I'd be lying if I said that I'm not worried about the UI. I'm actually very worried about it. It's probably one of my biggest worries about the game.

I am.

Flipping long horizontal list of simple elements that could much more conveniently be listed, is a horrible time-waste and goes against practicality. Lists (add a "z" for awesomeness) with hovering popus are much more efficient. And also the theming they did looks much more like Mass Effect or Star Wars than Skyrim.

Spicing up the background is the only fine decision they made. By the way, anyone noticed the Mage nebula? i guess so.

They originally spotted a point where they could probably try something different and that's fine, but the actual conclusion isn't.

I won't get Skyrim because of this. On to TES VI. /s

I liked the way they did it in Oblivion. But I have to agree with others. We haven't seen/heard enough information to make a solid opinion yet.

I agree. No matter if it was adapted to consoles or not (of course it was) I loved Oblivion's UI, on the PC too. Morrowind's is horrible. :banghead: Off topic: Is there a good mod for Morrowind UI? My Morrowind is quite heavily modded nowadays but I haven't found a UI fix to it for some strange reason.

Also, I don't like when Todd said "Apple". No need to copy Apple. A good UI for touch screen mobiles doesn't necessarily fit console controllers and K&M on PC.

Hm Im not sure. On the one hand I hated the default UI for Oblivion on my PC(I love you DarN).

But on the other it was still too... "classic". I hate old and outdated(not fun) things like... endless text tree menus, or the lazy way of making things more "difficult" by giving them more health and saying its Hardmode.

As for menus specifically? I would like more clarification on that one screen shot. Maybe thats just the spell category selection and NOT your Attribute list. If thats the case then Im all for it as it would make navigating for "Potions" much less of a hassle IMO. Basically Im all for streamlining, but not so much for consolizing.

Edit: And Im in favor of developers trying new things. Like Fable 3, even though I hated almost all the base changes I still think it was a great thing to not be afraid to make changes.

This just seems like the typical complaints about UIs because people can't be bothered to hit a couple of buttons quickly. People just can't be bothered to take an extra second to get to what they are looking for. That just seems lazy that you can't spend 2 seconds of your time getting to your item and you'd rather the dev team spends an extra month or two so that it can save you a sec. That's incredibly selfish. People need to learn that having your entire UI on one screen and being able to find what you want quickly is infeasible. It's faster to have organized tabs like in Oblivion than it is to have a full screen inventory like in Morrowind.

I seriously hope you sir are joking. I mean, really, you must be

Unless you can only see a maximum of five items at once, a la Oblivion. That was a very counter-intuitive design choice on the PC; I can barely play without the help of UI mods.

Yeh I can see that, I mean I like the Oblivion UI once its been DarNified. But from what I can see its still going to be basically the same, just a different way of doing the Tab menus on the bottom. I would really like to see what the Skyrim items and spell selection menus look like to be sure though.

Organized tabs are cool, but I like to be able to expand the window like in Morrowind as well.

I ain't worried about anything in the game so far

*tod scratches his head and turns to st frantic*

Tod: Whats up with people,their never happy!
St frantic: Boggles my mind too tod *pats tod on the back*
Tod: well i wish they were all like you
St frantic: aawwwww!....THANKS MATE! *Gives tod the thumbs up* :thumbsup: :thumbsup:
Tod: *looks at st frantic,with a tear in his eye* Well at least you got my back buddy! :hugs:
St frantic: Don't worry mate,it will sort it's self out!

Art deco fonts have no [censored] place in my Skyrim!

/thread

This.

You really do have to be joking. Complex? You are a master of sarcasm...

The menu is the least of my concerns, I'm both dreading and anticipating skyrim. I keep flashing back to the run-up to oblivion. I literally groaned out loud when he mentioned apple. Here's hoping the anticipation wins out over the impending feeling of doom

time for my meds now

/*resist fire*
/*invisibility*

I'd like Comic Sans font it's cool and it brings luck to the watcher.

What appear in the image is not a orizontal list. Is a table. Keep in mind that that what pretty constelations are representing are perks; so you can take a look to skills and they relative perks. Obviously it could be done in a most efficient way, but the space isn't so wasted. There seems to be a certain loss of functionality for the sake of graphics, but not so much at it looks at the first pek.

