Some interface thoughts from a new player.

[keith.lamothe]

FWIW, the gravity well thing really wasn't all that relevant for most of the game's history: the transport-unload-rule and the move-speed-rule weren't added until considerably after release.  Not all the UI implications of a change are evident until somebody jumps up and down on them.

Which you have now successfully done

[Eternaly_Lost]

I think more companies should take the Valve (was it Valve?) approach to intuitive UI design.
Take a person with little experience with computers (and most certainly no experience with the product you are developing), sit them down, start the program, and watch them for an hour or so. The devs are not allowed to talk to the tester until the time period is up.
Preferably, you would want to have more than one person per cycle, to mitigate that "intuitive to person A but not person B" effect.

You could possibly get a few other audiences as well, like those who are familiar with computers but not the genre of game, and those who are familiar with the genre of game but not this game exactly, and see how the responses differ as you get closer to the target audience.

Of course, this does rely on having some good "sufficiently uninformed" testers around, which is not always easy, or cheap.

From what I understand, that was more MS that did that for interfaces. Valve did that for game play. They watched where people died a lot and where they got lost and fixed those part up. That why their levels and games tend to flow nicely, they did not think that their limited QA team was enough. They got a lot of people in to test it before they even considered it ready to ship.

I do know that a lot people were upset when Microsoft changed to the Ribbon interface in Office, but as someone that had not used Office a lot before, and started to really use it afterwards, I found the Ribbon interface to be very nice. And just about everyone I had heard complaining about it had been using Office a lot before the Ribbon, and I think most of it ended up more as they changed it so it bad now.

[Wanderer]

I do know that a lot people were upset when Microsoft changed to the Ribbon interface in Office, but as someone that had not used Office a lot before, and started to really use it afterwards, I found the Ribbon interface to be very nice. And just about everyone I had heard complaining about it had been using Office a lot before the Ribbon, and I think most of it ended up more as they changed it so it bad now.

My biggest whine about the ribbon is the change in functionality.  Unless you know the old keyboard shortcuts by heart, you can't easily find them where you used to, and now have to dig around the ribbon until you locate wherever they decided to move it.

[TechSY730]

My biggest whine was the lack of customability, and a new categorization system to learn.

But they solved the customization issue in Office 2010, and I'm learning the new categories, so yea, there are no more valid complaints I have about it.

[clone]

My biggest whine about the ribbon is the change in functionality.  Unless you know the old keyboard shortcuts by heart, you can't easily find them where you used to, and now have to dig around the ribbon until you locate wherever they decided to move it.

This is why I'm not a fan of the ribbon as well.  It makes exploring what options you have a tedious exercise of hovering your mouse cursor over every single icon, waiting for tool-tips, and clicking on a bunch of tabs to toggle between separate tool bars.  It puts *more* clicks and time between the user and what they want to accomplish, and makes it harder to learn through exploration.  To me it was a pretty big step back - UI change for the sake of UI change, something that Microsoft has become fond of doing because it's hard to sell a product when it looks exactly the same as the previous version.

Anyway.  I've made my voice known or something.  Thank you all for hearing me out.  I know it's hard to digest criticism directed at something you love (especially if it's your own creation).  I don't think I can add much more.

Well actually that one is about to be fixed.

Quote from: 5.008 Release Notes'
On planet view, the game now draws two circles representing the key zones of the planet's "gravity well".

Thank you for bringing this up, it probably would of kept being an issue if you hadn't of mentioned it.

They also fixed the wave warning thing

Quote from: 5.008 Release Notes'

Now for wave alerts that list the actual ship type being sent at you: moving your mouse cursor over a wave alert will bring up that ship's data, similar to mousing-over a ship of that type.

In fact, you are credited in both of these changes.

EDIT: BTW, if you are curious, you can see the changes so far for any upcoming version at http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_Current_Post-5.000_Beta

I'm actually kind of speechless.  That was fast.  And I didn't know about that changelog, so thanks for that.

My friends did finally start playing the game and we're having an absolute blast running through a campaign.  It's the most fun I've had gaming probably in years.

I'll stop bitching and let this slide off the front page, and wait until some UI discussion starts when Keith has the time to explore these things again.  Until then let's relax.  Thanks for being receptive.