning normally alt+scroll does the trick]
Anyone that does explo a lot, manually recovers probes. They bug out occassionally and not recover or you get back only some of them otherwise [sudden tidi in a system is keen to make it worse].

map open/close button is handy, as when you stop scanning a system, you probably want it closed for a time.

Literally noone uses the “save formation” feature. Nor is the “spread formation” more than a meme.

Since you are re-thinking the UI, how about making some valid changes to it? For now, we have a copy-paste window; but with minor changes for the worse. Yay.

[and since I did not articulate the conclusion: the most used buttons are the smallest and scattered around that window; that is stupid]

[Mihai000]

It is a way to make a window more opaque in eve .Log in account then press ESC .In the General settings tab you will find a bar named Transparency. Move that bar as you like and after Return to game buton
Hope to helped

[Moonlight_Mernher]

BTW, I find that switching the position of the “loot all” button to the other side of the window, for no apparent reasons, sums up the Photon UI design strategy perfectly.

[Moonlight_Mernher]

The number of lines you scroll with each “tick” of the mousewheel has been notincreased but scaled*** .

[That makes scrolling through many windows feel off. Yes, it’s faster, but you often end up with scrolling 3/4 of the window per tick.]
This is most pronounced for market screen and agency [so far, and for me]
That’s too much, especially given that no finer control is given, nor any way of “making it finer”.

Why do I whine about it? Coz if you happen to have your mouse do 2 ticks instead of one, you just made 1,5 worth of window height scroll through. It means you did not see a part of it. And that makes “click on the slider” method the go-to for scrolling those windows. Which is silly.

And again, this seems to affect non-proportionally only some screens.

*** Okay, i think i know what it is. You coded the ui scroll in such a way, that the number of lines it scrolls per tick SCALES WITH the total hight of the window. So if there’s a lot of stuff, you scroll through them faster. That could make sense, but the obvious problem is:

you expect the user to expect different results from their input every time the size of the thing changes.

That’s simply not going to happen.

Further testing shows up that it’s even more stupid.

So: you assumed that every window needs to scroll through in 10 mouse wheel ticks. At least that’s true for trading:

Let’s look at the “drones” skill group in the market:

That’s the top of the window.

Now with a single mouse scroll tick we get:

And after 10 ticks we get to the bottom.

Which skips some information, 10 ticks is not granular enough.

Silly enough, when we try scrolling through the “standard amarr battleships”, the results are the same. In terms of ticks:

top of the window:

after a single scroll tick:

[and after 9 ticks we get to the bottom. Of a window that has 3 items.]

I’m sorry, but this design is ridiculous.
Depending on the window, we either scroll 1/10 of the screen, or even more than a whole screen.
No consistancy, except an arbitrary “need to scroll through the whole thing in 10 mouse scroll ticks”.

And if you think, this design is sound, then count how many mouse scroll ticks it takes to scroll through this post. Now imagine if it was 10.

[Arakkis_Melanogaster]

This has probably been said 100 times already, but cutting off very important bits of information when windows are not full screen is terrible. This happens A LOT, but particularly egregious is the m3 number at the top of the inventory and asset windows. M3 total and max should always show completely and all the other crap should scale around it.

[Dyver_Phycad]

I wish I could give you more likes.

[Kiera_Oramara]

I still dont like Photon UI… But i do realize your going to force us to use it

So can you add the darkmatter color theme to Photon ?

[Hueston_brestone]

I’m new so not sure what the old one was like, but one problem with Photon is that when scrolling through windows, other than chats, it scrolls 10% of the way down each moose click. this means that if you have 1000 lines, its scrolling 100 lines every mouse wheel click. it should have a cap, like max 5 lines per click.

[VLD_Miromme]

Currently compact mode does nothing for the “Log and Messages" window. I used to be able to fit 9 lines of logs on the screen and now only 7 because of the header being too high in Photon UI.

Please add compact mode for Log and Messages window. I can’t play the game properly because of this.

upd: It got added. Thank you so much!

[VLD_Miromme]

And while I’m here, adding those arrows in Photon would be good too, I use them a lot, but in Photon they don’t exist.

[Dyver_Phycad]

Funny but annoying new quirk of Photon: If you sit in a place with lots of people moving about, like trade hub station, the scroll bar in the Guest tab keeps flashing every time something in the list changes. Same goes for chats like Local in those locations. The old UI does not do that (it only resizes the bars unnoticably) and I don’t see any reason why the UI should flash the scroll bar every time something changes even though I am not even in that window, and it only does it if the scroll bar is not at the very top of the list. This another instance of useless, flashy UI clutter and UI noise that serves no beneficial purpose and is inconsistent because why would you not want a flashy change indicator when the indicator is at the top of the list…

[Posh_Wynoa_Spice]

Photon UI Leaving Beta on February 14th @CCP_Swift

Photon IS NOT READY.

The human interface sections of the user (a human, in the intended case) interface look as if they are designed by 2nd rate mobile/tablet designers.

It is laggy as hell compared to the original UI, and provides LESS information yet takes up MORE SPACE, and with less options for customization.

The key issues continue to be ignored (usability, more clicks to do basic things, responsiveness) and the simple “move the box a few pixels to the left so the text doesn’t clip” are half assed in a way that adjusting the UI scale breaks things again. Removing functionality and replacing it with additional clutter hidden behind separate layers of menus is not an improvement. It isn’t worthy of being called an alternative – it is an objectively worse UI in key aspects, from information provided to the player, to the amount of effort the player needs to put in (clicks, menus, etc.) to perform the same tasks through the UI.

The original UI needs to remain until all of these key, major issues get resolved.