4K UI Support: Part 2

[Arniox]

On 3/29/2017 at 10:15 AM, [DE]Danielle said:

Heads up - we're making this its own thread since the previous Dev Workshop was before release. Now that we're days into the release of Update 20, we're starting a post-release thread on the topic. 

U20 brought 4K support to our Menus & UI as per the original 4K UI Support Dev Workshop thread, and while we’re excited to have Warframe looking good in 4K, we realize that for those using different resolutions these changes have had a magnifying effect.

Our work is not quite done. 

To save your eyes and restore Menu utility to its former glory, we are working on adding a Menu Scaling Slider in the HUD settings. It will take us some time to touch on all Menus (as there are many), but this will give you the freedom to chose super-sized to kids meal menu UI and anything in between regardless of your resolution. Once we have more solid progress on this, we'll let you know (with examples). 

We still have the nut to crack of text rendering across the board - we'll get to this when we can! 

Thank you for your patience as continue to work on improving UI across resolutions! 
 

can we do stuff like 20% scaling? Cause in the past, 100% scaling on my relatively small monitor (1600*1050) made everything look quite large anyways. But when I tested warframe on my friends 4k monitor, I feel in love with the tiny scaling. I really like it :P

Can we haz that on smaller monitors?

[DepravedKnight]

SilentMobius I fail to understand why you are attacking others who you do not agree with. You are literally the only person I have seen post that this (paraphrasing here) was basically a minor issue. Hey, if you don't take issue with the update then thats great. I would however ask that you take a moment to pause and give some weight to the roughly 8 pages of people posting about how this is an issue. Stop tearing your fellow gamer down and try to be constructive. 

Adlez231 didn't post hyperbole (unlike some who did in the original thread), and if you want to see people take a chill pill you can do your part by not ripping into them for being (understandably) frustrated. 

Edit - As far as the FOV issue that some of us see, please see my original post on this thread. A couple of people have already chimed in that they are experiencing the same thing. I would love to produce a before and after, but since I don't have any screen shots to do so it's going to be difficult for me to explain more than I have. The post on page 2 that shows the slider bar is a good example of what I am talking about - how you see the background zooming in and out when the value is adjusted. 

Edited March 29, 2017 by DepravedKnight
Adding FOV explanation.

[Krylia_Viru]

Now we just have to hope they remember aspect ratios are important. Let's compare, yeah? Ok, so my monitor's native resolution is 1440x900, which has 1.6:1 (16:10) ratio. A far more common resolution you might recognize is 1920x1080 is a 1.77:1 (16:9) res. Meanwhile, 4K resolution is 4096x2160, which is 1.9:1 (256:135) ratio. So, what's the big wup? Well, mismatched aspect ratios mean blur. Lots of blur. We are talking the 'claw-your-eyes-out-and-eat-them' kind of blur. SO, as long as  they remember scaling and stretching are not the same thing, and try to support most typical aspect ratios, (4:3, 16:9, 16:10, the list goes on,) we should be fine.

[SilentMobius]

14 minutes ago, DepravedKnight said:

SilentMobius I fail to understand why you are attacking others who you do not agree with. You are literally the only person I have seen post that this (paraphrasing here) was basically a minor issue. Hey, if you don't take issue with the update then thats great. I would however ask that you take a moment to pause and give some weight to the roughly 8 pages of people posting about how this is an issue. Stop tearing your fellow gamer down and try to be constructive. 

Adlez231 didn't post hyperbole (unlike some who did in the original thread), and if you want to see people take a chill pill you can do your part by not ripping into them for being (understandably) frustrated. 

I'm taking issue with the hyperbole and frankly insulting tone of some of the players, because it's stated plainly why this was needed and that it's not finished yet and that it was a lot of work to get this far. In addition to simply reading what DE wrote and understanding I'm also a developer myself and have to put up with client hyperbole (Though not as acerbic and ignorant as I've seen in this and the past thread)

"Ignorant" isn't an attack, it's a comment on the fact people here have failed to read and comprehend what has already been posted, especially when they they questions DE's motives and competence because of their own preferences and lack of patience.

