The most confusing and cumbersome UI’s I’ve ever seen, all of them were movable.
This would be your fault as a bad UI organizer I think, lmao.
But really, it’s seriously NOT a problem having a moveable UI. Locking various parts of the UI, like the location of the inventory/shop/skill screens, I have no problem with that, I Just like to be able to move my health bar/map/skill bar around if I need to. I can live with the TQ setup, I can live with the D2 setup, all I’m saying is that to be able to move around the UI would be hugely advantageous to everyone, because as myrmidon pointed out, every player has different preferences.
Having the bar on top is usually bothersome because it’s out of focus of the battle, which becomes a huge hinderance to have to look back and forth while you’re fighting a difficult battle. But in the other perspective, having it in the middle of the screen (where I prefer it) can become bothersome because its occupying visual space which you COULD be viewing items or monsters.
Being able to move key aspects of the UI would clear up the above issue. Your argument is purely based on opinion, and like I said above. Shops, quests, etc, those are not directly part of the UI which I’m talking about. It’s a separate UI, not one you must constantly look at.
As Evil Medierra mentioned, there won’t be much change to the functionality of the UI except to the layout. So no, we aren’t planning to have user-movable UI. The existing UI tech we’re building from is just sort of a mess, so it isn’t something we can easily change without investing a lot of time. Right now, we just don’t have the time for a massive UI overhaul.
However, we have made a bunch of smaller improvements, such as larger inventories, DPS on weapons, trimmed down the HUD a bit, shifted the toolbar around to make skills more centrally located, etc.
I want my UI organized for me by a professional designer, who invests so much thought and polishing into it, that I don’t even ever have to ask myself where I would like to have my health bars.
all the way to the left: nothing can be changed about the hud
mid: you can move the complete hud
all the way to the right: everything about the hud can be moved freely. It can be clustered all over the screen.
Heh, I remember like 6 months ago I thought the game art looked a bit … shoddy… And medierra, I think it was, told me (oddly enough) that wasn’t going to change much.
And today the difference is like night and day. What the hell were you smoking anyway? Looks fantastic now. Basically everything I disliked then, now looks the way it should :). Needs more AA though :p.
Not sure to be honest, I think partially you just look at something for so long, you stop noticing the problems until someone points them out. So, partially it was that, partially is was that I wasn’t sure at the time that we’d be able to pull off as much as we have.
Anyway, I thank you for your past critiques, some of the things you said actually resulted in us sitting down, looking more closely at the game, and making changes that helped us reach the point we’re at today.
I remember some of the past issues that were pointed out, I didn’t think we’d be able to fix. However, I’m an obsessive compulsive perfectionist, so after reading various feedback I was like “NOOOO… MUST DO SOMETHING!”… So after a lot of tinkering around, we figured out ways to overcome some of the initial limitations we were working under.
They are indeed skills but they’ve changed a bit since then. Part of my new goal is to make skills more flexible when possible so that masteries can potentially be played in totally different ways and aren’t necessarily forced to use a particular weapon. In TQ, I had a certain weapon configuration in mind for each mastery when I designed it but I’m trying to get away from that somewhat, at least for some masteries. I thought it was really cool in D2 that you could build a melee socrceress with enchanted weapon, mana shield, etc. It wasn’t the most effective build, of course, but it was cool that it was viable.
So the old Ammo Mod skill tree used to be a ranged-only series of skills for guns, is set up now so that it can work for both ranged and melee weapons. The new skills in this tree are:
High Impact (+% Weapon Dmg)
Fire Strike (+Fire Dmg)
Explosive Strike (Adds radius dmg and increases physical and fire damage).
I’ve done similar things with other skill trees, such as the Soldier “Shield Hammer” skill that sends out a wave of force to stun and damage enemies. It is now Forcewave and can be used with either shields or 2h guns (in which case it plays a buttstroke animation… huh, huhuh, I said butt).
The result, is that if you decide to make a demolition / soldier class character, you have a lot more options in terms of which skills you can use with what weapon configuration. You could go all melee, all ranged, or switch on and off.
awesome, going to be interesting to see what class setups everyone will use once the game has been out for a bit, by the sounds of it, should be some interesting setups / class combos etc
Interesting that this thread just got necromanced seeing as there are three hawt new screenies up in the media section. If I’m not mistaken, these may be the first “underground” images we’ve been shown.
So, it seems I misinterpreted you here and buttstroking was no demolition skill …
… or maybe I did not, but you decided, that two such similar skills cannot exist and merged them into Forcewave. That’s cool because:
you can enjoy different animations depending on your equipment
if you picked demolition and soldier you don’t have a redundant skill
buttstroking is a soldier’s technique as mentioned by you in [thread=1015]the original thread[/thread]
whoever picks demolition needs to weigh, if he wants to be able to buttstroke enemies with his gun, or if he has other priorities - despite the larger number of skills in each mastery, it seems that desirable skills which complement your build are in other masteries only
… and I thought I was paranoid, when I added “… information is subject to change” in the titles for Soldier and Demolition :eek:
Yes, as things evolved with the demolition mastery, eventually I felt that the buttstroke skill didn’t really fit into my plan. However, we had the animation and once I started thinking about how to make more skills multi-weapon useable, adding it to Forecewave seemed like a perfect fit.
