Patch 27 - Port interface and usability feedback

[admin]

Moderated discussion - all off topic will be removed.

 

Captains

Please provide feedback on the port interface and its usability. 

 

old testbed feedback can be found here

 

[fremen]

In ship store, the ships had the original prize, not adjusted at new 1/25 ratio. So much people had 1M of reales and some ships cost are 9 Millions!!

BTW i try to withdrawn a ship from sale and cannot do it...or i dont know how to do it.

[Jim Beamreach]

If i press ESC to leave the Game there shoud be a Option to get back to the Server selectionscreen. I jumped first on the PvE-Server by exident. So i had to leave the Game complett.

[Destraex]

This is my first look at the new port interface (with the in game 3D ship as the backdrop).

I love the fact that you can drag windows around. That is a really handy feature. However it would be good if the ports buildings did not look so oversized  and out of place compared to the ship from an immersion standpoint. The buildings are ok at a distance in the open world but very strange when you are zoomed right next to it. The wooden jetty is the same. Huge and not in scale with the ship. A wharf would be better. Would love to see some actual human elements to the port as well. Like men running around visualising your ship. Maintaining the paint and fixing the ship in general. You know. Something to indicate that you are not actually at sea anymore. But docked in a port.

In general though I really love the concept for the port UI. The art work is top notch and really immersive on the card based interface parts. Lovely. A really great job in that respect!!

The picture below is an example of a wharf and slips. 

 

Also smaller ships like frigates would be docked along the peer rather than at the end. Larger ships would commonly not come close at all unless they were refitting. They would send boats:

 

 

 

[Sir Texas Sir]

One thing all ready bugging me is the icons only have pictures. I have to click on half a dozen things to find the one wood type I"m looking for or the one mod. IS there any way to put a little text on each icon so we don't have to mouse over every one to find the one we want?  Maybe antther option is to have it where you can change the items from icon or text name.

[Aster]

Doubloons in the money chest should be able to be used. Its annoying having to take them out of the money chest into the warehouse to then spend them.

[Sir Texas Sir]

yep found that out when I tried ot open my shipyard on my crafting char, which can't make a level 3 shipyard cause I havne't gotten my redeemables for my buildings yet.

[RedPanther]

Still no Wind indicator in-port.

[Corona Lisa]

Chat window is a bit annoying, as it blocks a pretty big part the new port icons. It will always get automatically to that size shown in screenshot, even with only 2 chats open (trade and nation in my case). Thats in fullscreen 1920 x 1080:

 

Thx for adding a search option in the buy/sell contracts window.

[DeRuyter]

4 hours ago, Sir Texas Sir said:

One thing all ready bugging me is the icons only have pictures. I have to click on half a dozen things to find the one wood type I"m looking for or the one mod. IS there any way to put a little text on each icon so we don't have to mouse over every one to find the one we want?  Maybe antther option is to have it where you can change the items from icon or text name.

This could be a case of familiarity. Didn't take long crafting on the test server to learn the icons.  

[admin]

4 hours ago, Sir Texas Sir said:

One thing all ready bugging me is the icons only have pictures. I have to click on half a dozen things to find the one wood type I"m looking for or the one mod. IS there any way to put a little text on each icon so we don't have to mouse over every one to find the one we want?  Maybe antther option is to have it where you can change the items from icon or text name.

After we converted to grid we must improve the icons - it will get done in the future. 

[admin]

1 minute ago, Banished Privateer said:

3rd Rate, Bellona, Santisima are old models with fake guns.

all lineships have fake guns on lower decks to reduce draw calls - without them fps will dissapear. 

[admin]

2 hours ago, Banished Privateer said:

1. My warehouse refreshes every time I move 1 item from 1 block to another. I consider this broken, compared to old UI. This entire refresh blinks my warehouse and locks me out from doing anything for 1-2 seconds. 

 

Will be fixed

[jodgi]

If we could turn off smoke most competitive players would run without smoke, wouldn't you say?

[Angus MacDuff]

5 minutes ago, Banished Privateer said:

I think it's smoke that is the biggest FPS eater, why we can't turn off smoke? I get the realism, but we probably could have much better performance? Make it a personal choice.

No smoke = half the rewards....

[Guest]

Gib closed gunports, anchors down and the ships thats in the dockyard are shown anchored a few houndred meters out. On the old UI when you swapped the ship it changed position with the one in harbor so i guess its possible to do the same but with graphics aswell.  

[Hawkwood]

Need to adjust, but within a week it should be fine.

Missing an old feature, where you could click on the port from distance to check what was the name of that port....