Oh and you might want to look up "hyperbole" if you think this isn't applicable:

Quote

 It fixed nothing yet broke everything

Edited March 29, 2017 by SilentMobius

[Krylia_Viru]

5 minutes ago, SilentMobius said:

I'm taking issue with the hyperbole and frankly insulting tone of some of the players, because it's stated plainly why this was needed and that it's not finished yet and that it was a lot of work to get this far. In addition to simply reading what DE wrote and understanding I'm also a developer myself and have to put up with client hyperbole (Though not as acerbic and ignorant as I've seen in this and the past thread)

"Ignorant" isn't an attack, it's a comment on the fact people here have failed to read and comprehend what has already been posted, especially when they they questions DE's motives and competence because of their own preferences and lack of patience.

We must dissent.

[SilentMobius]

1 hour ago, DepravedKnight said:

Stop tearing your fellow gamer down and try to be constructive. 

Oh one more thing, I'm not "tearing down" my "fellow gamer" I'm standing with my "fellow developer" against people tearing them down in a non-constructive manner.

I have more in common with the people I've met at DE than I seem to have with most of the people in this, and the previous, thread.

Edited March 30, 2017 by SilentMobius

[DepravedKnight]

Being a developer can give you very good insight into the concepts that surround this issue from a code standpoint, but you could also have a slight case of bias for DE's dev team when looking at the feedback from other users. I work with developers every day at my job, and any message that is delivered to our clients is funneled through me because those two worlds don't always see eye to eye. This is another reason you have community managers who are on the forums that do most of the front facing with the user base. People in positions like CM's and myself take the heat so our developers can do what they do best - develop. 

You have a major issue here (which you have called minor, and that is simply not the case) which you have tried to downplay, and dismiss concerns of others. All that is going to do is upset the people you are being critical of, and it will not get you any closer to your goal of getting rid of the hyperbole. You claim others are just posting hyperbole, however you are doing this yourself.

Example 1 you say how this "boggles" your mind "how anyone can find such a minor change game breaking". Well my friend, if the changes are giving people headaches and making it physically uncomfortable I would hardly call that minor. You also take issue with people asking (you call it yelling) "how could this go live?", and to be frank I am one of those asking that question. Perhaps there is a very good reason why this wasn't caught during the QA process, but as a developer I am shocked you are dismissing (calling it nonsense?) that question so easily. This is a valid question that I can only hope DE is asking internally in their scrum meetings. 

Further you tell Pablo that it's "fine at 1080p", which honestly is just jaw dropping given the number of screen shots that the community has provided upon DE's request. If this was "fine" then a second thread along with active resources working on this so quickly is proof that 1080p is not "just fine" along with all other resolutions. 


Example 2 you say "literally all that has change is the loss of a little whitespace and a slightly bigger text". Which when you look at the before/after is a huge understatement. You follow up to say that you feel for those who are impacted for the issue, but is your reaction really showing the community that you feel for them? I would say that it doesn't. Further, you are basically (from what I can tell) lashing out at the community because you deal with this at your job, and now turn around and see other dev's getting the business end (hence why I suggested you are perhaps a little bias on this topic) from it's client base. 

I am sure you have great intentions here, and, I 100% agree that we could do without hyperbole. The best course of action is to not fan the flames, which you are clearly doing. Please be constructive. Adlez2331 was praising DE for Warframe and telling us how much he loves it. Is he frustrated? Absolutely, and so is the community at large. Take note how Rebecca and Pablo didn't dismiss our concerns? Follow that lead my friend. 

Edit - I hope this doesn't come across as a personal attack, because I don't intend for this to be that way. I am simply trying to help you understand what is going on from the other point of view, because you have clearly dismissed the concerns of the vast majority in this case. 

Edited March 29, 2017 by DepravedKnight

[Krylia_Viru]

25 minutes ago, SilentMobius said:

I have no idea what I am talking about, I am completely and utterly reactionary, and I enjoy sowing chaos and discord.

Oh wow, he changed the quote contents, oh, but look, I can do it too. What now, strange man? Oh, here is an idea. Don't reply to this. Just don't. Just end it now. Take the hint of DepravedKnight. I'm gonna stop here as well.

