While at my time at BigAnt I have done everything in my best effort to make it easier for the future of the UI Team, here is a short list of what I have done
Ultrawide Support: Our widget system didn't support ultrawide screens and even though Ultrawide gamers only make up about 5% of PC users, I had a firm stance we should support them as best we can. Before my changes the widgets would scale incorrectly since our engine assumed you were running in 16:9, so added the correct logic for scaling and positioning and keeping the UI in the centre if the screen.
NoesisSDK: We have been coasting by on the Noesis version of 3.1 which came out in 2021 and since then they have made strides in performance and better tooling. After requesting to update to our technical lead he eventually gave in and allowed me to update it. (if you complain something enough you better be happy to do it (spoilers I WAS!!!)) It was a great experience to update our Noesis to 3.2.10 it did come with some unexpected hiccups however.
They made the reflection they implemented case sensitive which wasn't a big issue for all of our bindings but when it came to our custom in house controls they all stopped working so off I go to find all the incorrectly named controls
(eg. `workspace.controls.customcontrol` to `Workspace.Controls.CustomControl`)
I eventually found most of them so I wrote a new wiki page that allowed for me to document these new changes and new pitfalls that we could fall down.
Tooling: When we got our new editor we had an easier pipeline to make tooling soo;
I made a Noesis Inspector that allowed us to track focus since we had an occasional issue where ItemsControls that were purely for data presentation were focusable and we found it hard to track those issues down without opening the NoesisGui Inspector(Official Noesis Tool) and using that to track focus (it crashes a lot)
View Refreshing so when we have a view for example the frontend background we didn't have to reboot the game after small changes to test then it allowed for faster iterations on screens, and with that I added on a theme selector where you could paste the file path the the theme you wanted to apply and it would apply it (very handy when it came to HUDS and Wipes)
ViewModel Inspector this would iterate through all views and grab the datacontext off it and pass it to the tooling then iterate over all the properties(We are in LUA land here so it is easy) and created Toggle Boxes text inputs and sliders for the type of data that was in there. I also created the ability for a programmer to override the visual layout of this and we used this for further texture viewers, and CNVM's where we couldn't just iterate over all the properties as easily.
Career Tooling: The career guys for long longest time have been dealing with printing their debug in the output window, so I started making a framework for them to take over and control and make their on tooling, with this it came Competition Viewers where you can see the Fixtures, Player statuses, and so much more. With this tooling it allowed them to easily debug new features they were making, since we didn't have the feature to develop the UI for it.
Expanded Noesis Animations: We use a generic screen control that will scale up or down depending of the resolution and center it to the screen (It was made before I came it BigAnt) It did have the ability to fade in and out the whole screen you were working on, I found that in most cases it fell flat and no one ever used it. So this year(2026) I made strides forward and expanded the Intro and Outros so they can also fade in and out Left Right also, it works by passing an enum in the xaml and when you tell it to run the intro it will play the correct storyboard, it doesn't seem like much but it really allows the game to feel that little bit smoother and polished, then I informed my team (and documented it) and now our next product has every screen Swooshing across the screen in a coherent way.