UI Feature Feedback Request

[Freeborne]

I would like to be able to remove the BIG RED LETTERS telling me that I don't have enough focus/ammo/energy, no target, etc, out of range, ability is not ready yet on my screen.

 

The ability *not* going off is more than enough to tell me it didn't work. And those red letters ruin the cinematic experience. : )

[Zombull]

It's very difficult to precisely position UI elements with just the mouse. It would be great if the customization dialog had "nudge" buttons that would move things one pixel at a time. Also, display the X,Y coordinates on the UI customization dialog. That will help us align things.

 

Another thing that would be helpful would be quick bars that can sort of stick together, automatically aligning to one another. The background and border art could ideally then seamlessly extend around both bars so there's no ugly overlapping.

 

All individual unit frames should have the same customization options. Player, Companion, Target, Target of Target, and Focus should all be born from the same template that we can then scale, rotate and otherwise customize those elements with the same options.

 

Do away, imo, with the mini quickbar on the companion frame and instead allow us to put companion abilities into our own quick bars. This would give us even more control over the UI.

 

The chat UI still needs major work.

• We need to be able to lock the chat UI so we do not accidentally move it or rearrange tabs when we mean to click them.
  
• We need to be able to suppress the chat UI's background so that we can position it closer to the edge of the screen.
  
• If the chat UI background isn't suppressed, it should still not appear just on mouse-over. That's annoying.
  
• Chat lines should fade individually and should only reappear if I choose to scroll the chat window. This allows the chat window to appear clean when there hasn't been any chatter for some time. Therefore when a new chat message appears, it's much more apparent and harder to miss. It also helps keep the screen clear of unnecessary clutter.
  

 

The experience bar UI needs an option to automatically hide the XP bar if the character is max level.

 

BUG: The companion frame likes to move itself back to the corner when I'm grouped. I have to go into UI customization and reload the UI layout to fix it.

[GorZie]

Ui? Mhhh...!

 

 

There's lots to be done. Jusy my 2 cents for PVP UI's

 

A VISIBLE timer for PVP static fields or whatever they are called.(aka LOCKOUTS)

 

This is one of the most annoying things ever!!! Not to know how long its gonna take before i can rejoin my team. (it also has to be asked why you dont use those for balancing matches if a team is 2 goals behind or has less players just reduce the time)

 

A unified objective interface!

 

4 warzones 4 differents ways and FORMATS to show the objectives / goals / map.

Voidstar is totaly confusing as well, very bad communication skills!

 

Portrait and Health/Source options and proper Target Markers?

 

At this stage I have to choose between small health/source bars and buff/debuffs and I can NOT read the percentage of live anymore or an GIGANTIC portrait of my character.

I have the hardest time to see target markers in pvp unless the player is 500 meters away. in close range I have to tab thru the players and look at their portraits to find a marked one. This is just a result of turning on player name plates, but without them I could not identify who's in my team and who isn't.

that leads me to:

 

 

Same FACTION PVP (W T F)?

 

I don't mind it, but WHO EVER came up with the idea of placing GIGANTIC FACTION LOGO's for AOE on the floor, never thought of SAME FACTION PVP i suppose. Wait am I hit by that or is this of my own team? o.O it just defeats their purpose just remove them. NO ONE GIVES a **** anyways if you are surrounded by more then 3 players you have to expect AOE .

 

 

GENERAL :

 

* MORE ACTION BARS

* SEPERATE PORTRAIT AND H/S BARS

* SEPERATE PVP QUEUE ICON FROM MAP

* SERVER TIME & LOCAL TIME OPTION

* PVP LOCKOUT TIMER

 

EDITOR:

 

* ABILITY TO GROUP SEVERAL ELEMENTS OR A PARENT FUNCTION

* CENTRE GUIDLINES

* A HOLD SHIFT FUNCTION TO MOVE X/Y AXIS ONLY

* OPTION TO TURN ON/OFF PVE/PVP/SPACE HUD ELEMENTS WHILE ARRANGING

( at this stage you can turn off the pvp (secondary) stuff only)

 

 

END OF RANT

Edited May 3, 2012 by GorZie

[veyl]

Currently the UI feature has been a tremendous positive note for the SWTOR dev team (even if it should've came with the release of the game...as the beta community stated time and time again.) Here are some tweaks and why I think they should be included.

