First I have to say it's nice to see so many new options and all the possibilities that these should open to us mission builders, good.
Now the not-so-good thing about the GUI:
it is terrible, really - it would have looked cool in 1995 but 15 years have passed since then.
I really would like to give feedback that could bring some improvements with a little work but this really needs to be rewritten from scratch in my opinion!
I'll try anyway:
- try to use toolbars, for example for the selection of the displayed objects, no one wants to navigate to a submenu 15 times in a row to show what is really needed on screen at that moment
- same could go for types of planes or nationalities
- try to minimize the number of objects you can select from a list - if the number of items exceeds a couple of dozen the list become unusable - order the items using some criteria is not sufficient, sorry
- try to minimize the interactions with the windows and instead focus on the GUI items themselves, for example to insert a waypoint between two existing ones you could simply double click on the first waypoint
- allow multi selection of items and allow all permitted operations that are generic and disable the ones which are specific (e.g. if you multi select two flights you could change their altitude at the same time but not their callsign which must be unique)
- allow smart operations on multi selected items via context menus (the menus that usually pop up when you click right mouse button) no need for big space consuming windows all the time - for example you could multi select a number of flights and then via context menu decide to scale their altitude by 500 m / 1000 m / 2000 m and so on
- provide two (or more) mode of operations, for example a basic one and an advanced one - when sketching a mission I'd like only the most important parameters to be shown saving precious screen estate, when refining the mission I'd take care about the details (e.g. weathering) - let me concentrate on what's important at that moment
- use the native File dialogs for god's sake! no need to see that 15 year old file selection dialog where I can't even create a directory!
- add undo/redo, of course for multiple operations
- again on item selection: have you thought about trees? in some cases they allow a much easier navigation compared to flat lists
- use dockable panels instead of windows, really, it's 2010 - GUI toolkits have made huge progresses in the last 15 years
I could go on for hours...
Sorry Oleg but this GUI can't be fixed easily, it really would need a major redesign to be in par with the quality of your simulation (which we all assume here will be the new state of the art).
Writing a new GUI of that complexity could easily require a couple of person years and I don't think you would want or could afford to do that now.
So one last request: please leave the game open as much as possible for external mission creation and interaction.
Document the format used for the mission (that shouldn't be too expensive), you'll save the community the long time it would take to understand otherwise and maybe we could come up with something more modern that could complement this new FMB.
And thanks if you've read my whole post
