Some changes in the new desktop UI

Hello everyone!

This quick article, which I hope to update regularly, is meant mostly for vets that are used to the old desktop interface.

New desktop interface was unveiled in January 2015. It is based on the same code base as our mobile user interface (UI), so it looked like mobile UI, and some pages, like village resources or village list, were actually using the exact some code.

However, over time, one screen at a time, got updated with desktop-optimized UI.

This blog will document some of this, to help our vets see how the new UI is progressing, especially when their only experience with it, was in January 2015 :)

COMPACT Desktop UI now available! 

You now have an option to turn "Compact UI Display" under settings :

resulting in more old-ui-like display for quick build and quick recruit

New Desktop Village List

Village List got a new, more desktop friendly layout, and all old-UI features, including some new ones

The filter and settings popup allows you to control what you want to see in the village list

Answering some questions about old vs new chat, old vs new UI

QUESTION : why the old and new chat is not connected.

Basically, incompatible technology :(

Old UI is practically 10 years old. There was no chrome, there was just Internet Explorer 6 and 7. New chat, in order to provide the functionality that it did, relies on new technology and integrates deeply into our framework. In order to bring it into the old UI, we would need to bring 50% of our new UI code to old UI. Because old UI is a stateless architecture - page load on each action - doing so would increase the load time for each page load greatly, to completely unacceptable levels.

Syncing the chat, while theoretically possible, is a huge amount of work, and we are not sure if it could even be accomplish without putting too large of a load on the server.

QUESTION: New UI is good except that timing of attacks is not correct. There is a  +- 7 seconds error.

This is very strange. The new UI is / SHOULD BE way more accurate. In fact, the new UI is accurate to milliseconds. old one is not. If you are experiencing such an issue, please do help us find the cause! if you could perhaps record a video? or give steps to reproduce? that woudl be great!

This should NOT be happening.

We did have an issue, that the longer you kept the UI opened, the time got out of sync; this was fixed and should not be happening.

QUESTION: Why does the old UI not have the new new Chat

As I explained in the very first question, due to technical issues, we cannot embed, that is, put a chat box, right in where the old chat was. However, the old chat, always had the ability to pop out of the main page like so :

The new chat cannot be put in frame, and the two chats cannot be synced. Nor can we roll back one of the most asked for features (group chat, chat notification etc).

However, to be clear, the new chat IS accessible from the old UI. You can play with the old UI and new chat via Throne Room like so:

QUESTION: No one likes the new chat, so why have it

As with any release, we did hear players were not happy with a different way of doing things, however, the new chat, especially once you experience the power of it, has been well received by most.

Of course, players pointed out things that they did not like in the new chat (like defaulting to global not clan chat etc), and we are actively working on fixing many of those. In fact, last wednesday release already delivered some of those fixes.

It did not help that the chat caused almost 2 days of lag and was failing for some people, but once players started to experiment with some of the new powerful features like group chats and notification, we got a lot of positive feedback. Here are some of the positive comments we got, about the new chat, right from the chat:

• fancy new chat is fancy! :p
• Interesting new chat service
• Wow, new chat is good...provided you dont get them mixed up.
• his new chat will be good for you.  It takes single line responses and groups them all together.  ;)
• Sleek new chat box.
• new chat, woah
• i like this shiny new chat
• I like the new chat @=@
• I like this new chat now
• The devs are working on the glitches in this new chat!
• Hey guys - since this new chat allows us to create group chats I made this one for village claims for just our area
• New chat will be great once they sorted glitches
• wow new chat :D
• Testing out the new chat function here, and see if this helps coordinate any attack we may have.
• I like this new chat. Once forum is tied to it again it'll be a good change. I need to tinker with custom chats
• this new chat thing is great
• you can setup chat groups for ops which is useful with new chat