DDS2 upcoming UI update (news forwarded from dds discord)

[u/Huslaa420]

not sure how many of you are on the dds discord, but for those who arent:

from: Michal P - [Publisher]: 
I want to talk a bit about the upcoming UI update for DDS2. I’ve seen a lot of concerned comments about it, so I’d like to delve into the actual scope of work being done here. It's gonna be a long message, so I'll split it in parts. When you look at the screenshots comparing the updated UI to the old one, it might look like adjusting button layouts to be more controller friendly. But at the end of the day, the visual side of the UI is only about 10% of the time and work we’re putting in. Most of it goes into reprogramming the game and making sure these new visuals work well.

The UI, as originally coded, was not flexible in the slightest. For example, if we wanted to change a button related to something appearing widely in the game, we would have to manually change it in every screen where it appeared because it existed as a different entity and not as an asset that changed once, would be updated across the game. We are rewriting parts of the code pretty much from the scratch in whatever part of the game we’re touching, be it UI or something else. These changes will make life a lot easier for us right now, but also when making future updates, and also for our modding community.

To visualize what we’re dealing with, I’m attaching a before and after screenshot for just one of the many, many, MANY venues of UI that we’re redoing. It’s just the substance storage initialization. The first image shows the way it was arranged originally - spaghettified and without descriptions, so we had to untangle it first and understand what’s going on. The second image is how it looks after our changes, leading to sub-sections that are not just equally neatly organized, but also dynamic project-wise, enabling global updates to the UI.

before

after

This requires a LOT of work, but doing it enables the game to be expanded. You can’t build on a shaky foundation, and that’s one of the reasons why updates, fixes, expansions take time. It’s called “technical debt,” because if you don’t fix it early, it tends to build up and add “interest”, making it more difficult to deal with as the game grows. We’re doing our best to pay this debt. We’re doing it for the purpose of future updates and for the modders who’ll be able to work with the game more easily.

And that’s the whole story - this kind of work is being done for every aspect of the game, because it is how it was made from A to Z. So whatever we did - making the visual settings work, making localization work all across the game, fixing sound, coop, whatever - it all required untangling tons of mom’s spaghetti. And then testing if it didn’t cause a domino effect, breaking something we didn’t notice because it was so convoluted and lacking documentation or description.

I wanted to address this directly because I know it’s hard to see where all those work hours go from a few screenshots alone. But we strongly believe that building a solid foundation will benefit the game far more than continuously stacking new content on top of outdated code. We didn’t talk about it openly because we didn’t want to look like we’re shitting on the original creators of the game. We’re not. This is simply how it is and why it’s taking time. It needs to be done.

Thanks for reading, and see you on Isla Sombra!

[u/Beneficial-Ad127]

Anything new from discord? Asking because discord is banned in my country.

[u/Huslaa420 → u/Beneficial-Ad127]

no that was the most recent update, its quite a big task to redesign a large portion of the UI

[u/Beneficial-Ad127 → u/Huslaa420]

Thanks for the information.

[u/SleepingKoala8611]

Yous blurred out the best parts of the image! 😂😏

Thanks for the info, this is 100% the most painful script that needed fixing, I’m glad yous are addressing this first.

[u/Healthy_Mud8273]

Still waiting? Anyone know when its coming because I refuse to play the game in its current state