Hey, 

At 5pm I've decided to download the SpaceEngine and check it quickly - 5 mins max, before going to bed.
(Black stars, galaxies, procedural planets...)
At 6am SE crashed, so now I've finally decided to fall asleep.

Space Engine - Best pill against the restless sleep : )
Thank you for that experience!

---

Now I've decided to give something to the project. 
After 5 hours of tuning, and tweaking I've focused my efforts 
on a few logo concepts, UI, and fonts of the menu.

Here is my contribution to the community: 

If you think that some of these can be implemented somehow later, 
please ping me for PSDs, fonts, etc. I'll send them to the Dropbox / Gdrive or smt else.

Thank you!

ps Классный симулятор, нужно популяризировать его среди студентов, возможно "засветится" в документалках от NatGeo, BBC, Discovery...

Those look amazing! This would be awesome to see in SE

Getting the look in game should be possible. 

I really like the logo of the one in the center, with "ENGINE" typed with a lighter font, while I really like the background of the next one.
The "SpaceEngine" logo is pretty standard though, I'm not sure if the developer wants to change it whatsoever. 

Lovely, the only thing that i dislike of SE is the actual logo/GUI, this upgrade would be very appreciated
My favourite one is the blue in the middle

Looks amazing. I like the simplicity in your design, seems very attractive.

The GUI texture system will be changed in 0.981. I didn't make a tutorial yet, because it is too early for it. In short:

• Added a big font textures. There are 2 fonts now: old 256*256 pix (16*16 pix characters), and 512*512 pix (32*32 pix characters).

  

  win1251-font-big.png (75.32 KiB) Viewed 12044 times

• The font config file don't uses character coordinates/width table anymore, it is being constructed by SE automatically. It uses two configuration tags for two font textures (Font 0 and Font 1):
  Code: Select all

  Font 0
  {
   Texture     "win1251-font.*" // path to the font
   Ascent      0 // glyph vertical offset
   Approche    1 // glyph interval
   SpaceWidth  8 // whitespace width
  }

• The main menu texture was removed. Now text on buttons are typed with a new big font. The buttons images are added to the interface texture.
• The logo and crescent are moved into a separate textures, so can be easily modded.
• The skin config file has new parameters, which allows to mod all the mentioned above:
  Code: Select all

  SkinTexture "interface_mod.*" // interface texture
  BackTexture "menu2.*" // main menu background texture and cubemap (extended to menu2_pos_x.*, menu2_pos_y.*, and so on)
  LogoTexture "logo.*" // "SpaceEngine" logo texture
  HaloTexture "halo.*" // halo (planet crescent) texture
  Force3Dbackground    true // always use 3d background (cubemap), even in non-stereo/VR modes
  DualFont             false // don't use old small font, use only new big font with downscaling
  

So you now can easily make a main menu mod, by simply adding a new skin config file and required textures. The new skin can be selected in the player settings menu. The modded font will affect all skins thought, but I can change that too.

My current build uses static background texture for some skins. There must be provided a skybox texture, captured in the same location as the background texture, with 2048*2048 resolution. Then user switches to 3D stereo mode, VR mode or fisheye/cylindrical/cubemap projection, the background texture in all skins changed to that skybox texture (because flat background cannot be rendered in those modes, especially in VR). Some skins uses forced skybox even in 2D mode, with camera slowly wiggles across the skybox (sort of a dynamic effect).

I am not satisfied with this system, so it may be changed before release. The major drawbacks:

• Skybox texture is encoded into 8-bit image format, which in SE causes huge banding artefact on a part with a smooth gradients on the image (dawn, atmosphere top, milky way). Almost no scenes in SE has no smooth gradients.
• Skybox textures are large, very large. One single 2048*2048 uncompressed skybox took 128 Mb of video memory. Compressing it into DDS reduces it to 32 Mb, but artefacts became even more worse.
• Skybox must be at least 2048*2048 to make stars more or less "point" on 1080p screen. On a 4k screen, stars may start look blurry.

So I will probably change the static skybox texture to a full dynamic scene rendered by the engine. But this solution has also drawbacks, major of them is loading time. Each time you exit to the main menu, you will see nothing for at least few seconds (or maybe a blurred skybox?).

Great, thank you for the feedback! I really appreciate that!
Ok, now I'm fully motivated to make an updated UI for the main menu. Thank you guys!

ps И на родненьком: Владимир, спасибо огромное за SE! 
Обычно очень занят (проф дизайнер в прошлом 12 лет Гугл и т.п. клиенты, сейчас свои проекты и команды. Иногда помогаю с интерфейсами инди разработчкиам как хобби - из актуального The Long Dark), но видно, что правки тепло приняты сообществом. Думаю имеет смысл "причесать" меню и возможно позже и интерфейс в игре (есть идеи как улучшить некоторые вещи). 

Если не против, постараюсь найти время и разобраться с вышесказанным.
"Подшаманить" интерфейс под современные стандарты. 
Возможно это все позже из мода перекочует в основную ветку разработки.

So I will probably change the static skybox texture to a full dynamic scene rendered by the engine. But this solution has also drawbacks, major of them is loading time. Each time you exit to the main menu, you will see nothing for at least few seconds (or maybe a blurred skybox?).

Knowing now all these restrictions, I guess we can show the static blurred image first. 
Maybe even flat color or an image with minimal textures (that we know will be compact in VRAM and pleasant for users), 
maybe not a skybox (even for VR headsets) and fade it to the real environment when the engine is ready to show the real interactive beauty, let's say after 1-8 seconds.

Vladimir, you can PM me your skype, 
and we can hop on a quick skype call regarding UI / interface, etc.

Vladimir, I've received your PM messages. Can't reply on this forum.

So I've sent you a few skype messages. 
Please check them. Thank you!

The middle one and everything after it (the nebulae one, and the gas giant cyclone one) are amazing.  

The GUI texture system will be changed in 0.981.

Just another reason to by hyped about this version..

Thanks exgamesadrenaline, for the awesome mockups, and Thanks SpaceEngineer for working on updates to the GUI! I've wanted that for quite some time now. 

A while ago, on the old forum I posted my own re-skinned version of the menu interface that actually works. It's not quite as sleek as yours, but it's certainly an improvement on the default look in my opinion, at least until 0.9.81 comes out.

Here are some screenshots:
And I attached the download files. (To install, unzip the contents of loading_screen.zip into SpaceEngine/data/texture/common, replacing the files. And paste the file in menu.zip into SpaceEngine/data/locale, again replacing the current file.)

As a follow-up to my previous post, I also redesigned the main GUI of the game. (Just a mockup, however, it doesn't actually work)

In my design, I simplified the layout a lot, and made it look a lot more modern. The current SE design has all the tools and all the information right there, so it's hard to understand for people who are new to the game, and it's not very aesthetically pleasing. In my design, all the less-used tools and information are hidden in menus, allowing it to be much cleaner and simpler. 

Here is screenshot, and a YouTube video a made to showcase my design:  [youtube]tlinVp7FQwo[/youtube]
After I made the video, I realized a few things that should be changed about it:

• The button in the lower left should go to the planet, not center it on the screen
• The side bar on the right is missing a few important buttons that should be there, like time control and exposure control

(By the way, I posted this a while ago on the old forum website as well, so some may have already seen this - Sorry for the noob question, but does anybody know if all the content of the old forum was moved to this one? I can't seem to find my old post anywhere on the new site.)