The Zero-K UI

The recent expo brought some changes to ZK's UI which are bigger than any UI changes we've had in recent history. At the moment there are lots of issues and I can't really say that the changes have been entirely good, but it seems like some changes are going to be inevitable in the way of increasing user friendliness and reducing new player confusion.

In particular I've begun working on cleaning up the widgets menu so that things which should never be disabled will no longer appear in the widgets menu at all. There are some other things I have in mind but I don't really want to do anything that will make people hate me for it later, so for the moment I will instead pose a question:

Should Zero-K have a standard UI?

I'm not talking about removing the choices between various graphical effects widgets and optional UI panels and things, but certain things would be cleaner if they were simply considered part of the ZK interface with no option to disable them.

Some examples:

-newton firezone
-constructor factory guard (which has a toggleable button and settings in initial unit states)
-hold fire when cloaked (which also has a button and settings in initial unit states)
-local team colors (also, does anyone use simplified team colors? imo they should go in the garbage)
-the nuke launched warning widget
-the com morph complete notification widget
-the end of game "overwhelming advantage" announcer widget
-unit rank icons
-unit state icons (shows priority icons when shift is held, for units not using normal prio)
-the keep target widget (makes attack commands behave like 'soft' priority target commands)
-autogroup
-auto-patrol nanos (same as smart nanos but with a cleaner config)

Would not being able to turn off any of those things annoy you?

My goals with all of this are:
1) to prevent newbs from accidentally breaking their game.
2) to clean up and simplify the widgets menu.
3) to standardize the zk interface, or at least get a consensus on what things are ok to make part of the 'standard, built-in ui' and what things should absolutely be optional.

So, do you have a widget that you can't live without? Is there a widget you think should burn in a fire? Speak now or suffer later!

Those widgets seem pretty sensible, though I would also make Spectator Panels default on and have the Economy panel default to not show when spectating. Some adjustments would need to be made for FFA (we don't have an FFA info panel besides the player lists), but for the team game and 1v1 scenarios it would work well.

I'm also in favour of Outlines being default (though GoogleFrog's scaling option should probably be on by default to avoid the effect being overwhelming), since that effect helps a ton in differentiating units from terrain, regardless of map colours.

In Linux, when uninstalling software that belongs to the core system, the system warns you and makes you acknowledge that you know what you are doing in various ways, such as clicking "yes, I'm sure" or even having to type "I know what I am doing" before it lets you uninstall core software. If we use some bucket of essential widgets, then it should ask the user to confirm removal in a serious enough fashion.

Most games and software also have a reset to default settings button which should also restore the UI and widget settings etc.
We could also have settings profiles for screens of different sizes, tournaments, FFAs like we now have for spectator / player.

aeonios this idea seems to be based on misconceptions. You don't seem to know how widget settings work, what they can do, and the overall plan for their configuration.

Zero-K already has a standard UI. It's the default UI. It's what you get if you delete zk_order and zk_data (and some other things depending). This is what you must do before you can properly discuss the default UI. Technically, we are able to implement many configuration options so discussing the non-default UI is fairly pointless. Just make a widget and use it. If its decent then it could be incorporated into ZK as an optional thing. See https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-power-of-defaults/

quote: I'm not talking about removing the choices between various graphical effects widgets and optional UI panels and things, but certain things would be cleaner if they were simply considered part of the ZK interface with no option to disable them.

This statement is not backed up by enough knowledge of how widgets are configured. You didn't know the capabilities of the ingame menu, that it could toggle widgets, that commands can be added solely by widgets.

quote: My goals with all of this are: 1) to prevent newbs from accidentally breaking their game. 2) to clean up and simplify the widgets menu. 3) to standardize the zk interface, or at least get a consensus on what things are ok to make part of the 'standard, built-in ui' and what things should absolutely be optional.

These are good goals but you're going about them weirdly.

The plan to prevent newbs breaking their game is as follows:

• Realize that there is a button in the ingame menu to open the widget menu.
• Hide the widget menu button unless the Adv Settings is ticked.
• Unbind the widget menu from F11 by default.
• Put the tweak mode button next to the widget menu button then hide and unbind it as well.
• Do a massive pass through the ingame menu to remove many of the settings and fix the presentation of many of the options. Especially widget toggling (replace with tickboxes).

This is how to prevent newbs from breaking their game. Cleaning it up is a little nice but not required. Changing what is hidden in the widet meny has barely any impact on this plan. Sure, there are some things that could be hidden but it will only affect hardcore users. Stuff like 'nuke launched warning' should be in the menu because someone who has seen the menu should know what they are doing. Viewing it voids your warranty.

quote: 3) to standardize the zk interface, or at least get a consensus on what things are ok to make part of the 'standard, built-in ui' and what things should absolutely be optional.

As before, there is already a standard ZK interface and you're never going to reach consensus on exactly what it should be. You can make good arguments about intuitiveness, usefulness and first impressions to affect what the default UI is. Even better, you can work on widgets which would work as defaults instead of esoteric things.

That's not to say that esoteric things are bad. It's just that someone making some hardcore widget usable by experienced players is more like someone who is a hardcore player, not someone developing a UI which can be presented to new users. Esoteric things even have a chance to be cleaned up a bit and filter back to the default UI.

gajop offtopic. Did you test with the default settings?

In order to improve newb experience, it would be better to improve the standard UI settings. I don't know how they are currently. You can simplify the non-Adv settings, but be really carefull with removing Adv settings!