See ya next time, Forum Frame.

[SilentMobius]

44 minutes ago, DepravedKnight said:

Example 1 you say how this "boggles" your mind "how anyone can find such a minor change game breaking". Well my friend, if the changes are giving people headaches and making it physically uncomfortable 

It does "boggle my mind" for two reasons:

1. It only appears on game elements that either don't appear during gameplay or appear for a very short period of time, generally while the game is paused, so how it can have an ongoing effect ... well It, make me wonder if they are being entirely truthful

2. It's the same level of scale and blurryness that anyone playing at 1600x900 (or less) has been seeing since the beginning of the current UI and we haven't seen much complaint from them.

...and "boggle" comes from a root meaning "to hesitate" I don't think that's particularly strong language, hmmm?

44 minutes ago, DepravedKnight said:

Example 2 you say "literally all that has change is the loss of a little whitespace and a slightly bigger text". Which when you look at the before/after is a huge understatement.

Not at 1080p it isn't, The elements are simply ((1080/900)-1)*100 = 20% bigger (Which I just confirmed in gimp) which IMHO count's as "a little". At higher resolutions the size change gets bigger because that is precisely what DE wanted to achieve, for players with high res but normal-sized monitors.

20%, are you seriously going to try to argue that calling that "little" and "slight" is hyperbole?

44 minutes ago, DepravedKnight said:

I would say that it doesn't. Further, you are basically (from what I can tell) lashing out at the community because you deal with this at your job, and now turn around and see other dev's getting the business end (hence why I suggested you are perhaps a little bias on this topic) from it's client base. 

You know the expression of "Rubbing a dogs nose in it"? Well it applies to humans to, when they are going overboard sometimes the only thing to do is call them out or they'll never learn. On top of that the previous thread was like posterchild for the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Am I showing "bias"? only in the sense that If I was on the receiving end of the last thread, you would not be getting fixes as quick as you might otherwise do. Also in the sense that I can see how reaction like the ones I've called out have the potential to really harm developer engagement, and the whole game. Much more than this did.

44 minutes ago, DepravedKnight said:

because you have clearly dismissed the concerns of the vast majority in this case. 

Clearly... alternatively, you may simply have bias of your own.

Edited March 30, 2017 by SilentMobius

[Ryuhouji]

On 3/28/2017 at 5:40 PM, Xekrin said:

I have to wonder why 4k support was so darned important that it came first before making sure the change didn't adversely affect the rest of us.  I mean, surely the 4k people could have waited?

I'm sure 4k is great and all but do the monitors that support it not have the ability to downgrade their dpi to allow for easier viewing in lower resolutions?  I don't know, I just think these changes are coming in the absolute wrong order.

Slider should have come first, now those affected have to suffer with oversized UI waiting for this to come when 4k users could have simply waited.  It really felt like it was a luxury they wanted not something they needed desperately.  Now everyone else is in desperate need of the slider.

Anyway, yay, progress.

I for one LOVE the way the ui is now, I play the game at 1080p when I'm streaming it to my tablet (which is more often lately, been bed ridden for a while) And these changes make it far easier to see. I've played the game from my desktop as well, and being hard of vision myself, I am 100% happy with the way it is right now. I don't see where the problem is. When and if they do release the full slider for UI scale, I will probably keep it at the maximum, just because I prefer it this way.

[SilentMobius]

39 minutes ago, Krylia_Viru said:

Oh wow, he changed the quote contents, oh, but look, I can do it too. What now, strange man? Oh, here is an idea. Don't reply to this. Just don't. Just end it now. Take the hint of DepravedKnight. I'm gonna stop here as well.

See ya next time, Forum Frame.

I apologize if you mistakenly attributed malice to a simple forum error, I didn't change anything, the wrong attribution was put on the (unedited) quote, it's now corrected.

[Ryuhouji]

1 hour ago, SilentMobius said:

-snip-

 

52 minutes ago, DepravedKnight said:

-snip-

You guys need to calm down. It's not helping anyone to argue with each other in a public space. Take it to pm, or gtfo. They know there's an adverse effect of the UI Scale changes. They're working on it. Bottom line is, You guys are helping no one. And stretching the thread longer than it needs to be. So do us all a favor, and shove off. kay, thanks, bye.

