[IDEA] Oblivion UI

[Hanaisse]

Hi everyone;

I'm batting around the idea of overhauling Oblivion's UI. The vanilla one is simply bad graphic design and obtrusive. I can't even use it any more. I currently use DarkDARN, and there's nothing wrong with it, I love it, but hey, why not try something new.

InsanitySorrow is bored so I'm feeding him cookies to learn the Oblivion xml coding for menus and UI. I have my own ideas, but I'd like to get a community view of suggestions and ideas.

So the question is; What bothers you the most about Ob's UI and what would you like to see?

[ResolveThatChord]

Oooh, a couple of things.

I'd like to see the back of the "Are you sure you want to poison your weapon?" window. It's unneccessary and obnoxious, especially for us assassins who like to hotkey poisons. It causes an annoying pause in the middle of otherwise exciting battles.

Another thing I'd like to see even more is a little more complex to describe. When the player is presented with a menu that has a yes/no (or binary) option, they have to move the cursor to select the small rectangular button representing the option they want.

I would vastly prefer it if, instead of using the cursor, simply moving the mouse to the left would higlight one option, and moving it to the right would highlight the other. A small, intuitive movement. Like the Items/Magic/Skills/Map menu in Skyrim.

[AndalayBay]

I'd love to see some UI changes too. I like Darnified or Dark Darn, but I'd love to see a background that looked more like parchment or leather.

[ThomasKaira]

If you could make the Character/Inventory/Magic/Map menu larger and actually take up a nice portion of the screen (and reduce the size of that ginormous paper doll), that would be great.

I don't think I need to say "text size reduction," but maybe give a few more options for size then DarN, because for some people, even the larger option he provides is too small.

Map takes up entire screen (save the buttons you need to navigate the menus).

Possibly make a Skyrim style Hide HMF when they are full, only display the weapon icon when your weapon is readied, fade the equipped spell icon when the player has not used magic for a while (but don't hide it completely because it is necessary to see it all the time), and an option to show or hide the compass for the HUD.

I'll stop now.

[Hanaisse]

Thanks for the great suggestions! Andalay is eerily tuned in, we were planning on a scroll graphic for the menu's.

Some suggestions may just not be possible given Oblivion's engine, but we'll see.

Here's a preview of another idea we had, custom status bars. There'll be three flavours to choose - swords for all you warriors, staffs for magic users, daggers for rogue types.

Keep the ideas coming!

[AndalayBay]

Oh dear...

I like the swords or daggers, but I'd suggest something smaller if possible. One of the things I noticed when I was working in the HUD for Ob XP was that a lot of people really wanted the minimalist approach, even with the vanilla UI. Perhaps with the swords you could just make the hilt a little smaller.

[LMCampbell]

Honestly I feel the sword and dagger idea is a bit old. I dunno how to explain it exactly, but as Andalaybay said, the designs now a days seem to be simplistic and clean.

Not the dagger and sword idea you've got, but I guess it's all based on the persons opinion.

And if enough people like it you should go for it