[Feedback] List of Potential Quality of Life Improvements (Updated 12/7/2018)

[Pind]

A list of potential QOL and UX improvements I would recommend as an expert of two decades on the subject. Feel free to reply with your own suggestions and I will update this list as I continue to play as well.

Overview
Hotkeys - easy to change
Interface - harder to change
Encyclopedia/Information - missing info most painful to the player
Tedium - subjective suggestions to save player hassle
Features - simple features that save player pain
BOLDED POINTS - low cost high value changes

Hotkeys
Summary: Players are mostly missing the ability to hotkey functions already available in the game

• Missing Hotkey Options:
  • Deploy Device (Civilian & Military like satellite, nav beacon, laser tower, etc.)
  • Target next object/friendly hotkeys
  • Target under boresight hotkey (mainly because "Target Object" is unreliable)
  • Clear target hotkey
  • All Sub-Menu Shortcuts (Logbook, Missioned Offered, etc.)
  • Left/Right Navigation hotkeys for menu sub-tabs (like in Missions, Information)
  • Map filter toggles (Trade Popups, etc.)
  • Station builder module rotation hotkeys
  • When trading/transferring wares, HOME/END hotkeys to move all
  • Player squad hotkeys (Attack my target, Follow me, etc.)
  • Hotkey options for context menu items (Scan, Remove All Orders, etc.)
• Hotkey behavior
  • Property menu hotkey (as well as all other menu shortcuts) should work from within map, as the mission menu hotkey does
  • Hitting "ESC" or "back" from the information view should go back to the previous view, as opposed to closing all map menus
  • Use of double-click functionality in map (eg. target / guidance)
  • Context menu on map is not navigable by keyboard
  • Allow use of SETA, Travel Mode, and Full Stop hotkeys to function with map open
• HOTAS / Joysticks
  • Sensitivity settings
  • Strafing: bind for switch between "normal" and "strafe" flying (and diagonal strafing for HAT switches)
  • Allow separate inversion settings between devices (Joystick, Mouse)
  • Allow combination buttons for binds on joysticks

Interface
Summary: Some views are trying to do too much, and would be better served as multiple, separate views

