Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General The skill bar is flat out horrible

So many of you sound like your are professional UI designers and programmers who knows the ins and outs of how to fix his game's catastrophic failure of UI issues, maybe you can donate some of your time and brilliance to create a mod?

UI is made in IGGY and apparently there's no public SDK for that. So it's on larian to modify it/make it possible for us to edit it.

Yes! I've registered on this forum, just to make this thread, but fortunately it is here already. Lack of more quickbars, and lack of ability to have multiple on screen, without having to cycle through them with mouse tens of times in every fight, is really, really annyoing. Early in game this is not a problem, but after 40-50 hours of playing I have about 40 spells on my mage, and also many items, scrolls, potions, etc. which i want quick acces to, without having to open inventory/skills and searching for them every time. This is a serious problem, and can really spoil the fun later in the game. If implementing multiple quickbars on screen is a problem, then at least i would like Larian to give us for example 9, instead of 3, and hotkey to quickly cycle through them.

Well, that is unfortunate.

Since IGGY uses Flash components you can use Flash to help them build a brand new UI. Feel free to create AS3 objects as well to help integrate your UI components. This should be nothing but a days work for you UI experts, right?

http://www.larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=510926#Post510926

People are having trouble modding the UI with the tools they were given.

Regardless, you don't have to be a professional UI designer to recognize the UI sucks especially when it comes to something like skill bars which are better done and/or more customizable in many other games.

If you follow the thread you link they specifically say the issue is the underlying coding, that the engine doesn't have a function to display the information that the modded wants.

This means to do so, the modder will need to add (or rather extend) the engine to meet his/her requirements.

I just hope you guys realize reworking an engine isn't a one or two day thing. Depending on how certain objects are implemented, it maybe as easy as changing a parameter or scrapping and rebuilding entire modules.

Some of the requests I see in this thread border on ridiculousness. When you start a project in programming, it's a painful balance between meeting user requirements in the time and budget restraint given and preventing scope creep.

What do you think that is being asked is pushing it? All people are doing is taking UI's they've used and seen in other games and then think "it would be much better if we had some of that in D:OS", they/we don't necessarily have to know if it is hard or not. These are requests and suggestions, imo pretty good one's at that.

Too bad on how the UI was implemented in terms of being able to mod.

Its what happens when you start implementing things without a lot of plans for the future. Suddenly you've hard coded all sorts of stuff that should have been variable and there are a lot of dependencies that will break things if you change it. Been there, done that.

Fix it. 10 slots for spells, weapons, potions, scrolls... it's awful. Little tiny arrows to click on to access two more rows is even worse! How does this happen? Worst fault in an otherwise great game.

Need more rows visible, perhaps wider rows of 12 - 16 slots. Need a a bindable hotkey to cycle between rows as well, even with larger rows of slots this is needed.

This is the sort of thing that baffles me as to how a game could be designed in such a way. Complete lack of vision and polish. Great game but extremely poor UI hotkey slots.

Hot Fox please. Thanks.

Sadly, the game has multiple UI issues. Nothing serious, but they are still rather tedious.

I would be satisifed if I could at least use the mouse wheel to scroll through hotkey bars, but not even that is possible.

A ridiculous example would be a few posts back, someone wanted to be able to hot key every skill, alternate weapon, scroll and potion in the inventory. I can't remember what I had for breakfast last Monday, and I likely also won't remember if my summon Spider scroll is hot keyed to bar 9 slot 7 or bar 7 slot 9.

If you are going to compare games, a lot of games streamline skill bars by simply limiting how many skills you can have at one time in battle, from Diablo to Pokemon, Guild Wars to Tactics Ogre. Maybe Larian should just do that? Taking away your choices is a lot easier to implement than spending extra resources on UI preferences that could be allocated for other content.

A lot of people use the word suggestion here but finish their post with asking for when the devs will "fix" this. To me, setting a deadline means it is no longer a suggestion.

Let me make an analogy that hopefully will help people understand. Lets say a family buys a car. A couple of days later they all go back to the dealership and say they don't like the speedometer.

Family member Z: its analog needle uses a half circle to display range and I want it to use a full circle.

Dealer: well, we'd have to paint a new background and calibrate the needle to the new range of motion, it would take a few days...

Family member X: wait, analog meters are so hard to read, I want a digital display

Dealer: that's going to take a long time, not only will I have to order the new part, I'd have to modify the engine's wiring to...

Family member Y: I'm 6'5", I hate how the speedometer is 1 inch too low on the dashboard. It breaks my immersion while driving. Raise the speedometer by at least 1 inch.

Dealer: that's impossible, I'd have to have a new dashboard molded and the chassis modified--

Family member Z: actually, I used to drive this yacht and it's amazing. I want the car dashboard to be like the yacht

Does this analogy make sense?

I know scalable, modular programming is the hot trend but if you've been there done that then you know how that exponentially adds to your development time. Unless you want the UI to look like Excel using preset Microsoft UI modules, you are creating a lot of custom UI elements from new assets. You have to make decisions about what is scalable what can't.

