Clicking, clicking and more clicking...

[Skyrage]

Well, I've played for a couple of weeks now, gotten the feel of the game and all and thus have ended up with a point which I feel is rather important.

I think that the game is way over the top when it comes to the amount of mouse clicking that you have to do, and is more or less an invitation to RSI regardless of whether you take regular breaks or not. It also is a huge amount of unnecessary requests being made to the game server. A good design uses as few commands/clicks as possible and is a mentality which should never be ignored. The number of mouse related actions have to be reduced for many instances in this game, like farming or moving/dropping items. Pathfinding is also a must for characters, to remove the need for excessive manual navigation when it's not needed, and eliminating even more needless clicking. The seed sorting feature is a life saver, as it eliminates a huge amount of clicking, but I feel it could be improved even further. Most ideal would simply have a "sort" button or something which sorts everything in your inventory, including seedbags in one fell swoop.

For farming, it would be ideal if you could simply designate an area you want to harvest or plant (maybe get a menu of some sort if you have multiple seeds) and let the rest be automated. For picking up/dropping items, selecting groups of items at once is also a must. Construction like fences can also be simplified by using the standard approach of choosing beforehand the length of the fence and then automate it.

When it comes to ranged combat, the target that is designated should stay designated, but at the same time be able to designate another target with a single click. I have not dabbled much with the melee side, but I did notice that there were cases there where you once again had to re-designate a target when using a move.

I'm sure there are even more areas which could be slimmed down clicking-wise, so feel free to add any points that may have been missed.

[theTrav]

believe it or not there has already been some level of improvement to the clickiness of the game. Largely it's a matter of Loftar not enjoying UI work and therefore it only gets done when HE PERSONALLY gets rsi.

and loftar has WRISTS OF STEEL

[Skyrage]

Haha, well of course it is up to the devs to do but on the other hand, details like these are probably the most important thing and make all the difference between low and high quality products

After all, the most captivating and unique feature in a game is useless if the game itself is so cumbersome that you can't enjoy it to it's fullest

[sabinati]

just to be sure, you know about shift+leftclick transferring between containers, and ctrl+leftclick dropping of inventory items, right? and shift+rightclick for continuous fueling of ovens/kilns/smelters, and continuous planting of crops? of course you know about the shift+mousewheel and ctrl+shift+mousewheel/ctrl+alt+shift+mousewheel sorting variants.

selecting groups of items would be nice as well, but tbh i think the current key+mouse controls are ok for now.

i also agree with the point on fences/walls, and i'm not the only one

pathfinding for players would be a welcome addition, if the server could handle it.

not entirely sure what you mean as far as the combat goes, do you mean that after you designate a target you would aim, fire, and then auto re-target and aim for ranged combat? i do agree that there are a few kinks in the system of melee combat where you end up not doing anything unless you select a move and retarget, which is a bit annoying, but this combat system is version 2, just released recently, and they are working on further improvements, so we'll see what happens in version 3 i guess.

as far as autofarming a particular zone, i'm not sure about that. with a scythe and seedbags it's really not bad.

[jorb]

Yeah, UI is clunkier than it has to be. I would like to point out, though, that it has intentionally been designed to be fairly open-ended, so as to allow us to expand on the game without changing the UI. When we built it, we weren't sure exactly what we would be using it for. Once we get some major pieces of the puzzle in place, we plan to do a complete overhaul of the UI.

And, yes, farming could improve a lot. We are quite aware.

[Chakravanti]

This guy actually knows what's going on. Trav is right...a lot of work has already been done on the matter of 'click reduction' but we're still way too click intensive. That said....we're still less click intensive than runescape.....which HAS pathfinding btw...

Pathfinding plus mining ftw.

One less thing to macro.

[theTrav]

Haha, well of course it is up to the devs to do

Actually, that reminds me... Loftar did open up the source code to the UI to encourage experimentation.

At one point I was trying to implement area auto farming (it would have worked in a fairly inefficient way but worked none the less) but stopped when he released modal harvesting (not because of that though)

If you know java, or someone who knows java, then give it a shot