The UI is fine, i like it, although i would not care even if it was pink! I am more interested in the other visuals.
To be honest, i can't understand anything through screenies, but gimme the option to use BG1 sprites and i'm a happy panda o/
Other than that, all's well.
Be sure to stay tuned folks, and enjoy the next screenshots, where you can see Phillip Daigle eating breakfast, lunch and dinner, battling dragons, ogres as well as handing cookies to gnolls while pretending to hit them with kung-fu panda moves (as he does on screen while posing as Rasaad)! Shame on you for making Dorn and Andrew the Great do all the work!
Looks promising. Something seems a bit off about the portraits of the new NPCs.
I think the skin tone of the EE NPCs seems a bit glaring in comparison to the rest of the party. Though its quite possibly because they are unfamiliar and therefore stand out to my eye.
Overall I like the new GUI (mainly the color palette), but I don't like a few things: 1 - The chat window seems too narrow. 2 - The portraits should have a little separation between them like in the original GUI. 3 - The new portraits, even though are brilliantly draw, don't mix very well with the old ones.
The screenshot itself looks great, despite the unfortunate use of BG2 sprites (I still hope it will be possible to revert to the original ones, maybe in a future DLC). Two things I'm not very pleased about: - why that blue background for the UI and the brown/gold icons? It's strident and clashy and looks worse than the old background / icons; - the portraits for the new NPCs look watered down compared to the original ones which are more sharp and colorful. Not possible to make them more alike thematically? We do know Neera, Rasaad and Dorn joined the fun with BGEE, there's no need for their portraits to yell it at us from the side of the screen at every glance.
No need to discuss about the new UI colors I think, that's probably the most subjective issue. Personally I like them. The overall impression is rather good, but there are some details that I frankly don't like:
- portraits look kind of strange without some additional borders (they were present in the original UI). IMO they are too close together now and everyone knows that Xzar doesn't like when others touch him or are too close to him;
- there is no border where the bottom bar of the UI connects with the right side bar thus making it look, again, strange. That's because the stone pattern of the bottom bar differs slightly from the pattern of the right side bar;
- the dialogue window is a bit smaller than the original when minimized, now we can't even see two full lines of text but one and about two thirds of the second one.
As I said, overall it looks very promising, just needs some minor tweaks. Also a question: I noticed that the font in the dialogue window is different, will it be possible to choose a font from a set of available fonts and/or pick the original ones?
@PhillipDaigle please consider to make those little changes
The 4 icons in the lower right I see are for AI and Select All party members, but what are the other two? Specifically, the rectangle with finger and the magnifying glass. I take it one is for search and the other is a touch screen button, as this is an iPad version? If so, will the PC version not have those buttons?
Is the larger button next to the text window to make the window larger? Two lines of text is rather small.
Also ,do you have any screenshots of the character records?
One thing that should definitely be looked into is the colour saturation of the new NPC portraits. Neera is way to bright, Dorn is practically black-and-white, both stand out terribly. Rasaad actually fits in quite nicely, though his skin colour is also way off in comparison to the well-saturated original portraits. I don't think it should be too difficult to change that, so please consider it (if the artist has nothing against it).
The UI itself... well. It's okay, but it looks unfinished, like it was done by a fan community who lost interest halfway along the road. It needs tweaking, but I guess it's at least a fundament on which to improve.
Overall, it looks pretty cool. Most shocking thing is missing borders between portraits. It also feels like the combat log window is too small (width speaking).
I'm curious if the new UI code will allow the GUI overlay to be modded... Could someone with some skills be able to implement, say, an IWD2 style "single-bar" overlay?
Keeping the large sidebar buttons seems reasonable for iPad gameplay, but the old school layout is very superfluous when you have a keyboard and you don't really need the on-screen buttons. There's a pretty big amount of completely unused space on the GUI bars as of the new screenshot -- if the contents of the bottom bar were aligned to the left, it would easily be possible to fit the character portraits on that bar as well. This would completely eliminate the need for both of the sidebars and open up a lot more screen space for those beautiful backgrounds, all the while making the overlay less visually intrusive.
I would always hide the left column when playing BG2, and I'd love to be able to free up even more space. The IWD2 GUI overlay was a great improvement over the earlier IE games, IMO.
One thing that can be done to mesh the new portraits with the old is to set the top and bottom of each characters head to the same elevation in each portrait window (as compared to the elevations of the originals)
Click the screenshot to go to full view, then press F11 to put your browser into fullscreen mode. Once the UI fades away, zoom into the photo. Fits my 16:9 1080p monitor perfectly, giving me a very good idea of what the game is going to look like on my computer in full screen, looks great!
Click the screenshot to go to full view, then press F11 to put your browser into fullscreen mode. Once the UI fades away, zoom into the photo. Fits my 16:9 1080p monitor perfectly, giving me a very good idea of what the game is going to look like on my computer in full screen, looks great!
