LOTRO used to have static UI , now it is scalable.
 

LotRO's scaleable UI was a big improvement. Must say that in general I'm impressed with the large amount of useful improvements, changes and fixes every patch in LotRO brings. I played WoW for 1.5 year before turning to LotRO and WoW patches were typically "meh" events.

Tomorrow's patch day in LotRO and it will include Player Housing, a new 12-man raid instance, an expansion/revamp for Minstrels & Loremasters, a new epic book to develop the storyline, plus too much other stuff to mention really. Great stuff.

Cheers - Sveral
 

sveral

yes indeed i agree. i tried LOTRO partially because i was intrigued by TOBOLD's post (tobold's blog influence people lol) and partially because i was bored to death by WOW's focus on raid endgame.

since i join LOTRO 5 month ago, i feel it is the game for casual craft-a-holic alt-o-holic like me. and Turbine's free content update is a plus too..

i wish blizzard is focusing on their 90% casual player instead of their 1% raiders..

Dromor/Thissa (Landroval server)
 

There's probably less to gain from a developer spending long hours on the UI when the community will build their own custom ones anyway.

The EQ2 UI is great... very simple, highly customisable and there are a ton of 3rd party UIs out there to suit every need.
 

Having suffered from Lotro's early non-scalable UI I too vote for customisable scalable user interfaces.

I have a problem though with excessive customisability. Some of the WOW add-ons are almost game breaking because they give people such a huge advantage that they have become mandatory. It is a while since I played WOW but CT-Raid Assist and Auctioneer certainly fitted into that category. If the game designers want such powerful interface options then they should include them in the default configuration. Otherwise they should not allow them.
 

I have this problem too, but at 1900x1200. Even when a UI scales, often times not well enough, and you get distortion and other issues.
 

A little bit too much rant this time. Let's compare WoW with EQ1's UI, both only one generation apart from each other. Do we see some improvements? Uhm yeah, like a thousand times better.

UI design is very expensive if you want it to be handled by skilled people and not just by the guy who just knows how to handle Photoshop. If you deal with high development costs you'll look for the payoff and to be honest, people with resolutions higher than 1280x1024 are still a minority. Valve publishes very solid numbers about this, collected by their Steam service. So the sweet spot for UI size isn't your highend system, get used to it. It's a business decision that many UIs still suck. Companies with way more money than game studios invest millions into the transition to fully scalable vector based UIs.

If you want fully scalable UIs that do not look like grey boxes, but with all the eye candy you're used to, we talk about very complex vector gradient systems, very GPU/CPU intensive ones. So the demand, the basics and the ressources aren't quite realistic yet. We're not quite there yet, but it's coming.
 

This is off topic but...

You get a month of holiday a year, and you have enough money to buy a Nvida 8800 card.

I want be you.
 

There is no such thing as excessive customizability in WoW anymore. Because Blizzard created the programming language (LUA) and they control the system used to run the said code), addon authors cannot do anything Blizzard doesn't approve of. Furthermore, Blizzard is actually enabling certain types of addons to work better. For example, there's a command dedicated into commmunication between addons of different players. This was an explicit acknowledgement that addons like CT_RaidAssist, Damagemeters, GuildAds should work. Auctioneer is next. 2.3 has a command that allows the addon to scan the Auction House from anywhere in the world every 15 minutes.

Finally, Blizzard has adopted many addons since the release. The most popular features of CT_RaidAssist are now part of the vanilla UI. The same thing happened to Scrolling Combat Text and SpellAlert. An official threat meter is slated to appear in the Wrath of the Lich King.

Getting back to Tobold's original point.. the problem is that very few game companies actually apply the principles of usability engineering to their user interfaces. In the worst-case scenario the UI is being "designed" by the programmer or the artist. Even if they did know the basics, the're probably no budget to properly integrate usability to the overall design process. It has to be taken into account at every step of the way, from initial design to implementation, testing and maintenance. A lot of the probems can be solved by simple testing and application of the so-called common sense, but good usability does require time and effort, and usually money.

There's also a misconception abound that UIs with high usability cannot look cool. While mystery meat navigation, distracting animations, inefficient use of screen real estate and other usability problems often rise from the attempt to look cool, stylish design and usability are not mutually exclusive. Just look at the iPod. Or car dashboards.
 

The UI was one of many reasons I left LOTRO..I also use an 8800, and play at 1920x1200 (27" monitor), and even though they added scaling...the text in quests was still too small...
Looking at items has the same font...and I just do not need glasses yet...but man it hurts in this game..

I then went to EQ2, and the ease, and full control of the interface made me totally against any game that does not scale properly anymore...or give me some control of my interface...
Cheers!
 

when you design a good ui (like an ipod, dashboard) it's also fixed size. it goes fubar when you try to scale it.
it's definately not a 1to1 relation, that is the biggest problem with the screensizes of today.

furthermore, when you even begin to scale it's not handy to scale the letters as well, so that has to detach, what about buttons, do they have to grow as well. anyway that is too much effort for little gain. let the users decide if they want to customize the base-ui.

bit off-topic. LUA wasn't created by Blizzard, they only use it and give us an api where we can talk to via LUA to do our own stuff.
(WAR has got LUA as well for the UI)
 

I work in GUI design and usability at a large IT company. I get assigned to projects with customers that have good intentions (usually), but usability is always the first thing sacrificed on the altar of THE SCHEDULE.

Worse, most projects forego hiring someone with expertise in UI design and testing (it's dumb to have one without the other). There's this belief that because someone can write code they also can create a usable interface.

I'm in the Hellgate: London beta and it's really amazing how BAD the interface is there - multiple clicks to get a basic piece of information; important information hidden from the user; screen taken up with "fluff" (e.g., easily 25% of the screen is devoted to a picture of the item you're examining... and the picture doesn't really look any different than what's in your inventory).

There's both art and science to a good interface and what we've seen for many years is that software companies won't focus on usability as long as customers are willing to engage in a host of workarounds.
 

This whole UI question is largely a question of invest and return. An MMORPG forces people to use the UI for thousands of hours, and it has a wide range of possible use cases. In addition, it must be easily maintainable and expandable for the developers. Typical single player games are a) way shorter and b) way more limited than an MMORPG. Not to mention that they're usually sold at one point and not maintained for a long time. That's why it doesn't always make sense to spend millions of dollars for a great, expandable user interface system like the one WoW has (and such a system costs a shitload of developer time and money, it's almost like creating half an operating system from scratch).

And without such a system as a stable basis, creating a scalable UI that actually scales well is nearly impossible.