[XIceBladeX]

3 minutes ago, Ryuhouji said:

 

You guys need to calm down. It's not helping anyone to argue with each other in a public space. Take it to pm, or gtfo. They know there's an adverse effect of the UI Scale changes. They're working on it. Bottom line is, You guys are helping no one. And stretching the thread longer than it needs to be. So do us all a favor, and shove off. kay, thanks, bye.

I wonder if anyone saw my comment? :(

[SilentMobius]

2 hours ago, DepravedKnight said:

Edit - As far as the FOV issue that some of us see, please see my original post on this thread. A couple of people have already chimed in that they are experiencing the same thing. I would love to produce a before and after, but since I don't have any screen shots to do so it's going to be difficult for me to explain more than I have. The post on page 2 that shows the slider bar is a good example of what I am talking about - how you see the background zooming in and out when the value is adjusted. 

I understand what FOV means in the context of a 3D game, I was asking for specifics that had made to think something had changed. As far as I can tell, I believe you are mistaken, for reference here is a screenshot from my dojo comparing moments ago with July 2016:

 

I'll double check in-mission, I understand the FOV may be treated differently.

EDIT, Yep just replicated one of my old screenshots, FOV is identical:

 

Edited March 30, 2017 by SilentMobius

[Khunvyel]

Regarding the FOV talk; people should share their screen resolutions first before talking in circles. The FOV thing might appear as something that has less to do with FOV but more with UI alignment and camera placement than actual FOV realignment.

To reply to something that has not been jaded with supposed hyperboles, misunderstood points of view, and whiteknighting;

2 hours ago, Krylia_Viru said:

SO, as long as  they remember scaling and stretching are not the same thing, and try to support most typical aspect ratios, (4:3, 16:9, 16:10, the list goes on,) we should be fine.

This right there. That's something along the lines I mentioned earlier in the topic. We also need to understand which kind of "colloquial 4K" they're talking about. Are they talking about the one you mentioned, 4096x2160 (the uncommon aspect ratio in computer monitors) or the other one being 3840x2160 which is again 16:9
I still can't shake the feeling the UI has been written for the most common ground, being 16:9. This is all the criticism I have. Minimum system requirements: 800x600 . The design should not be compromised at that resolution, but it is. Because it is a non-widescreen resolution. It was ... "different" before U20 in that regard. Screen space was used but squished. Now less screen space is used, but not squished, thus leading to less readability. Not that I play on 800x600 (maybe I should) but it's still non-widescreen.

It's really simple. If a system is not well enough designed to accommodate for things, there are usually two roads. One is checking if the return-on-investment is worth it to completely rebuild how the UI works (I'd love to see Flash go away for starters). Apparently, such an investment is not considered worth it at the present time, and might never be. My reasoning of criticizing the UI spacing as it is should be well apparent. It's not well enough designed, it's modularity is something that leaves room for more and has me left wanting and overall it looks like a glorified bandaid with questionable design choices catering to the lowest common denominator. That's my opinion about it, take it or leave it. I once made a mockup of an advanced diegetic UI, but I cannot link to it any more since the forum upgrade swallowed the original topic content. It's blank. It annoys me greatly.

The other road to go is... well... something I could get banned for when I mention it (despite having no hard feelings or bearing ill will to anyone) so I won't.

Edited March 30, 2017 by Khunvyel

[Jake]

While support for alternate monitor sizes is being worked on it would be great if we see some additions for... very ultra wide displays (in my case 5040*1050).
The Frame-rate indicator is both blurry and way to big.
And it would be nice if we could get some more extreme adjustment settings on the hud margins.

[adlez231]

2 hours ago, SilentMobius said:

Oh and you might want to look up "hyperbole" if you think this isn't applicable:

Quote

 It fixed nothing yet broke everything

My apologies for being frustrated and having a grain of hyperbole in my comment. And I still do find it hard to believe that people think that this change helped 4K users and only hurt lower resolutions when pretty much every 4K user I've seen talk about this change has reported very similar issues as lower resolutions.

