Before I start I know its not finished but on the other hand I have no idea where Uber want to go with it, so I thought its worth a discussion at this stage to see what other people think. I am mainly going to talk about the look and functionality of the UI as it is. Overall I think the UI is messy in the current build. The black back grounds of the frames are quite harsh and could do with some transparency so they dont completely block out everything under them. The player tab should be toggleable instead of having to click it every time I want to check who's annihilated or who is playing that particular colour. Same with the planet system tab which I also think should show information similar to the 'Better System View' mod. The 'Economy Efficiency' mod shows your eco as a percentage of income/outgoings which I find incredibly useful at a glance instead of trying to work out using the small numbers how far in the red I really am. The power on/off and infinite build buttons should be located beside the factory build menu. It seems odd to have to move my mouse so far for common functionality. A health display for the commander would be a great asset too. Orbital is still tricky to select. Im not too sure if one of the settings can turn off ground icons when I go to orbital view but that would help alot. Again I know this is the first pass of a second pass and things are work in progress but I think it is best to discuss and address any concerns now rather than nearer launch day.
One thing I'd like to add: the "under attack" sound effect is incredibly annoying and long right now. It doesn't click in my head that something is going on, like the old short sound did.
I agree with basically everything you said, it feels like the UI took a couple steps back. The sleeker, semi-transparent elements from before honestly looked great and really fit, I would've argued they need very minimal tweaking at most. Besides what you mentioned, while scrolling through the build menu was clumsy before, the new giant menu that can get four layers deep and take up a lot of the screen is pretty ungainly as well; hopefully a hotbuild system will be looked at somewhat seriously soon. Orbital selection is going to be tough to solve, since there is some relationship between ground and orbital, like building teleporters or targetting with the SXX. My thought was maybe they could experiment with a very slight blur on the ground once you zoom to orbital along with a very slight halo around orbital units, and once you selected something the blur would fade out.
Forums are moving alot faster these days. Ill respost this in that thread if a Mod could close this one....
