Hello, I like the work you are doing. The current UE4 UI is visually a bit too cluttered and wastes too many pixels, and is also a bit distracting, and yours is surely better in those aspects. Also, while it will always be probably true that, for full productivity, large / multiple monitors are needed, this does not mean that UE shouldn’t be more usable also for people with laptops. So please go on, and Epic, please listen!
While I am at it, I think also that one of the UI issues with UE is the lack of support for retina/hiDPI displays, which makes the UI poorly readable and frankly, out of time in comparison with all other software out there. Just open last Unity in your retina display and see how better it is in terms of readability and use of screen estate. By the way, it seems to me that retina support was under consideration for UE 4.15 (or was it 4.14?), and now I don’t see it mentioned anywhere. Does anyone know something more?
Finally, are you changing just the visual style or also the layout / positioning of UI elements? I have some ideas, if you are interested.
In my version, all icons are in the vector format.
In Slate editor folder all icon files (most of them?) are raster 1x size, not 2x or more needed for the Retina support.
As you can see it’s not easy to remake this huge 4500+ (!!!) raster icons database…
Yes, I’m changing both UI and positioning, colors, UX, etc. (if it’s possible to skin myself, if not - Epic Games can consider this for future updates).
Looks like I was being conservative with my estimate of hundreds! I do know 3dsmax has consistency issues with icons because there are so many it gets difficult to tell them apart, not only that they are added at different times, updated by different artists. Its why the quad menu still uses a plain text format not icons, its why the UI is still very heavily text based because icons can work against themselves if their purpose isnt immediately clear from inspection.
Just to reiterate on a point I made earlier is that if an icon needs accompanying text then it probably doesnt do its job well enough, I will accept there is some middle ground where theres a need for both but if we consider screen realestate to be most valuable then perhaps you can get away with less icons or abit more reuse. One example of where its not very beneficial to touch on the icons would be the Content browser assets, we used to have just text and those icons are reasonably decent. If theres some way to blend the 3d and 2d icons it would be beneficial this way you dont have to make a set of thousands
I do like what you did with the File menu in your latest concept, I thought that was a good compromise between the more modern large icon styled file menu and the old style menu bar. It makes sense to merge them so Im glad youre considering all options.
I was actually looking at the launcher too and I noticed its tabs are similar to what youre suggesting here
Yes, moreover, why I used modern UI language in my concepts partially because of the Epic Games launcher and my initial goal to carefully research and build modern style based on the mix between both launcher and UE4 editor. Many items are very similar to the launcher like tabs, flat line icons, color scheme, a lot of square elements instead of round…
It’s very sweet to see comments from people “I like current Epic’s UI”, “it’s our last hope”, “I dislike flat icons” and maybe “tabs similar to Cryengine” (but this was very useful finding, so it’s valuable!) and boom we can see the same in Epic’s launcher
I can only imagine emotional rollercoaster of designers from Epic Games reading this thread…
And you know I’m trying to build my hypotheses not on loudest members of the community, but on valuable insights and my past experiences. So yeah that’s why I’ve provided the ‘bridge’ version for those users to check if it’s ok for them (maybe I’ve missed something) or they’re just haters without attention to details.
UE4 definately needs a new UI.
There is too much space wasted in UE, everything needs to be 1 pixel border material design, yes ive said it, i know many hate material design and flat buttons etc but its the best design for maximizing layout and space, we dont need 3d shaded buttons and editor fancyness, it can look many times cleaner/better with material design.
I would suggest epic to make the buttons at the top smaller, we can already make them smaller but they look weird and non intuitive like most of the interface.
Also adopt the blueprint nodes lines from blender, they are so much better than UE. Also searching/adding blueprint nodes and value functions etc is quite laggy even on good system.
Also adopt the easy unity mouse slider for values, when you hover your mouse over a value ex. X position, you get some arrows <> and you can drag + holding shift gives you more precision.
UE4 is in a desperate need of stability, UI remake, and A LOT of quality of life improvements.
UE is amazing and doing great but it can be even better, a lot better, please consider some quality of life improvements for UE we really need them.
Being partially color deficient, this really keeps me from “getting confused”
Idk if this stems from the color problem or it’s just me. but i get confused with the borders around tabs. I will focus on the border background border more than i should. this leads me to misclick. It’s not intentional i don’t think. Maybe it just makes everything cluttered but i also tend to get eye fatigue quickly using unreal.
