June 15th, 2008
Concept - Uru Live Nexus GUI
When it comes to how the Nexus is set out there is not much I don’t like about it, for the most part it is pretty easy to navigate around in. However there is room for improvements in regards to navigation, not only that but hood management and some “issues” that bug many people.
Issues like Keith’s Bevin (Bevin is a single hood, not a name of all hoods, I really wish Cyan would change it back). Or Ages being listed in my Personal Links tab as Keith’s Eder Gira, but I expect that is to stop people being confused. The other issue is when you have numbers after a location name, like D’ni Jazz Club 089’s hood. I understand that, that is to do with ID’s of locations stored in the database, but it’s something that personally should be hidden, not seen.
Anyway, I was talking about the GUI of the Nexus.
As you can see I have introduced a few concepts.
1. Scroll Bar
In the old UI the Nexus was given simple up and down arrows, on which one was forced to repeatedly click in order to scroll through the masses of locations available. The introduction of the scroll bar would allow the user to scroll through at speed as one does on an internet browser. 1 click, held down, allows you through all the entries on that page, as opposed to countless clicking.
2. Alphabetical Organization
One of the things I liked about the Neighbourhoods tab in the Nexus is the option to browse by population or by Name (A to Z or Z to A). However this is something that can be expanded on a little bit with the introduction of alphabetical organization. Looking for that Hood which starts with a P? Then clicking the “P” would list just the hoods beginning with a “P” thus cutting out a bunch of other hoods to scroll through.
3. Pages
Again this is more directed at the Neighbourhoods tab. Hood names soon build up and there is often a lot of hood’s beginning with a specific letter. The pages tabs would allow for users to specify pages thus cutting down further on the amount of scrolling needing to be done within the UI.
Not only that, but the Alphabetical and Pages tabs would mean that all hoods can be displayed (unless set to private by the members), the Hood’s had a nasty habit of vanishing off of the nexus when they hadn’t been visited in a while which was a complete pain in the ass when trying to arrange parties or if you had something in your hood that people wanted to see. If the hood is public, I shouldn’t need to log in to make it so people can visit it.
4. The Cogs Icon
I have left this one until the end for the reason that this section has a larger write up and further concepts to go with it.
The Cog Icon opens up the Hood Management screen. Inside this screen users can control aspects of their Neighbourhoods.
Hood Name: Does exactly what it says on the tin, this area would allow you to change the hoods name, a feature removed to stop trolling issues which certainly needs to be bought back.
Hood Customization: To be honest I am not really sure if this belongs here, however here it is. This option would allow hood owners to activate and deactivate aspects of the hoods (firemarbles, lamps etc) much like they would with Relto Pages in the Relto Book. Customizations would “flag” with the DRC and changes would be made by the DRC (IC explination of lamps appearing/disappearing).
Hood Ranks: This works akin to guilds in other games such as World of Warcraft. The person who set the hood up would be the Hood Mayor, he would have full access to the hood’s settings in the Nexus. In the hood ranks section he can set up ranks for members of the hood controlling what they can access in the Hood Management screen. He can also assign Hood Mayor to another hood member if he chooses to move to another hood (there would be a limit of only 1 hood mayor in a hood at a time).
This would allow the Hood name changing feature to return but would set it so the trolling issue of the past would not occur.
Thus concludes my concept for the Nexus GUI. Now I turn it over to you the readers and ask if there are any views you have or maybe I overlooked something that you’d like to highlight?
June 15th, 2008 at 8:57 am
[...] Concept - Uru Live Nexus GUI [...]
June 15th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
Brilliant. I only hope that Cyan can implement what you’re asking for. I agree the neighborhood changes were not for the better. I think this should be a top priority especially if a fan-age-sustained Uru emerges as I see the Nexus as the best of the currently-available areas in which fan ages can be placed.