A lot of my frustration with the game, these days, centers around the UI. The last update did speed up looking up cars in the Garage, but it does not address the fundamental issues with the layout and flow of the UI.
For example, I play Cycled Division and the ABCs fairly often, and when you have 700+ cars, trying to find th car you want, with the build you want in the limited amount of time we have is often impossible. We have no means of sorting homogolated vs class built. When looking at the cars, we can’t see what tunes we have available. You can’t see a list of cars+tunes and their times for a given track to help you decide what to go with.
Other UI oddities, why is Opacity not a function of the paint, and is instead part of the decal placement?
Or the leader boards. When I go in and race with a non-homogolated car that is 600PI, why is it compared to an 8000pi car I might have run on that course? Why would the devs even think that? Or, why can’t I see the leader board before the race, to give me an idea of which cars are competitive before entering the race?
I feel like you are missing one of the great axioms of UI design, “A UI is like a joke, if you have to explain it then it isn’t good.” Usually when I see issues like this, you have a very technical developer doing a UI that makes sense from a code POV, but confuses users.
Likewise, with the UI and timing, I have had a few races where I had a couple really good laps, but due to rammers I might have gotten a DNF. There is no easy way to goback and look at your good times because the you racing to catch up used up all the time.
Why can’t the end of race screens be combined in to one, that we can select panes in the screen and adjust those. A pane with your laptimes, itemized (instead of just the best lap) (would also be nice to include the itemized penalties here, when we get them). Another pane with the leader board and a race position chart, so you can see visually when and where people changed position (with marks for when penalties occurred would be very nice). Something for endurance races, with stats on tire wear, fuel consumption, and car damage over time.
I also wish that it would autosave the last 5 or so races, so if we have someone who we think it ramming over several races, we don’t have to remember to save the race right away.
And lastly, I’m a linux sysadmin here in the Seattle area and I do a lot of on-call time. In the evenings I will race until an alert occurs and switch to spectator mode. I wish I could lock it in to Spectator mode, so I don’t miss the start of the next race and end up causing an AFK accident.
Based on how little the UI has improved over the last iterations of FM, please give the UI the attention it have been sorely needing for so long.