Absolutely. The text size is one of the core problems. Its simply too large for a PC player.. then it gets worse because the UI is built around this oversized text.

Yes. When you're talking about a population that numbers in the tens or hundreds of millions, several thousand, or even several tens or hundreds of thousands, do not amount to 'lots' of them. 'A few' would be a much more appropriate wording. 'Lots' and 'a few' are both dependent on the size of the group you're comparing them against since they're so subjective.

This "resolution" sidebar has been going on for long enough, I think. We're really just kind of skirting the boundary of being totally off-topic with all of this. And if we're to the point of just arguing semantics (which just brings this whole thing further off-topic,) I think it's best to just drop it. :wave:

I'd recommend we try and stick to the topic of discussing the User Interface itself, and not get bogged down in something that's - at best - only peripherally related to the topic at-hand in the first place. :goodjob:

Dont know about PC, but on the consoles you can hot-key 8 or so items.... which is exactly what you want, In combat situations i never used the pipboy. If they didnt do that for PC it would be stupid (did they?)

Wow. Seriously, what is the point you're trying to make by harping on this? Now we're arguing the definition of "lots." I don't know how many different ways I can clarify what I meant...apparently you're not interested in reading anything that you can't disagree with...? We've moved on and are back on-topic. Please, join us. :foodndrink:

The reasons that PC users would be better off with a different UI aren't really relevant so long as we can agree that a difference is warranted, right?

I personally would like to see better organization of inventory, specifically. I spent way too much time looking through lists of items over and over when I should have been able to do what I wanted to in one pass. It would also be nice to see more status info consolidated into fewer screens. I always felt like I had to do a lot of jumping around between screens. As someone else mentioned, it would also be nice if the various "pages" were bound to hotkeys so we could at least navigate quickly without needing to click on stuff.

I have to say that most UI's need work for me, even on the console versions.

I am prepared to mod my UI so it is smaller and less obtrusive to the gaming experience. I just wish I did not have to.

I wish game developers would offer two or three versions of the UI for folks to choose from. Since they are usually XML based, it is really easy to create a new one (for those who know XML)

I would save your money then, as the DarN UI is one of the BEST mods made for the franchise IMHO.

And in the case of DarN, you may not like how successful he was as a modder, but that's no exscuse for bashing his work like that when You Yourself also mod. What would you do if you had been successful at multi-player and became a hugely popular modder with hundreds of thousands of downloads (like DarN)? Would you take the code down and denounce yourself because no one else could do multi-player code as well as you could? I somehow doubt it. You would become the very thing your proclaiming to hate here.

I don't think its right to trounce on someone's huge success as a modder, especially when we spend much of our time in the modding world IMHO! And I will have DarN's UI installed the day it comes out, and won't stop using it until I move on to the next game. I suspect there are a few others out there like me as well.

Miax

I think Morrowind had Bethesda's best UI to date, personally. All you had to do was press was one key and you had all of your vital information displayed on one screen. The local/world map, your entire character sheet, your magic spells, and your inventory. It was also customizable, you could resize all of the different windows at will. It may not have been as pretty as the Oblivion/Fallout 3 UIs, or as 'immersive' as the Fallout 3 UI, but it was efficient and practical. My only gripe with the Morrowind UI was the journal system.

If Bethesda could make a PC friendly GUI for Morrowind, I don't see why they couldn't have done the same for Oblivion and Fallout 3.



Ditto, DarN's UI is one of the few must have mods for Fallout 3, and I wager this will also be the case for New Vegas.

Pip-boy 3000 is garbage for a PC inventory. Something like STALKER or Morrowind has would be better.

I guess I'm used to "console sized" UI's, after Oblivion, Mass Effect 1/2, FO3, Borderlands, etc, so it doesn't seem all that "clunky". But I do enjoy using resized-UI mods like DaRN.





Interesting. ~16% using 1920x_____ res, and 3.4% using "other" (which seems to include all single-monitor setups above 1920 wide.)

Personally, I ran 1680x1050, but wish I could have gone lower - my card is on the weak end, and a lower res might have allowed me to push some of the distance sliders up a bit more. Alas, FO3's lower 16:10 resolutions were bugged, and instead showed something like a 4:3 res, squished into a wrong aspect ratio, and letterboxed. It was very strange. Hmm, wonder if that ever got fixed in one of the later patches....

I can agree that a difference in the UI is warranted. With all the discussion on the table. Certainly yes.

While the menu is open, the menu could just be bound the the arror keys. Less mouse moving and clicking.