Same old feature missing, where you were able to see which county/region you currently are(in case you get lost in open sea)

Isn`t it possible to see all resources in the port when you click on particular items? like resources/cannons/refits(whatever), instead of scrolling up and down?

Thanks.

[Custard]

17 minutes ago, Angus MacDuff said:

No smoke = half the rewards....

No Smoke =  no rewards

[AeRoTR]

I did not have any dubloons other than standart 2000. I had like 8 buildings including shipyard, workshop etc. , I should have some compensation right ?

 

[Tom Farseer]

5 hours ago, Sir Texas Sir said:

One thing all ready bugging me is the icons only have pictures. I have to click on half a dozen things to find the one wood type I"m looking for or the one mod. IS there any way to put a little text on each icon so we don't have to mouse over every one to find the one we want?  Maybe antther option is to have it where you can change the items from icon or text name. 

Until this get's better just use the search bar right below the grid. The first two letters of the resource will often times be enough to instantly filter out the stuff you need.

[Tom Farseer]

relax buddy. wasn't even talking to you
no need to get all defensive

Edited October 31, 2018 by Tom Farseer

[vazco]

I didn't test on testbed, now I find a few serious issues with interface:

• moving stuff eg from hold to warehouse reloads warehouse every time. That's very long with a large warehouse and extremely annoying
• you should think through flows that players have in game. Right now they require way too many clicks and are hard to pull off

 

 

Please find below an example of how one of the most common flows in-game should be optimized:

• crafting a ship, equipping it with guns, reps and upgrades and sailing out eg for a 1st rate requires right now:
  
   
  • required operations - total 68 clicks, 9 searches (3 very hard), 5 hard calculations, 5 inputs, 6 drag-and-drops
    • 5 clicks and 1 search (blueprint) - to craft ship
    • 25 clicks, 5 searches (blueprints) and 5 calculations of ship's gun poundage and numbers of guns, 5x filling in gun numbers -  to craft all required guns
    • 18 clicks - to equip guns
    • 10 clicks and ~1-5 scrolls to equip ship knowledges
    • 6 clicks and with refits in warehouse 3 searches and drag-and-drops - to equip skill books
    • 3 extremely hard searches, 11 clicks and 3 drag-and-drops - to split and equip repairs
    • 1 click - to sail out (this one is done neatly)
  • required windows - 6
  • required knowledge that:
    • you need shipyard to craft (there's no hint and red highlight at shipyard number is hard to spot)
    • blueprint means crafting (build ship would be easier to understand)
    • you need external source to give you information what different wood types change in ship characteristics
    • you need window of buildings to craft, ship to equip guns and upgrades and hold to equip repairs (there's no hint about this during this process)
    • you need to use right click to split goods
    • you need to know how many repairs to take for every ship and every wood combination to complete X repair cycles
      
       
  • should be and could be lowered to 27 clicks, 4 searches, no calculations, no inputs, no drag-and-drops, no knowledge:
    • ergonomy improvements:
      • go to crafting, click craft ship, choose from existing ships (if no blueprint, show option to get blueprint) - 5 clicks and 1 search
      • add option to craft guns directly from gun selection window, linking crafting guns with equipping. Make window close on selection - 12 clicks to craft and equip guns
      • allow to select last setup of ship knowledges for a given type of ship - 2 clicks to select ship knowledges in best scenario
      • allow to equip refits from warehouse AND chest - 6 clicks, 3 searches to equip refits
      • allow to choose what number of in-battle repairs to load on ship, remember last setup - 1 click to equip repairs in best scenario
      • 1 click to sail out
    • Quality improvements:
      • make searching for blueprints easier by making blueprint window fill in more space and show more ships at once, and by separating crafting ships from crafting other stuff
      • show ship statistics before it's crafted, based on selection of woods
      • lead user to next step by providing relevant buttons and opening relevant windows - eg move to a given ship after it's crafted

That's just one user flow and only some very rough suggestions of improvements. There are multiple others often used which could be optimized. This one is probably most important to optimize, as it's often used and I'm certain new players will have huge issues with it.

@admin

Edited November 1, 2018 by vazco

[vazco]

Btw, in terms of graphical look and translation support, you did a very big step forward. Some changes like removing materials are also brilliant. There are good sides to patch. There are however bad sides as well. The most serious one is complexity of some basic flows.

[Sir Texas Sir]

I’m pretty sure they didn’t put text so it didn’t have to be localization for those parts.

[Ruby Rose]

this new ui doesnt work for the players the could barely play the game in the first place its too graphic heavy, making likely players with low end pc's unable to play the game, i'd personally perfer a simple UI we dont need high def for a port ui something simple thats streamline and not graphics heavy