Inside Star Citizen: Maps and Apps
Inside Star Citizen: Maps and Apps
TL;DW:
- Complete overhaul of mobiGlas, moved to "Building Blocks" & "Cards" system
- New home panel displays:
- Tracked missions
- Notifications
- Reputation & crime stat
- Status of connected ship (ammo, fuel)
- Environment data (gravity, atmo, pressure, temperature, radiation)
- Health data (overall %, temperature, heart rate, suit fuel & oxygen)
- Some app updates won't make it to 3.23 (chat, vehicle customization)
- Health app displays everything home screen does as well as:
- Conditions effects (injury status)
- Active drugs
- Hunger & thirst
- Blood drug level
- Contract manager changes:
- Toggle between legal/illegal missions instead of separate tabs
- "Mark all as read" button
- Star map changes:
- Now responsible for everything (space and locations)
- Local map has a clickable list of available points of interest (shops, transit, hospitals etc)
- GPS routing
- Custom markers
- Mission markers
- Will be able to navigate between zones (ex. needing to travel via trams) but there are some issues that require fixing first
- Space part contains all the info available until now, plus
- Clicking on a space location (like space station) displays info about available POIs (stores, landing options etc)
- Improved feedback when routing between space locations
- Search bar
- Marker list
- HUD shows level of injuries to each body part
CIG asked for feedback on HUD readability, drop by on Spectrum if you have something to add.
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New mobiGlas looks good though they're still sticking with the transculent holo style that can be hard to read on light backgrounds (there are multiple parts in this very video with this problem). Oh well...
Hopefully they'll continue to iterate. I'm just so glad we'll have a functional starmap to be honest.
So do I, it's just kind of stupid considering this has been a problem for years and they'd rather reinvent the wheel (like in case of ship HUDs) instead of provide us with a simple solutions like:
- increasing opacity (or an option to do it yourself)
- adding a black outline to the text
Either of those things would fix majority of the issues with readability on any background. And let's not forget about the fantastic idea of using a ghosting effect which makes the UI less readable for people with some sight problems.
I understand the difficulties of game (or any other) dev and I really appreciate all the improvements they're working on but it really feels like they are completely unaware of decades of progress on accessibility within the games industry.
OK, that's not entirely true. They did acknowledge the need for such accessibility options in regards to the dynamic crosshair if I recall correctly so I hope they'll transfer this awareness to other aspects of the UI as well. Maybe now, as they're porting the rest of the UI to the new system and are slowly moving towards polishing it for SC42 this will be something that'll finally see some attention.
Sorry for the rant, CIG's aversion towards simple solutions can be really frustrating at times.
I think the reason they chose to do it this way (and I think this is the reason for most seemingly time wasting decisions) is because the current mobiglass was made with an old, easy to use but slow and difficult to expand, system they just used to get to a "playable" alpha and now they are updating to the new systems they always wanted to use.
I do think they should make the text more readable though, the only reasons I try to avoid microtech is because of the unreadable ui against the backdrop of a snowy planet or moon (in ships and on the mobiglass).
I understand the reason but the omission of something as basic as text outline is really hard to excuse (unless their argument for it is "artistic vision"). I checked the Scaleform documentation and, unless I found an incorrect document, adding such effect is extremely easy.
But OK, let's say they didn't want to do it in the old system. Well, they had a perfect occasion to fix it with this re implementation! It should be even easier since I'm pretty sure, the building blocks system uses HTML + CSS combo (this was mentioned a few years ago but I don't think we heard about that changing).
Good news is they acknowledged the issue on Spectrum and are asking for further feedback. There's a chance we'll get some improvements before 3.23 release.