 

Snapping: Most gamers are OCD when it comes to their UI's being "perfect". Having to eye something up and guestimate if it's 100% even with the box/frame/bar next to it makes our heads twitch. Everything has to be symmetrical or smoke comes out of the ears. (Okay, I'm sure that varies between gamers, however, bar snapping would be appreciated.

 

Buff // Debuff Overhaul: I'm just going to put all of the issues here in one spot.

: Have the ability to show ONLY your debuffs on a boss with the duration ticking down. Ever raid with 4 watchmen sents all who have their burns on something? or Sorc/sages dots?

: Have the ability to show ONLY your HoT's // Bubbles on targets in an operation frame. (The buffs/debuffs on an operation frame seriously needs an overhaul in general as you can't tell what is what.)

: Have the ability to show on an operation frame DEBUFFS that YOUR class can cleanse/purge/cure and the duration of those debuffs on the player.

: New ICONS for buffs/debuffs. Why do so many abilities share the same icon in the first place? This is absolutely -lazy- and should never have made it to live.

 

Pets in operation format: Not everyone uses the party frame if they do 4 mans... I'm willing to bet that most stick with the Operation format because when they raid, they don't have to change anything. Not being able to see your pet because of this, sucks.

 

Different colors // styles for framing. One of the cool things that players developed in other games was the ability to stylize your UI to something more "You".

[Thaladar_SWTOR]

1. Ability to truly "lock" the quickbars. All too often, I somehow click the unlock button in combat and start dragging my skill around or off the quick bar completely. This can be a double lock (lock on left and right of quickbar - both have to be unlocked) or double-click the lock icon to unlock or simply an option in the Preferences.

2. Option to have a visual/audio indicator when a skill procs

 

These are UI Customization, but are similar in that they are part of the UI:

3. Option to display the Mission Rewards when accepting/viewing the mission. It would be nice to know (without checking Torhead.com) what the actual rewards are for the mission prior to doing it.

4. Display character information (level, location, etc.) in the Friends Tab of the Social Panel, even for friends that are Offline instead of just their nam. Similar to how the info for offline Guild Members is shown if you select View offline members.

Edited May 3, 2012 by Thaladar_SWTOR

[gentlepie]

A feature to allow lining up of elements would be great. Also, the Warzone elements don't stay, they move for me, maybe because I stack them on top of the mission tracker. In addition, It would be nice if the mission tracker would stay off rather than having it pop up whenever you zone in/out of an area. I like to keep it off and turn it on briefly if I need to but I don't like to constantly turn it off when entering a Warzone.

 

Thanks.

[NoFishing]

Going to mostly reiterate ideas already in this thread, as a way of voting, in priority order:

 

1. Buffs/debuffs need to become much easier to recognize, both on the character/target portraits and in the operations frames. Take the 21s-long weaken mind icon, it is impossible to determine which one is mine if there is another sage, and nearly impossible to determine if it will expire in 1s or 4s (meaning I have time for another direct attack before refreshing). Best option may be to incorporate DoT/debuff info into the enemy nameplate, and limit that to only the player-applied DoTs/debuffs. And I don't really need a permanent icon on my portrait to tell me I have sprint turned on!

 

2. Health text/percentage on focus target please!

 

3. Give us some method of aligning elements when moving them in the interface editor.

[DevlinDarrk]

What would be great is the ability to move a bar with the arrow keys in order to move them a frame at a time, also the addition of an optional grid overlay.

[Patrycja]

More personal customization. I mean the possibility to change texture or colour at least. Percentage plus grid would be also nice.

[Ensquire]

Not a fan how my companion bar moves to the corner every-time i go into a group, its should stay put

[Ignobull]

let me move the debuffs and buffs. Let me resize the crew skill window. Let me change the order of my crew in the crew skill window. Let me lock the character selection screen so my characters are not always in a new place. Let me delete Thraran Cedrix from the game. Let me hire a new voice actor for the male jedi consular.

[EzoEo]

The ability to save UI based on spec so I don't have to drag icons from the ability list when I need to respec.

 

Others things have already been mentioned.

