Let us talk UI for a moment. Screw new game mechanic, ships, weapons and animations. If you are unable to properly utilize your ship’s UI and adequately operate the ship you are flying, then there is little to no point in adding more layers to bad looking & hard to use system. I felt compelled to write this article since 3.0 went live in early January. A mixture between the lack of urgency to fix the UI and a hope that CIG would address the matter on their own rendered me lazy to do anything. Unfortunately, with 3.2 dropping 6 months later, and complete neglect on CIG’s behalf, it was clear that we need this addressed (again! Many have tried to address this before (and continue to do so) and unfortunately, no response from CIG). So I will outline, in as many details as I can, all points that needs resolution. Others are welcome to agree, disagree or otherwise add more points they deem important to be reconsidered/revised As a fighter pilot myself, I tried -to the best of my abilities- to detach myself from this mind-set. All my solutions have catered (to varying degree) the needs of other professions in the game. But it mainly revolve around single seater ships that requires one pilot to do all the work. The real real-estate in the game Before we begin, let us establish some ground rules for this article, once you are in the cockpit, every centimeter of display should be considered a valuable asset that needs to be properly utilized. Some items should remain as part of the MFDs while others to be floating on your HUD, which is expected and accepted by almost everybody. But the problem stems in how CIG is managing our screen real-estate and how much of the information is relevant, necessary or completely useless to be anywhere. This article will highlight all the problems with potential solutions to utilize this screen space properly. 1. MFDs (AKA: Messy F**king Displays) The amount of redundant, useless, unreadable or over-sized information present on the MFDs is staggering. Let us take a look at some examples and how can they be better (Please note that I am aware of CIG’s plans on implementing dedicated stations to control various aspects of large ship systems, this is why my solutions have attempted to keep all related information in a single screen/tab yet allowing fine-tuning accessible through other tabs. Power MFD: The whole point of the power distribution triangle is that it is a graphical indicator, not informational. This means it does not need to be this big, you only need to glance at it to know how your power is distributed. Additionally, how useful is this triangle when there are no information provided nearby to suggest what action needs to be taken? Is it expected that we flip to another screen, identify the source of power shortage, flip back to the main screen to adjust the triangle? All of that is expected when you are flying your ship? You lose all control of your ship once you are in interaction mode anyway. How about we don't have the same information in so many locations at the same time? Why is our EM and IR can be found in Power MFD Have their own signature MFD tab (Heat) Under Our own ship status HUD. What if we do the following? This proposal makes all relevant information visible at a glance. You have a highly informative screen showing you grouped sections of each system, you have the ability to overclock and monitor each system whilst being able to allocate power based on your readings. Those who needs to go into details (large ships with dedicated stations) can still do the same in the item tabs. Fighter pilots can also go into items tab when no danger is present Can we also have keybinding to push power to two systems rather than just one? Shield MFD: The top slidy slider is pointless, no one will need that level of control of what exact percentage they will be setting their shields to. Instead, we can break that long bar into simple buttons signifying the maximum recharge rate we would like to achieve (off, 25, 50, 75, 100%) We would also have two small button to allow us to jump to the next percentage selection which will make it much easier to keybind 2 buttons to increase/decrease the maximum recharge amount Shield health and hardening graph (or that is what I assume it is because CIG never clarified the purpose of the graph or the mechanic for that matter) contains so many useless elements that is taking space from the actual usable allocator We should be able to OC our shields from this display (in addition to having the option to OC from the power screen) I am aware that my proposal isnt ideal, but there is little gameplay or interaction to be done in the shield screen to begin with, all of which needs to be key-bindable Results You will notice that my proposals for power and shield MFD placed the most important elements at the top of the screen. This concept allows the pilots of most ships to easily see critical information without the need to look directly at the MFDs 2. Own and Target Ship Status, the true whales of our HUD: Surprisingly, one of the biggest elements we have on our screen are our own and our target’s ship status, they equate to 13% of our screen space. Back in 2.6.3, we somehow managed to squeeze those inside our MFDs (which sometimes used as little as 6% of screen area). If it was usable back then, why not make it the same size now? This proposed fix rely on minor layout modification (text location), resizing of some elements (reducing signature history), and overall reduction in the entire ship status element. Now we can display the same information in only 7% of screen area. Before anyone jump in and complain that numbers size became too small, I have the following to note: Text size matches that on other HUD elements such as QF, Thrusters and IFC safeties The most important number present on these two graphs are the distance to opponent, something you can already see when you look at your target. 3. Overall HUD visibility, none to be found HUD Information, be it your throttle and boost indicators, current speed, your target, potential targets, your grandma, incoming missiles are all made of this thin geometric lattice in a single color that blends with the background under the right conditions (ask any AC player about broken moon map or remember when you wanted to go to Daymar when the sun was up). Not to mention that everything is blurred, all the time. Why don't we sharpen everything up for a start, and then add either an outline to lattice elements or fill the empty geometry with shade that alternate between light/dark depending on the background? Can we also look into that weird useless arrow that points you towards your target when they are out of your vision? It, too, have the same lattice ‘style’ that is aggressively hugging the edges of your monitors just to make sure you can never see it in time. Why dont we move it closer to the center of your screen? its going to disappear when you look at your target anyway so it will not stand in the way or obstruct your view when you are tracking your target's pips (Picture at the bottom) Lastly, can we look into HUD brightness and give us the option to reduce it? In many circumstances the HUD is the brightest element we have on display, making spotting anything in pitch darkness (night time on a moon, for example) very difficult. We often opt to fly in 3rd person view to be able to see around 4. Chat, the eternal annoying being: I do not understand why the chat system is the way it is now, it made sense in 2.6 when we did not have a HUD to speak of, but now? Why is it a second layer on top of our HUD rather than its own entity tucked away in some corner? Why was it kept on top of our ship’s status? Why the line spacing so large? Why the text is always hazy? Why does it move and blur as if it is part of the ship’s HUD when you hold the interaction key or zoom in? I am not going to bother creating visual solution for this, everyone in the game knows how bad chat placement is.