• Property management could be enhanced by an expanded property list placed at the same level as map in information hierarchy, allowing players to:
  • View additional property metadata in table format (current order/behavior, current action, current station, destination, etc.)
  • Sort, filter, and group property as empire expands (including fleet management and behavior)
  • Manage and review property in an expanded, full-screen view instead of in a small box (also allows bigger font)
  • The current property tab still serves its purposes as a selection list for orders and map-related tasks
  • Under the "Orders" section of context menu, there should be a quick and easy way to access "Default Behavior" to quickly setup auto-traders and miners
  • Missing "Asign to wing/fleet" in context menu for property
• Information
  • Single click for renaming expresses focus but does not actually grant it. Instead, single click should focus with current name filled (cursor at end), and a second click should select all text should user want to replace
• Personnel information and management are nested very deep in the information architecture
  • Let's trace a crew transfer action: 1) Get to info screen of ship, 2) Select "Information" tab, 3) Expand "Personnel" heading, 4) Expand "Crew" heading, 5) Expand "Full Crew List" heading, 6) Expand crew category heading, 7) Expand crew experience heading, 8 )Right click crew member for context menu
  • Instead, make a dedicated crew sub-tab for ship information
  • List of personnel lacks action links. A "Personnel" tab (perhaps as a sub-tab to an expanded property view) listing all personnel would make it easy for a player to view and manage NPCs, paving the way for additional features and modding
• Station Trade Menu should occupy more of the screen (probably most of it)
• "Landed Ships" list for stations (accessible through map)
• Empire tab sub-tables (Global Standing Orders, Hired Personnel, etc.) could use an indication that they exist. A bare minimum is using a right caret (>) to indicate!
• Logbook
  • Missing unread message highlight
  • Using relative time in addition to absolute (eg. "3 minutes ago, 1 hour ago, etc.). or simply real-world play-time would be much more informative than the absolute time that player has no reference for
  • Missing trade tab in filters (may be worth having dedicated trade history UI, see below)
  • Missing buy orders from auto-traders
  • Missing net profit/loss summary from trade message
• A "Trade History" tab (under Player Information) would be something any space trader would love, granting:
  • A clear view of every transaction conducted by the player's empire and subsequent impact on bank account
  • Analyze profit/loss over time by a variety of dimensions
  • The ability to measure the performance of any trader, miner or station over time
• Missions tab would be better placed one level above in information hierarchy (at same level as map), allowing players to:
  • Show current missions and missions offered in one-go, saving player clicks
  • Show all mission categories together (keeping categories as filters rather than sub-lists)
  • Show more mission metadata in table format (Mission destination, distance, etc.)
• HUD
  • Inventory Item drops and asteroids have the same HUD icon
  • Ship components damaged view on HUD
  • Missions offered, perhaps an icon with count badge with option for an expanded missions HUD, allowing the player to more easily leave a super highway when seeing a mission
• Map
  • Trade Overlays
    • Map station overlays (trade overlay) background transparency makes it hard to read both the station information as well as map content. Prioritizing the shown information and allowing the player to toggle with a hotkey is a superior approach
    • Map station overlays lack a clear visual connection to related station, a small arrow or line with dot would solve this
    • Trade Overlays tooltips may be better replaced with a list in table format, perhaps shown on the right side of the screen, with double-click actions centering and highlighting the related station. This would give players a cleaner overview of trade options, give space to provide more information without additional clicks, and prevent the confusion of chasing tooltips around the map.
  • Scale indicator for placement of satellites and an easy way to gauge distance on map
• Teleportation
  • When teleporting, the map should be closed as the player wants to do things outside of the map
  • When docked with a ship, item in docked menu to teleport to bridge of docked ship

Encylclopedia / Information
Summary: We clearly ran out of time in the crunch before launch. Here is a list of must-have information that is currently missing

• Weapon shield/hull damage description (and more detailed weapon stats)
• Software descriptions
• License descriptions
• Crew and personnel role descriptions
• Ship heat-management information as it related to weapon use
• Settings/options descriptions

Tedium
Summary: This list is subjective, and follows my opinion that in the space age mundane tasks should be automated

• Auto-pilot could be more automatic (saving player time and hassle)
  • Manual docking should be optional, not mandatory (without letting an NPC fly)
  • Travel mode should be used by auto-pilot
  • In general, auto-pilot should include all the behavior and functionality of NPC ships, since the player is a 5-star pilot
  • This would also include the ability to assign the player ship orders like any other NPC ship
• Walking in stations should be 100% optional. In my humble opinion, this experience is simply not the strength of X Universe games. Solved by adding to the station actions menu:
  • Station Traders - Surely in this space age station traders must have duty-free delivery to the gate! (Alternatively allow transportation from cockpit and add transport points by traders)
  • People & Comms - This includes faction reps and a list hireable crew with available skills and the ability to comms with them from the ship
  • Workshop (Crafting) - It can be quite a walk to that bench, it would be nice to know what the recipes are ahead of time
• In station ship-to-ship transfers

Features
Summary: Simple extra features that can save a lot of player time or pain

• Additional auto-save settings: frequency, on dock, on gate
• Trading & Mining
  • Ship behavior option for "trade illegal goods" (default unchecked)
  • Global sector blacklists for auto-traders and other NPCs
  • Global defaults for galaxy traders (wares traded) and auto-miners (ores mined, distance)
• Camera zoom
• "Favorites" for property. Favorites always appear on the property list, even if not in view on map screen
• Orders & Behavior
  • Flee sector order
  • Drone behavior toggle (automatic vs. manual hotkey)
• Settings
  • FOV Slider Setting
  • Toggle for clear all orders when taking command of ship (preventing ship leaving when going for spacewalk)

[Jashashunter]

Great post!!!

