(Poll) Do you like the new hotbar?

Seriously need to forget that flashlight :O
I got:
1: Melee weapon, be it 2h or DW
2: Gun (Varies)
3: Sniper Rifle or Rocket Launcher or Crossbow
4: Bandage and Medical Kit
5: Kunai and Grappling Hook
6: Bombs and Molotov

Light source on backpack or armor.

Second 6 slots on peaceful building.
Quite fine, but got Action Bar switch set to a quick mouse button just in case since playing hardcore

 

And if you want to, for whatever reason, toss bombs while grappled to the ceiling - you can't even quickly rearrange the bar. You have to open the inventory, right-click the kunai on the bar, then find the bombs in the inventory and drag a shortcut for them over. And then do it again to restore the previous setup. Instead of just click-dragging to swap the bombs with the kunai in 5 and 6.

The ineptitude behind the design of the current hotbar goes beyond mere layout problems. Even the current layout could have been bearable if it had the necessary supporting functions.

 

"Could have been bearable?" You consider the current design "unbearable"? O-kay. I think I'm in the wrong topic.

 

It's impractical and unwieldy in several different ways that make me increasingly aggravated as I try to play the game. I choose not to play the game like this, simply because I don't want the frustration of the UI's glaring - to me - flaws, combined with the devs' disposition towards the issue and handling of feedback, to make me actually hate the game as it is. I'd rather take an indefinite leave and try to remember the game as it was back when I still liked it. So yes, the new interface is, to me, unbearable.

 

I will have to admit that sometimes when I'm trying to play SB, I find myself having far more difficulty wrangling with the UI than I'd like.

A game's UI shouldn't need to be wrestled with, but that's what I find myself doing with SB's UI.

A gun comes out of a chest? Oh joy, the stat popup goes off-screen. Now I have to re-arrange my windows and move it to another inventory slot JUST to see if it's any good.
I find a cool new item that I want to test out? Oh joy, I have to get rid of one of my only 6 hotbar buttons to slot it somewhere.
I want to build something next to me? Yaaay, my inventory window is in the way and I have to move it..... AGAIN.... because it is so stinking large it covers a good 30% of the playable area.
So I finished building to the left of me and need to place a door to my right? ..... inventory window. In the way. Again.

I spend more time mucking with the UI than I do actually playing the game at times, and that's a clear sign the UI does not function very well. It has huge glaring flaws, like.....

1). Tooltips going off-screen.
2). Equipment Screen/Character Sheet being tied to Inventory (I don't need to see my armor equipment every time I look at my items)
3). Larger than necessary icon buttons taking up SO MUCH SPACE on the screen.
4). No way to easily place an item in your hands to use it without slotting it on your hotbar (I just got a door, one door, and I want to place this one door...)
5). Inventory windows being unpredictable as to whether they remember where you had them last or not.
6). Half of the time I open a box, the inventory window is ontop of the container UI due to #5.
7). Full-on Crashes if you use the "Take All" button and then close a container too fast (and other examples of horrible error handling)

And that's not even touching the Six-Button Hotbar issue.

Simply put, I really like Starbound, and I enjoy the aesthetic and the potential, and the idea..... but dude... the UI.

It is one of the worst UIs I've seen in a modern game in the last five years.

I am NOT exaggerating on this, I simply cannot think of any other game released in the past 5 years that has a worse UI. I simply can't do it.

 

And yet, STILL the devs do nothing.

 

IKR?

Especially when some of these flaws were noticed and pointed out during Early Koala, you know, what was that again, at least 2-3 years ago?

How hard is it to code a tooltip to not go out of the viewing boundaries? Can't be that hard, most other games manage it.

 

The mod Container UI Tweak is quite nice, if you don't have it yet.

 

I considered that mod, but again, that mod presents even more problems with tool-tips going off-screen. The whole reason I usually have my inventory window near the center, is so that tooltips don't go off the left edge of my screen.

With this mod, it will want to put the ridiculously large inventory window way over near the left of the screen which means I can't see the tooltips on the left half of my inventory, AND, I won't be able to see the tooltips on some of the items in the chest on larger chests, because the tooltips will go off the right edge of the screen.

