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UI, game controls, and Animation Issues

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Tim Maroth Zumari Force Projection Caldari State 10	Posted - 2012.08.22 22:31:00 - [1] - Quote Greetings, So for some this will be familiar if you were on IRC, I'm [STAR]CharginMoose. I've been part of the ISD for over 5 years helping new players in EVE-Online. While many people here will be focusing on game play for the most part, I see games very differently. When I play them I see a different set of issues. It could be bad 3d UV Layouts, character rig issues, textures, layouts or general design elements. I already know people will make the argument "This is Dust, not EVE-Online". And yes you are right, but the fact is that this game is part of EVE-Online, and takes place in same realm and scope of EVE-Online. This really is an expansion of EVE just on a Play Station 3. Ok! Now that that is out of the way letGÇÖs begin. Some of the first things I noticed were the similarities to EVE-Online and thought GÇ£Awesome this isn't going to be nearly as hard as I had heard aboutGÇ¥. Well toss that idea out the window it made things more difficult. What am I talking about? Well the Icons used in both Dust and EVE Online. Some people don't take note of them but in Dust they play a bigger role than in EVE in some cases. The most notable one will be the Fitting Icons, and this is what caused me a lot of issues. I immediately started associated things back and forth. The issue is that in Dust they mean something completely different then in EVE. In EVE people associate the damage mods (Mods that increase damage for weapon systems) to belong to the low slots when fitting a ship. Well that low slot icon in Dust means something different, and in fact the damage mod uses the slot that has the Med Slot Icon in EVE. My first impression was wait a minute, what the hell is going on here. ItGÇÖs a damage mod and it goes to a Med slot. . . I quickly went to IRC to ask questions. What makes this worse is that the current set of Icons is conflicting as well. The Infantry Small Capacity Grenade shares the same Icon as the Infantry Low-Powered Module. This is terrible, your icons are used all over the place they are bold and stand out people will use these when browsing the market to buy gear for their suits. And here you have two objects that share the same Icon but won't work in the other slot that in all respects looks the same. Here is another case of misleading Icons. When creating a new load out you get the message "Invalid Fitting! (EVE HIGH SLOT ICON) Must fit at least one Weapon". Nowhere else do you see this Icon used so what does it mean? Now then here is why it is bad design. It causes a lot of confusion and this is bad because people coming from EVE will take note of this, a new player might go to the market and won't be able to find an item that uses that Icon. What is worse is that people who play Dust might become more interested in EVE and possibly try EVE. This means they are going to EVE with a notion of how things work when they start associating the Icons with each other. Dust also makes a lot of use of the Icons so this will make things difficult as they we have pre-conceived ideas. Having dealt with new players for over 5 years and been through UI changes I can tell you now this is a HUGE pit fall in design it will make things more difficult for new players to both games. Your solution here is really simple, if you take Icon from EVE be sure it means, is represented, and is used how it would in EVE. If this can't be done, you don't use it. It is completely fine to create new Icon's because itGÇÖs new and it represents something different. The UI When a person dies they get the option of Re-spawning (Circle) or Calling for Help (Square). This is odd because you have placed the Circle option on the left side and the Square option on the right. On the controller the Circle is actually on the Right and the Square is on the left. Now then I donGÇÖt regularly play my PS3 so when I first saw this I was constantly pressing the wrong buttons. This peculiar design feature shows up again in your personal quarters with L1 and the Start button opening the Neocom. L1 Left side menu makes sense, start right side of the controller. . . Huh? It then goes that Select opens the chat menu/window, but R1 does nothingGÇª So there is a redundancy in the buttons that donGÇÖt make sense. You have the L1 open the left Menu, but the R1 doesnGÇÖt open the Right side menu. Then the start and select buttons are flipped in orientation of what menu they open. Again IGÇÖve pressed the wrong buttons I donGÇÖt how many times. While typically I would support having the Start button open the main menu, but in this case I donGÇÖt because I donGÇÖt consider it to be a true main menu has it lacks the ability to logout or quit the game. To me itGÇÖs just another menu, especially when L1 button can open this menu as well. Side note to this is that it would be nice if the chat menu/window was a little wider than it is currently. Also the use of the right Analog for scrolling windows feels reversed, again itGÇÖs the case of having the left do something on the right hand side of the screen. You have your scroll bar on the right side, this in my mind goes, GÇ£Right side scroll, Right Analog to controlGÇ¥.
