John Waveland

The new port UI looks great! It's great to be able to see your ship in port. Using windows, it also solves one of the current UI's biggest challenges, which is that you can't view the contents of multiple tabs simultaneously (for instance, the shop and the hold). However, I think those windows, and the iconographic approach to the interface, make for a long learning curve and a lot of clicking. I wonder if a hybrid of the new and old interface would be a little smoother. I drew up a few quick layouts (below), operating under the assumption that most people use the port UI for two things mainly: viewing ships and viewing the store. The first layout combines the roster of ships with the fleet tab on the left side of the screen, and displays ship information on the right side. A "Ship Stats" toggle in the bottom center of the screen displays displays information about speed, armor, hull, etc. Ship purchasing still occurs in a window that can occupy the middle of this screen, or be dragged around. I toyed with adding representative silhouettes beside the names of the ships on the left side, but I couldn't find a range of suitable images in a cohesive style. Still, it might look really cool, especially if the ships have player-assigned names (e.g. "USS Bonhomme Richard"). The following image explains some of the interface's functionality. The various buttons here would incorporate mouseover information and menus to save space (for instance mouseovers for SKILLS and UPGRADES). Note that the color of the overlay changes with the ambient light. I thought this was cool as I tried out different colors for the background. Below, we see a warehouse layout (left), maintaining the grid's economy of space, but giving the option to instead show a list to make use of the details presented in the new UI. The ship's hold is on the right side of the screen, where it was in the fleet layout (above). A right click menu on items would list "Send to Hold" or "Send to Warehouse". A few buttons are missing on the warehouse: "Expand Warehouse", "Sort A-Z", "Sort by Group", etc. It might be preferable to list the flagship and the fleet ships on the warehouse side so that it's easy to transfer cargo between the warehouse and the player's various vessels. Finally, I added a couple general suggestions in the image below. It seems to me as though the outpost and economic building windows should be accessed from the port menu in the upper left corner. That was where I first looked for them, and I think it's logical to assume that if you're going to interact with All Saints, you'll do it through the menu that reads "All Saints". I think one of the new UI's strong points is that you can orbit the camera around the ship in port. I wouldn't view lock in any of the layouts I presented, but I think the image below is a cool shot for landing in the port. In closing, 11/10 sailors agree we must have the blue peter on the sail out button!