New UI - same as the old UI

[rpbarrett111]

SW need an UX designer.

Yeah. That's where I'm coming from. I apologize to all for being unduly harsh. From my perspecitve, hey, I come in as a noob to FG, but not a noob to the world. It's kind of shocking and worrying to me that D&D Beyond has sort of appropriated the VTT thing with a Disney size art team. Worrisome, because FG is the real deal for gaming in a much broader range of games than just D&D. I'm an old guy. I'd like to see the hardcore gamers win - not the bigger corporation(s).

FG is like an operating system, and I can see it' s quite powerful, especially once one tacks on some of the addons from SW and the community. Incredible, really. Like a several other community sourced type of things, FG is an awesome creation.

I'm coming from the standpoint of, hey, hire a digital painter. I don't think it's bad to say the thing can look a lot better. It's constructive. Like I say, take a look at the competition, because they're killing it.

Looks carry over to function of course . . . which got me thinking - they're really going in a nice Adobe Photoshop sort of direction with the map layers. Very perfect for the VTT. And so, I I would think InDesign or Adobe Acrobat then are nice inspirational models for a UI interface . . . how to present this large mass of interelated tools. They've had decades to work that out and the analogy to FG is thorough.

Tack on Discord and you've got my dream come true.

But man, at the table, I need to have the option of an experience where the portal is of my composition. Know what I mean? Composition. I want to be in my game world a lot more here. I'm actually considering being a DM for a living. So imagin the ability to have a custom map, tokens, labels, sounds, lighting, icons, and yes, lists comprised of nothing but an atmosphere I've crafted from, yes, some rented materials. This will be gathered in a large room, with FG on a big monitor, running a localhost session that includes all the characters' markers. It's a tactical display and reference resource, mainly. My players are seated about a large area with their own character sheets in hand. My part is the presentation of the map and story. So it's like that. When there's all this fumbling . . . Nah. Can't have that. There's too much I'm runing. Everything the players ever see needs to match my mood and story, and everything I do needs to likewise be the touch of a button. It's kind of like showtime.

I simply don't want the final experience to include wading through tiny lists of 8 pt font items like "PC Customiztion Class Pack - Druid." I NEED that stuff to run the game yes, but I need at some point not to be scrolling through it.

I figured that if I could simply link to groups then I could do it. I could make an image map that says, "Rappan Athuk" (in my case) and on that image map have links to just the classes, images, etc. that I want. To skip the scrolling. For my players - people who don't want to scroll through lists of all that stuff. Sorry, they just don't. They told me so.

So you know, I'm not a developer, but I did figure the ability to link to groups would accomplish a whole lot. Shortcuts icons to one's own select groups would be another idea, I guess. I think if you guys did either of those things, I could work with that.

BTW - I just had to share this. So a party of adventurers comes up the trail. They're halted by a very large pile of droppings in the middle of the trail. The Ranger bends down to examine the droppings. The Fighter asks him, "Cave bear?" The Ranger says, "No. Druid."

But yeah, sorry if I come off as a ****. I've worked in graphics for 30 years. We get very, very used to everyone criticizing art and changing it all the time. It hurts and annoys every time, but the best thing to do is keep changing **** all the time anyhow. I was just suggesting some ground up rebuild of some key parts in Unity and getting some fresh digital matte painting talent. About five new hires. Full-time. Salaried. You kind of have to make FG the Metallica of this whole thing at this point. Old school. True Solid. Can do anything the other guys can do . . . AND offers the DETAILS, the gaming system versatility, etc. that the hardcore VTT people want. So I'd like to see them do that, is all.

[seycyrus]

Yeah, like the last 14 times I used roll20, the integrated sound and voice chats were terrible. No thank you!

[DM_BK]

I apologize if I came off as hostile or trying to drive anyone away. That was not my intent. I agree with most of the feedback on this thread. It IS good feedback.

It was my hope that I helped you understand why things are so funky/alien seeming with the way FG functions. As stated previously, things have come a long way and continue to improve bit-by-bit almost every week now - with the limits being that we can't expect the over-arching UI design to disappear....I think that's mostly where things will not change much.

The lacking of sound used to seem like a strange hole in FG features set...but eventually I came to realize that other products do sound better. It's not likely that FG is ever going to have VOIP features that could rival Discord or a dozen other products out there that specialize in those services. So it's my thinking that they shouldn't spend limited resources there trying to reinvent something others do well already.

I keep thinking we used to blame the "Norwegian design" for the bizarro way the UI worked (by the standards I am/was accustomed to). I can't recall with certainty now but it's stuck in my head that this wasn't originally designed by people in the US. It's well known that UI design is heavily influenced by culture. This isn't a bad or good thing, it just is and you can see it distinctly in many products across the globe.

[Nylanfs]

The original design was from two guys from Norway (Denmark, Finland?). I still have Ville's card somewhere.

[Springroll]

The original design was from two guys from Norway (Denmark, Finland?). I still have Ville's card somewhere.

It was a program from Finland I believe...

[Jiminimonka]

One thing that could be improved in FGU is the mouse accuracy for window selection.

Like the mouse is on the desktop before the cursor for resizing the window changes.

border.png

Same when trying to click windows that are stacked, sometimes you have to move the window on top even though the mouse has plenty of room to "touch" the window beneath it.