Just from the SS alone, my eyes are thanking you.
“border background border”
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I’m wanna try the theme and see if i misclick less.
The biggest problem with the interface, all of them, including yours, is dead space:
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Fix that problem, on ALL panels, first. Then you can color bash all our eyes into bleeding with extreme contrasts like DARK and WHITE which are horrendous to work with as matte backgrounds when doing artwork till your heart is content.
In order to do that you will need to re-write the widgets to be better about how they “flow control” their layouts. As in “have any”.
I like the idea of changing the theme, but I am not a big fan of your work.
I am not saying it’s bad, I just thing it’s not too practical. The GUI needs to be clear and concise, new users need to be able to understand the GUI effortless.
The settings and source control icons are a great improvement. But I like the clear borders and the contrast of the current GUI.
Hmmm. That’s very interesting. Thanks for that finding!
I suppose based on the picture above this happens when you’re trying to drag the border, right?
Dear Mr. maybe you’ll try to use the word “please” first? Let’s be polite here.
Regarding comments, I think you’re suggesting to use content reflow, unfortunately, in many cases, content reflow is doing more evil than provides benefits (fe think about the column of buttons in the elevator, and then condense them to 8 columns instead of typical 1 or 2…)
Anyway, can you very quickly mockup your vision (pencil / word / paint) and send it here,
at least for the ‘mode’ panel, so we can see the benefits of your suggestion. I’m very skeptical, but who knows. Thanks!
Regarding contrast / borders can you please check the WIP interactive version and comment on dynamic panel colors:
Semi-interactive Hi-Fi prototype: http://xddacp.axshare.com (please hover your mouse on the details > transform). Thank you.
I just tend to get distracted by the high contrast borders which seem to make me misclick. Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever misclick the borders, going to a button or something, only to get distracted by the borders and clicking somewhere else.
Maybe this is something weird with me, but tiny pixels borders tend to be jarring. Like the white 1 pixel border around the quick reply on the forums, it makes me focus on the edge of the quick reply not the content of the quick reply.
I originally was diagnosed with protanopia but recently I found out I actually have protanomaly. Not sure if that information is any help.
The picture i was trying to show the number of pixel borders.
Last version with line icons is the best thus far.
Line icons are best because you can color code them in code instead of just getting them done as pngs.
Color coding conventions would be useful, especially on the toolbar.
Don’t forget to show grouping, either with sub boxes or separators, since visual enclosure aids with human recognition (search pattern recognition human eye in the big G).
Also, remember to show square shapes for windows, to differentiate them. Right now the Tab bar on every window is the same as the BG color, and that could potentially confuse people when docking tabs together.
And, the problem with the interface lies with the node view and the various sub-views, so i’m looking forward to your interpretation of round boxes with big orange outlines
In any case, stellar work so far!
P.S. I would like if someone could suggest a way to decouple modes and class placement, both conceptually and visually.
Modes are more similar to tools and they can reside in a toolbar space, whereas item placement would be more like a section of the content browser.
Mode Settings could be housed in the detail window as usually mode operation and item settings are not done at the same time.
Yep, I thought it’s obvious that this panel can be shrunk, and if not I decided to give a hint for (“draw your vision”) that this is more related to the presentation of the screenshot.
Hmmm… what? where?
Some secret code for chosen one?
The launcher is something completely different. You don’t spend hours working with the launcher. It has very few functionality, so there’s not much to have there. You absolutely cannot compare the launcher and UE4.
The majority of people who professionally use UE4 have at least 2 or 3 monitors, so space is no issue when using UE4. UE4 is not designed to be used with a single monitor, because that’s just not how professional people would use it. Just because some people like you want it to be usable with a single monitor, it would be wrong to change anything and affect the workflow of people using it professionally in a quite negative way.
Readability and the whole usability of the UI is much more important than “maximizing layout and space”.
My first post was to show that the design of the widgets themselves dont lend to collapsing gracefully.
The “MODES” tab window, while ‘long’ should have self-expanded to two columns so as to accommodate the size of the current icons on my screen, and yet, save the real estate of the extra width.
Responsive design in UX is now a very real sector in all digital industries.
In the least I should have the ability to change it easily, in my engine version, but not gonna happen without a lot of work.
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