I would love to have everything you mentioned. The game is currently lacking a lot of QoL features.

[Pind]

Great post!!!

I would love to have everything you mentioned. The game is currently lacking a lot of QoL features.

Thanks. I'm hoping a lot of this will be fixed by mods as well, and will update the post when mods come out that solve any of these problems.

[Max Bain]

Agreed!

I have one more for the interface/Logfile:
Add or replace the actual time with the REAL LIFE time. In the logfile there is only the time of the in game universe but it does not help anyone to find something useful if there stands a datetime of 3245-05-06 17:45 when I have never been playing at that time and dont know when a day in the X4 universe starts or ends. Even the hours and minutes are completely different to what the player would guess.

[JamesTheClarke]

Fully agreed with the OP, this is a solid list of issues I've encountered myself as well during the first 30(ish) hours of gameplay so far.

To me, the biggest tedium atm is trade-fleet management. During the early stages when you don't have a station yet (no, I didn't want to do the mission where you are practically given one, I felt that was a bit breaking my experience of really earning it) and you don't have 3+ star pilots yet it is really time-consuming to ensure your few trading vessels are buying and selling from the right places. Auto-trading is currently quite broken anyways, so even after getting a 3+ star pilot I still have to manage my ships manually - got satellites on every station and galaxy wide trading enabled, they still buy and sell according to proximity regardless of losing money in the process. But back to the main point: there needs to be an early loop-order command, i.e. go to station XYZ buy space weed and sell to station ABC - now repeat till infinity and beyond.

The balancing could be that it only works as an automation between two stations and it won't change its orders even if prices fluctuate due to shifts in supply and demand, even make it a 1+ or 2+ star requirement for all I care.

[PyroChiliarch]

I had an automated freighter purchase my whole bank account worth of space weed, they were subsequently scanned by police and dropped their cargo.
Some sort of way to blacklist illicit goods for auto traders would be great.
Also some sort of way to limit how much credits worth of cargo they could carry (or something similar) would also work.

[Pind]

Agreed!

I have one more for the interface/Logfile:
Add or replace the actual time with the REAL LIFE time. In the logfile there is only the time of the in game universe but it does not help anyone to find something useful if there stands a datetime of 3245-05-06 17:45 when I have never been playing at that time and dont know when a day in the X4 universe starts or ends. Even the hours and minutes are completely different to what the player would guess.

Great point. Added to list, also offered alternative using "relative time" as seen in email/messaging interfaces.

Fully agreed with the OP, this is a solid list of issues I've encountered myself as well during the first 30(ish) hours of gameplay so far.

To me, the biggest tedium atm is trade-fleet management. During the early stages when you don't have a station yet (no, I didn't want to do the mission where you are practically given one, I felt that was a bit breaking my experience of really earning it) and you don't have 3+ star pilots yet it is really time-consuming to ensure your few trading vessels are buying and selling from the right places. Auto-trading is currently quite broken anyways, so even after getting a 3+ star pilot I still have to manage my ships manually - got satellites on every station and galaxy wide trading enabled, they still buy and sell according to proximity regardless of losing money in the process. But back to the main point: there needs to be an early loop-order command, i.e. go to station XYZ buy space weed and sell to station ABC - now repeat till infinity and beyond.

The balancing could be that it only works as an automation between two stations and it won't change its orders even if prices fluctuate due to shifts in supply and demand, even make it a 1+ or 2+ star requirement for all I care.

This seems to be less of a QOL issue and more of an auto-trader issue so I won't include it in the list. However, I too miss having a trader that would actually get smarter as they leveled. Seems like personnel should have a "Trade" skill specifically for this kind of thing. FYI, pilots are supposed to automatically level up as they do things, but from what I understand that is broken currently.

I had an automated freighter purchase my whole bank account worth of space weed, they were subsequently scanned by police and dropped their cargo.
Some sort of way to blacklist illicit goods for auto traders would be great.
Also some sort of way to limit how much credits worth of cargo they could carry (or something similar) would also work.

