Some UI Suggestions


Aduron

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Posted

I have a couple of small UI suggestions, let me know what you all think.

1) One thing I really love about the new patch is the ability to pull torches from fires, as I hate wasting fire and sometimes don't want to boil more water. As a result, I've been using a lot more torches this last week, which brings me to two things that I think would make torches MUCH more user friendly:

a) I've noticed that basically every time a wolf finds me, it's been a little while since I lit it, my torch is on its last legs, and after brandishing it once it dies and the wolf charges me. That the torch dies is totally fair, it's the lack of warning that bothers me. It's nearly impossible to tell the condition of the torch, the only way to do it is to open the inventory and look for it, but you can't do that with a wolf in your face. I recognize (and LOVE) the need for a minimal UI, so can we have the little duration (condition) slider bar appear each time we brandish, and in the last 5 in-game minutes of a torch's life, and be hidden otherwise?

b) I for one really like that torches act differently than flares, and they don't scare wolves away. I like the brandishing mechanic, but this is huge: I accidentally do all the time! Mostly when trying to interact with small objects. This causes it to run out prematurely, leaving me in the cold with the wolves. Please consider switching LMB and RMB for torches, that would be the only change necessary. I'm already used to the "starting to extinguish the lantern" with LMB, and it doesn't cause any issues when I'm trying to pick things up.

2) I've had a bunch of issues late game with all my matches deteriorating at the same time, and I finally figured out why! The fire-starting window has matches show up in order of decreasing condition. This means that if I just push the "make a fire" button, I use the highest condition matches, which doesn't make sense, I should use the lowest condition matches first. Obviously, I can navigate through to the lower condition ones, but I can't see the condition of my matches in that window, so it requires me to memorize the amount of matches of lower condition that I have. Lately, I just click left once to the lowest quality wood matches, which works when I remember, but still I forget often enough that I would benefit greatly from this. Food is cooked in increasing order, which makes sense in the same way that this would.

3) This is something I'm not 100% sure about, but cooking meat might benefit from having a window similar to the water one, so that you don't spend 3-4 real life minutes just clicking "cook....cook.....cook...." etc. Make it up to the players to do the math, like we need to for water. What are people's thoughts on this? I've seen it come up on the forums from time to time, I have mixed thoughts about it.

Posted

I like your torch ideas I also have had problems knowing when the torch was about to go out but I think that it would be better to just visually show the torch going out kind of like how campfires die down over time.

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