New menu design for Minetest

[u19503]

It's not going to happen, the core devs like there boring gray GUIs too much

[Sergey]

It's not going to happen, the core devs like there boring gray GUIs too much

Besides developers, designer is needed, so everybody does what he should, and does not do extraneous things.

Now MT developer is a man-orchestra. This is not good. That's why the impressions of MT — not so much. And MT is not going to be as popular as MC.

[Wuzzy]

Quick list of mistakes in current main menu design:

- Small default font (that's true for all of Minetest)
- Subgame banner is positioned incorrectly or disappears at 16:9 and other widescreen resolutions
- A lot of precious screen space is wasted for no reason
- As a result, some menus are extremely crammed especially at small resultions
- The controls menu is extremely outdated and also kinda broken
- Subgame selection is brain dead and unwieldy if you have tons of subgame like me so you have to use the scroll buttons
- Inherits all the problems from still officially experimental formspec API
- Settings menu needs reorganization, more of the important settings needs to be promoted the the main settings menu
- Mapgen settings must be set in advance in the deep advanced settings menu rather than at world creation. This is tedious
- Mapgens are called “v5”, “v6” and “v7” in main menu, suggesting that the first two mapgens are legacy
- No exit button

[Napiophelios]

Edit: oops wrong topic.

Azekill, there used to be an archive with files to change the game menu
but they have been removed.

[azekill_DIABLO]

for the third time: is the jp work on menu available somewere?

[Wuzzy]

I don't think so. The image just looks like a quick mock-up and not a complete design.

[webdesigner97]

It's not going to happen, the core devs like there boring gray GUIs too much

Besides developers, designer is needed, so everybody does what he should, and does not do extraneous things.

Now MT developer is a man-orchestra. This is not good. That's why the impressions of MT — not so much. And MT is not going to be as popular as MC.

It doesn't only need a design, it needs some proper UX. Let's take the advanced settings menu as an example: Developers love trees, but the user experience is poor because it's hard to navigate.
The placement of buttons is also inconsistent. Sometimes primary buttons are on the bottom right (singleplayer tab), sometimes they are on the bottom left (change keys menu).

[Wuzzy]

Well, the advanced settings are meant to be complete. There are lots of settings which many people never want to change. Using a tree structure is quite appropriate for managing huge amounts of settings. It's also not intended for new users. I see no real problem here.

A rework of the main settings menu is what's much more important; all of the most important settings need to be extracted from all settings and be “promoted” to the main settings menu. The way the advanced settings are organized now is OK in my opinion. The average user should normally not be required to change the advanced settings. It's for the uber tweaking.

Also, all of the mapgen settings need to be “promoted” to the world creation dialog. It's terribly inconvenient to first go to advanced settings to change the mapgen settings for a single world, then repeat the same for the next world, and so on.

[TumeniNodes]

The UI would benefit greatly in scalability, from the ability to use .svg for images and fonts.

Also, all of the mapgen settings need to be “promoted” to the world creation dialog. It's terribly inconvenient to first go to advanced settings to change the mapgen settings for a single world, then repeat the same for the next world, and so on.

I agree with this but, if only some of the basic flags are available in this instance. For the more involved settings, I think having them in advanced settings is appropriate for "reasons".