Wow, nice to see a Bethesda employee chiming on on this subject.

The only question I have for you is: Does Bethesda have any intention on modifying the UI yourselves or is this left to the community to better tailor the UI to PC?

So....we can mod the UI toaday and game content in the pretty near future......

I'm not satisfied, if Beth really cared about their fans; Pete Hines would be dressed in a maid’s uniform serving us all drinks.

Can I have my life back now please?

I bet this has been asked about million times:
Is anybody working on Morrowind style grid-based inventory or is it even possible?

I hate list based inventories because list is one dimensional and going through it takes much more time than finding the same item from 2D inventory.

You can create your own intrinsic class to solve the numControllers error. Just save the next code as "capabilities.as" and put it in a folder named "System". Put the "System" folder in the clik folder or in your project root folder.

If the favorite list could be transformed in some kind of quick key like in Morrowind, this would be quicker and would not disrupt gameplay.

I'd like to see a radial menu pop up on screen with a small image of the item or spell inside a color coded circle (blue for magic, red for weapons, etc) when you press the Favorites key, then you can click quickly with the mouse instead of taking your hand off the mouse and pressing the number pad keys.

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=310


Personally, I imagine taking once hand off the 360 controller to reach for the keyboard would be pretty cumbersome. That said, I have my mouse on top of a stack of speakers and my keyboard on my knees

I appreciate a DEV coming on here. But he really needs to read this article. This says it all. A patch is in order.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/EricSchwarz/20111114/8890/User_Interface_anolysis_Skyrim.php

PC is where Bethesda made their name first. There is no excuse for a UI like this...

The second one. It's been made pretty clear that it's finalized and they don't consider it to be an issue. The main reason socrates is even posting here is to give a few tips and pointers to the people that are working on a player-made UI.

Hi all, I was bored today at work and decided to sketch out a design for a PC Specific version of the UI.

I started a thread here: http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1274237-skyrim-ui-pc-specific-redesign/page__gopid__19284241#entry19284241

Here's the quick sketch I put together. http://i.imgur.com/GKuzW.jpg

Some thoughts around it:

• Not trying to fix everything at once
  
• Add sorting options
  
• Able to quickly click through and get to where you want
  
• Stick to the design philosophy that Bethesda has started
  
• Add some texture

As much as I *LOVE* to complain (see the hardware and software issues forum):

Can we keep *this* thread about the mod and modding? The main threads on the UI from the other forum have been linked to here, if new issues come up we can link to them, but I'd rather not get *THIS* thread derailed or locked out because the post count gets out of control.

(That being said, everyone is talking about layout, I've asked on the H&S UI thread: are the modders seeing control-response issues in-game? i.e. mouse clicks or keypresses not having the expected effect or an inconsistent effect? This is one of my biggest problems.)

Yeah I should add, if anyone is serious about working on a UI Mod. I might be interested, my time is rather limited right now with a full-timer and freelance, not to mention holidays, but given a realistic timeline I might be able to turn around some UI work.

This is the place to be for people that are serious about doing work on a UI mod. DarN is taking a detailed look at it right now. He and several others have made some very interesting (and technically detailed - read: over my head!) posts in this thread already. Take a look see.

@socrates200x

First of all, thanks a lot for chiming in on this subject, this sheds some light on many suppositions floating on the web. I do have a couple of complementary questions… (of course )

1. Concerning the vm, did you use the default Scaleform’s one? If so, can you tell us the version of the gfx you guys used? Or did you roll out your own implementation of an embedded flashplayer based on Scaleform’s?

2. Is it possible with this vm to output some debug info? Or better yet, debug it at runtime? (It would be great to see what kind of data is going through and how it is structured… Now, we can only guess).

3. How deeply nested in your game engine is this vm? Is it almost "plug and play"? What I’m getting at is: since the newest flashplayer is retrocompatible with ancient versions and since you use the native externalinterface, would it be possible to use a more recent version of the flashplayer to take advantage of the 3d api and the faster avm2 programming language? I mean, the data would still go through the externalinterface api…

4. I kind of hold back on my modding intentions because I hope there will be something “gui related” in the creation kit… I know it has already been stated that you won’t be releasing the source files, but can we expect anything at all concerning the gui?

Thanks a lot for your involvement in this.

Sorry.. totally unrelated to UI - but didn't want to start a whole new thread..

I am using the startup method where I created app.bat to run Skyrim with 'high priority' .. which runs TESV.exe instead of the launcher. I didn't realize until reading the above post that this was keeping me from Achievements and using Steam Community while playing.