I too miss the wares blacklist! Added to list under "additional features"

[vr01]

My playing preference is joystick and I have the Thrustmaster HOTAS X

I like the fact that you can bind two commands to one button. What I would really like is the ability to bind a key or button to enable me to switch between "normal flying" and strafe mode on the same joystick axis. This would be handy when docking, scanning objects or flying in the gravity well of larger ships.

[NapalmVFR]

I had an automated freighter purchase my whole bank account worth of space weed, they were subsequently scanned by police and dropped their cargo.
Some sort of way to blacklist illicit goods for auto traders would be great.
Also some sort of way to limit how much credits worth of cargo they could carry (or something similar) would also work.

There is a way to do this already.

When an Auto Trade command has been set go to the behaviors tab in the ships information screen, find the Auto Trade order and click the + symbol to the left of the order. You can then remove the wares you don't want the ship to trade in from there by clicking the x against the wares.

[Pind]

My playing preference is joystick and I have the Thrustmaster HOTAS X

I like the fact that you can bind two commands to one button. What I would really like is the ability to bind a key or button to enable me to switch between "normal flying" and strafe mode on the same joystick axis. This would be handy when docking, scanning objects or flying in the gravity well of larger ships.

Added to list

I had an automated freighter purchase my whole bank account worth of space weed, they were subsequently scanned by police and dropped their cargo.
Some sort of way to blacklist illicit goods for auto traders would be great.
Also some sort of way to limit how much credits worth of cargo they could carry (or something similar) would also work.

There is a way to do this already.

When an Auto Trade command has been set go to the behaviors tab in the ships information screen, find the Auto Trade order and click the + symbol to the left of the order. You can then remove the wares you don't want the ship to trade in from there by clicking the x against the wares.

Didn't know about that either. Changed the list to only ask for a "trade illegal goods" behavior checkbox

[limit]

I have one more for the hotkeys/interface for build planner:
- Add buttons/hotkeys to rotate station modules without placing them.

In addition to "Weapon shield/hull damage description" this should also include burst shots count and delay for weapons like bolt repeater or pulse laser. For example something like this:

S Pulse laser MK2

• Projectile speed: 4,147 m/s
• Effective range: 3,000m
• Hull damage per projectile: 10MJ
• Shield damage per projectile: 15MJ
• Hull damage per burst: 40MJ
• Shield damage per burst: 60MJ
• Burst shots count: 4
• Burst time: 0.5s
• Delay between burst: 2s
• Accuracy: 0.95
• Hull DPS: 16MJ
• Shield DPS: 24MJ
• Projectiles count per shot: 1 (For weapons like shard battery, which has more projectiles per shot)

[Alewx]

I totally agree with the TO.

Hotkeys

• using return during trading should confirm the trade not just give input for a number at a ware

[Studders]

Fantastic post there pal. Would love to see this.

[Zealoth]

I would also like to see:

• Hotkey for simply targetting anything that I am directly aiming at
• On ship information page - information about current activity the ship is doing (For example - "Fly and Dock at [station]" , "Mining [mined resource]", "Selling [Ware]") as well it's current speed. Maybe make it a requestable update so it's not dragging performance down needlessly
• Dock hotkey doesn't work for me properly
• Designate Personal Ship - a single ship that has an always visible icon on a Map that makes it easy to select it and order it around - maybe even an hotkey to select it
• Different pathfinding for ships In Sector (for example make any object that is not a target for docking simply have a big cubic pathing hitbox, and possibly even simply leverage the modular system for targets for docking (!) - add a cubical pathing hitbox to any module that is not a dock. It really kills immersion having to scrape autopilot off a rock or station all the time, while for 90% of the cases all they have to do is simply give a wide berth to any station. Designated Personal Ship could also get a little more fine-grained pathing, since it would only ever be one ship
• Ability to black-list sectors and stations for automating trading

[Wou]

IF I may:

-double clicking an object on the map targets/"untargets" it, or sets/deletes guidance, whatever you prefer
-manually change autosave frequency, allow "autosave on dock" maybe some other conditions
-wouldn't mind a shortcut that would bail me into space in a suit faster
-home/end keys to move all of the wares during trading

EDIT:
one more thing:
-bring back the "show me the way to the nearest shipyard" dialogue option. Also for Wharfs and Eq Docks.

