I haven’t watched the vid yet, but one of my least favorite modern UI trends in console games is using a virtual cursor to replicate mouse movement with those long hold button presses to do actions. It’s all the more annoying when the long presses are still in the PC version. There are more efficient ways to make UI.
As modern games have grown more complex, they increasingly have a need for a fully fledged GUI toolkit encompassing all the widgets and layout mechanisms one would expect from conventional GUI toolkits like Qt. This is convenient because it allows UI designers to have all the familiar components like radio buttons, text entries, drop-down menus, sliders, etc. at their fingertips while outsourcing the maintenance. It also provides a common API for companies designing middleware, tools, extensions, and assets for the game engine. The drawback is that every. single. game. is using the same UI engine, just with different skin slapped on top of it.
Back in the day, GUI was something most games had to roll their own. They were a lot more unique because they were literally re-inventing the wheel each time. Modern games using off-the-shelf UI engines should at least benefit from additional considerations when it comes to internationalization, accessibility, and porting to platforms with different input methods (the provisions are there), but apparently nobody gives a fuck and we end up with GUIs that could have been produced by Copilot.
I haven’t watched the vid yet, but one of my least favorite modern UI trends in console games is using a virtual cursor to replicate mouse movement with those long hold button presses to do actions. It’s all the more annoying when the long presses are still in the PC version. There are more efficient ways to make UI.
As modern games have grown more complex, they increasingly have a need for a fully fledged GUI toolkit encompassing all the widgets and layout mechanisms one would expect from conventional GUI toolkits like Qt. This is convenient because it allows UI designers to have all the familiar components like radio buttons, text entries, drop-down menus, sliders, etc. at their fingertips while outsourcing the maintenance. It also provides a common API for companies designing middleware, tools, extensions, and assets for the game engine. The drawback is that every. single. game. is using the same UI engine, just with different skin slapped on top of it.
Back in the day, GUI was something most games had to roll their own. They were a lot more unique because they were literally re-inventing the wheel each time. Modern games using off-the-shelf UI engines should at least benefit from additional considerations when it comes to internationalization, accessibility, and porting to platforms with different input methods (the provisions are there), but apparently nobody gives a fuck and we end up with GUIs that could have been produced by Copilot.
Kitten Space Agency is developing an entirely in house custom engine