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New UI preview!


Chris

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I'm sorry you don't like it. The general reception to it has been quite good and I personally greatly prefer it, so I think overall it has been worth implementing. But your mileage may vary based on your own personal tastes, of course.

The layout is good indeed... i am talking about the colors... The entire game should have some form and atmosphere, and i am not sure that bright environment really fits the atmosphere of the game...

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Going back through the forum's archive, I can see as many complaints about the old geoscape as the new one. The lesson we take from this is regardless of what is done people aren't going to be happy, so the developers may as well please themselves.

Are you sure you have read the posts above correctly? It is not geoscape it is being talked about. Geoscape looks just fine... dark, moody and cozy... It is the other screens that look too bright and happy that they pull you right out of the immersive mood this game should have. Screens like base, loadout, research, workshop, etc... White is not the major color there, and it really does not fit the tone of the game.

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I personally don't think the backgrounds detract from the game. The fact it has some colour in it doesn't mean the game can't have a dark tone. But as I said above, it's a question of personal taste and you can't cater for everyone so devs just have to do what we think is best and hope everyone likes it. We don't get our choices right every time, but even if we did there would still be some people who had different tastes to our own.

In any case, it's too late to change the UI designs now it's been finished and implemented (well, unless you want go into the files and darken the background images yourself).

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Incidentally that is really easy to do, took me about 20 minutes earlier plus a few more going through the scripts to see which files needed adjusting.

It makes no real difference to the mood of the game for me but it is a bit easier on my eyes after staring at a monitor doing work all day.

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Incidentally that is really easy to do, took me about 20 minutes earlier plus a few more going through the scripts to see which files needed adjusting.

It makes no real difference to the mood of the game for me but it is a bit easier on my eyes after staring at a monitor doing work all day.

That's what always been my reason for asking for a darker UI.

I have a big display with high max brightness, which 99% of the time is a good thing. But if most of the game is dark enough and the UI is very bright, going into the UI, for any reason, becomes a dreaded blinding flash that not just causes almost painful discomfort, but sometimes makes it impossible to play for a minute or two. I have to reach for display controls, switch it to low brightness, do what I need in the menu, then switch the display back to game mode again.

Xenonauts is probably not a game to dim the lights for, but still, guess I'll have to go around darkening the white areas to make it reasonably playable without reaching for display controls. I know, my problems... still, while the impact is reduced on a dimmer and smaller screen, it has to be there in some form.

Hey, here's an idea: What about a separate "Menu brightness" control (or just an ini setting)? Has to be brightness rather than gamma to affect the white point, and it doesn't address the aesthetic concerns, but shouldn't be too hard to do.

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Hmm, so the issue is with the whiter areas (ie the clipboard and the white parts of the speech bubbles) rather than the background art itself?

Yes, definitely!

The background art looks very nice, but I think the old brown color scheme fit the setting and moody music better. The white aesthetic feels out of place outside the science station, and I get the impression I'm checking my soldier roster on an iPad rather than a notepad...

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Hmm, so the issue is with the whiter areas (ie the clipboard and the white parts of the speech bubbles) rather than the background art itself?

If I may digress for a moment - skip way down if you like.

In a perfect world, "Sunlit window white", "Nuclear flash white" and "Office spreadsheet white" would've been three completely different colors. In a perfect world, everyone would use Lab color space where L is a floating point value from 0 to millions, and displays would then represent it to the best of their ability.

Our world's not perfect and computer graphics have suffered from working in two modes, 1) being what they are, active light sources, and 2) pretending to be sheets of paper. For an active light source, 0 represents perfect darkness and max value (e.g. 255) represents maximum possible brightness. For a sheet of paper, you range between max (255) for no ink and 0 for ink.

In a perfect world absolute scale, these are completely differen. Maximum human tolerable brightness is about 40,000 cd/m^2, professional video editing displays have a brightness of 2,000-8,000 cd/m^2, consumer TVs top out at 500-1,500 cd/m^2 and a blank sheet of paper in an office is 75-125 cd/m^2.

With early CRTs the display wouldn't pull more than 100-150 cd/m^2, which was close enough to paper, and all in all it was easy to conflate the two: 0-255 for display brightness and 255-0 for the amount of ink to put on paper.

It broke with later CRTs that were much brighter, and most of them had at least two modes, one for representing a light source and another for representing a reflective surface, i.e. pretending to be either a window to the real world or a sheet of paper. Same with LCD. Thus the two modes were allowed to persist well past the point where it should've been fixed; instead, we keep switching our displays between text and game/movie/graphics modes. It works to a point, as long as the two are always separated in time and never mix on one screen.

Now back to the point.

Xenonauts breaks this convention. It mixes two display modes, "reality" and "paper", on the same screen. It's not the only game to do so and it's not the worst offender (Last Light holds that cup), but it's enough for people to notice.

These modes can be mixed, but then one has to account for sunlight white and paper white not being the same color. It's especially noticeable with the game having a pretty dark gamma. For instance, here the "paper" whitepoint is clearly much higher than the background whitepoint, even being brighter than the ceiling lamps.

What I see that can be done about it:

* Ensure that all backgrounds have a full brightness range (0-255).

* Pick a "paper" whitepoint that's well darker than the background whitepoint. Perhaps also warmer, or, even better, matching the background.

* Possibly use a light texture and/or minor gradient for the "paper" areas to allow for a little less average luminance for the same whitepoint.

* Possibly add minor darkening gradient around intended-white elements to keep high perceived brightness with less eyestrain.

We evaluate what is white/light/dark based on surrounding colors, so a darker whitepoint can look bright enough as long as the image makes a good impression of it not being particularly well-lit. For instance, the OLED panel on this page looks far brighter than the page background, even though print-screen will show it's the exact same color. In contrast, on this image the UI looks grayish despite being much darker than a sheet of paper would be in the depicted room.

To avoid that, the brightest points of "paper" elements only need to look at most as bright as a sheet of paper. That's much darker than now, but the UI can actually avoid looking gray if it matches the ambient lighting on the background image and particularly if it cuts, by a lot, the brightness of these few small white areas that are now very close to 255. These areas represent the whitepoint and making it much darker can help the rest of the element look brighter.

Edited by HWP
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The next update will involve the UI being darkened by 10%, so perhaps people with sensitive eyes will find it a bit less painful. My work monitor is quite dark, but playing the game on some other screens made me a bit more sympathetic than previously. I don't think there's any more scope for darkening it beyond this, though.

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I'm actually going to close this thread at this point because it is well over a year old and the new UI has been implemented now (subject to final tweaks, perhaps).

If you want to discuss the new UI then it's best to create a new thread about it in the General or Beta boards, as all discussions should be based on what is in the game rather than what I posted up as concepts a year before the screens were implemented.

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