[MUD-Dev] UI Design in MMOs

[Nathan Rogers]

On Sat, 27 Nov 2004 10:59:10 -0500, Derek Licciardi
<derek at elysianonline.com> wrote:

> The biggest issue in WoW reminds me of the first EQ interface,
> lack of consistency.  Let's see, right click is the primary
> activity on an object.  Uh NO.  Everyone from Mac to Linux to
> Windows has been trained that left click or left double click is
> the primary action and right click brings up a context sensitive
> menu. (EQ2 and SWG seem to have figured this out for the most
> part) Why abandon that idea?  It makes zero sense at this point in
> the software industry.  Scrollbars for windows are placed on the
> left hand side of the window.  Wrong again.  Every scrollbar you
> see in the big three OSes are right side scroll bars.  Again why
> abandon this familiarity.  There's more.  The skill information
> dialog has icon based tabs on the top right hand corner of the
> window while the character information dialog has worded tabs
> along the bottom edge of the window.  The item information dialog
> comes up in a fixed location on the right hand bottom corner of
> the screen and your inventory is on the left hand bottom corner
> but for some strange reason they figured out hovering stat windows
> for various other dialogs in the game.  I simply do not get it and
> one would think that major development houses would have a clue
> about this sort of stuff.  Learning from history seems to be
> beyond some developers these days.  While I'm typically a,
> we-need-to-throw-the-whole-design-formula-out-the-window kind of
> guy, in the area of UI design, I'm firmly in the camp of taking
> advantage of what the user already is comfortable with.  After
> all, M$ and company have spent millions of dollars figuring out
> how people use computers and they generally have got it right.
> Sure, tweak the UI but don't abandon its general principles in
> favor of something has no user testing.

I agree totally with your rant, but I think the actual root cause of
the problem is that its traditionally been difficult for game UI
developers to take advantage of operating system supplied window and
ui APIs while retaining performance.

With the advent of OSX and the upcoming release of Microsoft's next
client OS, there shouldn't really be a technical reason why my mouse
wheel doesn't scroll text around, and why I can't CTRL-click
multiple items in "listboxes"

Cheers Nath

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