Personally I love the PipBoy 3000. It's simple to use, highly immersive, and it just plain fits. I do wish more stuff fit onto it by default but eh, what'reyagonna do?



That TV isn't getting 1080P though. The source is only 720P. The xBox 360 and PS3 lack the GPU power to game at true HD and simply run at 720P and then an upscaler chip to spoof it. Looks like ass compared to true 1080P gameplay.



I agree on this. I had no trouble with the PipBoy regardless of input method. I played with the mouse most of the time, being that Fallout 3 is an FPS at heart, but even when I tinkered with my 360 pad I still found the pipboy easy to navigate.






Won't take long. A week, at most.

Gunmaster95 approves of this message.

But...but...what does the importance of graphics have to do with the UI?

The UI has been designed to work on all platforms, the problem with this is if you have the best platform for visual quality i.e. the PC it appears rather oversized and not as smooth as it could have been. However I think given the way some games "port" their PC versions so badly I think Bethesda has done a fine job of making the PC version work plus one of the benefits of being on the PC is if you don't like something chances are someone else doesn't either and so they make a mod to change it and thus you can just install it and play the way you do like.

The problem is it's not a particularly hard change, just as a token effort. The PC UI was improved no end by merely shrinking the text size to something where you could get more than one sentence on the screen.
All I want from my UI is to not get in the way. That's difficult on a controller, you need some way to navigate between different elements, and you can't really do that and still keep it smooth, so simply putting mouse support into a console-designed UI is nowhere near as good as a decent PC UI could be. But then, that's why we get DarnUI (And hopefully others, with NV - competition is always good!)

what he said.

Shame what he said was hardly relevant to this thread.

No. Stop this, now. UI design and "Graphics" have nothing to do with each other, and ignoring discussion on the former because you're lumping it in with the latter is simply ignorant.

Okay, I'm a bit worried about dragging this out too long, here - but I also agree. (Though.. let's try to avoid calling people "ignorant...") :shakehead: There's a difference between "graphics," and the User Interface. I'm sure we could all think of games that might not have had the best graphics or art-direction, overall - but still managed to display the relevant information in a concise and easy-to-access manner. Take the original Wolfenstein 3D, for example. It's absolutely outdated now, but the UI display for that game pretty much set in stone a large part of what you expect to see in a first-person game ever since.

One thing I always thought was a rather elegant design solution was the little picture of your guy down at the bottom center of the screen. Sure, you had Armor and Health read-outs, but your avatar's face actually conveyed quite a bit of useful data at a glance. You had a graphical representation of your overall health level (if he started looking really beat-up, you knew you were in trouble,) and he looked in the direction you were taking fire from.

Now, you're probably not going to see something like that in a contemporary first-person game. My point is only that how "good" that head looked would be better suited for a discussion of the graphics. What (and how) that element conveyed information is a completely separate conversion - that would pertain to a discussion of the User Interface. Absolutely, I feel that gameplay trumps graphics. But the interface through which you access that gameplay is intrinsically tied to that element - and has little to do with "graphics."

the PS3 puts out in 1080 and is not scaled up, are you even aware of what blue ray is capable of? Now in terms of scaling the quality up it really depends on the game, some are in actual 1080 and others are made in 720.

I'm not taking part in your argument in any way, but the PS3's graphics have nothing to do with Blu-Ray. Blu-Ray is just a storage medium. It holds a lot, so it can store high-quality video data, which is why the movies look so nice. The video format for movies has nothing to do with graphics in a video game, though, that has more to do with the video rendering hardware.

The storage capabilities of a medium have absolutely no bearing on what the processor and graphics chip can do. The few games on PS3 that do run in 1080p do so when very little is happening, and seamlessly shift back to 720p when more starts to happen. I do not believe, however, that any "modern looking" 3D game outputs entirely in 1080p.

The only additional "tab" I want in fallout is some way to find out WHAT is weighing me down so damn much. I sell my weapons/armor at a shop, and I'm still 131/190 weight. I'm sure its scrap metal and food, and..... something? But I have to wade through 6 tabs of misc and aid and apparel, to ultimately find out "OHHH I was carrying 7 toasters". I just imagine a person in real life exhausted from carrying a brick, and going "MAN whats weighing me down? OHHH its this brick."

In Fallout its SOO convenient to auto-loot and then deal with it when you're over encumbered, but then you DONT have a way to find out whats really encumbering you. Sometimes its a small part (or an AMMO in hardcoe mode) with a weight of 0.01 but you have 4000 of them and its not even obvious its the culprit.