On Eric Min’s Thanksgiving ride this morning he indicated that there will be a major Zwift UI coming, though no clear indication as to when. It sounds like the majority of the ‘upgrades’ may be directed toward the ATV app, as this appears to be the UI most lacking in features, but everyone should see some changes. As an ATV user I am really looking forward to seeing how things change!
A simple toggle for switching UI elements on/off in game without resort to hacks would be great. Some additional elements like TSS would be helpful. Complete customisation of elements would be awesome.
Quick question about your TSS comment: Is this something you want to see in-game? TSS is already available as part of the ride summary at the end of each ride.
Yes to in-game. Sometimes I ride to make a certain TSS, but even if I weren’t it’s a useful metric. But I realise others wouldn’t want/need it so ideally make it switchable.
I took the AppleTV comments to indicate that the new UI will be a lowest common denominator style UI. Hopefully that’s not the case though.
1 Like
I, also, hope that is not the case. My take was that more functionality will be added to ATV UI than any of the other UIs. Keeping my fingers crossed!
I forget where (podcast, forum post, etc…) but Jon mentioned earlier in the year that a UI revamp was coming. IIRC it was not just for the AppleTV.
Yeah it’s for everyone, but IIRC there was some mention that AppleTV would get it first.
Making everything easy for AppleTV users is fair enough. They need to be able to access all the game functionality just the same as everyone else.
What I don’t want to get is something that forces me to do things via the UI or Companion rather than, say, keyboard just because some people don’t have a keyboard. Pressing 1,2,3 etc. for camera angles, space to pop a power-up, cursor keys for turns etc. is simple and convenient. While some users might only be able to “press here, scroll right, tap there”, it shouldn’t preclude keyboard users from having additional ways to do it.
I guess we’ll see. =)
3 Likes
I have a bad feeling about this, will we be forced to use the mouse for everything or the companion app, even tho we have a keyboard right in front of us.
I have been told that we can’t get more keyboard shortcuts, does this translate to we will take the few away.
2 Likes
That would be very, very bad from an accessibility perspective. There are multiple reasons why forcing use of a mouse (or any sort of pointer) is bad.
For example:
- finding the mouse pointer on screen can be difficult. It’s small, and hard to detect against a moving background. This is made even worse when the action is time-limited (e.g. clicking on a Ride On icon for someone who’s just set a PR).
- the mouse pointer can be hard to control for people without fine motor control. The click targets on Zwift are pretty generous, but this is still an issue especially for people trying to click a moving target. Have you ever tried to click a specific rider in “Riders Nearby”, for example? I have good motor control, and it can still take me several attempts as the names jump about.
I don’t understand why we can’t have more keyboard shortcuts.
In fact, I don’t see why Zwift can’t allow us to customise keypresses. I mean, this has been something that videogames have done for more than 20 years. Take something like Quake 2’s autoexec.cfg for example. It would have entries like this:
bind r use rocket launcher
That would make you switch to the rocket launcher by pressing R.
You could even assign a single keypress to multiple commands:
bind z "say You lose!;wave 2"
Here you’d press Z, say “You lose!” and perform the “wave 2” taunt.
No reason Zwift couldn’t have something like that.
3 Likes