[MUD-Dev] UI Design in MMOs

[Johan A]

rjw <rob at wygand.com> wrote:

> Why spend dev cycles developing interfaces and/or UI components
> that you don't know are going to get used? Build a community that
> can fill in the wholes after release.

Why pay big money having shoes sowed in the US when you can have a
Chinese child do it for a fraction of the cost in Asia?

While I do agree that allowing the community to modify the UI
through LUA/XML is awesome, I still think at the end if the day the
developers are responsible to supply at great UI from the start. If
the community develop programs on the side it's a bonus but they
should not be required to do so. 9/10 they will make programs
anyway. Imagine Doom3 shipping with an editor and 1 map and a catchy
slogan like "design your own destiny". All the people who can't
design content would have to wait until a few bright individuals
release their work. Same thing with a broken or unfriendly UI. A
little extreme but it's following the same reasoning.

One thing that is a little annoying with how Blizzard handles the UI
situation is that they remove features as people discover them. They
have left a lot of freedom in what can be done with LUA (very nice)
but too much since they change the rules everyday.

For example, they removed the distance to target hook and hooks used
by Thottbot. While some of the decisions are understandable, its
still annoying to have a feature introduced and then removed because
blizzard think it's cheating.

Personally I like a UI that I can change 100%. I like minimalistic
UI's that are fast and set up for my play style. Movable windows is
one feature I really like and I think it's a shame WoW does not
support this.

-Johan
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