Thread: Dev Diary Feedback: New Main Menu

As LOTRO grows and new UI features are developed, like the new Skirmish Join and Skirmish panels, we have found that we can't just keep adding buttons to the toolbar at the bottom of your screen (or the border of your Radar) to launch the new panels.

Read more about the new main menu and join the conversation!

This is going to look great on high res monitors but can you scale the list down for people that have lower resolutions?

for those of us who use the hot key options, is it possible to remove the buttons? they take up precious real estate on my tiny monitor =]

Originally Posted by c4maniac

This is going to look great on high res monitors but can you scale the list down for people that have lower resolutions?

The Main Menu scales together with the toolbar. So if you have your toolbar set to display at 1.3 (under UI Options), the Main Menu will look bigger as well.

Hopefully this addresses your concern.

Originally Posted by Chroner

for those of us who use the hot key options, is it possible to remove the buttons? they take up precious real estate on my tiny monitor =]

If you want to remove the buttons, you'll need a custom skin. Take a look at www.lotrointerface.com

Skins will need to be updated for SoM, but I'm sure it will happen pretty soon.

Originally Posted by Ransroth

If you want to remove the buttons, you'll need a custom skin. Take a look at www.lotrointerface.com

Skins will need to be updated for SoM, but I'm sure it will happen pretty soon.

i was hoping you wouldnt say that =[

When the first version of this feature appeared on our Preview Test Server, Isengard, one proposal got a lot of support: Our testers wanted to also be able to remap the buttons on the right hand side, the ones that open the different bags from your inventory.

You mean the "crayon eaters" had a good idea, provided meaningful feedback, and helped shape a new feature into something even better? Unpossible.

Originally Posted by Chroner

i was hoping you wouldnt say that =[

There are some really nice skins out there, and they're very simple to use. You should give them a try.

Originally Posted by Ransroth

The Main Menu scales together with the toolbar. So if you have your toolbar set to display at 1.3 (under UI Options), the Main Menu will look bigger as well.

Hopefully this addresses your concern.

Ya it does thanks. I play this game on a laptop too usually on a boring sunday afternoon which isn't so big screened and everything in game is huge on the screen even at .7

Originally Posted by Ransroth

If you want to remove the buttons, you'll need a custom skin. Take a look at www.lotrointerface.com

Skins will need to be updated for SoM, but I'm sure it will happen pretty soon.

maybe...most likely not....very few of those skins got updated with MoM.

the most popular ones are still SoA versions.

Will there be some sort of new menu system for hunter porting locations? Right now I have one quickslot bar dedicated to nothing but porting, and every slot is filled - I would hate to keep having to shuffle ports around as new locations are added!

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Originally Posted by KMSone

Will there be some sort of new menu system for hunter porting locations? Right now I have one toolbar dedicated to nothing but porting, and every slot is filled - I would hate to keep having to shuffle ports around as new locations are added!

I've heard rumours that skills are usable from the skill menu, so you wouldn't even need to slot them if that's true. If not... Ew.

I'm happy with any UI improvements, but less than ecstatic about these button improvements. The reason being, it doesn't really address the awful limitations of the UI in LOTRO.

Over the last couple of years most custom UI modders have been making buttons/bags transparent in order to gain screen real estate or use it more efficiently.

Indeed the default UI components do not truly scale with most typical screen resolutions so it is simply preferable to make them invisible.

Major UI issues:
1. experience bar text illegible
2. unit frames have buffs/debuffs grow down with no option to grow upwards depending on frame's screen position
3. UI components inexplicably attached to other UI components (ie. xp bar and main action bar)
4. No true scaling for UI fonts, they become either too fuzzy to read or too small too matter.

The button changes unfortunately address a portion of the LOTRO UI that most custom mod users have already dispensed with due to the glaring deficiencies present in the default UI.

Love the concept of the new main menu. I would love to be able to use the inventory slots area to hotkey Food and and potions. Will that be an option?

