Simon Bursey · UI Director

There's kind of two bits to this, I suppose. There's the legibility thing, how easy is it to read, and then there's the customization thing. So in terms of legibility, we're always looking into better ways to do that. So we have a thing at the moment where it automatically makes the screen a bit brighter and increases the drop shadow on bright backgrounds. So that's a little step in the right direction. But we're always looking at ways we can improve that. Ideally, we want to get to a point where players wouldn't need to change the colors to be able to see the stuff. I think we're getting there. And then in terms of customization, the direction at the moment is we want to make each manufacturer feel unique. So especially starting with the ships, we want people to be able to say, OK, my Drake ship looks like this with these particular colors, and my RSI ship looks this way. So we're definitely heading more towards that direction at the moment. Technology-wise, it would be possible for us to allow things to be customized, but I think that's something we'd look at after we've got the ideal vision in place first.

David "Bone" Gill · Principal UI Programmer

Just to reiterate what Simon's saying, ideally it wouldn't be an issue that you'd want to change the colours if the legibility was perfect across all these different environments. Again, it's the same story with it being diegetic. The visor and the lens and the head-up displays are actually in-world, so the same effects are applied to them that are applied to real pieces of glass in the world. So the exposure is different, and what's behind them we can't really control. We can't control if they're looking at the sun or the blackness of space. So there's automatic exposure control, a bit like you get on a smartphone. It brightens up in a bright environment, darkens down. It's obviously more complex because it's translucent. In an ideal world, we would fix all the problems so people wouldn't have to or feel like it was a requirement. I don't think it would work long-term anyway, because you're flying somewhere that's snowy, for instance, and you decide to pick colors that would look good against the snow, and then you suddenly fly into space and then it doesn't look good. It's not really a solution that you have to keep configuring your colors to be able to read the UI. Really, the UI should be adapting to the environment properly. And hopefully, we'll solve that or at least get it dialed in a lot better.