Default zero k widget and setup not user friendly at all

Are you sure?

He used a really weird upload site but it works for me: http://imgur.com/cdDQrZS

Princey is right though, recently I was just randomly googling things like "springrts" or "zero-k rts" etc to see if the internet ever took notice. It was kind of funny how every single mention of it gave the same type of feedback like "unpolished", "terrible first impression", "messy & obnoxious GUI"

It's kind of sad that so many people never did or will get to notice that there is actually a good game behind the terrible first impressions. Even more sad that the visual issues aren't even that hard to fix but the only person who seems to want to do any graphical work is Googlefrog and he always goes over the top with the cheesy photoshop fx (just look at the amount of times bevel is used in Princey's picture), I even saw one reddit post which made exact same comment.

The lobby skin is not such a difficult fix either, Anarchid did a great skin makeover for weblobby on a whim, albeit it is easier to do with CSS but still, it's surprising nobody cares enough to get rid of that ugly grey, white & cyan mix we currently use.

...well, you do have the power to arrange your hud however you like, so I'm not seeing the problem here. Of all of the above I would find the last one utterly unplayable and wouldn't really mind any of the rest, personally. Then again I use the starcraft-type default (being what I am mostly familiar with) so there's that.

Regarding the resource bar... while I acknowledge there are problems with the plain resource bar I've never been sold on any fancier improvements I've seen, including the current one. I'm giving it some more time to see if I can get to the necessary "understand at a glance" stage, but I'm unconvinced that it's necessarily an improvement.

I imagine the problem with upgrading the GUI is finding somebody with the knowhow to do a good job and the interest in doing it. Is there such a person in the ZK player base? I for one know I don't have the artistic expertise to do a good job of such a thing.

have have the map top-left, and unitspecs placed on top of the build menu at bottom left.
eco on top right with menu(sound,menu,time)below it, player list bottom right, chat top-center.
though it could be that I hadn't fully re-installed it for a while so everything on mine's been the same way for a while until whenever they re-arrange it themselves.

I think the basic changes needed are

1. Old resource bar for newbies
2. Option for vets to use the new resource bar.
3. Move chat to the top left/middle, away from the middle.
4. move the info box back to previous place or find a new place. Current position is just in a very bad spot in general.
5. Move resource bar back under the menu.

Ok

Here is my latest one.

Skasi, Your one looks very nice, how I get it like that?



edit: How i get the mex metal numbers?

quote: Skasi, Your one looks very nice, how I get it like that?

1) Hold space while left-clicking the minimap. Disable minimap buttons there.
2) Press Ctrl+F11, move chat to the right, left of your playerlist.
3) Move command menu to bottom left corner.
4) Move selection menu right next to command menu.
5) Press F10, go to Settings/HUD Panels/Selected Unit Panel and lower Opacity
6) Press F11, disable Chili Core Selector (press Search and type "Core" to find), enable enable Chili FactoryPanel
(Optional) 7) Press F10, press Search, type "Skin", enable DarkHive, type "/luaui reload"

The map marker displayed on the right is my personal modified version of the Chat Bubbles widget

quote: How i get the mex metal numbers?

Press F10, Search, type "income", click checkbox

quote: Having the power to change or re-arrange widgets is meaningless, devs always say that newbies aren't supposed to ever need to do this and realistically most gamers aren't going to do this before they've made their mind up about the game.

Changing widgets I quite agree with you (the list is rather imposing) but when it comes to rearranging them going to the settings menu and choosing whichever arrangement you like (there's a short list) doesn't seem like too much to ask. For that matter, pressing Ctrl-F11 and dragging around windows is also not really all that hard.

There you go:

The whole point of the new resource widget is to make it newbie-friendly. Specifically, to improve the action-feedback loop. I have said this before: the main elements of the new bars are the gross income and spending, which users have direct control over. Unlike the bars, which are the integral over time of the difference between the elements users have direct control over, and thus do not provide immediate feedback to the user that their actions have done anything!

Income/Spending numbers are things the player has direct control over.

Storage bars are not!

Direct feedback on actions in UI is key to getting new users accustomed to a system, since the best most will do is experiment directly.

Unfortunately, in order to get it accepted at all I had to put in that balance bar at GoogleFrog's insistence, since they figured that if the economy panel was going to teach newbies what is important in the economy system, it must show them that energy income should be higher than metal income. That really impinges on the design of the widget.

EDIT: However, I do agree that there are a lot of numbers. The most l can pare it down to without losing information that I have used for decision making is: net resources, storages (with small bars for reserve mechanic), current total BP, and either gross metal or min(gross metal, gross energy) (this gives a ceiling on BP before resources throttle, and it is important because one can get away with a lot more at +40 or +50 than +10 or +20). I may make a mode for the econ panel that shows only this data. It loses a bit of the directness of feedback and the ability to let the player actually be rewarded for making the numbers big, but that may be worth the reduction in data to parse.