This is great! I always thought those bag buttons were a waste (who doesn't open all their bags at once with I?)

Any way to get button customization set up as drag & drop from the main menu, rather than through options? Good to know it's there, though, there are buttons on my bar that have never been touched.

Originally Posted by KMSone

Will there be some sort of new menu system for hunter porting locations? Right now I have one quickslot bar dedicated to nothing but porting, and every slot is filled - I would hate to keep having to shuffle ports around as new locations are added!

Not right now. Having some kind of a panel which lists your travel skills is something that might happen in some future version, it's definitely on our radar.

Originally Posted by ndbot

I've heard rumours that skills are usable from the skill menu, so you wouldn't even need to slot them if that's true. If not... Ew.

I can confirm those rumours - you'll be able to activate skills directly from the Active Skills panel. So you'll be able to open that up, hit the [-] button, expand just the travel section and select your port.

Originally Posted by Kuldebar

I'm happy with any UI improvements, but less than ecstatic about these button improvements. The reason being, it doesn't really address the awful limitations of the UI in LOTRO.

Over the last couple of years most custom UI modders have been making buttons/bags transparent in order to gain screen real estate or use it more efficiently.

Indeed the default UI components do not truly scale with most typical screen resolutions so it is simply preferable to make them invisible.

Major UI issues:
1. experience bar text illegible
2. unit frames have buffs/debuffs grow down with no option to grow upwards depending on frame's screen position
3. UI components inexplicably attached to other UI components (ie. xp bar and main action bar)
4. No true scaling for UI fonts, they become either too fuzzy to read or too small too matter.

The button changes unfortunately address a portion of the LOTRO UI that most custom mod users have already dispensed with due to the glaring deficiencies present in the default UI.

They might find these buttons more useful now that the player can assign any function to any of those buttons.

Originally Posted by wheelercub3

Love the concept of the new main menu. I would love to be able to use the inventory slots area to hotkey Food and and potions. Will that be an option?

I'm afraid not - The only actions you can currently assign to them are panel type actions. So you will be able to have them open the Skirmish Join panel, or options panel, or open the Lorebook, or Destiny Perks, etc. But not a particular item in your inventory, that would be a considerably different thing.

Originally Posted by atteSmythe

Any way to get button customization set up as drag & drop from the main menu, rather than through options? Good to know it's there, though, there are buttons on my bar that have never been touched.

Right now this isn't something you'll be able to do. If there's enough call for it, we may be able to get it added, but it may not have the bang-for-the-buck.

Originally Posted by Kuldebar

The reason being, it doesn't really address the awful limitations of the UI in LOTRO.

Actually, the fact that they're now customizable will mean I'm much more likely to use them. As for the major UI issues... I play at 1680x1050, and it looks fine with the default scalings for me. Sure, if I played at 1920x1080 on a laptop, it could be a problem. But I could always use a large external monitor in that case - that makes a lot of stuff easier on the eyes, not just game icons.

They said nearly 2 years ago that they were going to rewrite their UI because it was leveraged out of some of the oldest code in their entire system, and it was time for an upgrade. More flexible, more extensible, more customizable, all that jazz. Unfortunately, given the intervening time... it appears that project got a serious postponement. But until they can get back on that, I'll take any improvements they can deliver.

Thanks for adding this Ransroth, Frosty, and/or whoever else worked on it!

Khafar

Looks good, but I've just started using a cool new UI so I guess it's back to the old set-up if the custom UI isn't compatible

Looks great! Can we please get a different icon for Hobbies? It is the same as Main Menu and System. I know I will be slotting Hobbies on the toolbar as I am having to get to it the long way right now as I check on my fishing progress while I fish. Other than that, very happy about these changes to the UI!

Originally Posted by artistV

Looks great! Can we please get a different icon for Hobbies? It is the same as Main Menu and System. I know I will be slotting Hobbies on the toolbar as I am having to get to it the long way right now as I check on my fishing progress while I fish. Other than that, very happy about these changes to the UI!

