Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta Beta UI Wishlist (Menus, Controls, Etc.)

I'm totally with you on this - I'd like all my spells to be readily available. Together with new keyboard hotkeys to switch between the bars, we'd be going places.

It might be too late to implement anything new, but still I'd like to suggest something concerning the slot shortage:

What about stacks for slots in the hotbar?

By that I mean something like right clicking over any slot to display above it a list of skills of the same type as the one currently equipped. For example, with Flare equipped in slot 1 a right click over it would display a stack of all my learnt fire elemental skills. Then I could choose any of them to replace it with a single click. The same would happen for skills from other schools of magic and could even work for scrolls, potions, consumables... Each item type appearing as stacks in a manner not so different from the interface of DD.

That way a wizard could have his/her hotbar equipped with all four elementals in slots 1-2-3-4, witchcraft in the fifth, have one slot for potions, one for scrolls, one for consumables and still have two free slots left for any personal preferences or even warrior/ranger skills.

Simple and easy as that! No dragging, no hotbar cycling or the like.
And of course it would be possible to do the same in the second and third bars for even more flexibility.

What do you guys think?

hmm, don't know if it's possible to do that for the deadline ( adding 2 more bars is simpler I think )

Pitheco, why didn't I think of that? This would be awesome. It would be a pretty significant change to the interface, but at least you've put the idea out there for Larian to consider - we'll see.

Or maybe a slightly simpler way to implement Pitheco's idea, at least for skills/spells, would be to make right-clicking on the "Fire" (for example) skills toolbar slot open the window showing the "Fire" page of the character's skillbook. Just a thought.

Nice and simple idea, Mikus! I would greatly appreciate that.

I realize Larian already has too many things to do, so I wonder if this is the kind of implementation that could be patched in later or added through mods. Anyone with better knowledge on the subject able to comment?

Pitheco - I'm no modder myself, but I wouldn't be surprised (if the editor is as powerful and user-friendly as promised) if this kind of thing is added later. Good point.

Still, I really hope at least the simple-ish UI fixes listed in this thread's OP that have been frequently requested on the forums (e.g. consistent item stacking, a key ring, inventory sorting, keyboard hotkey selection and toggling, etc.) are implemented by Larian before final release. Fingers crossed...

Yeah, me too! I believe eventually they will find a way to spare the time and effort to implement these little things as many of them will definitely improve the game and essentially none seems excessively complicated when compared to huge things like proper game balancing or discovering and eliminating every single crazy bug there could possibly be. I mean, how hard is it to include more keyboard shortcuts or a key ring, after all?

IMHO, good UI is of ultimate importance in a game where everybody is expecting to play for dozens of hours and has a tremendous effect on the enjoyment one could get from it. And personally, as long as the game feels right (must not be a chore to play), has good gameplay and is fun, I'm ok with a few crashes and a bit of unbalance (so, a highly intelligent-magic wielding-all four elements empowered wizard is capable of dealing more damage than an absent minded-body pumping-sword swinging warrior or a dexterous-master pickpocket-dagger stabbing rogue? Reeeeeeally? Who could conceive such nonsense! )

Well, don't get me wrong... I really hope the developers manage to do everything they need to do and deliver our dream RPG (hint: they're very very close).

Way to go, Larian!

So Swen just tweeted a note about their plans to fix the Repair/Blacksmithing mechanic... now I'm waiting for the tweet about item stacking, key rings, inventory sorting, keyboard hotkey fixes, etc. Give us another cryptic note, c'mon!

Personally, I would look more forward to the Steam newsmessage than a tweet... as that would also accompany the patch

Mikus, that post is too hard to read. Could you please add a space or two between each point, thanks.

Quite some time ago, someone suggested that in combat, as you move the mouse around to determine how far you can move, the skills on your skillbar dim or highlight to indicate if you can still use those skills if you were to walk to that point. A Larian dev did reply to that and said he thought that was a good idea. I wonder if that's on the to-do list or was scrapped.

That too is a great idea and would really help! You know, with that said I had a sudden realization that maybe I have counted and compared those remaining APs a little too many times.

Mikus, can you still edit the OP list to include these new suggested improvements? Oh, and by the way, I agree with Cutter about the spacing thing...

Yeah, the spacing in the OP does make it harder to read.

Some UI improvement suggestions for co-op:

• I should be able to use punctuation and dashes in the chat lot, to differentiate between questions and statements.
• I'd actually like the chat log to be present in the multiplayer character creation screen, so you can do things like ask what class your partner is going to be before the game starts, which is sort-of important for building a balanced party. Right now you still have to use the Steam Overlay for that, which works for Steam, but won't for the GoG version.
• For co-op, icons over the head of a player could help let their partner know what they're doing. Several times today my partner wondered what I was doing. Icons for "typing", "trading", "talking to NPC", "in menu" could help/
• A way to "ping" things in combat, so when you type things like "focus this one down" you know which one to refer to.
• Placing markers on the map could also "ping" for your partner's attention as well.

Cutter/Pitheco/Stabbey - I wish I could edit the OP to make it less wall-o'-text-y, and also to add several ideas from this thread to the main list, but apparently I edited the post way too many times already, and now I'm locked out of the "Edit" option (LOL). At least it seems Larian is making an effort to read through new forum posts, so as long as these interface/control ideas are somewhere in this thread, they should be aware of them. Great ideas BTW.

And Hassat - you're right about the Steam message... it would also probably be easier to read than Swen's handwriting.

There is a 48 hour limit on editing posts. If you want to quote it and edit / add to it, I can move the result to the original post.

hi,
don't know if it has been mentioned yet, (or if this is a bug) but a "true" pause button would be great. For the moment, using ESC tu display the game menu doesn't pause anything, at all. Charracters still walk in the backgroud, spells effects disapear ...

I'm not sure if this has been requested, but I'd like to see a way to scale the UI. I can change to a lower resolution to make the UI larger, but then text is blurry. My monitor looks best at 1920x1080 and the text is very sharp, but icons and text are a bit too small for these old eyes

Raze - thanks a lot for offering to fix the OP (and good to know about that 48-hour limit on editing posts); could you please replace the two lists currently in the OP with the below big list? Also, please remove the "1.0.231" from the thread title, since these issues seem to span several versions of the beta. Thanks again for your help!

Everyone else - hopefully the new OP will be a bit easier to read; I also tried to add new ideas from within the thread where there didn't seem to be disagreement. Sorry if I missed anything, but at least it seems Larian is making an effort to read new posts, so feel free to keep adding new UI suggestions to this thread. Cheers!


[updated list moved to original post.. Raze]

It was, but unfortunately isn't feasible (see the topic font).