 

You seem to take everything criticizing this change as a personal attack because DE are your "fellow devs" so I will outright tell you this is not an attack. It's a concerned user giving feedback on a welcome feature that was implemented poorly or just had an unlucky bug. The idea of this change, a scaling UI with a customizable slider to edit the size of the UI to a player's preference, is a GREAT idea. And that seems to be roughly what the intent of this change was. But it certainly seems that somewhere along the way something went wrong and resulted in a default UI that is comically large and lower resolution that frankly looks somewhat bad. The in-mission HUD is also affected and, personally, causes about 50%-70% of my screen to be taken up depending on the mission type making it somewhat more difficult to play. The FoV "change" is hard to describe because I'm not well versed in FoV and usually leave it at default in most games, but whereas the default before was fine, now it is zoomed very close in and feels, for lack of a better term, squashed. Setting the FoV slider to maximum slightly alleviates the FoV strangeness but with the HUD, the UI, and the FoV issues all coming together it causes me headaches between the blurry low resolution text that's far too large and the slightly off FoV.

 

Like I also said in my original post, to a lesser degree, I completely admit that anything I have said here is personal opinion or experience. I will also freely admit that this UI issue somehow does not affect every player. 1 out of 6 friends I regularly play with has reported no visible change with the UI, HUD, or FoV and is confused why people are upset because they see no change. I've also seen reports of varying combinations, players having one or multiple of the 3 issues but not all, or again, none. Just because you are not personally affected by a portion of this issue does not mean that it doesn't exist or is not worthy of time invested to fix it. Respectfully, as a self-admitted dev you should agree with that sentiment.

 

I agree that the dev-bashing over this issue is too far. Mistakes happen. Bugs happen. Sometimes things that worked in test builds go awry when pushed live. But the majority of the "hate", and I very loosely use that term, I've seen in this and the last thread is you obstinately trying to refute anything a player says because you are "siding with the devs" over this. Again, this is not meant to be an attack, just an observation. I have been as respectful as possible in my posts, with a hint of involuntary frustration mixed in, and I can only hope that the discussion can be more civil and relate to fixing the issue instead of arguments over what is or is not happening to a specific player.

Edited March 30, 2017 by adlez231

[SilentMobius]

23 minutes ago, Khunvyel said:

Regarding the FOV talk; people should share their screen resolutions first before talking in circles. The FOV thing might appear as something that has less to do with FOV but more with UI alignment and camera placement than actual FOV realignment.

Hmmm, You may be on to something here, not with FOV (Which I don't believe has changed even allowing for different aspect ratios, as the FOV appears to be height-locked)

The correct thing to do with non-square aspect ratios is to scale or pin-to-other-element boxes but keep line thicknesses and glyph aspect constant.

Even at extremes the post-U20 new UI seems to succeed in doing that, _however_ the in-mission HUD does not, it's easy to test in windowed mode.

For example:

Edited March 30, 2017 by SilentMobius

[SilentMobius]

25 minutes ago, adlez231 said:

My apologies for being frustrated and having a grain of hyperbole in my comment. And I still do find it hard to believe that people think that this change helped 4K users and only hurt lower resolutions when pretty much every 4K user I've seen talk about this change has reported very similar issues as lower resolutions.

The intent, as was stated was to allow 4k monitor users with normal sized monitory to be able to read the test in the same way as users at 1600x900 and lower. This is precisely what happened.

25 minutes ago, adlez231 said:

But it certainly seems that somewhere along the way something went wrong and resulted in a default UI that is comically large and lower resolution that frankly looks somewhat bad.

The UI is precisely the same resolution it was previously BTW.

25 minutes ago, adlez231 said:

The in-mission HUD is also affected and, personally, causes about 50%-70% of my screen to be taken up depending on the mission type making it somewhat more difficult to play.

You can see two sets of before-and after in my post only a few above, you can see the HUD is the same sale. occasional additional elements (transmissions etc) are scaled to match how they were intended to appear at 1600x900 but they are infrequent and rarely important.

