Yes. Almost seems like it's lost focus or something and you need to click something to give it focus.

I get the "menu exit" issue whenever I try to click "Misc". I click a little to the left of it, but within the menu bar itself, it's even highlighting Misc, but when I push the button... poof... back to talking to the sales person. Annoying.

No, the flash can't be replaced by XML. They were talking about the fact that the flash can be decompiled into an XML format, but it's only useful for inspection so far, probably not useful for altering. It's flash or nothing with Skyrim because that's what the game is hardcoded to use.

In theory a code injector (like the SKSE is) could change what the game imports for the menus, but that would count as pulling a "hail Mary" move.

I found it on the mod thread, I guess it was more of a hypothetical. Someone else said "back to XML!" and that derailed my thinking of it.

Ha, thanks! See my worry is that something I knocked up in an hour on photoshop while searching for the right font and occasionally going to get my sick girlfriend a lemsip shouldn't really impress anyone more than the design department of a company who's PC game is outselling Modern Warfare 3! More on-topic though, yeah I think the movement lock would be a bit better, although even just locking it to that constellation would be fine, as my real gripe is I'm trying to level lockpick and suddenly find myself on light armor or something. I think the problem is they were trying something like Mass Effect's galaxy map, but in the wrong context, and it ended up more like the 3D sphere grid thing on FFXIII.

It's good to know UI mods will be possible though, I'd be quite happy to contribute to one if anyone knows their Flash - I'm going to be covering it this year at uni and I have some game scripting and graphic design experience, but for now I wouldn't know where to start. Maybe if there's a way some of us with ideas could send them to the guys working on major UI overhauls they could implement the ones they thought were good.

Also, there's something out here that fixes some of the issues apparently - http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=88

And OMFG.. 360 hotkey enabler. This will be awesome if it works with the tiny keyboard you plug into the 360 controller, even better if there's one that enables the whole thing (we can but hope) - http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=310

There is a lot of good discussion in this thread and a lot of good ideas.

Before adding my two cents (scents, sense ) let me point out that in the Skills constellation it only takes one click of the mouse to get from one constellation to any other—just put your mouse anywhere in the bottom quarter of the screen (except on the names themselves) and click and hold. Voila! A dazzling, spinning display of the constellations. > You can also scroll in and out within a constellation, or click on any individual star within the selected constellation to go immediately to it.
.................... NOTE: It spins so fast you may overshoot, requiring two clicks

Now on to the dreaded inventory lists; All good suggestions here regarding auto sort by individual criteria and/or equipped items. Let me add click and drag for manual sort. This would then be:

1. Equipped items automatically at the top
2. Immediately thereunder any similar items in inventory with higher stats
3. After that a list sorted at he players choice; Name, Type, Weight, Value, manual, etc.

great thread - will I be able to have a good UI by Christmas???

Yes, as written in the classic song "12 Mods Of Skyrim" -

On the 1st day of Christmas Bethesda Gave to me,
A far less stupid skill tree.

I like you. You can stay.




I think there's a fair chance of there being a decent UI mod by Christmas. A good number of people are putting a lot of effort into it, and with Socrates helping out it hopefully won't be too long until someone cracks it.

Technically yes, but that's pushing it. What matters is the amount of time it takes to actually select the skill you want to select, and even though click-and-hold is "just one click" it is still a massive waste of time when there are far more efficient methods available for navigating from place to place using just one click.

Also the star navigation is still not well thought out. Yes, you can easily navigate FORWARDS by clicking on the star you want to jump to, but what about BACKWARDS? Then you need to guess where to click, and that is a horrible, horrible, HORRIBLE oversight. Seriously, I need to guess in order to navigate a menu? That's bad, really really bad.

By the way, has anyone noticed a lot of the mouse issues in menus could possibly be due to the fact the cursor is incredibly long and pointy? I suspect the focus of the cursor is the tip, which in most cases is all but invisible, so people naturally assume the bit they can see is the place where they are clicking. I could be wrong but it's a thought.

Did a mockup of the http://i.imgur.com/0PUmG.jpg - with thumbnails spanning the entire screen.
Left click to equip in one hand, right click to equip in the other. Hover for more info, and press 1-8 while hovering to enable the hotkey for item
Note the button to switch between list and thumbnails and the sorting panel, including sort by category.
A radial menu as someone suggested would be interesting as well, though I think this fits better with the rest of the UI without sacrificing functionality.

I wish Bethesda had used the pause menu UI as a base for other menu screens. It's the only part of the UI I actually like. Clean, reasonably proportioned, and fast. Plus tabs are far more intuitive than this "tweed menu" nonsense (Oblivion's was only bad in this respect because it had tabs within tabs, which is easily avoided here with the sidebar).

Your mockups are nice! I'd also be really interested to see how you would do the base Magic screen - as pointed out in the OP graphic, almost the entire base Magic screen is empty and could really benefit from some 'summary'-style information. There'd certainly be enough room to give a rundown of the player's Active Effects, Powers and Shouts. That would render at least 3 of the sub-menus redundant, and get rid of that extra scrolling and clicking. I can imagine lots of possible ways the Magic menu might be overhauled to cut down on the sub-menu syndrome.

I think it should work exactly like the Inventory, just mirrored. And with magic instead of items. So I won't really bother doing an extra screen for magic.

.
This definitely seems to be on the right track - at least to my eyes. I think I might have underestimated the number of skills with respect to the organisation of these on a cicumference. Maybe the circular display might not be as practical as I thought...?

The Skills screen is the most difficult one to fix, but perhaps it could be left as it is. What if the existing Skills screen was only used when leveling up?

If there was a summary screen elsewhere in the menu that displayed all the skills (an idea many people have floated), then we'd be covered for Skills anyway. That summary could be used for quick reference of what our skills are, and we'd only need to go into the full screen when we either:

1, Need to level up
2, Want to explore the trees
3, Want to mess around and look at the pretty stars

IMO a solution like this would be best, as it addresses our biggest gripe (we have no quick reference to our skills) without throwing away the constellation interface. It gets the best of both worlds.

I'm playing Skyrim on the Xbxox 360 and I must say, the UI is atrocious. Everything pointed out in those diagrams was spot-on, although I would stay away from making any of the text any smaller. The text is barely readable as it is.

200+ posts