Some interface thoughts from a new player.

[eRe4s3r]

Actually this brings up good points, i always liked the minimap and was dumbfunded why the removal happened, the large zoom we already play in makes it bothersome to quickly see where stuff is... and even if we had no screenspace it could still be there, just optional. As for the gravity well, it should obviously not be displayed in the actual graphics but rather drawn as a faint /grey/bluerish 2d-circle, i am sure unity can do 2d line and spline functions

And the one thing really missing imo is the build template function. Yes, maybe 5% used it, but for those 5% this meant the difference of playing a game to the end because you can quickly select/scrap and select/build defenses in a creep-forward manner...

And believe me, but pre unity the interface was not this confusing. We lost a lot of very nice stream-lined GUI functionality in the switch.

[Wanderer]

This Mantis Bug-tracker is fairly confusing to navigate.

I think you need to be involved in tech somehow to ever get used to a ticket system.

At a glance I believe these issues of core usability are far more important than some things listed as Major Issues.
"Exogalactic Spire Fleet still not winning on its own in a timely manner."
This is possibly a major issue, but I've invested 20 hours into this game and I still have no idea what a spire fleet is. 

If you turn on the Fallen Spire campaign and play it to the end, this will make more sense.  Short version: If you play it all the way through (which is time consuming and has massive waves) the Spire goes to all out war with the AI.  The spire fleet is not supposed to be able to lose, or even go to a standstill.  Your fleet is nothing compared to the war going on through the galaxy though so you can't really even 'help', so it can set a game from 'win' to 'stalemate' if it doesn't go through.

[Eternaly_Lost]

This Mantis Bug-tracker is fairly confusing to navigate.

At a glance I believe these issues of core usability are far more important than some things listed as Major Issues.

Bug Trackers are rather hard to use, they are very much something you have to learn with time and practice. When I had marked the Spire Fleet issue, I did so in the traditional method that more or less goes like this:

Blocker: Crashes, Data loss, things of that nature.
Major: Features that don't work as intended and are important to the program in question and no work around is possible.
Minor: Features that don't work and/or could be improved, but are not vital to the program and/or work around exist right now.
Trival: Polish and things like that. Things that can be delayed until you happen to have the time to get to them.

I marked the Spire Fleet one as major, as it was designed that once you completed the Fallen Spire campaign to the end, there was only 2 outcomes. 1) you lose in the next few minutes or so. 2) You win. There is no middle ground as I had found still was the case, and based on the results you would lose several hours after you finished the campaign. At best it was stalemated. A major feature (a way to win the game) not working as intended (You can't win with it in some cases), and no work around existed. (Fire power that the AI gets is larger then the player can build with the help of the Spire Fleet.) Well it might be possible to win if you help early enough and in the right points, if you failed to do so quickly enough, the game does become impossible to win. (No reasonable work around exists)

Well I do agree that User Interface is a rather major thing, the way I been taught to mark bugs in other software puts most User Interface stuff as minor. Making a User Interface better, very much falls into the minor listing, as it already works, so it would being improved. And you often don't fix the display of information to the end user over fixing the fact that your program fails to do one of it major features correctly. It would be like finding that MS Word was failing to save a text file, and MS pushed out a patch that changed the color of the close button knowing full well that MS Word was failing to save a text file for whatever reason.

[clone]

Fair enough.  That does sound pretty major.  I plead ignorance about both Spire Fleets and Bug Tracker tagging standards.

[Hearteater]

Dont' worry about tagging.  It really isn't used much.  Here are the basics:

1) Especially as a new player, if you can't figure something out, try posting on the forums before reporting it as a bug unless it clearly is.  We're really helpful, promise .
2) Before you report something, go to View Issues and type some keywords for the issue in the search box and click apply.  Try and see if anyone has reported it before.
3) Make sure you set the correct version number!  This is critical information.
4) Select the best fitting category.  There are a ton of options for suggestions, but for bugs there are only 6 with 2 game play pseudo-bugs.
5) Be as descriptive as possible and (especially for new players) try to keep "selling" to a minimum.  If it is a bug, it doesn't need selling.
6) Screen shots and save game attachments are massively helpful.  Attach them whenever possible.
7) Set the severity accordingly as suggested by Eternaly_Lost:

Blocker: Crashes, Data loss, things of that nature.
Major: Features that don't work as intended and are important to the program in question and no work around is possible.
Minor: Features that don't work and/or could be improved, but are not vital to the program and/or work around exist right now.
Trival: Polish and things like that. Things that can be delayed until you happen to have the time to get to them.

And don't forget to spend some time playing the game too!

[Spikey00]

The minimap still exists in AI War, although I really haven't used it ever and only recently remembered about it.  Press and hold T. 

[TechSY730]

(Everything I'm about to say is just my best understanding. I am not a dev, but I do remember many of the goals the devs have talked about)

Just to ease some of your concerns, there is plans to revisit the UI. The UI library that they were using was, as you have noticed, clunky and buggy. Sadly, they started on AVWW before they had a chance to work on that.
Thankfully, they found/worked on a much better UI library that is actually pretty good, which they are now using for AVWW. Once AI war becomes the focus again, they said they hope to port it to the new UI library, which will give them many more options to improve the UI.

The game used to have a mini-map (EDIT: a conventional mini-map, not the pop-up one when T is pressed), but as Keith pointed out, it was left out during the port for performance reasons. However, with a better UI library, they might be able to bring it back again, or bring it in again and leave it optional, so computers that cannot handle it don't have to.