The screenshots in the Dev Diary are very old - before we got the pretty icons. The Hobby icon will look the same as your fishing skill icon.

Main Menu Icon also will look much nicer than the one in the dev diary - it's a nice up-arrow in a circle.

In fact I just went back and double-checked - pretty much all the icons are wrong in the screenshots. The new icons are much nicer .

About removing unneeded buttons via UI skins.... There are some really great minimalist skins out there, but (unless I was doing something wrong) you can't use them if you switch in and out of full screen. if you start in full screen and stay there it's great. If you go from full screen to window, no problem. But if you go from window to full screen, the skin no longer sits where it should at the bottom of the screen. I guess coordinate 0,0 is at the top left, and it's smart enough to move the bar up when the number of usable vertical pixels decreases (when switching to window mode) but doesn't know to do anything when the usable number of pixels increases.

I don't really understand why, since the native skin has no problem adjusting to any amount of window resizing, but I tried several skins and ran into the same problem with all of them. And as someone who frequently bounces in and out of full screen it made the skins useless.

Anyway, I was hoping for a native option with fewer unneeded (for me) buttons, but at least the update allows for some customization to make them more useful.

I see two things that somewhat confuse me. Skirmish, and world join. I thought skirmishes were able to be joined from anywhere, so the world join sounds redundant?

Originally Posted by MrBloodworth

I see two things that somewhat confuse me. Skirmish, and world join. I thought skirmishes were able to be joined from anywhere, so the world join sounds redundant?

Skirmishes use a system called Skirmish Join. It was called World Join before the name was changed for consistency.

Originally Posted by MrBloodworth

I see two things that somewhat confuse me. Skirmish, and world join. I thought skirmishes were able to be joined from anywhere, so the world join sounds redundant?

Two different things. http://www.lotro.com/gameinfo/devdia...bility?start=1



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I would think it would make more sense to have the Join panel be the default tab in the Skirmish panel, but that's apparently not how it was designed.

Certainly looks nice. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out with my skins. Would absolutely love it if it works with the minimalist skins- where it could essentially remove all the buttons but this one. That would be wonderful!

I would love to see some of the skin makers get more of the skins updated as well. A couple of my favorites are still stuck back in SoA mode.

Originally Posted by LlamaDraco

About removing unneeded buttons via UI skins.... There are some really great minimalist skins out there, but (unless I was doing something wrong) you can't use them if you switch in and out of full screen. if you start in full screen and stay there it's great. If you go from full screen to window, no problem. But if you go from window to full screen, the skin no longer sits where it should at the bottom of the screen. I guess coordinate 0,0 is at the top left, and it's smart enough to move the bar up when the number of usable vertical pixels decreases (when switching to window mode) but doesn't know to do anything when the usable number of pixels increases.

I don't really understand why, since the native skin has no problem adjusting to any amount of window resizing, but I tried several skins and ran into the same problem with all of them. And as someone who frequently bounces in and out of full screen it made the skins useless.

Anyway, I was hoping for a native option with fewer unneeded (for me) buttons, but at least the update allows for some customization to make them more useful.

There was a bug fix in this general area which may have also fixed the problem you are reporting above.

Originally Posted by sirwillow

Certainly looks nice. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out with my skins. Would absolutely love it if it works with the minimalist skins- where it could essentially remove all the buttons but this one. That would be wonderful!

I would love to see some of the skin makers get more of the skins updated as well. A couple of my favorites are still stuck back in SoA mode.

The skins will definitely need to be updated to work with the new system. You ought to be able to get a skin to do what you want.

We put in a nontrivial amount of work into making sure that if a skin were to move the Main Menu button to a different location on the screen, the Main Menu itself will move with it and open next to it in an appropriate direction (so down and to the right if the button is in the top-left corner). Hopefully that all will work .

Originally Posted by Sapience

Skirmishes use a system called Skirmish Join. It was called World Join before the name was changed for consistency.

Its ok, I had just assumed all skirmish related things would be under one button, not two. Wasn't really the name that confused me, I just thought it was redundant.

