Small window size of Launcher & Updater

[Weissrolf]

Why do I have to scroll in some small window while most of my expensive 30" display remains unused?

https://i.imgur.com/yFJOAuz.png

It's even worse in the Updater/Preferences:

https://i.imgur.com/9ynUkqn.png

Please fix both to make full use of available screen estate.

[LordEntrails]

Do you really think this issue is an important issue to take developer time away from things like dynamic lighting, performance improvements etc?

Why are you not using the Idea Informer site to add suggestions such as this so that the community can vote on the ideas to get some relative importance to them?

[Weissrolf]

Indeed I do. There are usability issues and they add up. Forgoing sane UX implementation while promising some future version of dynamic lighting for months is not going to cut it forever. Dynamic lighting is a nice gimmick, bad UI experience is a more constant and thus more important issue.

The UI not scaling properly to screens larger than 10" is an issue, not an idea.

But feel free to clean up the mess that is FG's idea informer before asking paying customers to go there (which I even do despite being revolted by its current state).

[Zacchaeus]

Idea informer has changed https://fantasygroundsunity.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portals

[LordEntrails]

I've come to realize something and I'm not yet sure what I should do about it. Maybe nothing but I fear doing that will lead other users of this community to suffer as has been expressed to me via PMs.

In the meantime, I would ask that you please take several moments to reflect on the following. Do you realize that in the last few months you have been responsible for more threads being closed on these forums than combined over the previous years that I have been here? There are two possible non-exclusive reasons for this, moderation practices have changed, or you. Please take some of the time you put towards FG into consideration of that fact and perhaps you will think of what you can do to help make this community a better place instead of a more stressful and contentious one. I appreciate your consideration of my request.

[Weissrolf]

Astounding indeed, considering that neither do I use derogative language like other members ("Pff, blabla") nor is it my practice to repeatedly blame customers when they criticize the product. Let's just leave it at that and reiterate your quote from the last closed thread:

Experience shows that driving cars has frequently led to dead people. Simply put, the technical reason(s) do NOT matter.

G'nite.

[Zarestia]

I don't know why some discussions have become so heated in recent weeks...
This UI sizing behavior has been there for as long as I know. It would be for sure way better if it would reasonable size, navigation in the shown elements is difficult sometimes. I think most people would agree. We can debate forever wether this should be a bug report or feature request. In the end the devs decide, so let's stop arguing for the sake of arguing and give the devs the best possible feedback. :)

Just some opinion from a lurker.

[Zacchaeus]

Whilst I have no issue at all with reporting things it is perhaps the manner in which things are reported that is the problem here.

There is a world of difference between posting something like this:

"I have a 30" monitor and the launcher screen looks quite small in it. Whilst I appreciate that the vast majority of users will have much smaller screens and therefore the launcher screen will look perfectly fine in them I would appreciate if some consideration be given to maybe scaling the launcher screen to be more fitting to monitor size."

Rather than:

"I have a big monitor and the launcher screen is small. I don't care what anyone else's experience is and I'm not interested in what your priorities are; just get it fixed."

I'd suggest that the first sample might get a more sympathetic hearing - or at least it would generate discussion about the point at issue rather than people becoming defensive and targetting the poster rather than the post. It's just a thought, though; feel free to ignore it and plough your own furrow.

[Weissrolf]

I used neither form of reporting and surely did not suggest that other users can just s*ck it. The Launcher is 980x720 pixels, the tiny updater/settings is 550x630 pixels, both of which use large fonts and boxes to squeeze even less information in there. That Extensions frame is 330x130 pixels, less than modern smart watches, it can only display 5 lines of text and not even to full width.

How may users have screens of such low resolution and where did I suggest that I don't care about them? In fact, I do care about them. UI practices have been around for decades that allow users to resize a window to their liking and have UI elements dynamically change accordingly. The Launcher screen is not perfectly fine on small screens, in my personal opinion it is one of the ugliest and least utilitarian screens I had to use for years.

Even on a 4.7" phone screen 30% of the width is wasted while the text does not fit in. It's a true testament of bad UI design that does not care enough for its users.

https://i.imgur.com/KrZMER0.png

Arguing that it has been like this forever is rather underlining the point, but I am shocked that this supposed counter-argument comes up repeatedly. No innovation, no future. And it is tiring that we keep discussing people in support threads instead of technical topics/issues.

[Zarestia]

My use of it is not a 'supposed counter-argument', just an observation with no further meaning behind it. I have seen about one post in the last months about the extension window being too small in the forum, one could conclude that most people don't mind. The now old ideainformer shows no request like that for me.
Back to the technical part...
I see three problems/bugs/ugly things/whatever from your posts. Here are some thoughts:

1. Launcher takes too much screen space with blank nothingless
Only occurs when FGU starts maximized. FGU has to start maximized for the game to be automatically maximized after loading/joiing the campaign. There was a thread about maximization a few days/weeks ago.
Suggestion: Start the launcher windowed with a fixed size, start the campaign maximized.

2. Extension frame is too small, doens't scale, can't read all extension names and much scrolling is tedious
This is not present in FGC as much, the frames in the launcher are arranged differently.
Suggestions: Make the frames scaleable. Rearrange the frames for better visibility and management of the campaign and extension frame, see FGC.

3. The explorer popup from Settings->Advanced does not use the standard OS explorer, difficult to read and navigate
All other 'open folder' / 'open in explorer' buttons do not have this behaviour.
Suggestion: Use the OS standard explorer for these buttons.

I will link this thread in an improvement suggestion. Most has been said about the complaints, I think.

[fubeca150]

@Weissrolf, I have agreed with many of the issues you have brought up, personally experienced several, and can see why they would leave you irate. However, you tend to bring that anger straight into your posts, and have a very confrontational tone when you report issues and make suggestions. That is best left for the development group you work with as a tester that knows you personally and can flip you the bird in a friendly manner when you push too hard. In a written form your tone comes across much too harsh and condescending, and that's from my third-person perspective.

I suggest that when you report issues here you fall back to the simple but complete form of reporting issues. Namely, "When I do [A] I experienced [B] but I expected [C]". Any advice beyond that might be helpful, but it's typically better to leave it out unless you know the team well enough to anticipate the additional details they will ask for. Given the amount of pushback I've observed in your threads I would suggest that you don't know how to anticipate that.

As an example, "When I use the launcher I have tried expanding the screen to take advantage of my larger screen size because I have lots of campaigns and many extensions and navigation of 15 campaigns and 5 extensions at a time is not sufficient. I expected to have a more responsive UI with expanding UI elements (such as the campaign and extensions lists) to fill up some of the newly available area, but instead it just leaves the launcher section centered in the area and shows more background area."

[Moon Wizard]

The launcher uses the defined UI scale for the launcher screen. To increase the size of the launcher text, you would increase the UI scale, which gets used in both launcher and tabletop modes.

Regards,
JPG

[Weissrolf]

Thanks for the answer. The intention was not to increase the text-size, though, but to make more use of the free screen estate. As in less text truncation and less scrolling necessary, because the window size is fixed and small. And in the Updater/Settings the path explorer dialog does not even fit into the window boundaries.