I'm screwed without the mod, because I have to keep moving junk around constantly, but I'm screwed WITH the mod, because I can't read any of the stinking tooltips because the devs still haven't coded proper screen boundaries like any other game has.

SB's UI is just plain bad. It uses too much space (the tooltips on items do not need to be that large with 5+ lines of empty space between things).

Look at the Food Rot indicator -- there's 4-5 empty lines of space between the description and the Food Rot info and it, 99% of the time, goes off-screen off the bottom of the viewable area.

Some of these problems are exacerbated by the fact I'm forced to play on 1360x768, but one shouldn't need to play at 4k resolutions just to get a UI that doesn't go flying off the screen. I can play Terraria and other games just fine with said resolution. I can play Cities: Skylines on that resolution, and they have so. much. stuff. in their menus, far more stuff than SB has, and their UIs and tooltips never go off-screen.

We use a huge font size, and we have huge open spaces between UI elements. The UI size could probably be cut in half if we'd be a bit more efficient about it.

Maybe someone could make a mod for some of that stuff, but sadly I'm afraid that a lot of this stuff is hard-coded in the game's UI, such as the fact that you get your Status/Equipment Screen every time you open your Item Inventory. Those SHOULD be separate -- you don't need to see your character stats/equipment unless you actually want to, or you're changing equipment which is probably Less than 1% of the time you open your inventory.

 

Since this is kinda-sorta going off-topic, I made a new thread about the UI and its plethora of problems:

http://community.playstarbound.com/threads/starbounds-ui-desperately-needs-love.127516/

 

So what do you all make of they modability of hot bars+inventory?

 

Kinda ironic, what was that about "doing nothing" earlier ?

 

It possibly was because of that remark that they finally got around to fixing it.

 

Not that quickly though. It takes at least a day to code something like that.

 

Number of action bars and action bar size modding was in the pipeline for months now. It's pushed to Unstable now, it was in the Nightly before. It still solves very little - none of the key usability problems are addressable with that. Sure, it's some kind of progress, but it's not progress towards what will actually allow a solution.

About the only thing left to hope for is that scripting layer for the UI, so that a proper custom interface can be made. Like SkyUI for Skyrim. Can't do it right without SKSE.

 

What changes are there to hotbar and inventory, again? They didn't post any blogs about it.... and I haven't been playing US lately.

 

I loath it mostly for the fact since items aren't really held there it stops instruments from playing songs with every interaction.

from sitting,sleeping,warping,using them in cars/boats and even in ball form.

Wheres before you could...used to enjoy playing runescape sea tunes as i hydro-ball floated across oceans......and greatly enjoyed using that telsa bubble ball jump tech that lets you float and using dash to move left and right quickly.


Like why spend so much effect to add in playable .abc's and then make it so hard to enjoy using them.

it has its good points being able to dual wield alot of things...........but thats honestly all i got for it.

before you could endlessly play instruments without interruption unless you physically put it away
and store items in the inventory to hold one more item.

 

Cons:
- no more 1h item mixing on the fly, like keeping your flashlight equipped to use bandages while running through the darkness, or hanging from the ceiling with the grapple (go on, try doing anything the like with the grapple without falling off)
- 2x6 slots instead of 10+2 (LR could hold 2x 2h items which I used a lot) so we need to switch where we didn't before
- less inventory space because stuff stays in there now, even though the fact that we have now 4 bags almost evens it out but well, for me only almost

Pros:
- better dualwielding, something I barely ever did except pistol/grenade launcher + bandages

I'm never gonna understand neither the idea behind this "improvement" nor why they went through without completely ignoring the negative feedback that was already given back then up until now.
Only hope that's left is that one day it'll be moddable but I'm not holding my breath : (

 

The number of buttons is already moddable, it's just we need someone to actually write a mod (I don't know how to do it) for it.

The only mod around that modifies hotbars is Frackin Hotbars, but all that mod does is add more bars, rather than more buttons. It's kinda frustrating.