Our resident UI guru Paul Kiesling will be giving us part one of a two-part series on this UI revamp below:

With this month's update comes a functional refresh of our front-end UI. We have spent the last several months really digging into the UI to improve the user experience and feel. We have moved away from the holographic stylization and towards a more hardened TEC feel, with emphasis on readability and organization. We went through every menu and intentionally lined up all of the universal elements between pages to make moving between windows seamless and smooth.

Let's start with the newest screen to be introduced, the Newsfeed, located on the left of the top bar. If you click this, it will take you to a feed of the six most recent dev diaries. This updates each time you open the game, so you can see everything we are working on and keep your ear to the ground for upcoming updates. Each link will bring up the respective Steam page or YouTube video, depending on the information linked. This screen will be editable by modders with some controls on how they want to display their own respective updates.

Moving on to the surface-level details, the UI has been given an overhaul, not only to improve the visuals but to make interacting with it a lot easier. Across every menu tab, the menu options and visual information are all lined up pixel for pixel, so when doing things like switching between single and multiplayer, or going from replays to settings options, the arranged information is all in the same place between screens.

We put more emphasis on the lobby this time around, doing our best to polish the aesthetics and allow for a greater level of customization when it comes to how you want your avatars to look and how you want to best represent your favorite faction. We have commissioned hand-painted portraits for each faction, as well as added what we call faction plates, a bit of factional flair that players can choose from to customize their lobby appearance. We will be going over the details of this more in depth in part two.

We’ve improved the lobby system for semi-fixed positions with team number selection, and added a number of QOL features to the lobby customization that will be discussed further in part two, but for now can be summarized as:

• Color customization - The ability to pick a team color and adjust brightness/saturation to your heart's content, solving the constant battle between bright/gritty colors.

• Faction Selection - We have added the faction selection screen and added in the ability to live preview any asset for each faction giving new players the ability to have a better picture of the faction before playing.

• Live Map Preview - Players can now see a top-down basic representation of the map they are about to play on. The preview menu also lets you manually change starting positions, or set fully random starts.

• Change Map Menu - Players can now change maps within the lobby, allowing groups of people or a single person to change the map without having to back out and make a new lobby.

All of these details will be more fleshed out in part two as we dive deeper into this UI update.

One of the biggest additions with this update is one of our most requested features since launch: the in-game map generator. We have put a fair amount of work into bringing back the in-game “Map Designer” from Sins 1. It gives you sliders for the basic controls of galaxy generation and allows you to control a nearly infinite number of systems at the click of a button. Each input has a tooltip and range to give you a thorough understanding of what you are editing. We have made additions to the Drop-in Scenario system, so maps that are generated are immediately available to use without reloading or restarting. Each slider has a range from low to very extreme, with colored indicators that signal you may be going off the deep end. However, we will not stop you from creating very large maps. Performance in an extreme map is heavily dependent on your PC’s capabilities, so create galaxies at your own peril.

If you would like to try this ahead of our live release, please feel free to participate in our public opt-in, available wherever you have Sins 2. Public input has already helped us improve this prior to release, and we would love to hear from you as well.