25 minutes ago, adlez231 said:

 The FoV "change" is hard to describe because I'm not well versed in FoV and usually leave it at default in most games, but whereas the default before was fine, now it is zoomed very close in and feels, for lack of a better term, squashed. Setting the FoV slider to maximum slightly alleviates the FoV strangeness

Below the post I referred to above is one comparing FOV, they haven't changed, also you have control over the FOV with a slider.

25 minutes ago, adlez231 said:

 low resolution text

Again, the text is the same resolution as it was before, simply larger in some UI elements but not the in-game HUD.

Except:

If you are using a non-standard aspect ratio (That isn't selectable in the config menu) the HUD may be horizontally stretched

25 minutes ago, adlez231 said:

 I've seen in this and the last thread is you obstinately trying to refute anything a player says because you are "siding with the devs" over this. Again, this is not meant to be an attack, just an observation. I have been as respectful as possible in my posts, with a hint of involuntary frustration mixed in, and I can only hope that the discussion can be more civil and relate to fixing the issue instead of arguments over what is or is not happening to a specific player.

I will refute anything that I can demonstrate is not true, It's important to allow the devs to focus on the actual problems rather than chasing non-issues, and I'll agree with any issues I can replicate, as I did above with non-standard aspect ratios.

As I said above, for 1080p the non HUD UI is 20% bigger and the resolution is no lower than it was originally. at 4K the UI is significantly bigger and that is absolutely intentional (as was posted by DE at the very beginning) as the assumption was parity of monitor size but higher resolution.

Edited March 30, 2017 by SilentMobius

[CaelThunderwing]

looking forward to seeing this finished w/ an an more senitave FOV , (thats also been knackered since U20.) but this clears up the last response i had by a support staff was just disgruntled saying soon 1080p (1920*1080) Resolution would be droped and display would fall out of Min req.

[adlez231]

@SilentMobius You know what? It doesn't matter and I'm not going to get any more riled up over someone on the internet being a pedant. If you want to believe that this is how it was intended and that DE can do no wrong, unintentionally or not, that's fine. I'll just calmly wait for them to fix it.

 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Edited March 30, 2017 by adlez231

[Primed_Noob]

Thanks D20 for giving me a warning and informing me that free speech is not welcome on this forum. 

[egregiousRac]

5 hours ago, enizer said:

I normally set most games I play on 90-110

Never below 90.

So I'm in the group of people wondering why the max is 78

DE does FoV right, which means that is 78 vertical. The only thing they are doing wrong is not doing the math to show it as a horizontal value. On a 16x9 screen (such as 1920*1080), that is actually 110 degrees horizontal:

On wider screens the horizontal FoV would be higher, on narrower screens it would be lower. Using a vertical value allows all aspect ratios to look the same at a certain setting.

Borderlands 2 is an excellent example of this sort of implementation. They acknowledged the lack of quality in the PC port of the first one, so they put a lot more focus into the second one. One of the changes was switching to vertical FoV. Just like it has here, the values shown in the menu confused testers, so they made the shown value be a formula that shows it as a horizontal value. If you change aspect ratio the slider doesn't move while the value changes, and the only difference ingame will be less stuff seen horizontally.

Edited March 30, 2017 by egregiousRac

[egregiousRac]

1 hour ago, SilentMobius said:

As I said above, for 1080p the non HUD UI is 20% bigger and the resolution is no lower than it was originally. at 4K the UI is significantly bigger and that is absolutely intentional (as was posted by DE at the very beginning) as the assumption was parity of monitor size but higher resolution.

The issue is not that the resolution is lower than it was before, it's that it isn't higher than it was before. They are rendering everything to the same size canvas, but scaling it up afterwards. This gives the appearance of low res assets even though they are the same resolution as before because they are now displayed larger.

I have always felt that the UI was excessively large at 1600x900. It was slightly too big at 1920x1080 and about right at 2560x1440. Once it got to 3840x2160 it was too small. Now, it is too big on all of them and looks like garbage on all of them as well.

Edited March 30, 2017 by egregiousRac

[Basqui]

Thanks, always, for the hard work!