First off, I'm going to say that I really like Starbound, and I really want this game to be better, but right now, my #1 beef against the game is the UI. When you really sit down and think about the UI, it is actually rather bad. It is inefficient, and it has a lot of glaring flaws in it that causes so much frustration and lost time due to having to stumble over stuff that SHOULD be easy to do. So, first off, let's talk about outright bugs: Bug #1: Tooltips Going Off Screen: This should not be happening, At All. When you mouse over an item near the edge of the screen, the tooltip goes flying right off the viewable area and in a lot of times, is simply not readable because of this. This forces the player to manually move the inventory window and the item in question to a slot furthest away from the edge of the screen. This is because the tooltip INSISTS at spawning at the Mouse Cursor location instead of setting a boundary and being flexible. The Mouse Cursor is treated as 0,0 and the game doesn't care that the mouse cursor is only 50 pixels from the bottom of the viewing area, when the window is 500 pixels high. What the game SHOULD do, is check whether or not the bottom of the tooltip can fit on the screen and if not, spawn the window higher. OR, if that takes too many CPU cycles to do.. then simply add an option to always pop the tooltip in the center of the screen, with a 1 second delay (tooltips only spawn a second after you stop moving the mouse cursor). Bug #2: Take All button causes crash: If a player opens any container, clicks the "Take All" and then quickly closes the container, the game will outright crash and send them to the Title Screen with an error about no open containers existing. This is due to bad/non-existent error handling routines, and this kind of stuff should not exist in a fully released game. It was OK during Beta, because lack of error handling on such an easy-to-reproduce error is something that should normally be fixed during Beta. A simple error check routine would handle this: If the game's "Take All" item script is run and there's no open container, then simply take nothing. Have the script check to see if there IS an open container each time it tries to take an item. If open container = false, then simply take nothing and immediately halt the script. OR, make the Take All button disable closing the container UI window until it has finished running. Allowing the game to crash to Title Screen because of this is just plain silly, and it can cost a player a LOT of lost time if this happens during a mission (because the player then needs to re-do the entire mission). This makes the button dangerous enough that I never use it; I always individually take each item. At this point, we should just remove the stupid button unless we fix it. Now, once we're done with Bugs, let's move onto inefficiency: Inefficient Problem #1: Character Sheet: In most RPGs and RPG-like games, you will have an Inventory Screen, and a Character Sheet (aka Equipment Screen). These screens are usually separate, for a good reason: If the player needs to know various stats about their character, they will open their character sheet. If the player wants to equip something, they will open the equipment screen if it is separate. Equipment Screens are usually bundled with Inventory, because if you are viewing equipment, you probably intend to change it or are just checking it for a second. However, Starbound is the ONLY game other than Terraria that I know of, that forces the player to open their character's equipment screen each and every time they view their regular inventory. This is HORRIBLY inefficient and wastes a LOT of screen space. Terraria gets away with it, because their equipment screen is so tiny that you don't even notice. Starbound, however, has a GIANT window that takes up nearly a third of the entire viewing area on lower resolutions. This makes one of the prime functions of the game very unwieldly and awkward: Building. Building in SB would be so much better if I could have my inventory screen open and it NOT gobble up so much space. The easiest way to fix this, is to add a new inventory-lite and/or perhaps change around hotkeys: Make "I" open the Inventory without Character Sheet, and make another hotkey (usually something like "C", or "E") open up the screen that we see today. Inefficient Problem #2: Wasted Space: Can someone tell me why there are giant voids in the UI windows of unused space? This causes UI windows to be much larger than they really need to be. Do this: go into the game, and look at a food item. Notice that below the description of the food, there's at least 4-5 text lines worth of empty space between the bottom of the description and the Food Rot Indicator text. This makes the tooltip for any food item a good 30% larger than it really has to be, and in 99% of the time, any food item in the bottom 2-3 rows of my inventory goes off-screen and I can't tell how much time is left until it rots. Other areas of wasted space are again, the Character Sheet area (we don't need a character portrait in a 2D game, I think I can SEE my character standing right there, lol. I don't need a 2nd character on the equipment screen), and containers (I don't think they need that HUGE area that shows what the container looks like TBH). Fixing these 4 main problems would go such a long way to making the game's UI a lot more friendly.
UPDATE: CF has announced that hotbars can be expanded, and tooltips will no longer go off-screen. Hopefully stuff like the equipment screen etc can be modified too.