[Pind]

• Hotkey for simply targetting anything that I am directly aiming at
• On ship information page - information about current activity the ship is doing (For example - "Fly and Dock at [station]" , "Mining [mined resource]", "Selling [Ware]") as well it's current speed. Maybe make it a requestable update so it's not dragging performance down needlessly
• Dock hotkey doesn't work for me properly
• Designate Personal Ship - a single ship that has an always visible icon on a Map that makes it easy to select it and order it around - maybe even an hotkey to select it
• Different pathfinding for ships In Sector (for example make any object that is not a target for docking simply have a big cubic pathing hitbox, and possibly even simply leverage the modular system for targets for docking (!) - add a cubical pathing hitbox to any module that is not a dock. It really kills immersion having to scrape autopilot off a rock or station all the time, while for 90% of the cases all they have to do is simply give a wide berth to any station. Designated Personal Ship could also get a little more fine-grained pathing, since it would only ever be one ship
• Ability to black-list sectors and stations for automating trading

Added the last point for automated trading. "T" in space targets what you are pointing at (though it doesn't work too great). Also the ship your player is currently on is highlighted in a slightly brighter green already, though perhaps the contrast could be higher.

IF I may:

-double clicking an object on the map targets/"untargets" it, or sets/deletes guidance, whatever you prefer
-manually change autosave frequency, allow "autosave on dock" maybe some other conditions
-wouldn't mind a shortcut that would bail me into space in a suit faster
-home/end keys to move all of the wares during trading

EDIT:
one more thing:
-bring back the "show me the way to the nearest shipyard" dialogue option. Also for Wharfs and Eq Docks.

Added auto-save setting and home/end functionality to list! Also quick-bail.
Targeting/guidance from map is available via click then "T" or "SHIFT+G" respectively.

[Wou]

Targeting/guidance from map is available via click then "T" or "SHIFT+G" respectively.

I know but it's not very convenient for something so basic, while the doubleclick basically does nothing.
oh and you cannot "untarget" from the map level in any way afaik

[Alee Enn]

-manually change autosave frequency, allow "autosave on dock" maybe some other conditions

+1 on auto save options
I'd go a bit further, have 4 options ...

Auto Save On or Off
(If On)
Auto Save every [n] minutes (either drop down list or manual input)
Auto Save when docking (tickbox)
Auto save when exiting a gate (tick box)

So if you wanted you could have the game auto save every 5 minutes (for example) and every time you dock and exit a gate

[ParGellen]

I'd like to request diagonal strafing options for digital HAT switches. I use a T.Flight Hotas X and it works great except when I use the HAT switch to strafe. Any time I press it in a diagonal position it stops all strafing movement rather than adding the horizontal and vertical together as you would expect. The game already recognizes the diagonal positions (see screenshot) but I just don't have anything to assign them to. Here is a screenshot of what I would love to see. https://i.imgur.com/DHgri4w.png

[Zippo342]

I'd like to add a few:

Allow bore-sight mouse aiming flight controls as a toggle/menu choice. This is where when piloting the x axis of the mouse is directly bound to yaw, and the y axis is directly bound to pitch. Do not force us to chase the dot please.

Put the ship's service crew to work. If transferring wares between 2 ships, the source ship has service crew, have them get out of the ship and carry the goods to the destination, rather than force the two ships to depart the station. I hired them to work, not play cards in the cargo hold!

Give better feedback on why a ship is not doing anything in space, when you give it orders to auto-trade and the like. I've watched ships sit there for hours not doing anything productive, yet the pilot has 3 stars and a full complement of service crew, and another vessel in the sector is actively and constantly finding deals.