Improve HUD visibility (arrows/boxes)

[Atomik]

I swear these damn things hide from me. Maybe it's my old eyes .. but ..

A few things I struggle with:

- Seeing the 'highlighted' station. The white corners given to a target station just gets lost. This is particularly bad with Light Blue and Green highlights already. Please accentuate the targeting 'box', or allow us to change the color/shape/pattern.

- Finding my own ships and bases in friendly territory. Yes, I can go to the overhead view/list and select them there, but sometimes when I need to do a great deal of switching around (forgive me, I'm new) it is a nuisance just finding my own ships and stations in allied territory. Please accentuate or allow us to change our own colors.

- Those arrows targeting a selected jump calculation or target. They are easily hidden behind the UI. Please allow us to change their size/shape/color or better design those indicators.

- Less, but on occasion (finding 'objects of interest') those little '>'s are not as obvious as they could be. If my sensors actually pick up such and object, I want an audio alert along with it. And my 25th (?) century computer should be able to tell me roughly where it found something long after I've left sensor range.

Overall the HUD is acceptable. Not great (I'm sure I've struggled less in the past with other games), but it could use some QOL improvements.

EDIT: A simple 'fix' might be to display arrows OVER the HUD elements, rather than the HUD hiding them. That said, I still would like them to be a bit more obvious.

 

 

Edited November 18, 2020 by Atomik

[Fichom]

I discussed this one on the Steam discussion forums, but I can not find the post for the life of me. I did find an example image I used to prove my point.

All of those markers would be great, if only there way a black outline - in the picture underneath I used the simple 'crosshair', but the same principle would apply to all the others as well. There are 7 crosshairs on the left part of the image - can you see all of them?

The problem you are mentioning is not a problem with the colour (though if you have a slight color blindness, or your monitor is a bit lower end, I can see how similar colours could present a problem as well), but with contrast - seeing a blue marker with an orange-background is not that hard, but seeing a blue marker in with almost identically hued background is troublesome. Also you can see that making the markers a bit thicker also helps with visibility (but on the left part you can clearly see that some of the markers are border-line invisible without a contrasting border).

Also, I see what you are trying to get at with the sensor "memory", but you could argue that you should have those special objects highlighted permanently. And I agree that it would be more 'realistic', but considering the way the system upgrade works, that would be kinda making them kinda useless - you could simply get several scanners, and then just mass-scan sector by sector, get all of the positions 'remembered', and then come later to collect them. Idk, it doesn't seem like that kind of change would bring anything to the table.

Edited November 21, 2020 by Fichom