Excellent idea. That does give a pretty good idea.
There's obviously still some tweaking going on, but overall, I like it very much!
First time I feel it's compulsory for me to give some feedback. So here I go:
At first I felt really underwhelmed by the new UI but now I feel somewhat >>ok<< about it. I feel it will be very handy but, but, but… The thing is – I do like most of the interface, I am not bothered with absence of portrait borders, I can live with small dialogue window (although I would like a bigger one) etc. And I do think that it’s a good, solid step forward from the old UI. Technically. However aesthetically speaking the new UI is just terrible for me. I dislike mixing bluish rock with gold, I just cannot stand gold colour shininess in screenshot presented and making the UI borders gold is a kiss of death for me. I admit – the old UI was also very heavy on gold but it was low-keyed and now it’s just… shinny. I understand that colour scheme is matter of taste, but since everybody will have different opinion about it, why not stay with something that we were at least used to? When dealing with project like this, it’s obvious that even little changes will upset ‘hardcore fans’ - and I find this particular change in UI very bold. Too bold as for my taste. I think that at least tempering down colours would be in order. I’m writing this as, I hope, constructive criticism.
Tl;dr: Good job on technical aspects but please please please make the colour scheme at least less garish.
Comments
To be honest, i can't understand anything through screenies, but gimme the option to use BG1 sprites and i'm a happy panda o/
Other than that, all's well.
Be sure to stay tuned folks, and enjoy the next screenshots, where you can see Phillip Daigle eating breakfast, lunch and dinner, battling dragons, ogres as well as handing cookies to gnolls while pretending to hit them with kung-fu panda moves (as he does on screen while posing as Rasaad)! Shame on you for making Dorn and Andrew the Great do all the work!
more like "starve until noon"
otherwise my physique will never match that of Rasaad
Who's such a bad player that he'll waste a magic missile on a gnoll already surrounded by 3 melee fighters?
I think that's a wild surge about to obliterate the entire party by accident.
I think the skin tone of the EE NPCs seems a bit glaring in comparison to the rest of the party. Though its quite possibly because they are unfamiliar and therefore stand out to my eye.
1 - The chat window seems too narrow.
2 - The portraits should have a little separation between them like in the original GUI.
3 - The new portraits, even though are brilliantly draw, don't mix very well with the old ones.
Thank you! I have a few questions.
The 4 icons in the lower right I see are for AI and Select All party members, but what are the other two? Specifically, the rectangle with finger and the magnifying glass. I take it one is for search and the other is a touch screen button, as this is an iPad version? If so, will the PC version not have those buttons?
Is the larger button next to the text window to make the window larger? Two lines of text is rather small.
Also ,do you have any screenshots of the character records?
1. Select All
2. TAB key from ToB (probably for tablets)
3. AI on/off
4. ???
The UI itself... well. It's okay, but it looks unfinished, like it was done by a fan community who lost interest halfway along the road. It needs tweaking, but I guess it's at least a fundament on which to improve.
"No more rhyming now, I mean it!"
"...does anybody want a peanut?"
He's really very short on charm.
Keeping the large sidebar buttons seems reasonable for iPad gameplay, but the old school layout is very superfluous when you have a keyboard and you don't really need the on-screen buttons. There's a pretty big amount of completely unused space on the GUI bars as of the new screenshot -- if the contents of the bottom bar were aligned to the left, it would easily be possible to fit the character portraits on that bar as well. This would completely eliminate the need for both of the sidebars and open up a lot more screen space for those beautiful backgrounds, all the while making the overlay less visually intrusive.
I would always hide the left column when playing BG2, and I'd love to be able to free up even more space. The IWD2 GUI overlay was a great improvement over the earlier IE games, IMO.
More screenshots please @PhilipDaigle
TIA!
There's obviously still some tweaking going on, but overall, I like it very much!
At first I felt really underwhelmed by the new UI but now I feel somewhat >>ok<< about it. I feel it will be very handy but, but, but…
The thing is – I do like most of the interface, I am not bothered with absence of portrait borders, I can live with small dialogue window (although I would like a bigger one) etc. And I do think that it’s a good, solid step forward from the old UI. Technically.
However aesthetically speaking the new UI is just terrible for me. I dislike mixing bluish rock with gold, I just cannot stand gold colour shininess in screenshot presented and making the UI borders gold is a kiss of death for me.
I admit – the old UI was also very heavy on gold but it was low-keyed and now it’s just… shinny.
I understand that colour scheme is matter of taste, but since everybody will have different opinion about it, why not stay with something that we were at least used to?
When dealing with project like this, it’s obvious that even little changes will upset ‘hardcore fans’ - and I find this particular change in UI very bold. Too bold as for my taste.
I think that at least tempering down colours would be in order.
I’m writing this as, I hope, constructive criticism.
Tl;dr: Good job on technical aspects but please please please make the colour scheme at least less garish.