Ok here is all the feedback of a seasoned aeolus warrior with lightyears of client and chat navigation experience under his belt.
I put quite some effort into collecting all those points and would
R E A L L Y like to see them if not addressed then at least discussed.
I'm gonna focus on what's bad because what's good is fine as it is.
1. FeaturesProblem: Initially I wanted to just write the changed styles out myself instead of saying what to change but it proved too tryhard with restarting the client and what not.
Proposal: "Refresh styles" button like in python client. There is a theme section in settings, but no idea if it even works, and there is no tooltips or info on that.
2. Client responsivenessProblem: Layout is fine if you don't go into autistic screen sizes but I often keep my client on 2nd small screen in windowed mode along with some second window which means the client is gonna be pretty small, let's see how that looks.
You can see not all the tabs are showing, in python client you can scroll through them but here you can't do anything. Pretty much unusable if you want to move from tab to tab.
Proposal: Switch navigation to vertical/more compact or both on small window size. Or at the very least make scrolling work.
!CRITICAL! Problem: No "dragging" header to grab, only real reliable way is to use this area here
But on small window sizes this area does not exist, making dragging actually impossible
Proposal: A header that will hold window buttons and dragging ability, see discord
Problem: Userlist on smaller window sizes takes up a lot of space
Proposal: A small toggle above it to show/hide the userlist.
3. UI/UXProblem: Not gonna question the background image choice over solid color, but all the headers should use a different background.
Solution:
but not assfugly. Maybe edit the image to fade into that color too.
Problem: No chat topic is displayed unlike python client, that's really not good considering mods put all sorts of useful information for noobs there all the time.
Proposal: Uhh... Put the chat topic in?
Problem: Literally insufferable alignment of names in chat.
Proposal: Please please please switch this disease
to align names to the right of the column.
Problem: Can't apply custom colors to whole usergroups like friends/mods at once, a pretty big quality of life feature.
Proposal: Be able to apply colors to groups of users.
Problem: The duplication of users in userlist across different usergroups is a bad decision imo
Proposal: Have them displayed only once in the highest priority usergroup: mods > friend/foe > faf user > irc
!CRITICAL! Problem: Downlords client has surpassed python in power by a long shot, but things like (this is all one list)
is what needs work. Huge array of options which is great for whatever edge case you need. Only problem is that 95% of the time I just wanna sort by rating and maybe map, and it takes me like 10 seconds to locate those in this huge list. Every time I want to find something.
Proposal: Save your filtering choice/allow to set a custom default. Also something like splitting criteria by primary/secondary, maybe color coding. Would also be nice to save the vault sub-tab so you don't have to load map vault every time you want to go watch some replays.
4. Bugs (?)Problem: I dunno what's up with local replay vault but it seems to just be missing any replays after my rename from Whiteheart
Can't find anything no matter how I sort. All the replays are in the same folder and show up fine in python client.
Proposal: Fix pls.
!CRITICAL! Problem: Colored users only apply to past messages and don't work on upcoming ones. I'm not kidding when I say critical because lack of proper chat experience is the sole reason I always stuck to the python client. Here I apply a color to ThomasHiatt and it applies to his old message but not the new ones -
This is a dealbreaker when it comes to reading chat, 70% of the time I completely ignore anything that isn't colored blue in python client.
Proposal: Color all chat messages.
Problem:
https://puu.sh/CqY9U/81f43725b8.mp4 when min width userlist and scrolling through it
Proposal: Fix pls.
Some, like the doubling of usernames or header color is a suggestion, but most others are more like
VERY SUGGESTIVE SUGGESTIONS. Hope they get enough attention.
Cheers, ya boi.