That's a somewhat unfair representation of the criticism. It's risible to say that people who complain about an interface's inelegant design are "lazy" - after all, what is the job of the UI in a game like this if not to present useful information to the player in a clear and efficient manner? And there are reasons to think that Skyrim's UI won't be doing this as good as it should be (and, FWIW, although I think we're just pulling numbers out of our arses, I doubt that it would take "an extra month or two" to make the few little tweaks that would make a big difference).

Anyway, I think one significant benefit to the UI could be had if the player was allowed to customise the order of the skill list. Having only seven skills displayed fully at one time, along with their value and their progress, is not such a big deal to my mind, provided that you can display the seven skills you want. Otherwise, if you're playing a character specialising in, say, One-Handed, Archery, and Alteration, you might need to scroll around a few times to get the information you want. But if you could put your preferred skills together in the skill list, then you could just open up the skill menu and take in the information you want with a quick glance.

As for the horizontal list (as opposed to vertical), I don't mind this so much, even in light of Ghastley's point earlier. I do agree, that stacking the skill progress bars on top of each other makes it easier to compare the progress of a bunch. But only if you want to make more fine-grained judgements of which of a set of skills is closest to increasing. And generally that's not so important. One generally does not need to know that Destruction has made 52% progress to the next level, while Alteration has made 50%. It's usually enough to be able to tell that Destruction has made 52% progress to the next level, and Conjuration has made 40%. And there's no problem with being able to make those sorts of judgements reliably with a horizontal list.

As for the inventory, I thought Oblivion did a reasonably good job - it was just that the icons were way too big for PC. Tabbed/filtered browsing is certainly a necessity. I hope that what Skyrim does here is something like iPhoto (for instance, just to follow the Apple theme). So suppose you were browsing weapons. Then there would be a horizontal list of icons up the top (or the bottom) of the screen, and when you select one of them (by scrolling to make it in the center of the list), the selected item is shown in full-size below the list, in the middle of the screen. Something like http://emiratesmac.files.wordpress.com/2006/02/iphoto%20fullscreen.png is what I have in mind.

You know what Apple does that's great? They give me the option to view my music as a LIST instead of their giant icon default interface.

Now, Skyrim's skill interface looks pretty awesome. And we have to keep in mind we aren't just looking at a skill and a number now. That interface is going to show us are chosen perks as well.
Visually it looks great. How good is it practically? We will not know until we see a video or play it for ourselves.

I just hope not all of the interface is like that. It was my understanding that other stuff would still be in a list like previous games but you have some kind of option to go into a 3d model viewer on every item?

the current UI looks amazing for consoles.


but horrible for PC, much like Oblivion. I want



Mods ftw. I guess it's too much to ask for a completely seperate UI for the pc version, something that Bioware always does.





No its not , not for PC.

Incredibly concerned, yes. Worried, not yet.

Gi didn't really mention anything about pc people...who knows I guess.

I'm a console sadly, but at least it looks pretty. Menu's are evil anyway. If it can be hotkeyed, I usually hotkey it. Backbacks in general are annoying for me. As long as it holds all my stuff, with similar stuff together, I'm fine. The only real important change I want to see is a key-ring. If there is a key-ring, I will be a happy camper.

They also give you the option of resizing the icons.

They also give you option of splitting your screen between cover-flow and a vertical list of text.

I'm aware of this. My point was that Bethesda should give us options.

NO I'M NOT

i'm telematics engineer, one of my favorite topics is the usability, and i'm capable of make heuristic evaluations to user interfaces, maybe right now you think Oblivions UI is easy well sir That's because you've played too MUCH,

Oblivion UI is just a fanzy excel list, at the end your'e searching in a &%$ list the item you want.

some posible changes that i could make to OBLIVIONS UI could be:

-the posibility of erase spells (WHEN you've got a LOT of them it turns messy) also if i'm playing the warrior badass who dont use spells i dont want them, maybe just the dragon shouts

-any menu should be able to be accessed without passing through another menu (the solution that bethesda made up, down, right and left is great)

-if i use a lot some menu it must be placed first than if i use another (the "favorite menu" is also a great solution)

-if i throw away all the alchemy tools and ingredients that menu should disappear until I get some (that applies for all menus i just use alchemy as an example)

-a heuristic rule says: "Recognition rather than recall" it means that the user should not go reading THROUGH the list seeking his item, instead should recognize the picture or icon (another great change bethesda made IN SKYRIM)

I was agreeing with you.

Oh. Well, then let's revel in agreement. :foodndrink: :celebration: :hugs:

:D