What's up with the UI being so holographic that it can become unreadable at times?

I think we have a line to tread.

Yeah. So we want it to look cool, right? But we want to be able to use it at the same time. So there's a balance to be had. We're not going to release something that looks like a vanilla web page, that's just black text on white background for all the UI. For sure. See, there's the extreme where you've got all this chromatic aberration and bloom and fog and effects and stuff going on, and it's not particularly readable and it's difficult on the eye. So we've got to find a balance where it looks cool and it's diegetic and it's in the world and it looks futuristic, but ultimately very usable. You've got to be able to use it, and it's got to not be bad on the eyes.

No, and I think with the mobiGlas in particular, because I think that was maybe the worst offender in this case. It's supposed to be this holographic thing, so it got a bit over the top and we got overexcited. It can look even cooler. But no, we very much appreciate the feedback, and I think everyone's very happy with the results that we've got now and it's coming out really well.

But we're still dialing that in, to get the tone right.

It'll be a continuous process. And there's also some graphical fixes that we've fixed recently as well. I think on some of the low-res render-to-texture stuff, there's actually some color correction weirdness going on that graphics seem to have fixed. So that's probably going to increase a little bit the brightness of some of the elements, because now the colors are consistent between low-res and full-res render-to-texture. And there's also some sorting issues that we need to work out in the system with regard to 3D planes and 3D objects. There's sorting issues that we've sort of fixed, but there's a proper solution we're going to do post-3.23.

So it sounds like some of it is technical, some of it is bugs, things not working the way that they're intended, and then some of it is pushing to find this happy medium.

Yeah, finding a balance of good art but good usability.

Because if there's a 3D plane in the world that's behind another, the thing that's trying to render a drop shadow or whatever, it's the thing that's over it. And when it's sorted incorrectly, you're going to null out any of the benefits of the backdrop or the drop shadow or whatever we put in.

And some of the diegetic UIs are in the world, so they receive the same world post-process effects, like chromatic aberration and the bloom and all these kind of things. So it's trying to combat them sometimes to make things perfectly readable, but because we're doing a diegetic game, because these things are in the world, you can't just sort of say, hey, don't apply these effects, because it would look really, really strange. It would look really out of place, like a game just putting stuff over the top of the screen after you've rendered the game world. We're not really after that kind of look. It's meant to look like it's part of the scene. So these kiosks or even the mobiGlas are part of the game world.