Hardware Cursor option

Hello,

I sometimes have a bug (not sure yet what causes it. Might be tabbing out, not sure yet, thus nothing submitted), that causes the actual little white hardware cursor to appear, and as that's moved across the screen with good framerate you can see how much the ingame cursor drags behind with lost frames in between. I rather play with that bug then, because at least In know where the cursor is.

I honestly prefer the bug to the feature, as Unity is a resource-mess. The same issues were present in WftO. Especially with the tiny buttons (and the impossibly thing scrollbars in the editing UI) the UI was designed with, this is nothing but pain. This UI was not designed with players/users in mind, especially with knowledge of this Engine's problems, but only to "look nice".

It's been stirring for a while, and it's one of those things just add up frustration over time. As we say here "Even a fly takes a dump", and that adds up over time. It's not gamebreaking in the classical sense. But when such things frustrate player-interaction it is in effect the same thing. Similar to having relevant functions behind too many UI clicks.

* * *

We have an arts uni here that also offers "Communication Design", which is an interesting field, but as all depends strongly on the Professor. There's hacks there as everywhere else, and those not teaching these basics, well I have words for that, but they probably shouldn't be in a public forum.

They also teach complete nonsense that then haunts the world for a few years or decades, because everyone wants to be a revolutionary and everyone wants to be the cool new paradigm shift and fashiontrendsetter, and from that follow pretentious uncreative dogmatists who push that nonsense because "That's the new thing, therefore it's good, therefore we must all do it!" (I'll not open the history can of worms for that one, because some pretty horrendous things were argued for in that exact manner). That's simply not an argument.

One of those horrid things is how bloated websites are today, with several layers of images, autoplay background videos, at best with several layers of parallax, and this impossibly giant tiles with no borders but glossy animations like dangling keys for the little kids, all to hide that there's no actual content but 3 advertisement slogans on how awesome the thing the website is of is. And it has to load all at once, because it's all made for mobile, even the wide-screen PC-websites, are made in the same fashion, spamming into memory, draining connection (especially great on mobile with volume-tariffs as still are the norm in scam-countries like mine), and loading a ton of extra scripts that nobody needs. All at once. All because "Oh hardware is better so we let everything bloat, ductape it together, and when things run worse than a similar looking game in the 90ies (Looking at you Hollow Knight), we'll blame the consumer to not have the newestest space age hardware for a bazillion bucks, because the last space age hardware for a bazillian bucks is clearly not enough.

If people, for some reason, go to uni to learn these fields, and don't get things Quake and Donkey Kong Country, things made by absolute talents who did not study these fields that way, like all the great masters in the arts and science of centuries gone by, as the prime examples to aspire to, for code machine efficiency and UI cleanliness and clear communication, I'd say, people get scammed.

There are very few people who have this gift level intuition where they just make such things perfectly. Those are the people, and their work to be analyzed and learned from, to teach those who don't have the gift. Basically as in every other field.

What I've learned in my time: Artists can't UI, because they just make weird stuff they personally like looking at without consideration (empathy) of what anyone else actually needs. Programmers also can't UI, and it's hilarious, because the average programmer just invents a cool new function and then crams the button in somewhere where there's still space a key-combination still free. Why? Because he knows what he wrote inside and out. That's also lacking consideration for other users, same as above. That's why vim, emacs, the original Dwarf Fortress effectively need flight simulator manual you have to study. The same is true for editing software from photoshop and gimp to KDEnlive where certain standard buttons may be very core useful for the program but are utterly unintuitive for a new user. If you've ever been frustrated with the hotkeys for layers and selections in GIMP because you didn't use it for months or a year, and intuitively do it wrong, because things work by an unofficial standard everywhere else, that's that.

I know this is really harsh critique, but for your next game, please consider a completely new UI design philosophy. Just copying the UI from DK2 for WftO worked because it was an actually good UI for the most part and especially for its time (with its own flaws that you also copied). Copying Two-Point-Hospital's UI does not to the same trick, as that is already close to a "programmer's UI".

For example, look at western "Functionalism" (which I think was a scam by untalented people to pretend to be artists and designers for an excuse to market cheaply made products) Rice Cookers, and japanese Rice Cookers with proper Communication Design.
The latter has a million more buttons, but you intuitively know what to do and use for what. What's important is prominent. While the former... is the pretention of orderliness where everything looks the same and you have no idea what anything, and you get tiny script printed on, that can come off, that you need a magnifying glass for, and if you're really "lucky" it instead has cryptic symbols in the mental language of the "designer" that you have to interpret like the walls of the Temple of Thoth.

That by itself probably makes me not want replay the game once I'm through.

For a first game any company, any developr gets what we call "whelp-protection", you get a lot of leeway for mishaps and errors, because you're new to the party and still learning. Technically we're all always to be always learning. But on the second, especially with a big budget, long development time, that whelp-protection is not there anymore. You can't just wing it like that at that point.

Now I wrote a lecture again. What is wrong with me? Stuff like this really riles me up. Bloody autism. Seriously. Now it's noon and I don't have a burger.

PS: I hope you don't take this as an attack. This is the venting from a long time and many other things and places gone awry that come together and sadly, unnecessarily, are also present here. When everything goes wrong in a certain way, or when you're taught wrong, then there's no blame to not be able to see the see obvious, because everything is like that and everyone does it, and there's also always an element of workflow-blindness and  a prevalence to wanting to continue to work with the tools you already worked with. It's only in contrast that we can truly see the flaws and errors in our reflections. Just like we can only see our prior ignorance and naivety, once we've grown out of it. Just like a child can't remotely fathom what is like to be an adolescent, and adolescent to be an adult, and even an adult, to be senior. There's always another step.