[JasonNH]

Save and load the XML files to/from a location that does not get deleted when the game is uninstalled (hence losing all of your profiles if you don't manually back them up). Using the tmp directory feels like a hack, they should be in the MyDocuments folder somewhere.

 

Like others said, snapping, and allowing individual scaling of all windows so that you don't have to rely on global scale.

[ustupidcow]

Some feature akin to Power Auras mod from WoW would be cool to have. Also, ability to turn off/supress the red error text right in the middle of the screen when something is on CD or resources for the ability are unavailable. Edited May 3, 2012 by ustupidcow

[Antissa]

I would like to be able to:

 

...increase the height and width of the healthbars and powerbars,

 

...remove the portraits

 

...choose to have certain parts of the UI to fade out and to come back with full opacity if I mouse-over them.

 

...track my debuffs on targets.

 

...track procs from abilities on myself

 

...adjust the size of buff and debuff icons (especially within the raid frames).

 

...to do a ready check

 

...to have companions as part of the party and raid frames. (maybe with another healthbar color).

 

...to see introduced class colors and ability to have healthbars in raids to show as class color.

 

...adjust the castbars

[OVZeshin]

Please, saving and loading keybindings and/or quickslot icons!

[Corac]

Add UI elements to monitor Threat/DPS/HPS

[I-ku-u]

First and foremost, I'd like to point out that many issues I have with the UI can be attributed to failing to understand the difference between making it possible to do something, and making it easy and intuitive.

 

1) When rearranging the UI, if I have a group of elements in a specific, desirable pattern, but then find that I want to move the group as a whole for some reason, I have to move each part in isolation and try to recreate the original pattern. This is unnecessarily tedious. Some way to select a group of elements (an area drag *won't* cut it given the arbitrary nature of overlaps) for movement would be ideal.

 

2) 1.2 introduced seemingly continuous camera distance settings, which is great for better control in getting to a specific, desirable distance, but horrible for staying there (given that the game changes the camera distance in some cases) and/or returning to it. Please add a setting for 1 or more user defined camera positions that can be reached by a keybinding.

 

3) The crafting UI is barely sufficient. If I want to send crew on missions, it's usually because I'm in need of particular components. So needing to reopen the window to click through most of the choices to get back to where I can select another mission like the last one is *very* common. And if I'm trying to get materials for a specific recipe, I have to remember the grade and type while I change to the mission window and, regardless of how good my memory is, I have sometimes sent crew on the wrong missions. It would be *wonderful* if I could click on a material listed for a recipe and have the mission window appear (assuming I know the appropriate skill) highlighting just those missions that might return the material desired.

 

4) Some way to save and load keybindings between characters.

 

5) When previewing a gear item or companion customization, the window that appears shows the new appearance in low resolution in a small window. This doesn't allow for seeing what the gear looks like with and without color matching, and for companions it means that differences in the face (even non-subtle changes like tattoos) are nearly invisible. As a result, the only way to truly see what a new item looks like is to acquire it, which means the preview window is not effective. Please allow for zooming in (and not just on the face, maybe I'm looking at new gloves) and toggling whether color matching is present (for the new item, not in general).

 

6) Sometimes if I'm looking at several pieces of gear, I loose track of which pieces are shown vs. what's worn. A button that reverts the character shown to current gear would be nice. Bonus: highlighting/listing in the window which gear is being previewed.

 

7) Move the reset button on the GTN window away from the search button and give it its name back. The icon looks too similar to the one used for filtering in the old arrangement, and having a button that erases *all* the settings that close to the button that uses the settings invites mistakes.

 

8) The crew window is not large enough to list all the companions without scrolling, which makes it tedious to use those listed lower for any purpose. This makes no sense since the point of the variety of crew attributes is to encourage the player's freedom of choice for the current activity. Most of the space for each companion seems to be wasted with status info that is only used when they are working crew skills. I suggest a different layout that shows in the companion area all six companions and their buttons (maybe in a 2x3 or 3x2 layout?) and then *below that* the progress status of any companions actively working on crew skills.

 

9) Stop removing the crew skills from the hotbars for whatever reasons.

