One of the bigger parts of the upcoming v1.5 patch in Pirates of the Burning Sea is an overhaul of the User Interface. Devs have released a preview article and several screens.

This patch, the UI strike team wanted to focus on some of the biggest sources of strife for our players, based on what we see in playtests and hear about on the forums. We also wanted to get started on upgrading and polishing some of the art pieces that have been neglected. Heres a preview!

Port Conquest Status

By popular demand, our first order of business was to overhaul the Port Conquest Status UI. First, we pulled it out of the local map UI because it makes way more sense to be in the victory status UI. Also, there's more room to play with in that UI, so we can display a lot more information.

Next, we started working on how to better display all the port conquest information. Now you can quickly sort by nation, port name, status, contention points, etc., instead of scrolling through the entire list of ports. You can also filter out any ports that are currently peaceful, so you'll always know where the action is. Your general contention points are also displayed on top. We're still tweaking some of the text colors, but heres a preview:

Toolbars and Click-Dragging

Toolbars (sometimes also called hotbars) are another area we focused on for this sprint. Lots of people have told us that they like being able to move their UI around (using the Manual UI preference), but that they want to lock their toolbars in place. We've seen this a lot in playtests too- players move their entire toolbar when what they meant to do was just trigger a skill or use a consumable item. To solve this, we added a preference to move and lock your toolbars separately from the rest of the UI. Now you can set up your toolbars and have them stick that way until you decide to change them again.

The other piece of toolbar lovin we have for you is the ability to more easily move items and skills around. Now you can pick up a skill icon and swap its position with another instead of having the new skill replace the old one. We also improved the way skills and items behave when you're dragging them around. Its a subtle change mouse behavior, but it sure makes setting up and changing your toolbars a lot less annoying. Give it a try!

While we were poking around in the code that controls clicking and dragging, we did one more exciting thing. You now have the ability to initiate trades with other players by dragging an item to them and dropping it on their avatar!

Collapsible Inventory and Skill Lists

Another step in our continuing effort to make things you do all the time a little bit easier, we made it so you can collapse and expand all inventory and skill lists by category. Reputation works this way too. It's nice:

Lockable Mini-map

Something else we hear a lot is that some people don't like their mini-map / radar to spin around with them as they move their camera. For instance, some of us just prefer that North point up no matter where we look. For these folks and everybody else, there's a new preference to set how your mini-map behaves. You can set the mini-map heading to North, to your ship's heading or to your camera's viewpoint. Enjoy!

New UI Art

The messages that pop up in the middle of your screen (we call this the "generic message box") used to be on a boring brown piece of paper. We tossed that old paper out and came up with a much better design:

The server and character selection screens also got some much-needed artistic attention, but you'll have to wait until you log in to see those!

UChat

Last but not least, this patch also brings support for Sony's Uchat system. Now you can chat between different PotBS servers and other Station games. The syntax looks like this:

/tell character name@game.server, Hey, I'm playing PotBS! You should too!

If you use Uchat to speak to people on other PotBS servers, you can leave out the game title. To talk to characters on the same PotBS server, you should send direct messages as usual.

We're really looking forward to getting these changes out to you. As always, we hope you'll love them... but if you don't, be sure to let us know!

Everything looks really nice!