Citizens,
Today we've released some big changes to both the sidebar and the mobile topbar. We felt these changes were necessary as a prelude to several major features including Chaining, the upcoming mobile app and Travel 2.0. They may take a little while to get used to considering most of you here have spent potentially thousands of hours on the old sidebar / mobile topbar. We're confident that it's a big improvement however and the experience should be greatly improved once everyone has adapted.
Desktop sidebar
- Everything on the sidebar is now live. You don't need to load a new page. For example: New events and messages will instantly appear, money is updated the instant you receive some and hospital / jail is instantly applied / removed live.
- Messages, Events & Awards have been moved into a separate mini-panel. We felt this was important as eventually a new 'Support tickets' system will be added to this same panel. These four things will always appear here on the sidebar, while the areas list will change depending on where you are (Jail / Hospital / Future travelling).
Mobile top bar
We had to find a solution which displayed all vital information while using as little vertical space as possible. A system that works well for both new players and veterans, one that is both intuitive and user-friendly. I feel we've achieved that, although it'll take some getting used to for the players who finally managed to adapt to the old system.
- The area navigation system has been changed to a slider featuring bigger and clearer buttons so it's easier to find the area you want to go to, and much easier to accurately tap it. With the previous system, although most area icons were visible at once, it was not always clear which icon was which area (especially for newer players), and very tricky to accurately tap as they were so small.
- Area favoriting system has been added to ensure all of your most frequently visited areas can be positioned exactly where you want them. Tap and hold to set / remove favourites.
- Stat bars have been condensed to fit in a single line, preserving precious vertical space.
- Money and points appear alongside icons. If you have lots of icons, you can scroll this row to see the rest of them. Their size is defaulted to large to ensure they remain easy to tap. One tap displays their information, a second tap will take you to their assigned page.
- Time and server moved to tappable 'i' icon at the very top.
- Topbar width scales with the size of the device to ensure no available space is left unused. This might look a little odd for now, since the page content below still has a fixed width, however you'll be happy to hear that we're planning on changing this too in the future. We'll eventually work on making all page widths flexible with just a set maximum and minimum, and extending this 'top bar' mode to tablet view also.
Please note, special refills are not lost, however they may be unavailable for a little while - they're likely being relocated to the points building with the original refills system.
As usual, if you spot any issues / inconveniences, please report them in the Bugs & Issues forum and bear with us while we fix them!
Thanks.