Hey! The devlog is back and it brings some news and some discussion opportunities, allow me to quote it:
We have a lot of own ideas on how we can improve the user interface with everything from the appearance and style, general UX to removing the tedious task of navigating the management panel… but we want to hear from you! Not what you don’t like about the Airport CEO UI but what you do like about another game’s UI. What’s your favorite game user interface and why? How should we redesign the Airport CEO UI and what are your top rated features for us to include? As you know, we can’t fulfill everyone’s wishes but your input on this will really help us in the grand design process. You’re welcome to participate in this forum thread. In the meantime, we’ll continue mocking stuff up and watch your feedback and discussion.
The EVE online neocom is awesome because you can adjust the Tasks you want on your shortcutbar. You can even preset several of them for different situations within your game.
The fast bar of Anno 1404 is awesome, because you can drag / drop menu items in it. Also dragging your viewscreen over the map with the mouse is nice.
In roller-coaster tycoon you can Template stuff in game, so you can reuse a certain setup of an object. Airport CEO should have that, I dragged the same queue-line for check-in desks several times now, it gets annoying. Same with assembling shop space or large groups of benches in the boarding area’s; for vehicles and staff the “assign area” tool of roller-coaster tycoon staff would lend itself to the Airport CEO grid. In CEO I would like to assign a depot a certain “service” room on grid, so I can decide which stands will be serviced from which depot.
Please make it possible in CEO to CRTL delete floortiles, now you cant.
Can we also get a “backspace” option in building mode, like in Anno 1404, it does the following “remove last placed object”.
Let me ad; please let us set a “pre-slot-setup”, with a button in the flight planner that reads “fill empty slot positions”. So, if I want the first flight at 5:05 and every flight 5 min after, until days end, I dont want to setup it again and again every week. I want to setup it once for my airport and then auto-fill contracts in the setup that I created.
When you move the forums to the new server, please re-enable email updates.
I really like the fact that you can sort contracts by building companies, fuel services, airlines, and others. but I think it would be handy if you could sub-sort airlines to small plane contracts and medium plane contracts.
I’m not sure how relevant that will be once the contract system is overhauled, but I think it will have more features in terms of information for the player to decide which contracts to sign
I’m so hyped for 2018 and the new contract system deployment on Friday guys!
On the one side, I’m looking forward to a better UI, on the other, I’m getting mixed feelings.
ACEO seems to have at least 1,5a to go, with many big features to come, which will affect the UI. The UI may be not as pretty as we like it to be, but it works. Changing it now in a fundamental way, may lead to another complete overhaul and probably one to three more month till beta/gold.
Other way around: aren’t there more high value issues, to be conquered first?
performance
airport expansion/upgrades, inkl. big planes (+ new ATC, runway, jetway), enhanced traffic (on streets and taxiways), trains, hotels, etc.
Was the feedback you got really so devastating?
Please just stop the UI glitches for now, do some minor UI stuff (right-click-scroll?) and hold on with the bigger UI changes <3
I understand what you are saying and i partially agree. But they are only asking for suggestions. Depending on that they might decide to do a complete overhaul , minor adjustments or even nothing at all. but a few quick wins and some nice gui ideas (perhaps for the upcoming features) dont have to colllide with adding new features imo
I strongly agree with todi. There are many things which I would like to see first. The game has a learning curve anyway, and the UI is not more complex than other aspects of the game. And btw. it (the UI) is not that bad.
I agree todi, but I thunk a new UI would be very nice. I personnaly think the UI is very important for the look of the game while playing and a good ui leaves a much better impression and it’s more fun to play. And I dont think it would take 1 to 3 month more to develop the game just because of the ui (but im not a developer). You have some good arguments @todi , but I would like to see a new UI in the near futur. There are already some good suggestions and other games mentioned above so I think I don’t have to say all this again.
I’m very excited to see the new contract system and think ACEO is one of the best games in this genre I’ve ever played. You did a very good job!
Im not an UI expert but I would take some inspiration from games like Cities Skylines and Hearts of Iron IV (those games prove that Swedes can make great UIs ) But not make it crowded like Europa Universalis IV that games UI is a giant mess. Cant really say what I want, I quite like the current UI.
It is good point but we are not talking about a complete re-design. Most of the parts will be more or less the same (at least under the hood) but more refined. Some examples of what we want to do are:
Better structure and intuitiveness of management panel.
Clearer notification handling and communication to the player.
Look over building menu to make it more accessible and easier to locate the right object.
Improve the flight planner.
Improve icon description.
Improve overall information to the player.
Improve agents and buildings panels.
Improve general look and feel.
Unfortunately, when we read through the refund statistics, UI, lack of intuitiveness and general confusion due to unfriendly is the main reason for refunds. Of course people get used to it but It would be much worse if we were to wait longer as we would then add new features soon to an already bad solution.
Also it is worth noting that we always do parallel development tracks so we don’t forget about bug fixing and of course performance improvement. For example, even though we will both be involved in improving the UI, It would be difficult to work at it simultaneously. So it is very likely one of us will work on the improved path-finding system and of course try to find the suspected memory leaks. So it is not that we neglect performance optimization, it is just that it is the most time consuming and challenging part to work with, so it takes time and the result is often only very small improvements at a time.
The managment panel has two hierarchical levels: the tabs on the left and additional tabs on the top. I think it would all be easier if there were only one level.
Some things need not be in the managment panel. An intuitive place to manage vehicles would be the depot. CIO and so on could be hired and fired in their respective office desk or office. Or maybe an HR office for hiring and firing?
@Fredrik: thank you very, very much for your kind, honest and open reply! You corrected my perspective and I’m now looking forward to these changes. I’ll try to come up with some suggestions
Refunds for a game that has potential damn people don’t know what they search in alpha version lol …I have not played aceo in two months because I am waiting for performance improvements and other aspects in the game this doesn’t mean i ask for a refund lol sorry Fredrick you have to put up with bunch of noobs who are trying to find full acesss in alpha
Fredrik addressed @todi well so I’m just gonna chime in on how we work with sprints and as Patrick state above, this is correct. We develop the game with parallel sprints and focused a lot on the UI scaling over the holidays. As we now watch the discussions around the UI, that sprint gets to rest a bit as Fredrik continue with contracts and I work on performance improvements. I won’t dare to say too much, but I think I’ve today found the memory leak that for large airports render the game unplayable after a certain amount of time (15 t0 20 minutes) regardless of passenger influx. We’ll have to check it when Alpha 23.3 is deployed on experimental but, yeah, that’s just a small depiction of how we work with parallel sprints.
For the dragging of belts; from OpenTTD, they have a MULTIDRAG button for tracks. The direction of the track is determined on DRAG DIRECTION. That would be awesome for baggage betls.
) But not make it crowded like Europa Universalis IV that games UI is a giant mess. Cant really say what I want, I quite like the current UI.
Of course people get used to it but It would be much worse if we were to wait longer as we would then add new features soon to an already bad solution.