Quote:
Originally Posted by Kyrwolf
Why do you use a UI from a third party?
What do you think devs need to keep in mind when designing game UIs?
What do you think is the best third-party UI for EQII and why?.
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#1: Functionality that isn't present in the default UI (eg. click-to-cure), and a visual appearance that differs from the default UI (often because my own preferences in a UI differ from what the devs were looking for for the default UI).
#2: One size fits all, doesn't. The needs of a veteran raider with years of experience in the game, for instance, may be radically different from those of a brand-new player starting their very first character. And what a healer wants in their UI may be radically different from what say the tank wants. You can't make a single UI that's good for everything across that wide a range. It's like trying to make a single vehicle that simultaneously performs like a Formula 1 race car on the track and hauls 80,000 pounds of freight like a tractor-trailer. Your best bet's to create a UI system that's flexible enough to let people with experience create special-purpose mods for it, while you concentrate on making a solid entry-level UI to give people the basics needed to get started. And don't assume your initial choices are necessarily the best. It's not a coincidence that the new default UI introduced with GU57 took a number of design elements from UI mods like Profit and Fetish: those mods were so popular precisely because people preferred their design choices over those of the old default UI.
Also, designers should bear in mind that not every player's the same. Red and green, for instance, may be obvious color choices for "bad" vs. "good" (eg. for health bars), but they're also very bad choices for the large minority of players who're to some degree or another red-green color-blind. People have different ideas of comfortable text size, comfortable UI theme colors and so on. Don't get so enamored of your own preferences that your UI can't accommodate those sorts of differences.
#3: ProfitUI, but that's mainly because I'm comfortable with it. You'll tend to prefer what you're familiar with, most of the time. My own preferences are for a few bits of functionality like click-to-cure and a design that's as compact and clean as possible, keeping the UI elements from obscuring my view of the game world.