Wyzack wrote:Please if you mess with the UI make it an option. I quite like the current UI and do not much care about losing that small amount of visibility at the bottom of the screen
I made the current UI and maintain what I said back then: A good unified experience is far better than offering options. The only thing that needless options do is create maintenance problems down the road and complicate development down the line. Yes, I know, "muh interface". I never said this was a popular stance, but it's the correct one in the long run as the alternative runs to more difficult development. The thing is, you can make options for absolutely everything. But you very, very quickly make your code completely unmaintainable this way. For this sort of stuff, opinionated and unified design is way better.
If you can improve the UI, improve it. Don't keep the current one because people are used to it, keep the one that is better. People will adapt. This comes with a warning though: Only change it if it's an improvement. If you can't create something, which is clearly and significantly better, then don't. Forcing people to adapt is sometimes necessary, but should only be done if there is a real benefit to it.
PS: You can put things outside the playing screen too. So you could have a completely empty 15x15 view with the interface around it. The issue (and reason why I didn't do that way back when) is sprite scaling. Running the game at 2x sprite size means that the best experience is with a screen 960 pixels high. This means the "play area", so without the byond header, the menus, the bottom description bar, the text input field and the windows task bar. As it turns out, that's how much space you have on a 1080p display. Adding an extra row of icons for the UI would cause the tearing that you see if you have "stretch to fit" enabled on non-1080p monitors or with byond not maximized. Unfortunately Byond uses nearest neighbour for scaling, which makes this awful. I used to play on a 768 pixel high laptop. It was awful. Each sprite was stretched to about 48x48 pixels, which meant that every other column of pixels was stretched horizontally to 2 pixels and every other row was stretched vertically to 2 pixels. This means that for every area of 2x2 pixels, the top-left one was normal, the bottom-left one was 2 pixels high, the top-right one was 2 pixels wide, and the bottom-right one was 2 pixels high and 2 pixels wide. Needless to say, it was horrible.
