I play on a laptop or two, so compact mode obviously, however it can’t compromise functionality (minimize/close buttons collapsed, other functions removed like search and loot all, ffs). Otherwise way too much padding and wasted space.
I do like the drone tab not disappearing/reappearing when launching drones.
Selected Item compact mode - actually wastes more space with an icon.
Overview/D-Scan compact mode - good, compact without loss of function.
Locations in System, permanently in compact mode missing close/minimise and wrong shortcut.
Solar system map - inconsistent, old UI (floating), same for AIR Career program.
Extra tab for Locations/Search seems a bit clunky, but better than the old popup for results.
Looting is much snappier but also in Classic UI, phew! Previously loot all button would only appear after contents had been shown and several round trips/ticks, so I can opt-out.
Can y’all get around to adding a scrollbar for overview presets when right clicking an overview tab? I would like to not be limited by the resolution of my screen as to how many overview presets I can quickly access at any given time. Edit: This thing/menu: https://i.imgur.com/q0YmSbb.png
Let me make the watchlist narrower!
Oh hell I just noticed a typo, “Fleet Commnaders” indeed
In particular with these light items, it is much harder to see selected items compared to the old UI which highlights the entire item box and not just the icon.
They probably think that a dark-to-light color fade in the speed bar is easier to read than the lightblue-to-blue fade in the old UI. No idea why they think this would be the case.
Sure, but why was the Neocom resized for people as part of this change? Even once I turned PhotonOS off, the Neocom was resized on ALL of my accounts, which then broke the way I had my windows laid out in each client. And of course, unless you want to go fiddling in the hidden AppData directories and copy and paste a good known config for one character to the file for every other character, CCP don’t make it easy to standardise interfaces across clients/characters.
You keep going on about how good Photon IS, and how we should all just focus on the positives instead of the negatives. Please give us a list of five improvements that we can all agree on…
Good example.
I want to point out that especially the marking for the 75% ship speed is a very important figure.
In this example you can only guess where it could be.
yeah, 75% is important, not noticed when was on tether and made screenshot.
Also in compact mode column with structures must be little less than it now. And fonts… “small font” is really small, current little bigger, then need to get all needed information and not get a overview on a half of screen.
Dude, I don’t know what you are on about. 1- I have already provided several instances of constructive feedback, long before this thread when Photon UI testing started and we were told it would become the norm… most of my positive input has been implemented, not that I was the only one to provide it. 2- No, it isn’t only positive. I don’t like a lot of stuff either, but this isn’t the place to ask “why did you guys mess it up?” or other unconstructive “feedback”. It is easier to make improvements if there is direction, rather than scoffing. If someone is only bickering about how they liked the other thing, they haven’t made any positive contribution and are in the wrong thread.
And 3- I don’t know how you are surprised about how CCP doesn’t make things easy to do anything… it seems to be what draws most of these masochists here in the first place.
Whining:
Constructive feedback:
I can only imagine how you would react if someone told you “your work looks like feces” vs if they told you “you see this specific thing, what if you did something like that specific example”.
I recall a saying about catching more flies with one or the other.
PS. Taste is subjective, so I’ll keep my tongue deep wherever I like it thanks.
Allright @CCP_Paragon, I’m keeping one of my accounts to on Photon to see if any of this feedback bears fruit. That first post was my initial reaction, but I have actually been following the opt-in phase of photon. Basically this is what I can think of right now that is needed:
Too much wasted space in headers, boarders, and between lines. By putting everything I can into compact mode and setting font size to small I can bring it down to something on the fluffy side of usable, but I would rather the tight, drink-from-the-fire-hose levels of information density I can get with the old UI. Reducing UI scale helps a little, but then my HUD is too small. Fix those header, boarder, font-size, & spacing issues will solve like 66% of the problems with Photon.
Speaking of compact mode: not all windows can be made compact (like show info, or create bookmark) and when in compact mode, the close [ X ] gets hidden within the three dots menu. I’m not putting it in compact mode to hide stuff, rather just to try to clean up some of the wasted space; I’d like to keep the functionality of the normal window buttons just without them gobbling up so much space on my screen.
