Diegetic menus

[thedavid]

Diegetic interfaces are a kind of game UI where the character in the game walks up to an in game item and interacts with a menu instead of heaving it always available. Examples of these are the mission boards in Elite Dangerous, the operation menus for almost all items in Occupy Mars, and any other thing where an in game item is used to access a menu.

Has this ever been considered for X4? The computer in the station manager's office is crying out to be used to bring up the logistics menu for the station. Or maybe a mission board to have immediate guaranteed missions that the player can do.

A diegetic mission board might help with the very infrequent Quentanauts missions.

I think in the ship you are flying, we can assume that that ship doesn't need this because the ship will display a hologram for the pilot's eyes. But for other things, I think this could work well. Maybe the station trader can have a vending machine to cover for those many times the station trader fails to load.

Right now X4 does have some diegetic menus for hacking but that is about it that I can remember seeing. I think if the game had more it would add to a feeling of polish and quality.

[CBJ]

It's certainly been considered. Diegetic menus tend to sound better in theory than they work in practice, partly because of things like viewing angles and readability. That's one reason why so few games use them other than in very specific circumstances (e.g. certain cockpit elements), and of course with X4's more complex menus that becomes an even bigger issue.

That said, we'd like to extend the use of diegetic menus in the future. However, mainly due to technical limitations of the tools we are using, this is more likely to happen in a future game rather than in X4 itself.

[vvvvvvvv]

It's certainly been considered. Diegetic menus tend to sound better in theory than they work in practice, partly because of things like viewing angles and readability.

The usual approach is that you have a display with data, but when you interact with it, the game grabs the camera and moves menu into focus. One good example of in-world UIs was in Doom 3, by the way...

[CBJ]

Yes, we're aware of that. As I said, though, technical limitations with some of the tools we're using make solutions like that harder than we'd like them to be, so moving in that direction may have to wait until we have different tools.

[mr.WHO]

Wasn't something like this in X-Rebirth?

It was so bad and unnecessary, that I switched it off, the moment Egosoft allowed back to classic menus in one of updates.

That was something that looks cool for first 5 minutes and then becomes tedius and tiring.
Plus makes navigation and game time bloated with uneccessary actions/animations.



This is like trying to reinvent the way we operate computers, by replacing mouse.

X3 menus were functional, but X3 was suffering from nested menu-fest.
X4 improved and streamlined the menu system and added RTS-like, mouse oriented command GUI - that's the perfection - not some low key Star Citizen inpersonation for cool factor.

[Otas Elite]

It works well in VR or with face tracking. But with a controller/mouse/keyboard it's more annoying than anything else.

[vvvvvvvv]

Wasn't something like this in X-Rebirth?

Rebirth had partial implementation. Rebirth insists on displaying stuff on physical display to your right, so every time you open the map, you can see Yisha sitting behind that screen, looking at you with judgmental smirk. Even in VR that's not convenient. Other displays, that display current weapon, current speed, shield stauts --> they're all physical too, but do not cause issues.

The display trick wasn't done well and felt like a gimmick. The problem was it being to the side. If the display was physical, and appeared in front of you (on a robot arm or something), it would work well. Indicators for shields/weapons caused no issue.

Something similar was done in Elite dangerous, where all the control with menus were physically floating next to the pilot seat.

Rebirth also had better implementation. In Ship brdiges mod, in the middle of cockpit you had map screens. Galaxy map, current sector and so on. It was smoke and mirrors (swaps textures instead of dynamic data) but well done.

In case of x4, one thing that would be interesting to see if those control stations you see everywhere displayed meaningful information. And same thing happened with the display in your office. Right now it pretends to show stock market prices or something, but it is just a texture.

Obviously it doesn't need to be displayed non-stop all the time, and could turn on when you approach it.

[vvvvvvvv]

Yes, we're aware of that. As I said, though, technical limitations with some of the tools we're using make solutions like that harder than we'd like them to be, so moving in that direction may have to wait until we have different tools.

At the moment this is not a feature I feel strongly about, and while it would be cool to have, there are multiple other things I'd want more.

Having said that there should be middleware available, and something like stuffing economic graph into render to texture should be doable with current tools.