Could I just get some clarification here?

If I open notepad, type "72850", file > save as, steam_appid.txt -- and save that to my Skyrim directory, can I then launch with app.bat and be "connected" to steam?


Thanks!

Nicely done...crisp and intuitive.

That looks great! I'd love the interface to look like that... fits the UI aesthetic (which I otherwise like) perfectly while adapting it for the PC.

This is exactly how the Bethesda interface should have looked.

A UI like that would be perfect. This is what we need for PC.

Some other suggestions for improvement:
Smaller Fonts
Bigger lists

This is an excellent layout and very familiar to anyone who has played previous gamesas titles. It worked well in those games and hopefully whatever team is formed to make a new UI will do something similar.

One thing I was wondering is if 'sampling' alchemy ingredients can be given it's own distinct hotkey? All too often I've eaten an ingredient instead of putting it into a container.

Can I add to your suggestion list?
Paperdoll
'Apparel' is highlighted at the top - don't need to say it twice
Scroll Bar
Maybe character level next to the name?
This might be a matter of preference, but paperclip's health/magicka/stamina bars seem to drain right to left instead of both ways
Also, his toggle view of item/character looks like a good system

I'm sure that development of the UI called for an interface that would be accessible and unobtrusive. As the UI does do that (though not to many PC users' satisfaction), we should not expect Bethesda to change it just for the PC users. Thankfully, Socrates200X is here to offer information for the modding community and the modders specifically to assist in this effort.

That being said, there are aspects of the UI that are simply broken (i.e. not working), specifically having to do with reassigning keys from the defaults and button help graphics not changing. PC users have every reason to expect that these issues will be fixed, but for a UI overhaul, this is up to the mod community.

It's great to have a dev on board with the discussion. One thing that I haven't seen any details on is multiple menu edits. Once we all figure out how to edit the menus to our liking, how do we have multiple mods for the same menu? I'm specifically looking to add elements to certain menus, but I guess it would apply to changes/rearranging of elements as well. I really don't want to have to make versions for each possible combination of menu mods for compatibility...

Really nice piece of work.

For me there are three issues: favourites, buffs and hotkeys.

I actually think the favourites idea is quite strong. It means you can choose what you want on hand as your loadout and playstyle changes. And left/right clicking on them is fine too, once you've swapped the left and right mouse buttons.

But the big alphabetical list you have to scroll through is terrible, even with a scroll wheel.

So ditch the scrolling list. Use some of that acreage of screen real estate. Press Q, and the screen fills up with your favourites. The list is arranged as you choose - alphabetical, by spell school, by gear type, by damage. Left click, right click, done.

Next, buffs are too distant for how important they are - maybe have them show up when you press Q so they're not cluttering up the standard screen? The clean aesthetic of the standard screen is quite important, so maintaining that would be nice.

The final issue is hotkeys - we need to be able to hotkey combinations and then be able to see what those combos are. So we keep the current functionality but add a new tier of combo hotkeys and steal the RTS style control groups - during play, you press shift and a number key and you memorise that combination of left and right hand for later retrieval. And when you press Q for favourites the combos are displayed (which is trickier but would improve playability a lot).

Hell, maybe you could even have an option to auto-populate - best shield and best one hand weapon, best two hander, double healing, magicka/healing potions, that kind of thing, though that's getting tricksier, I presume.

Great to see the attention this is getting - it's a sublime game and the UI issues all seem pretty fixable.

Has anyone managed to recompile inventorymenu? I've managed to remove all errors flash spits at me but it still crashes the game. -.- I haven't tried recompiling many, but thus far inventorylists is the only one I've managed to get working. Nothing like a nice hot pink inventory to spice up the game. But seriously, it seems like recompiling the existing files is the greatest hurdle at the moment. Looking back through the thread I can't find mention of anyone really having nailed it only getting success with a couple of odd files. Even in those files I'd be concerned for bugs since I'm assuming we've all been using the same process for the working files as we have for the non-working files. I wouldn't mind hearing an update from one of the more tech savy folks as to where they are to help us less versed in that stuff to catch up.

I love seeing the community (and even the devs) all come together to work out a problem. Keep it up.

I've updated the OP with information that seemed important from this thread. Can those of you that are getting stuff done, or posted info that you think might be good for others to know, check the OP and see if I missed anything (or if anything needs further clarification). I'm trying to keep the OP as a kind of reference so people don't have to look through old threads to find the nuggets of good information.

If someone wants to write a mini-howto for the OP (like using the UDK version of Scaleform in some tool), that would be great too.