whats up with it?
Elemental Forums
Currently we're playing with this very flat, dull interface, but after seeing some screen shots on other gaming sites I find my self almost lusting after the one from this image:
Yeah, to be honest I'm really unsure why they changed from that to what we have. Our current one is a bit smaller, but it feels less polished.
Yup. Seems like at least two possible causes: 1) Devs are mistaking 'immersiveness' for maximized 3D display area or 2) The real game (not the engine) is still so far from finished that there's no point in trying to polish the UI yet.
Might also be some vexing mixture of 1 and 2, but hopefully not.
Those SOASE/Demigod influences do not seem like a good thing to me, but then I've never loved a single 'RTS' game yet. The closest I come to being in that audience is my affection for games like SimEarth, SimCity, and a series of ancient Rome-Egypt games whose proper names I can't even remember because the fun was short-lived.
For Elemental, when I get serious about managing details of a 'large/old' faction, I want to be able to put my entire display to good use, not suffer subwindows crowded with info-free artwork (I like pretty, but as a garnish, not a full-on side dish). I also want to see the info frame for the main view have some awareness of the resolution I'm using and stretch to cover the entire bottom of my game window (why scroll for three more icons if you have room to just put them in view to start with?).
Yes.
<-- monkey still working for a minimum of 800x600 
I wasn't suggesting the scroll thing go away for lower resolutions; it might be necessary in some contexts even on larger display areas. Besides, I might well end up wishing for 800x600 myself because my rig has a crap-ass NVidia hybrid card and I don't expect to have budget for a new rig any time in the text few quarters.
But if I can hold up something like my normal desktop settings for the game, then I'd very much like to save clicks by not 'wasting' those areas to the left and right of the current stumpy bottom-frame UI.
Alright...I tried to let it grow on me, but after receiving a box from fed-ex, I cant stop thinking that the entire thing is located on corrugated cardboard. I just noticed the minimap button, and again...holy crap it looks like such a step backwards from the one in the OP. Why Stardock? WHY?????
True, but I am pretty sure that it will be decent after 1-2 patches. 
The UI in that concet image is fantastic. Especially the look and feel of the research panel is infinitely better than what we currently have. Hopefully the final UI will at least partially resemble that image.
Props for making the distinction between GUI and the full UI, which alas looks to be heading towards a heavy GUI/mouse bias.
I'm rather sad to see the Keyboard tab gone from the Options window in the latest builds and I'm getting seriously worried that there will be no 'proper' 8-direction keyboard navigation for selected units (the game still seems unable to distinguish between keys like 7/HOME on the number pad and the dedicated HOME key).
stardock should allow people to also mod the UI of elemental much like Blizzard allowed addons to do for WoW healbot and other massive changing things were great but i am over WoW. the screenshot at the top is a rather early primitive UI the one we have now would be better but still needs a lot of more work.
As long as they have hotkeys im all good.
Nothing's stopping you from doing it now.
http://www.desktopx.net.
Edit: I also want to repeat a long-ago suggestion - quick-switching between cloth map and the 3D map. By holding down TAB (or something), I'd like to switch to the cloth map "on the fly".
A similar (but seperate) switch to see the grid would also be amazing to have.
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