Let’s talk about the new Starport Services and the Outfitting menus in Odyssey…

The Starport Services and outfitting menus in Odyssey see an upgrade that make them look the same as the Fleet Carrier menu and I find it lacking in many ways:

  • The splash screen is less fancy (no fading/fewer glitching)
  • Store button is massive
  • Holo-me button is gone
  • Livery button is moved down with other buttons (outfitting, maintenance, etc) that are all missing labels
  • The ship wireframe is black and white, stands out from the old orange, doesn't feel as fitting
  • Lots of menus open a "place holder" like feeling pop-up rather than fitting in the original window screen (contacts, maintenance, mission board)
  • The Windows 10 styled buttons change location and size depending on the # of services available, making it hard on muscle memory as well as I wonder how things like voice attack will handle the dynamic UI elements
  • Clicking Mission Board brings up a pop-up with 3 options (community goals, mission board and passenger lounge)
  • Mission Boards needs to be clicked twice in order to get to the board because of the silly popup (click Mission Board -> click Mission Board)
  • Passenger Lounge is missing from the main menu and moved to a pop-up despite having plenty of room available if we just made the mission board button smaller, like how we do when there is a shipyard, etc
  • Opening the Mission Board or Passenger Lounge brings up a much larger screen, no longer are all the menus uniform in size, they used to fit so nicely in the original window size without having to blow up the entire panel
  • The outfitting screen has lots of additional button presses that need to be made to get to the same screens
  • Selecting to buy a new powerplant requires that you first navigate an additional screen to select which catagory you want to buy from (despite there only being one available catagory for each core internal component) – This screen makes sense for optional components, but not for core ones.
  • The outfitting screen removed class numbering and now uses dots, which means you need to count dots before instead of just glancing over the number

All of the menus look like menus you find in an "early access" game where the UI is going through various phases still.

We had such a lovely menu already, I'm sad to see it go… I'm hoping we can at least bring in some of the QoL stuff we had in the old menu, and bring them over to the new menu to make it easier to navigate.

I've made a side-by-side comparison video as well to go over these changes which hopefully sheds extra line on the changes. It might feel like I am ting all over the design and I hate to be that guy that just hates on the new thing but… I'm trying to be constructive!

Here's the side-by-side video: https://youtu.be/Fv6ec8ru88k

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/mofoyx/lets_talk_about_the_new_starport_services_and_the/

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