Tim Maroth Zumari Force Projection Caldari State 10	Posted - 2012.08.22 22:32:00 - [2] - Quote In game play weapon selection using a mouse and keyboard is rather odd. All first person shooters I have ever player have used the numbers above QWERTY as a form of weapon selection. The number 1 being your typical primary and 2 being your secondary weapon, but in dust you get the mouse wheel. The issue here is that for some odd reason it feels like there is a lot of lag on changing weapons with the mouse wheel and at times IGÇÖve scrolled it a little more and come to realize IGÇÖve now over scrolled my weapon selection. The next area IGÇÖve found the DS3 pretty cumbersome in the fitting window and hitting the mod slots at times. Enabling the D pad to be used here would be a huge step up, as for the mouse and keyboard it is a dream to use when setting up suit configurations. IGÇÖve also got to say that for me to turn my character 180 degrees shouldnGÇÖt take me my entire desk length to do with a mouse. The sensitivity for a mouse needs to be higher to accommodate for the fact you have to stop during the turn to move your mouse back to a comfortable position to even continue turning or to start your engagement. This is a huge downfall for mouse users. IGÇÖm not saying the character should turn with a simple flick of the wrist, but forcing me to lift and reset the mouse a couple times even after having max sensitivity is pretty terrible. Not being able to pick what you want the hot keys to be on a keyboard and mouse is also very limiting to those who are using these, this doesnGÇÖt facilitate fair or level game play. One final point to make here before moving on, why is the D Pad disabled so heavily for scrolling and navigating things? The Analog is about as accurate as trying to kill a mosquito with a rocket launcher in a lot of cases. If you have scrolling, and or selecting you should enable both analog and d pad has navigation options. Oh and before I forget tab on the keyboard doesnGÇÖt open the player list during game play. The next thing that felt rather awkward is the market. The layout is pretty straight forward with the exception of horribly misleading tutorial. There is no way to tell if you are buying a onetime use mod, or if you are buying a GÇ£Blue PrintGÇ¥. This was one of the most frustrating things to try and learn, so I went back to IRC. It turns out that only the militia mods are blueprints. If there is no future plan on creating other blue prints, this GÇ£TutorialGÇ¥ should be reworded. This will help avoid issues and misunderstanding like VillardGÇÖs Wheel that plagued new players to EVE for years. This feels like a terrible wording issue that leaves people in a guessing game of what they are about to purchase. If the term GÇ£Blue PrintGÇ¥ is going to stay in the Tutorial I highly suggest going back to all items that are indeed GÇ£Blue PrintsGÇ¥ and editing their item description to include the fact they are Blue Prints. In the current settings this isnGÇÖt mentioned anywhere and leaves it to a guessing game. The next market point IGÇÖd like to make is the skills. Buying skills will sometimes at the end ask if you want to inject the skill or use the skill. IGÇÖve had many cases where it doesnGÇÖt and you are stuck double checking to see if you purchased it or not. Maybe itGÇÖs a bug or what not this is a rather minor thing and should be an easy fix. IGÇÖve seen some other nice suggestions on this. But I want to add that when looking at mods on the market and a person checks the prerequisites to check what skills are missing give the option to buy a skill from that menu. For example a person shows info on Basic Armor Plates required skills Armor Upgrades and Mechanics. Now then on my character I didnGÇÖt start with Armor Upgrades, so a nice ability would be to be able to buy that skill through the show info window on the Basic Armor Plates. This would reduce the back, back, back, ok now go and find the skill. This is tedious for people who want to make things easily and quickly it also helps people focus on what they want to accomplish or strive to. Myself I just started buying up all the skill books and thought oh this is cool and this is neat letGÇÖs do a little of this and a little of that. This very action could either make things a little difficult or even overwhelming for a new person that has no idea what they are getting themselves into. There are some other great suggestions on the market and skills but this is my 2 cents. The game looks great right now but there are subtle little things that if changed would make Dust stand well out in front and above all other games. While playing IGÇÖve noticed some textures are suffering an issue with scale to your characters. This is most notable on textures that are showing doors that arenGÇÖt usable. They are neither tall enough, nor small enough to be believable. Many of these fake doors look to be about 6-7 inches short. These doors and scale issues could be corrected by either making them larger to look believable to be a door that could be used, or make them smaller to the point they look like some kind of service door where a character wouldnGÇÖt enter. Animations, while many of the animations IGÇÖve seen so far look good the run animation, not the sprint, looks really really bad. This animation looks like characters are running on a treadmill. It looks like a character takes 3 steps in what should be done in 1. To see this, go in a game run a head of person and watch them run by you as you look at them in profile. Meaning you arenGÇÖt watching them run at you, you are watching them on either their left or right side. Watch their legs cycle 3 times or so to take what should have been done in 1 step. When I get more time to watch people accomplishing the animation cycles IGÇÖll provide more feedback on other cycles, but right now this one was glaringly obvious.
Tim Maroth Zumari Force Projection Caldari State 10	Posted - 2012.08.27 03:53:00 - [3] - Quote Bumping this up for more conversation
Tim Maroth Zumari Force Projection Caldari State 10	Posted - 2012.08.29 22:02:00 - [4] - Quote EO v Prime wrote: I agree with all of the points. I want to add that navigating on the overviewmap with KBM is nearly impossible. And I need to change back to DS3 after the game (except fittingscreen) cause its a PITA to navigate the normal menus with the Keyboard. Try to scroll with the right joystick on the keyboard... for example 'options' -> 'Keyboardsettings' -> right sidemenu Highlighting skills baught/learned in the market window would be great, they get highlighted in the 'All Skills' tab (most of the time) so why not in the market? Yes navigating the overview map in a match is impossible for me I always have to switch back to the DS3, also it's pretty bad that the DS3 has to be on for the game to function. I had a match where my DS3 battery went dead. I then had a screen saying please reconnect a controller. I did die but oh well, had this happened to a tank driver I'm sure they would have been up in arms losing a 2-3 million isk tank. This is pretty sad when I can navigate anything on my PS with Mouse and Keyboard, but the game requires the control to be on at all times.
Tim Maroth Zumari Force Projection Caldari State 10	Posted - 2012.08.29 22:05:00 - [5] - Quote Maximum Appendage wrote: I've never played Eve & don't use mouse/keyboard but I agree with most of that. Weapon switching on the gamepad has its own issues as well Weapon switching with mouse and keyboard is terrible. It is either the mouse scroll wheel, or caps lock. Each of these are bad options. Caps lock means that if you start typing it's all in caps locks and well that never look good or goes over well because you know look like a raging maniac. Mouse well is absolutely terrible it is hit and miss with how much you need to scroll, and if you are trying to change the weapon while the reload animation taking place well you are more or less screwed royally because 90% of the time it doesn't work and just locks in the reload.
Tim Maroth Zumari Force Projection Caldari State 10	Posted - 2012.08.29 22:06:00 - [6] - Quote http://imgur.com/2W6Ox This is an image I did up a while back as an exploration of possible icon changes.

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