Chris

Although looking at them, you should be able to mod in a lot of those changes yourself if you want to! Which is good because I don't think they're sufficiently different from the original concepts for it to be worth us considering the changes.

Mercy - the problem there is there's not a consistent background colour running through the UI screens, which I think we want. Some of them do indeed look nice but they only work on their particular screen.

Gauddlike - anything painted or with a rounded edge (ie. all of the speech bubbles and the clipboards) is done with images rather than in-game colouring. So an alternate UI isn't really possible, no.

Wozzi - it's just a concept, you don't need a plasma rifle to get a laser gun. We were just adding extra items to that field to see how the layout handled long text strings.

The iconset on the Geoscape is the final one, btw. The other ones are just earlier iterations.

The /assets/scripts/ folders contains all the code for the various UI screens. You want the styles file, I think, plus whatever the specific screen you want to change.

Yes, the soldier is missing an arm. As the backgrounds will hopefully change as you research new things, so too will the characters. So you can probably see why having him missing an arm is an advantage!

Thothkins, doesn't Super Injuction play for Wales?

Hmm. No idea why that might happen (it basically needs to run in windowed mode), are you selecting a smaller size than your monitor is currently displaying?

Yes, I'm looking at adding the soldier role icon on their portrait for the dropship screen. Without the final images for the soldier roles it's not really possible to try though. Re: the lightness, I've added a warning to the Base screen pic. As someone else pointed out above, that's the first concept I put in the post and it has no painted background or art on it yet (it's just a layout) so obviously the contrast is going to throw people. The screens with the painted backgrounds are a much better judge of the palette. Also, why does everyone seem to want to play this game at night in the dark? I wasn't aware the X-Com fanbase was comprised entirely of vampires. It's really bad for your eyes too. Bear in mind you'll spend more time on the ground combat screen than you will on the strategic menus as well. EDIT: Also, yes, animation is something we're looking at if possible but it's not exactly a priority.

Avatar for children?

They're the third best in the world don't you know!

Also FTL was on Kickstarter too

Simon's a nice bloke too. He's very much a fixture at (the bar of) pretty much any event in the British indie scene. I chucked in a tenner just to lessen the risk of seeing him cry!

Mercy, I know what transparency looks like. The game is set in 1979 though, so we don't want a super sci-fi UI. Plus, having a more colourful UI won't help you present lots of information in a coherent way. Now, I'm dismissing most of these suggestions simply because I've spent literally weeks playing about with different iterations of this UI over the past year so I have a pretty good idea of what works and what does not. I'm not willing to waste my time experimenting any further because at this point I'm convinced that the currency concepts are the best option. However, if you want to demonstrate your own alternative suggestions, feel free to do so. The zip file with all the Photoshop files for the UI is here and you can use that to produce an alternative concept (which has a lot more chance of convincing me than theorycraft): http://www.xenonauts.com/devfiles/FinalUI.rar

HWP - how on earth would you end up balancing screen luminosity across the game when some of the maps are covered in bright white snow and others have dark green grass? Obviously it's going to vary depending on the scenario. Anyway, I'm not going to discuss the background element colour any more as it'd mean changing every other colour that goes on top of it as well (plus it's nowhere near pure white either). I don't think "the white is too bright" was as a major issue when we unveiled the original immersive UI screens using exactly the same colours, I think most of the reason it's being discussed here is because people are reading the comments on the first page about it and getting hypersensitive to something they might well otherwise not have noticed.

There's no flying units in the game, some units have jetpacks but they can't end their movement in mid-air. Grenades / explosions should hit units in the tiles above and do reduced damage though (that does need to be tested). Yes, there is the functionality for gas and stun grenades in the game. The smoke grenade is a type of gas grenade. Whether actual stun grenades and poison / stun gas grenades make it into the final game, I'm not sure at this stage. If not, it's easy enough to mod it back in.

Ah, I see - you may have to do that then. Or perhaps invest in a pair of sunglasses?

Mordobb - we're obviously not going to redo all of our soldier art and a hundred portraits because you personally don't like the style. You've clearly also been watching different zombie movies to me.

People told me the new forums were too white and in-your-face after we migrated from our old dark skinned ones, but those complaints stopped abruptly after the first day or so and I think everyone is happier now. I'm pretty sure you'll get used to the new UI very quickly. That's my attempt to assuage your concerns, as a dark skin is a lot of work because of the way the engine works (any UI changes are a lot of work) so we won't be doing an alternate skin I'm afraid. Why are light colours a problem at night?

Not to rain on the fiery parade too much, but the biggest issue with the flamethrower is actually that of animation. The guy who does the explosion / fire / whatever animations has stopped freelancing, which puts us in a bit of a fix. Still, we'll see what happens.

Here's a preview of how the new UI will look. This is more to keep everyone in the loop as to what we're up to rather than to solicit much feedback at this stage. The UI has gone through enough concept iterations now that we know pretty much what works; in fact in this iteration we've stayed much closer to the present design than previous designs have. The main changes are: 1) A consistent topbar across all the screens. This improves on the current design which only has 4 tabs on the Geoscape, and vastly improves on the previous "immersive" concept which would have awkwardly used a sign on the wall for navigation. It means that the navigation buttons and the date / money information is all in a consistent place on every screen, which is key from a usability point of view. 2) We've implemented a tabbed "speech bubble" menu type on most of the screens. This has two advantages - it keeps the UI clean as we don't have to have all the information on screen at once (the player can just click to the desired tab) and also it adds more character to the game. There's now a chief on most of the screens, which involves you in the organisation a bit more. 3) It looks a lot nicer. Our painted background are nicer than our previous ones and you can see more of them than before, and the light background works better than the dark one we currently use. It's just much more coherent than before. Some of the art is placeholder. The topbar name is the same on each page because there was no need to update it, plus the background art repeats on the right-hand side. I can't be bothered to go into details on aspect ratios, but if you have a 16:9 monitor you'll have the ideal experience from the game. If you have at 16:10 then the actual playable area will remain the same, but there'll be a band of background on the left and right of the screen that will be hidden. So, here's the UI: Laboratory Screen: http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/3_Research_1610.jpg http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/3_Research_1610_2.jpg Workshop: http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/4_Workshop_1610.jpg http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/4_Workshop_1610_2.jpg Barracks: http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/5_Barracks_1610.jpg http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/5_Barracks_1610_2.jpg Stores: http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/6_Stores_1610.jpg http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/6_Stores_1610_2.jpg Soldier Equip: http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/7_SoldierEquip_1610.jpg Vehicle Equip: http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/8_VehicleEquip_1610.jpg Aircraft Equip: http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/9_AircraftEquip_1610.jpg http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/9_AircraftEquip_1610_2.jpg Base Screen: http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/2_Base_1610.jpg (this does not yet have a painted background, it's just a layout!) There's also the Geoscape and Xenopedia screens, which are not yet complete. The Geoscape is being concepted up at the moment. Here's the current concept for the Geoscape screen: http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/Geoscape_normal.jpg http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/Geoscape_zoomed.jpg EDIT - if you want to come up with your own alternative concepts (as I'm not tweaking these concepts any more) then you can download the Photoshop files for the UI screens here and have a go: http://www.xenonauts.com/devfiles/finalUI.rar

They raised some $700,000 on Kickstarter not so long ago, they were one of the first big success stories after Doublefine. Surprised you weren't already aware of them!

The "small font problem" is just that those particular bits of text haven't been coded with scaling fonts, so they don't get bigger as the monitor resolution expands. All text will be scaling in the new UI..

Although I guess it'll be an interesting estimation of piracy when we sell 20,000 copies at release and have 100,000 unique users playing the game