We have been hard at work on the next update, tinkering away on systems, recipes and buildings - as well as a few surprises. But, I wanted to take some time to show how we have addressed a very common piece of usability feedback, the almighty screen panels.
The Problem
As you know, Foundry features a world space UI on many of our machines, adding a sense of immersion and context as you interact with these devices. It’s a great mechanism for allowing you fine grained control of a building, even as your factory grows in complexity. We have done a ton of work to make these world space interfaces performant and scale with your builds- but in many dense configurations (or when playing on small screens like the Steam Deck) it can be difficult to both read and interact with these panels. Even more common, is that a friendly loader blocks you from getting right up against the panel.
The Solution
It’s hard to take credit for this solution, because it was directly suggested numerous times in feedback reports and on the game's official discord. When looking at a screen panel you can now press interact (E) to open up a screen space representation of the UI. This UI is consistently placed in the center of your screen and does not block other screen space UI interactions, like moving around your inventory.
This new UI space panel has much larger, more readable, text. Your mouse opens at the center of the screen each time, and the UI is consistently placed/sized, which means configuration movements will be consistent between panels. And for those prone to it, you also have a locked camera rotation helping reduce nausea.
Right now we have the interaction set so you need to look at the panel to interact with it. We did this because a few buildings have multiple panels, but it may be possible to tweak the system so you can interact with the panel simply by targeting the larger building. We are still unsure if the context of having interacted directly with the panel is worth the loss in usability of being able to sloppily interact with the building. I’m really looking forward to hearing different thoughts on how this should be rolled out.
Quality Of Life
We have received tons of feedback on how to make the minute to minute experience of Foundry better, but we are always looking for more. What’s the one thing you wish we would fix/improve/rework in Foundry to have a better time? Let us know in the comments or on the official discord.Cheers,
-Mark
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Changed depots in development branch