A friendly and consistent UI

[octavian]

My wishes for a friendly and consistent UI. Obviously I can't speak for anybody else but maybe others agree. It's a big list.

Instead of repeating endlessly, forward and backward movement keys for such and such, I'm going to say that it would be very nice if every UI could be navigated exclusively with the keyboard if desired.

Inventory UI

1. The amount of fuel in lanterns displayed at the top left of their icon like in the case of water, jerry cans and lantern fuel.
   
2. The amount of calories displayed at the top left of food icons.
   
3. The warmth and windchill bonus, along with their associated symbols, displayed at the top left and right of the icons of clothes.
   
4. When in the inventory of a container, moving all items from one inventory to another moves the focus to the inventory that has items. You click fast to move everything, focus follows the last item and you start taking items back from the other inventory. You shouldn't infinitely loop if you keep clicking. Alternatively, or in addition, right clicking on the arrow would move everything.
   
5. Holding Shift while clicking the arrow between player and container inventory moves the entire stack without prompt. Holding Ctrl on click moves one item from the stack without prompt. By Shift I mean the player's bind for run and by Ctrl the bind for crouch. At least, that's how I'd expect it to work.
   
6. Same for holding Shift or Ctrl when clicking the drop button and picking items up.
   
7. Holding Ctrl while clicking an item in either player or container inventory drops one item from the stack without prompt. Holding Shift drops the entire stack without prompt. With the addition of a Drop button next to the Back button in container inventory. So both players that rely more on the keyboard and those that rely more on the mouse can conveniently drop items.
   Inspection UI. The one when you pick something up.
   
8. If picking up items, holding Shift or Ctrl on click bypasses the inspection UI.
   
9. Warmth and windchill bonus is displayed.
   HUD
   
10. The amount of fuel your lantern has should briefly be displayed on screen when you light it.
    
11. While it's lit, the amount of fuel your lantern has should be displayed like calories are, for brief intervals at certain thresholds. Say at 1, 0.75, 0.5, 0.25, and 0.1 Liters.
    
12. Along with the progress bar that appears at the top of the screen while eating or drinking, another one like it could be added below it that shows your hunger or thirst. I find myself eating, pressing Tab, looking at the bar, deciding to eat more, and enter inventory again. And Tab doesn't work from the inventory.
    
13. In the case of the few items that drop stacked, like matches, the size of the stack, the circle that you get in the top right of the icon in the inventory is also be displayed on the tooltip.
    Rest UI
    
14. The estimation of time you get in the survival panel should also be in the resting UI.
    Crafting UI
    
15. Along with required materials, how many of them you have should also be shown. Instead of "x number" being displayed, as in x3, number in inventory - requirement could be displayed instead, as in 4-3.
    
16. Being able to go backwards, from recipe 1 to the last one.
    
17. Making the page taller so "tool required" would be a part of it, below "required materials", instead of having it to the far top right of the screen.
    
18. The amount of time to spend crafting combined with the "begin crafting" button. "Craft" or "Craft for 0.5 hours", in the latter case arrows to the left and right of the button, like the pages have, would adjust the amount of time.
    
19. Perhaps a better approach would be to have the page bigger and to the right of screen center and a list of recipes to left of screen center. Especially if more and more crafting recipes will be added. Very approximately speaking, something like the actions UI. List on the left, page on the right.
    Actions UI.
    
20. The actions UI feels bad. It feels like it's from a different game. What I dislike about it most is the extra screen required to select the tool. Also, it's very big, especially the harvest, repair etc. list on the left, and the tool selection screen. I can understand this if the reasoning behind it is that players with controllers would be on average further from the screen. But everything else in every other UI, particularly the inventory, is comparatively small, so much so that it would not be legible from the distance that would require the actions UI to be so big.
    
21. The inspection UI should be the basis for the actions UI. It's the only other UI in which you can rotate objects and they should have in common more rather than less. You would get the same information for the item. Description, weight and condition. Regardless of tab, harvest, repair and so on. Because now for example item condition is not displayed in the harvest tab although it would be useful. Also, the condition bar is green in the actions UI and white in the inspection UI.
    
22. Along with required materials, how many of them you have should also be shown. Same thing for harvesting yields. It could be of the form ( number in inventory ) +/- yield/requirement. So for example harvesting cloth would be expressed as 4(number in inventory)+1(amount harvested).
    
23. Like in the crafting UI, the required tool should be shown underneath required materials. Even if the game tells you what you need if you press the button and don't have it. If only for consistency with the crafting UI.
    I'm sure there's more, but it's late.

[bethany]

I love detailed feedback =)

The UI is being overhauled a bit to make room for controller compatibility...Even once that's done, it's likely other changes will happen in the future. I'll take some notes from your list and pass them along. Thanks for sharing!

[elloco999]

Since this is still an alpha game, (parts of) the UI is (are) being redesigned constantly to see what works best. I've been playing TLD since version .127 and have seen several overhauls of the UI. It's very much a work in progress, but in general it is improving. When the game gets more towards being feature-complete the final interface will be decided upon and all parts of the interface will be done that way. Until then there will probably always be some inconsistency among different parts of the UI.

Feedback is obviously very important to make sure that final UI is as good as it possibly can be, so keep it coming