The "alt or other keys being held down when switching windows" is sadly a Unity bug. Actually its a combination of two bugs, when the program is set to continue running when it loses focus. (Needed, so, for example, a pop-up doesn't cause a network disconnect in multiplayer)
1. There is no way to tell whether the game currently has focus
2. The engine does not properly update "key held down states" when the game loses or gains focus
Unity is the engine that AI war (Tidalis and AVWW too) runs on. They can't fix it themselves, because Unity is closed source. And yes, they have brought these bugs to Unity's devs/support team multiple times, and nothing has come from it.
And no, they probably are not going to make their own engine. They tried that once, and it had even more limitations then Unity did, and they found that the work needed to maintain an engine AND a game was generally not worth this level of control. EDIT: Possibly they could switch to another engine, but that still gives a large number of headaches for questionable gains. (Maybe the new engine is even less stable than Unity is)

And no, having it ignore modifier keys (shift, ctrl, alt) when they are held for a long amount of time is not really an option, as there are legitimate reasons for leaving modifier keys (and keys in general) for long amounts of time.

[keith.lamothe]

To address one of the original points: just tested it, and if you have advanced warp detection on a planet with a wave warning, the wormhole draws red both zoomed all the way in and zoomed all the way out.  I recall color blindness being mentioned at some point in the thread; is that the issue?

[TechSY730]

To address one of the original points: just tested it, and if you have advanced warp detection on a planet with a wave warning, the wormhole draws red both zoomed all the way in and zoomed all the way out.  I recall color blindness being mentioned at some point in the thread; is that the issue?

I don't think so. I think what he was saying is that even with this info, it is not easy to see which wormhole it is coming in from without either a "non-standard for this genre" pop-up map, or by zooming out.

Though the color-blind thing still needs to be addressed. The close zoom icon of wormholes turn yellow-ish properly, but the far zoom wormhole icons still change to red. (I believe the shift was made for people with red-green color-blindness)

EDIT: Oops, I missed that the OP had color-blindness. Sorry about that

[clone]

I'm relieved to hear that there are plans to revisit the interface.  I'm not an impatient person, and I intend to keep playing the game as I love so many of the ideas they're exploring.  However, some of the issues I'm talking about can't be saddled on technical limitations. 

I understand the overhead of an always-on mini-map in a game of this scale, redrawing the battlefield twice is no joke.  But other issues seem to be attributable to a lack of common sense in regard to UI design.  Making it a pain to see which wormhole a wave is coming from, not having the slightest clue that there's an invisible void around planets that renders units useless, not being able to compare all the MK2 tech with the MK1 stuff I currently have (there's plenty of room in the tech tree to list tech I start with so I can evaluate the upgrades).

Like I've said, I believe the mini-map to be largely redundant anyway aside from two pieces of important information that are hidden in it, and hidden for no discernible reason.

There are a lot of things I really like about the UI too.  Technically speaking it's great.  It's smooth, snappy, I love the range displays, the path displays - that stuff blows me away.  They've thought about it enough to color-code items in the text descriptions - that's nice.  It's all the "common sense" UI oversights that make me grind my teeth.

As for my color-blindness, it's very very minor, and it causes no issues in any other games.  Subtle changes in hue shouldn't be used to indicate something major like the AI coming to kick my ass anyway.

[keith.lamothe]

As for my color-blindness, it's very very minor, and it causes no issues in any other games.  Subtle changes in hue shouldn't be used to indicate something major like the AI coming to kick my ass anyway.

Just to clarify: so if the "wormhole the wave is coming through" were drawn yellow or orange instead of red, it would work for you?  This is assuming advanced-warp-detection is on the planet, of course.

[TechSY730]

I'm relieved to hear that there are plans to revisit the interface.  I'm not an impatient person, and I intend to keep playing the game as I love so many of the ideas they're exploring.  However, some of the issues I'm talking about can't be saddled on technical limitations. 

Agreed. Although many of the UI improvements had to wait for a better UI toolkit, some of the interface choices should not of been made in the first place. Some of them were introduced in the first Unity engine version (3.700), some of them even older than that.

But believe it or not, the period where the UI was forced to undergo major changes (to port to Unity), there were MUCH bigger issues then interface and UI design awkwardness. This remained the case until 5.001, where, IMO, most of the massive issues were finally dealt with.
It was a pretty turbulent time for all involved. (Just to give you an idea of how crazy this was, the last version on the previous engine was 3.189, the first public version on the new engine was 3.700. And as I mentioned, IMHO, the game finally got to a pretty nice state again at around 5.001). And then not much longer after that, work on AVWW had to start going in full swing, severely slowing AI war development. But hey, things are starting to settle down again, so these kinds of issues can be worked on in not too much longer.

[TechSY730]

As for my color-blindness, it's very very minor, and it causes no issues in any other games.  Subtle changes in hue shouldn't be used to indicate something major like the AI coming to kick my ass anyway.

Just to clarify: so if the "wormhole the wave is coming through" were drawn yellow or orange instead of red, it would work for you?  This is assuming advanced-warp-detection is on the planet, of course.

It already yellow-orange for the close zoom icon of the wormhole. The far zoom icon of the wormhole somehow missed that change.

[clone]

Yeah, I can't see any difference at all between the wormholes until I zoom right up close to each one individually.  A real pain.

I'd rather a wormhole glow, blink, shake, rumble, get a little halo around it, or some other iconography like that - unless the colors are very obviously different.  Relying on subtle color differences to differentiate things is, in my opinion, always a mistake when it comes to a UI.  Unless, of course, the differences themselves are subtle.  A wormhole that has a huge fleet coming through it vs a wormhole with nothing coming through it is not a subtle difference.

[clone]

I also play with wormhole names always displaying on top, but before that I still had trouble distinguishing between the "hot" wormholes and the "cold" ones.  In addition to whatever change you make with the color, perhaps eventually doing something with the wormhole label would help as well.