The color pattern so far available hurts to look at after a while. “Mercury Arc on Obsidian” sounds awesome, but gets old quick. I’m guessing more color options are probably in the works on down the road, but I would suggest among them a few that are not quite so harsh as this one. [Update] Wait? Am I seeing this right: There are alternative color patterns available, but only on Omega accounts? That’s rather trash move right there.
Probe window needs a lot of work. Like there are some play styles (explorers, hole-dwellers) for whom this window gets almost as much use as the Overview. Can we get the relative sizes of the probe formation buttons and the [Recall Active Probes] buttons swapped? Alternatively, can we just make them all small like the [Open System Map] and [Recall Active Probes] buttons and get the option to set a shortcut for recalling active probes?
I haven’t seen it myself, but I’ve been hearing grumbling about the [Loot All] button missing from container inventories. Is this just a bug, or maybe a side-effect of having to compact mode everything? Is it an attempt to thwart loot bots? I may be on-board with it if it’s for the latter.
[Update] Something I missed before but feel needs mentioning: the system sec status indicators on the Route indicator seem desaturated and it makes it kinda difficult to tell some of them apart. Just crank the saturation on those all the way up please because that is definitely something we need to be able to see at a glance.
there are other issues like the placement of tabs in the wallet (across the top instead of down the side) cutting down on the space available for transaction entries, but I think fixing the line spacing problems will go a long way to alleviating those as well, and I think most of the icons like in the Neocom and especially in the selected items window are just ugly, but the selected item ones at least look like what they do so I guess they’re acceptable.
I’d still rather just see photon scrapped and get non-photon versions of the photon-ified windows (Character Menu, Skills Menu, Agency, AIR Career thingy), and get my old color neocom icons back, at least as like a “retro” UI option, but I digress.
Want to make something functional out of Photon? Shrink the icons, remove the wasted space, shrink the headers, just give us the option to stand behind the dump truck of info as it unloads upon us. They don’t just call it “Spreadsheets In Space” because we use a lot of spreadsheets: We crave a density of info that looks like a half-dozen spreadsheets across our screen with a pretty spaceship in the middle.
[Update] Have y’all considered adding in an “Advanced UI Settings” option with a little warning dialogue popup but that lets us adjust the fluff, borders, spacing, margins, icon size, etc with like sliders or maybe just by editing number fields? Then you could still keep this awful spaced-out can’t-see-half-the-info style as the default and just let the rest of us adjust it to something more functional.
I posted up in the General Feedback yesterday after just a brief review, of the things that jumped out right away, and decided to give it another go and even undocked, but it’s even worse out in the deep dark vastness of space.
I’m pretty sure this has probably already been covered but:
The Drones window is massive, there’s way too much space used here even in List view. The Horizontal spacing is way too much.
The overview is spaced out too much between lines and columns. The old UI works great here and looks clean and compact.
–Horizontal spacing looks like for every 2 or 3 lines you could fit another line in here, but it’s just empty
–The spacing between columns adds too much of a buffer for the same information to the fact that if I don’t resize my window from the old UI, I lost station names, where it’s very clear the start of the information is presented, and enough to know which Jita IV I’m warping to without having to hover or click to verify
From a personal standpoint, and might just be my OCD, but I leave item windows sized based on what they’re used for, so for example when I’m CareBearing, my Mining Hold window is exactly the height of one item and 4 items wide.
With Photon UI enabled, the height of the window needed to achieve this is so much taller than it needs to be, so basic inventory windows just take up more space with no added information. This is unnecessary
From a positive standpoint:
-The text contrast is rich and looks great
-The highlighting in the windows looks much better where the older UI is a bit more flat
-Context menus look good with the changes (with the exception of horizontal spacing)
Overall I think there’s just way too much buffer space in these windows and it’s taking up way too much space for the same information.
