Okay, so here's some first quick shots uploaded (I have video's, and lots more pictures as well, but I wanted to get something up right away for you all!)
Above is the 'default' view of the duel scene.
Hand is at the bottom.
Chat and logs and notes go to the bottom. Which is you know, standard.
You can move the whole left side to about 35 to 45 pixels. When you do that, items in that screen pop out as needed. You can also zoom out cards in the graveyard from that side.
Another item of interest, as mana is added to the mana pool, the mana pops out of the side. There is no persistent pool to choose from/waste space. This allows for some really cool stuff, like expanding out mana of special types. So a Snow Mana, a regular Mana, and a doubling cube mana... are ALL IN DIFFERENT SPOTS!!! While that's a corner case right now, it's only just a matter of time until we get some new mana, or snow-covered basics make their way back into Extended.
Another neat thing is that there will now be a "Red Zone" that creatures move into when they're attacking blocking. This seemingly simple change REALLY helps to show when you've entered the combat phase, which has been a particularily touchy subject over the past few years. It also allows you to set the blocking order in a very, very obvious manner.
As I mentioned, I have a lot more screens and a lot of video's of it being demonostrated that I'll post, as well as an interview with Adriana (yes, she still works at WotC). I'll post that information as I get it transcribed for the web, and if the audio itself came out well enough I'll post that in MP3 format as well.
37 Comments
A sneak peak from my interview:
Multiplayer is being worked in from the ground up. There will be some unique challenges with it from the new UI, but it should be getting the proper attention in V3.5. :)
Oh my.
It does look nice. I hope in the end everything is laid out cleanly and everything is obvious. The chat window looks small but there appears to be a slider that allows you to shrink the "hand" box to allow more room for the chat window.
Much, much better than what we have now. The focus is on the cards rather than a bunch of other stuff and the increased playing area allows for a scene closer to paper magic (rather than the cramped view we now have).
Well, they still made many borders wider than they need, but it's a lot cleaner and seem more usable.
Why don't they call it v4?
Technically, they haven't officially called it anything. I call it 3.5 because it will run on top of the current infrastructure. Which is why they are still working on fixing stuff like the collection server and stuff.
Where does the stack go? I really don't find anything wrong with the current duel screen (with big card format). What is bad UI is everything around it (i.e. dock, sliding menus).
wow.... I sooo need a new computer... but I'm going to have to wait till an announcement as I would rather get a MAC!!!!
On a related note... What I want is a freakign alarm for round starts and for disconnects! I've lost way too many tourneys/packs thanks to being disconnected without realizing it.
Maybe i'm alone in this, but I always felt that of all the UI problems 3.0 had... the duel scene was the least of them. Other than the misplaced chatbox, everything worked fine -- better even than 2.5. What REALLY needed work was... everything else! Has that been updated too or do they still have their heads in the dirt?
The stack starts at the center of the left edge of the screen, going on top of the rest of the display, and grows towards the right as things are added to it. There's also a function to let you collapse the stack in case it's covering up stuff you want to look at, that makes all the cards slide over to the left edge in a compact pile, then they spring back when you're done.
I got to toy around with the prototype and ask Adrianna some questions about it too, I'll be writing up a Pro Tour report and will put some of what I found out in there. Interesting trivia for today - 40-50% of current MTGO users run their PCs at a screen resolution of 1024x768.