Morrowind's User Interface & HUD

Post » Fri Nov 18, 2011 1:24 pm

Morrowind has a great user interface, I think, but there is always room for improvement. What do you think needs or should be improved, added, removed, or changed about Morrowind's HUD or user interface?
This thread was inspired after reading about TESV Skyrim's UI for PC and the image that was made to address it. http://img3.imageshack.us/img3/5679/skyriminterface.jpg

I think the way you barter should be changed so that you can type in a number instead of the up/down arrows.
Perhaps make all the icons 3D objects instead.
I know I definitely want the character portrait screen to be vastly improved. Right now it's just a 3D frozen image of your character. I never look at it because the third person view in-game is much better. I'd like the character portrait in the menu screen to behave like it does in Oblivion, except with more freedom to look above and below your character at all angles.

DragonGeo2 is working on http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1209177-wip-project-aedra/; an engine re-write. There is also the http://www.fliggerty.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=53&t=1008 mod, with which the team has done a wonderful job. Maybe some of these things will be implemented in the future.

I'm not a HUD expert and don't know all the details about making a great user-friendly & visually appealing user-interface. But I hope this thread will serve as a basis to give other modders ideas who are thinking or wanting to change Morrowind's UI and actually have the knowledge to do so. I'm just a simple modder. I don't do computer programming or any of that stuff.
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P PoLlo
 
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Post » Fri Nov 18, 2011 11:40 am

Well, Morrowind's UI is actually really intuitive to use. That's what I liked about it. Oblivion introduced the consolized UI, which Skyrim took to a whole new level. I don't even want to go into detail how many general conventions were broken with the Skyrim UI, but suffice it to say, my Human Computer Interaction lecturer would've had a seizure and would've promptly failed the UI designers.

Morrowind's UI is great because it can utilize as much space as the user needs it to utilize. Furthermore as the screens are split up into Stats/Map/Magick/Inventory but are still fit into your whole screen it gives you a much broader control over managing your character/items and whatnot.

It is true, the paperdoll can be fixed up a bit, at least to be able to rotate it, but that's not crucial for me.

Your point about the bartering is also spot on. The ability to enter a value would be much better than having to scroll through it.

I honestly can't think of anything, as Morrowinds UI has always been easy for me to understand and I got really frustrated with the OB since everything was changed and even more frustrated with the Skyrim UI which is frankly idiotic.
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Jerry Cox
 
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Post » Fri Nov 18, 2011 3:06 pm

Literally my only real problem with Skyrim is the UI. It is indeed like you say, idiotic.
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Brad Johnson
 
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Post » Fri Nov 18, 2011 5:10 pm

The inability to punch in a number value, either for quantity or price, often made barter a chore (especially with prices in the 10,000+ range,or quantities of arrows in the 50-100 range).

Aside from that, the MW user interface is one of the most convenient and useable that I've dealt with in any video game to date. The resizable panels, the hover tooltip info, the ability to close any of the panels independently, coupled with the basic on-screen mini-map with built-in compass (ONLY a compass, not a magical homing device), all combine to allow the user to see virtually anything that needs seeing in a second or two, with an absolute minimum of clicking. To have thrown that away and gone to a pathetic and clunky console-style menu for the PC versions of both OB and SR is simply beyond comprehension.

In short, I can now spend five times as much time and effort to see half the information that I used to; and THAT's supposed to be an "improvement"?
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Hazel Sian ogden
 
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Post » Fri Nov 18, 2011 2:42 am

There's really only one thing I would change about the Morrowind UI, and that is I would add a charge meter to equipped enchanted weapons.
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Laura-Lee Gerwing
 
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Post » Fri Nov 18, 2011 4:12 pm

The only thing that bothered me was the difficulty of moving a large number of items. With the exception of the "Take All" button, you have to pick up and drop each one individually with the mouse. (I understand the console version may actually be a little better on this.) It might be nice to have something, perhaps a modifier key like Alt, move items between your inventory and whatever container you have open with a single click. Kind of like how it works in the shop screen. For completeness sake, doing this with no container open could be a shortcut for dropping items.
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Karl harris
 
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