What happened to the old UI?

[woejoe]

I’m curious, why was the UI downgraded in version 0.5.0? The old aesthetic looked kind of better.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

Is this really fitting for the “current game” category?

[DeepSix (He who overuses footnotes)]

I don’t know for certain but maybe it was changed because that shard-ish UI was more complex and thus harder to add more stuff? Here’s the Dev. Forum thread discussing the UIs:

Microbe GUI

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

I think I also heard of this cause before, and it also stated back then that it was changed because the older one was too complex for when the godot migration occurred. Nevertheless I think most are OK with the current in-game UI as it turned out after 0.5.0.

[DeepSix (He who overuses footnotes)]

Speaking of nostalgia, we could always change the name of the Thriveopedia to J-Rod

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

Is this a meme from the days of the old forum or something?

[DeepSix (He who overuses footnotes)]

Ya. Apparently it was proposed during the Evolutions! era.

J-Rod, the Guide and Informer of Thrive.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

Ah no wonder I never heard of it before then. Looks like it’s a bit too late now…

[hhyyrylainen]

The old UI was implemented in HTML and JavaScript, it was not possible to port it to Godot Engine. The look would have had to have been reimplemented from scratch and many of the element looks would be hard to implement with standard Godot GUI Controls, making it quite an arduous process.

And If I recall right there were also to additional thoughts:

• Many people desired a more modern GUI that wouldn’t have all of those random cut corners and shapes taking up way more space than they need for their functionality. So it was also kind of the perfect chance to upgrade the GUI look rather than trying to painstakingly replicate the HTML in Godot. If I remember right I didn’t end up having to do any of the GUI theming in Godot so that was a really nice thing for me as I could just use the Godot GUI stuff once I was given the theme files.
• Some of the GUI assets, if I recall right, were optimized as a spritesheet or something for the HTML GUI, if I remember right so it was a bit painful to try to get the assets out and into a usable form for Godot. So the effort was only spent on grabbing all the icons etc. we didn’t want to lose and all the GUI shapes and containers were mostly left behind.

I might be slightly misremembering details about those two points. Checking the git commit history likely would have enlightening commit messages as to what I was thinking about at the time and how quickly / in which chunks the GUI came together.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

I suppose if anyone wants to they could mod the ui to look more like pre-godot, though I’d expect this to have happened a while ago already, as in around the migration’s time.

[hhyyrylainen]

Despite people saying they want some things, there’s still not been a single case whatsoever when anyone has ever made a mod to fulfil their need for having something in Thrive.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

That’s probably the case because there are much less modders than suggestors and the former would usually have better things to do than to make the ui look different.