Introducing brand new World & Session UI as part of the ongoing UI/UX overhaul
Hello everyone!
We have a very special weekly update today: The new Worlds menu is finally released to the public! It’ll have a few tweaks and some polish to come, but for now it’s functional and ready for the community to use. The MCC is about to commence as well so be sure to check out Medra’s posts on it as well as our previous weekly updates!
[h2]New overhauled World UI[/h2]
We have finally released another major part of Radiant UI as part of our UI/UX overhaul efforts - the brand new world browser. This unifies browsing published worlds, active sessions and managing opened worlds into a single unified UI, simplifying the interface for new users, while allowing more flexibility to existing users.
You can find the new world browser under the “Worlds” on your main dash in place of the old one. The interface automatically merges opened instances, active sessions and published worlds into a single item for each unique world, reducing duplication and clutter and by default pushes any active sessions to the top, making it easier to join populated worlds.
By clicking on any of the items you’ll be able to quickly join the opened session (if any are running) or start your own. The compact view also shows you the list of users present in that world, with your friends colored teal and away users semi-transparent. When there are multiple active sessions of a given world, you can either cycle between them or expand the world detail.
The detailed view contains a list of all available sessions as well as an option to start a new one. You can also find the metadata, such as publishing date, tags or the description and access to common actions like getting the world orbs, URLs or starting a custom session.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
The searching and filtering functionality has been significantly improved as well. Not only it works on live sessions instead of just published worlds, but it supports more complex term matching, instead of exact phrase match. You can find items with any of the terms or force them to be present by prefixing them with the “+” plus symbol or excluding with the “-” minus symbol.
Both the backend and client have been improved to provide much more responsive search and UI, handling most of the heavy work on a background thread.
On the left you can also find common filters to quickly narrow down the list to only show Active sessions, Game worlds, Educational, your own worlds and other categories. By clicking on “Custom” you’ll be able to customize all the searching parameters.
And as last cherry on top, the whole of the new World UI is highly modular and customizable. You can use the individual components to build your own UI’s and facets. The search bar and paging control are completely general and we’ll later use them for other overhauled UI’s as well.
All the pieces are dynamically linked using the new Dynamic Variable system (which you can also use for your own tasks), making it easy to make your own custom pieces of UI.
There are still some tweaks to be done, but we hope that this will greatly improve the experience of new users and reduce frustration. The days of new users not being able to find any populated worlds should now be gone!
If you do have any feedback, problems or suggestions, please let us know on our Discord or GitHub!
[h2]Dynamic Variable Spaces, Data Presets and more[/h2]
One of the major challenges of the UI overhaul is building out new highly modular systems to enable the new UI to be developed and maintained much more easily. Similarly the World UI has paved the road with several general additions to Neos, that have a variety of uses beyond just the UI.
One of them are the dynamic variable spaces, which allow dynamically linking values within the hierarchy based on a name. We have talked about them in the last update, but they have received some more additions in the latest build, providing more components for interaction with the system, like one way value driving or automatically resetting variables when objects are loaded or duplicated.
The system might still undergo some breaking changes, so please be careful if you want to start using them right now. We'll be adding more behaviors and fine-tuning them in the upcoming days.
Another addition is a Data Preset system. This has been used to implement the search/filter presets for the World UI, but it’s generic at the core, operating over raw data. It allows you to setup a set of preset values for certain fields and organize them into a DataPreset component.
You can then automatically assign all the preset values to their fields using a button event and you even get a handy notification if all the fields are currently matching their presets!
Our custom UI framework UIX has received various additions, tweaks and bugfixes as well, helping to mature it some more and provide new capabilities for building your own custom UI.
Several parts of the old UI have also been tweaked and upgraded to these new systems. If you’d like to see all the additions, tweaks and bugfixes, check the #neos-updates channel on our Discord or the updates here on Steam!
[h2]Community Highlights[/h2]
[h3]Planetarium, by Orange[/h3]
Orange of Neos East Japan has brought the Neos community yet another beautiful creation! The planetarium is customizable and shows users many beautiful constellations, so bring your friends along for a field trip!
[h3]Blackboard by PolyLogiX[/h3]
PolyLogiX is working on a new, soon to be public tool, the Blackboard! You can draw using various brushes and materials, and scroll in 2 directions making the board itself much larger than it appears! Can't wait to see this go live for public use!
[h3]Deep Space by Enverex[/h3]
Through a lot of creative and genius tweaks, Enverex was somehow able to create a massive world that is both detailed and extremely performant! Plus some of the NPCs utilize text to speech and can even say avatars names! There's lots to explore from an alien planet to a rideable starship, so give this place a visit!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]What’s Next?[/h2]
With the release of the new World UI, our immediate goal right now are tweaks and bugfixes based on feedback. One of the changes will be stabilizing the list of worlds when it’s being interacted with to prevent the items jumping around too much. Another small feature will be the ability to quickly close opened worlds without having to switch to them.
We’ll also be fixing and tweaking many smaller things that have accumulated while the focus was on getting this new system ready for release. After that we’re considering several things. We might implement the ability to place facets on your avatar, which should be a relatively quick task and possibly an UI translation system.
For the next big task however we might focus on some major optimizations to help improve performance with large numbers of people in the world and in general, but things aren’t set in stone yet. Let us know what you think!
