Originally posted by Cherppow
For example: after reaching a certain level in the skill of stealth, an indicator could appear on the GUI, explaining how well your character is currently hidden. Similar could happen with tracking skill; a small GUI addon could tell the player if there is a creature nearby, and how it was detected (later on even the direction). Players with low skill would have no use of such indicators, as their characters wouldn\'t be able to use them. Hmm, eg. in Final Fantasy 7, new GUI items are added to the menus/combat menus when the game proceeds, rather than sending a new player straight into the world with all the possibilities and no experience how to use them. This also helps to keep the players interested; one never knows what new possibilities may await.
Hmm... I agree that it is not necessarily a good idea to put up UI elements that don\'t serve a purpose. OTOH, the UI elements serve as landmarks and hints of what will be possible. I might never have thought of scouting without a tracker element on the screen, for example. I like to explore things, thus most of the time, I set things to \"advanced\" mode immediately.
OTOH again, there should be a minimal UI that gets the most common things done quickly without having to spend much time figuring out a forest of UI clutter.
So obviously, it\'s the time for implementing choice again, like in each window at least a \"minimal\" and \"full\" view. Ideally, the elements would be customisable like the toolbars in common word processors. However, PS can do without such nifty things for the near future, but it\'d IMO be good to keep the idea for future reference.
Originally posted by Cherppow
In my opinion, a fully transparent/unnoticable GUI fits in fast paced FPS games, where you need very little info about your/target status, and maximum view area. Surely some of the same properties are also wanted in an RPG GUI, but with different priority, I think.
By \"transparent / unnoticable\" I was not referring to visual functions, but to every aspect of the UI. Any UI needs to try to become as unnoticable and \"natural\" as possible, because the goal is not to work the UI, but to achieve another goal. In this case, acting within a virtual world.
Therefore, the UI must try to make this interaction as easy and powerful as possible. For lack of better words, ideally the UI would be a direct link to the user\'s mind, thereby eliminating the need for keyboard, mouse, screen, speakers, etc.. Obviously, this isn\'t yet possible, but that\'d be the perfect UI, since it\'d enable the user to just do what they want to do without having to formulate their wishes in a way that can be communicated to a computer.
So, it\'d be \"take sword\" instead of \"open inventory window, click sword icon, click hand icon, close inventory\".
The UI would be \"transparent\" and unnoticable, since it\'d be the same UI that our minds use to interact with the RL world (which by itself isn\'t really good, but that\'s another story).
Or take the task of changing songs in your favourite music player while playing PS. Ideally, you\'d just think \"play song XYZ\" and it\'d instantly play it, but in reality you must switch tasks to the player, sift through the playlist, doubleckick and then taskswitch back to PS. Nomatter how nice the UI looks, it still is a layer of abstraction that detracts from the efficient interaction with the underlying process, slowing down and complicating the achievement of the desireg goal.
Thus, all I am saying is that the UI must try to mimic the process it gives access to as closely as possible, not abstract from it.
That said, it wasn\'t really bashing your GUI, since it\'s not easily possile to substantially alter the way the game UI works.
Originally posted by Cherppow
Info window: (...) the actual window would still have remained rectangular, and it would have confused the player when moving and selecting different windows.
Exactly. That\'s what bugs me each time when I try to interact with an object that\'s in the upper screen behind the invisible main toolbar. Basically, the main toolbar would have to shrink to the size of the little arrow instead of remaining the size it was with the icons in it.