Originally Posted by Darej

the most popular ones are still SoA versions.

I always thought it would be nice if Turbine included one or two additional UI skins with the installation, so that players without the necessary computer skills could try out some alternate skins. This would mean Turbine would keep these up to date when the books change.

Ie, they could provide the default UI, plus a minimalist UI that hides a lot of the buttons and has smaller borders on the windows. Maybe a third one that keeps the toolbox at the bottom but with with a different style.

Modifying existing ones is not that difficult, but it can be annoying (you have to restart the client in order to see many of the changes). My custom one is pretty small though, and keeping it up to date isn't hard (when I find the time). However the UI skins that try to do a complete makeover, changing every single element and background, will get out of date quickly and take a lot of work to fix up the new windows.

Originally Posted by Lohi

Modifying existing ones is not that difficult, but it can be annoying (you have to restart the client in order to see many of the changes). My custom one is pretty small though, and keeping it up to date isn't hard (when I find the time). However the UI skins that try to do a complete makeover, changing every single element and background, will get out of date quickly and take a lot of work to fix up the new windows.

Didn't lotrointerface.com used to have a 'skin viewer' that didn't require you to fire up the client?

Originally Posted by atteSmythe

Didn't lotrointerface.com used to have a 'skin viewer' that didn't require you to fire up the client?

True. But it's not updated immediately when a new book or expansion comes out. So you can wait for it to update, or bite the bullet and spend a lot of time rebooting the client :-)

Originally Posted by Ransroth

There was a bug fix in this general area which may have also fixed the problem you are reporting above.

Muy excelente, I will try again once the Mirkwood comes out and the skins are updated.

This is a very nice feature. Since I run a 17" monitor (CRT FTW), I shrunk all UI interface down to the minimum a long time ago. I also overlaid a quickbar over the top of those useless bag and main menu buttons. With this feature it is like gaining 1.5 more toolbars for me! (no overlaying plus additional mapable buttons).

Thank you very much!

Dolnor The Happy

I think this is certainly a great step, although I really think we need another quick-slot bar. Please?

I am looking forward to these improvements and thanks to the team for thinking of these things. Our UI needs lots of love as the game gets more complex and options pile up. Now for my question: A small but annoying problem is the cursor. It gets lost in a lot of battles with all the glorious eye-candy. If I could make it bigger or color it differently, that would be a great help. I know this has been suggested many times, but could this be put on the never-ending list too? It is so minor, I fear this little thing doesn't get the attn it merits.

Very nice.

Since we can now re-map the bag buttons on the right side of the bar, it'd be nice if you can make it look like the left hand side and provide 7 slots instead of the current 5.

Oh yeah, and if you want add a couple extra bags. Thanks!

Very cool and exciting changes to the UI! Kudo's to the developers. One question/comment/request, though. Will the UI settings apply to all characters on that server or will we need to set up each character individually? I really wish there was an "import UI settings" option to make creating a new character easier and faster.

Thanks!

Originally Posted by VonRoden

Very cool and exciting changes to the UI! Kudo's to the developers. One question/comment/request, though. Will the UI settings apply to all characters on that server or will we need to set up each character individually? I really wish there was an "import UI settings" option to make creating a new character easier and faster.

Thanks!

I think you will need to set up each character individually. "/ui layout save" and "/ui layout load" would be perfect for the import UI settings you are asking for. Unfortunately I'm not sure whether they will be setup to save/load the button mappings right away. If not, it's definitely something that would make sense to add in a future relase. I'd check but am at home at the moment .

Originally Posted by Ransroth

I think you will need to set up each character individually. "/ui layout save" and "/ui layout load" would be perfect for the import UI settings you are asking for. Unfortunately I'm not sure whether they will be setup to save/load the button mappings right away. If not, it's definitely something that would make sense to add in a future relase. I'd check but am at home at the moment .

Wow, thank you for the response. I'm sad to hear it's not in there yet, but glad to see it is something to be considered.