And as usual, thank you very much for your support and for helping Neos grow and improve, we couldn’t be doing this without you!
We have a very special weekly update today: The new Worlds menu is finally released to the public! It’ll have a few tweaks and some polish to come, but for now it’s functional and ready for the community to use. The MCC is about to commence as well so be sure to check out Medra’s posts on it as well as our previous weekly updates!
[h2]New overhauled World UI[/h2]
We have finally released another major part of Radiant UI as part of our UI/UX overhaul efforts - the brand new world browser. This unifies browsing published worlds, active sessions and managing opened worlds into a single unified UI, simplifying the interface for new users, while allowing more flexibility to existing users.
You can find the new world browser under the “Worlds” on your main dash in place of the old one. The interface automatically merges opened instances, active sessions and published worlds into a single item for each unique world, reducing duplication and clutter and by default pushes any active sessions to the top, making it easier to join populated worlds.
By clicking on any of the items you’ll be able to quickly join the opened session (if any are running) or start your own. The compact view also shows you the list of users present in that world, with your friends colored teal and away users semi-transparent. When there are multiple active sessions of a given world, you can either cycle between them or expand the world detail.
The detailed view contains a list of all available sessions as well as an option to start a new one. You can also find the metadata, such as publishing date, tags or the description and access to common actions like getting the world orbs, URLs or starting a custom session.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
The searching and filtering functionality has been significantly improved as well. Not only it works on live sessions instead of just published worlds, but it supports more complex term matching, instead of exact phrase match. You can find items with any of the terms or force them to be present by prefixing them with the “+” plus symbol or excluding with the “-” minus symbol.
Both the backend and client have been improved to provide much more responsive search and UI, handling most of the heavy work on a background thread.
On the left you can also find common filters to quickly narrow down the list to only show Active sessions, Game worlds, Educational, your own worlds and other categories. By clicking on “Custom” you’ll be able to customize all the searching parameters.
And as last cherry on top, the whole of the new World UI is highly modular and customizable. You can use the individual components to build your own UI’s and facets. The search bar and paging control are completely general and we’ll later use them for other overhauled UI’s as well.
All the pieces are dynamically linked using the new Dynamic Variable system (which you can also use for your own tasks), making it easy to make your own custom pieces of UI.
There are still some tweaks to be done, but we hope that this will greatly improve the experience of new users and reduce frustration. The days of new users not being able to find any populated worlds should now be gone!
If you do have any feedback, problems or suggestions, please let us know on our Discord or GitHub!
[h2]Dynamic Variable Spaces, Data Presets and more[/h2]
One of the major challenges of the UI overhaul is building out new highly modular systems to enable the new UI to be developed and maintained much more easily. Similarly the World UI has paved the road with several general additions to Neos, that have a variety of uses beyond just the UI.
One of them are the dynamic variable spaces, which allow dynamically linking values within the hierarchy based on a name. We have talked about them in the last update, but they have received some more additions in the latest build, providing more components for interaction with the system, like one way value driving or automatically resetting variables when objects are loaded or duplicated.
The system might still undergo some breaking changes, so please be careful if you want to start using them right now. We'll be adding more behaviors and fine-tuning them in the upcoming days.
Another addition is a Data Preset system. This has been used to implement the search/filter presets for the World UI, but it’s generic at the core, operating over raw data. It allows you to setup a set of preset values for certain fields and organize them into a DataPreset component.
You can then automatically assign all the preset values to their fields using a button event and you even get a handy notification if all the fields are currently matching their presets!
Our custom UI framework UIX has received various additions, tweaks and bugfixes as well, helping to mature it some more and provide new capabilities for building your own custom UI.
Several parts of the old UI have also been tweaked and upgraded to these new systems. If you’d like to see all the additions, tweaks and bugfixes, check the #neos-updates channel on our Discord or the updates here on Steam!
[h2]Community Highlights[/h2]
[h3]Planetarium, by Orange[/h3]
Orange of Neos East Japan has brought the Neos community yet another beautiful creation! The planetarium is customizable and shows users many beautiful constellations, so bring your friends along for a field trip!
[h3]Blackboard by PolyLogiX[/h3]
PolyLogiX is working on a new, soon to be public tool, the Blackboard! You can draw using various brushes and materials, and scroll in 2 directions making the board itself much larger than it appears! Can't wait to see this go live for public use!
[h3]Deep Space by Enverex[/h3]
Through a lot of creative and genius tweaks, Enverex was somehow able to create a massive world that is both detailed and extremely performant! Plus some of the NPCs utilize text to speech and can even say avatars names! There's lots to explore from an alien planet to a rideable starship, so give this place a visit!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]What’s Next?[/h2]
With the release of the new World UI, our immediate goal right now are tweaks and bugfixes based on feedback. One of the changes will be stabilizing the list of worlds when it’s being interacted with to prevent the items jumping around too much. Another small feature will be the ability to quickly close opened worlds without having to switch to them.
We’ll also be fixing and tweaking many smaller things that have accumulated while the focus was on getting this new system ready for release. After that we’re considering several things. We might implement the ability to place facets on your avatar, which should be a relatively quick task and possibly an UI translation system.
For the next big task however we might focus on some major optimizations to help improve performance with large numbers of people in the world and in general, but things aren’t set in stone yet. Let us know what you think!
And as usual, thank you very much for your support and for helping Neos grow and improve, we couldn’t be doing this without you!