Since Larian has neither infinite time or budget to create this perfectly fluid, modular UI, maybe you would like to assist by adding your expertise to this issue? I mean AS3 is just your regular ECMAscript derivative. Every backyard scripter and their grandmother can pick that up.

I agree, really the toolbar is highly insufficient.
Some people said they can't even fill 1 bar, that could be true in some cases but as i play, 2 lone wolves, 1 mage, i get all mage skills for 1 person from all schools and i do use a lot of them during 1 fight, so it gets very annoying to constantly scroll back and forth between bars for skills and for food (eventually).
There should be a way to add more bars on the screen.

This my wow skill bar from IDK how many years ago(WoLK) :



Not only are there far more abilities available, they take up very little of my screen and I have keybound most of them(over 40) and could use most of those fairly quickly in combat. People can learn/develop muscle memory for quite a few keys and it can dramatically improve fluidity and convenience of combat to be able to do so.

All I really would ask for in D:OS though, since it's turn based and we have all the time in the world, is just to conveniently have all my combat skills on the screen at the same time to be able to click them in a timely manner and not need any excessive extra steps to access them.

Well, it might seem like something no one noticed before, but actually this whole skill bar thing has been discussed a lot during beta at the Beta UI Wishlist thread. Many people noticed the hotbar is a little too small for all the things we'd like to use it for and some suggestions were made in order to improve it. If Larian didn't implement any of these suggestions I believe it's because they didn't have enough time or had more import things to worry about before release.

I made a suggestion myself that most people seemed to like and once again I ask your opinion on this. First, in order to make things clearer, I came up with the following thoughts:

Our problem:
- lots and lots of options to choose from (skills, scrolls, arrows, weapons, consumables and so on);
- limited hotbar and screen space;
- sorting through our options and doing what we want is somewhat harder and more time consuming than it should.

What we need:
- Some way to quickly view/sort through all ours options and easily select/activate them.

What could be done:
- Increasing the number of slots in the hotbar would be the most obvious solution, as most people seem to think. But is it really the best solution? Would it really be that great to have 15 to 30 or so slots appearing at once on screen all the time? To my eyes it would just make everything look cluttered and, honestly, quite a mess;
- Maybe having more than 3 rows of skills to cycle through? IMO it seems like a pain even if the buttons were larger or we had a hotkey to do that (though I agree it would help a little). Problem is it would take too many cycling to find what you want and too much trouble to organize all rows;
- But hey, what if we think about something different but still something Larian has already done before. What about having stacks appear when right clicking over a hotbar slot (sort of like the Divine Divinity UI)?

Well, that's not so easy to explain, but here's how it could work (with mockups and all):

1) When right clicking over any empty hotbar slot a stack of all learnt skills separated by type would show up. Left click over any skill shown to occupy that slot. E.g. right clicking over slot number 9 could open something like this:



2) A right click over any occupied slot would open a stack of all learnt skills of that category (or itens of that type). Left click to select and replace the selection for that slot. The same could be done with other skills and itens like potions, arrows, scrolls, weapons, consumables and so on. E.g. right clicking over a slot with Flare would open all learnt fire elemental skills. The same with air elemental skills and so forth...




3) By filling the hotbar with a choice of each skill category and a few item types you would have just about EVERYTHING beautifully sorted and just two clicks away.

That's it... Keyboard numbers would still work as usual and very little UI appearance changes would have to be made in order to accommodate for this functionality. But don't take me wrong... I'm not saying doing this is easy or that it has to be exactly like that. I'm not even demanding that Larian do it. That's just something I would like to see in this great game and so I decided to give away my two cents. So, what do you people think?

PS.: My thanks to Aramintai for coming up with the idea for presenting mockups and for providing one I could use as work material

OK... and this is the skill bar from Pokemon.



Let's say for the sake of argument that the UI from WoLK is the epitome of good UIs that all games should aspire to be. It still only covers 50 or so skills. The other poster said that he had over 78 skills on his lone wolf. Then there are also the healing potions, the 5 resistance 15% potions, the resistance 50% potions, str potions, int potions, str debuff potions, int debuff potions, etc. not to mention the foods pizza, cheese bread, apple pie, dinner, fries, mashed potato, etc. and oh don't forget if you are an archer you have your 20+ different types of arrows... wait that UI won't cover everything either.

Pitheco, it's a really nice mock up

The only limitation I see is when you start getting more skills per category, but it's a good fleshed out idea

Agreed. That's why I believe the problem isn't the number of slots currently presented, but how difficult it is to sort out our skills/stuff and select them. And that's also why I believe Div1 UI is still a good source of inspiration in that department. There you had one button for selecting skills, one for drinking potions and one for changing weapons... and still somehow it felt right. Now we have 10 buttons to do the same things and that's not nearly enough.




Thanks for your feedback Songbird

About the limitation you said, this too has been noticed before and IMO I don't think it would be a problem that bad as there's nothing preventing the stacks of each category to occupy two columns or even being positioned horizontally. There certainly are many ways around having the skills go through the roof.

+1