I remember when I was in college for game development. At the time Mirrors Edge was in development. My instructor for UI made us study it as the perfect example of a good UI. The dot wasn’t so much a reticle as an anti nausea measure.
This was also a time where UI layers were occasionally just made in Adobe Flash (I think it was just after Adobe bought out Macromedia) so having a UI with crazy out of theme colours and issues syncing with the rest of the game was a real problem.
Designers felt the UI layers were often clunky, mechanical and in the way damaging the immersive experiences that had been becoming increasingly more “life like”. It also saves a lot of localization cost.
I didn’t end up in that industry but it seems like this became the norm for quite a while. Though I am starting to see better accessibility in game UI’s games depending less on audio or visual only feedback. Which is good as we are all getting older.
This was also a time where UI layers were occasionally just made in Adobe Flash (I think it was just after Adobe bought out Macromedia) so having a UI with crazy out of theme colours and issues syncing with the rest of the game was a real problem.
This was the reason early Skyrim mods rarely had custom UI*. Skyrim’s user interface is done in Flash and making even minor changes is a huge pain in the ass.
I believe Skywind and Skyblivion both ran into problems implementing features from the old games due to this. Skywind actually had to scrap an entire feature set (their original implementation of enchanting, IIRC?) very late in development because the feature’s developer left long ago and didn’t share their Flash project files, meaning the team couldn’t change it to work with later mod builds.
* I think there are modder-created UI libraries to make it easier now, but it was a huge problem back in the day.
Ugh, of course it is. What’s one more outdated component in an engine that’s just a quarter century of hacks duct-taped together? I wouldn’t be surprised if Bethesda are still battling technical debt from its NetImmerse/Gamebryo days.
I remember when I was in college for game development. At the time Mirrors Edge was in development. My instructor for UI made us study it as the perfect example of a good UI. The dot wasn’t so much a reticle as an anti nausea measure.
This was also a time where UI layers were occasionally just made in Adobe Flash (I think it was just after Adobe bought out Macromedia) so having a UI with crazy out of theme colours and issues syncing with the rest of the game was a real problem.
Designers felt the UI layers were often clunky, mechanical and in the way damaging the immersive experiences that had been becoming increasingly more “life like”. It also saves a lot of localization cost.
I didn’t end up in that industry but it seems like this became the norm for quite a while. Though I am starting to see better accessibility in game UI’s games depending less on audio or visual only feedback. Which is good as we are all getting older.
This was the reason early Skyrim mods rarely had custom UI*. Skyrim’s user interface is done in Flash and making even minor changes is a huge pain in the ass.
I believe Skywind and Skyblivion both ran into problems implementing features from the old games due to this. Skywind actually had to scrap an entire feature set (their original implementation of enchanting, IIRC?) very late in development because the feature’s developer left long ago and didn’t share their Flash project files, meaning the team couldn’t change it to work with later mod builds.
* I think there are modder-created UI libraries to make it easier now, but it was a huge problem back in the day.
Still true for starfield, mind you.
Ugh, of course it is. What’s one more outdated component in an engine that’s just a quarter century of hacks duct-taped together? I wouldn’t be surprised if Bethesda are still battling technical debt from its NetImmerse/Gamebryo days.
Fallout 4 does have a bug that I first encountered in Morrowind.