 

10) This problem has a mentioned solution, but it's not intuitive. If I decide to check the GTN for crafting materials to make some items, the only way I've found to simultaneously have open the crafting recipe list is if I first put the crafting skill on the hotbar. This is because opening the GTN first also opens the inventory, which force closes the recipe window, and using the crew skill window to get at the recipes force closes the GTN. The only solution that comes to my mind that feels intuitive is somehow allowing one click access to the recipe window (and/or all crew skills) without relying on the character having the forethought and space available to put them in the hotbars. It's probably not the best tho'.

 

11) On the hotbars, I have many slots bound to keys on my numpad, which normallyI use for just that - easily entering numbers. Yet the hotbars show the function names for the keys, which I am not familiar with and never use. Which means I can't look at a slot bound to a numpad key and know which key I have to press to use it - that defeats the purpose of showing the keybinding in the first place. Can you show the numpad keys as perhaps "N0" - "N9" (and don't forget "N."), perhaps as a preference toggle so those familiar with the names are still happy?

[Edit: ok, just discovered this issue is partly due to my not being familiar with the use of "Numlock" in Windoze, which I only run in VMWare to play TOR.]

 

There are probably other annoyances, but these are the ones that quickly come to mind as I encounter them very often. The sheer number of these annoyances has, in my mind, the game teetering on the border between fun gameplay and tedious work.

Edited May 3, 2012 by I-ku-u

[Psnacky]

Here are a few things I'd like to see in the layout editor.

 

1) A grid overlay with a snap-to option for more precise spacing and positioning.

2) Snap-to-edge and snap-to-center options for elements that are touching each other. For example, being able to perfectly center the instance indicator with the menu bar or making sure that two action bars are evenly aligned.

3) The ability to dock UI elements to each other. For example I could dock my target-of-target frame to my target frame so whenever I move my target frame the target-of-target frame moves with it. Alternately, things like docking the companion action bar to another, or multiple other, actions bars so that whenever the companion bar is displayed the other bars move to accommodate it.

4) Color selector. I'd like to have the option to change the default blue UI with options such as red for Imp faction pride, or matching lightsaber colors.

[SigPiFeraxin]

I like the ability to save my UI and apply it to all my characters; however, it would be nice if there was a similar way to apply my key bindings so i do not have to reenter them on each new character

[KalSpiro]

You are off to a great start. I would suggest the following:

 

1: A snap to grid capability or at least a set of coordinates to allow for precise alignments

2: Make buffs and debuffs separate elements and separate both from player / target bar

3: Add numeric timers to buff / debuffs

6: Add companion boxes to the operations frames.

7: Add health text to party frames

8: For the Mail UI, PLEASE add alts to the auto-lookup that is currently guild only in the TO box

 

All of these also, very good suggestions.

[Karniel]

What I think is needed most is a better BUFF and DEBUFF section, bigger. more noticeable.. its sometimes hard to tell when something procs for your abilities in the "heat of the moment"

[KalSpiro]

The chat UI still needs major work.

• We need to be able to lock the chat UI so we do not accidentally move it or rearrange tabs when we mean to click them.
  
• We need to be able to suppress the chat UI's background so that we can position it closer to the edge of the screen.
  
• If the chat UI background isn't suppressed, it should still not appear just on mouse-over. That's annoying.
  
• Chat lines should fade individually and should only reappear if I choose to scroll the chat window. This allows the chat window to appear clean when there hasn't been any chatter for some time. Therefore when a new chat message appears, it's much more apparent and harder to miss. It also helps keep the screen clear of unnecessary clutter.
  

 

Click through.

 

I would like to see click though on chat, the map, the quest list. There is too much on my screen that blocks sections of the world I might be trying to interact with. I would like to the option to activate click through on any of them that I don't require interaction with in order to use. If I want to type I'll hit enter. If I want my map I'll hit M. If I want to view my quests I'll click L.

[BlackSpin]

I was kinda disappointed to see there was no target of focus. You have to click on the focused person, to find their target, click the target (to heal or whatever)... then click back on the focused to find the next target... Just an additional un-needed step. Also, as has already been mentioned, buffs/debuffs need to be modable so we can actually see them without blowing up everything else.

[Aurojiin]

I can guarantee that everything I'd like to see has been said already, but I'd like to throw it a vote for:

 

- mouseover healing

- a snap-to-grid feature in the UI editor

 

The second one especially would alleviate an incredible amount of OCD-driven frustration