by Alayan » 03 Aug 2018, 10:45
A few things :
- About the reasons for why the current UI must be replaced (page 1), the only one which seems to be hardly fixable is usage on touchscreen (as Auria said, keyboard/controller navigation has already received improvements and will receive more). The thing is, a smartphone and a PC, while both computers at the core, are vastly different in how they are used and in their capabilities. The "one-thing-to-fit-all" strategy leads to compromising by not taking advantage of the characteristics of a given platform and dumbing down to the lowest common denominator. This produces horrendous things like WIndows 8 shitty metro UI, forced on mouse-and-keyboard users in the name of touchscreen compatibility. I'm adamant I don't want anything close to this happening to STK. Having only a few big buttons because it's better on smartphones would worsen the PC experience. PC and smartphones are different beasts, and while indeed having two different UIs is more dev-time consuming (certainly an issue for a small team), it is the only proper way to cover adequately such different platforms.
- Many suggested icons are nice, though the circles-as-octogons thing is too much as others have noted already. I'm also unsure of how that style would fit with things like the acceleration/nitro indicators. (Edit : also, the semi-transparency for the bubblegum icon is a bad idea imho)
- I'm strongly in favor of making icons selectable, in the same way as skins. This doesn't look like an overwhelming task, and I'll probably try to do what's needed for it myself. Such an approach should make everybody happy,whatever their personal preference. Shipping with two icons sets in the base version would have a small size penalty, but if the PNGs are optimized, I suspect it to be acceptable even for the android version (which is the only place where it may matter).