The TL;DR of this whole post:
It looks terrible, worse than the old 2004 UI.
The large padding and margins make it feel like a cheap mobile game, while reducing usability.
The actual post:
Okay, I get it. The game is coming on 20 years old and you want to spruce it up a bit. This, however, was not the way to do it.
This new UI looks like something out of a bad scifi B-movie from the 80s, where they had to make the buttons big so people watching it could tell the actor was hitting a button.
There’s so much unused space in the windows that its functionally unusable to anyone beyond the tutorial missions. My normal UI can fit chat, Dscan, Probescan, Sysmap, Overview, and Fleet all nicely without obstructing my view of the explosions. The new UI can’t even fit Dscan and Chat on the same half of the screen because there’s so much padding the chat bar that normally fits 10 people fits 3. Compacted.
Many windows just dont work at all. Fleet window clips off the window title to [Fleet (3…] no matter how large you make the window. You could have 3 people or 30 in fleet and it’ll always chop right there, yet the fleet member display is so large it takes up almost 1/3 of my screen just for the names.
So I have to honestly ask this question:
Are you trying to make it so you can play this with a laser pointer from the ISS, or did someone not understand the difference between “3px” and “3em” in the stylesheet?