Interface:

The Interface menu has a ton of options. He can choose window size, window colour, text font, if notifications should display in combat or not, where the popups appear instead of right in the center of his vision, how transparent the windows can be. He can change the vocal commands to open Menus, he can set the commands to be activated via hand signal instead. He can set them to be activated via eye movements if he wants.

Pretty much any way he can think to customize how things display or are activated he can do it, ease of use and customization so he can get it exactly the way he wants seems to be the theme of the interface menu.
 

Ooh. How user friendly. He starts fiddling with the thing and asking for the hobbit input. And he would rather not have notification happen in combat. Popups can appear at the corner left of his vision. Can he make them only show up an exclamation mark until poked to expand?

All of that is possible and more with the interface menu being designed by someone competent! Can have popups remain minimized with only the number of popups waiting to be read as a small number in a circle showing until accessed.

The Hobbits have no real context for User Interfaces this being the first they have ever seen, but Frodo likes the windows being semi-transparent so he can look through them to what is behind them. He is apparently good at just ignoring the windows as long as he can still see past them.

When Bilbo gets added back in he finds he is less good at looking past them even when the transparency is set fairly high, He has to be taught how to minimize and bring windows back up for it to be something he would be comfortable having on all the time.

Frodo takes to moving windows around and tapping on things like a fish to water, he is a very adaptable Hobbit. Bilbo, however, takes a few tries to get the hang of the controls since this is so different from any frame of reference he has ever had in his life.

Hey, even old people back home have trouble with this sort of thing. After fiddling a bit he finally settles with something that it's not too intrusive and adds a variety of commands so he has every avenue available to get access.

After all that's done. He will go back to the graphics menu and very carefully fiddles with things. While the hobbits are temporarily disconnected. 

Fiddling with the FOV more than a few percentage points in either direction Immediately makes him nauseous, the brain is not used to suddenly dealing with more input or having everything look distorted like that.

Depth of field blurs things he isn't focusing at like a fancy camera, really has no practical use unless he wants to take fancy screenshots with the notes menu.

Motion blur is the most sickening Option of the bunch, why does this even exist except for that most games have it as an option? everything blurring is nauseating to the extreme.

Saturation makes everything have more or less colour, turning it all the way up is very trippy but not actually nausea-inducing, turning it all the way down has Franklyn seeing in greyscale.

Contrast makes everything more contrasty, more contrast has a bit of a worse effect on the eyes than over-saturation but it does seem like Franklyn can see deeper detail into shadowy areas of the room. Less contrast just makes everything harder to make out.


Brightness makes everything brighter, not in a lighting sense just actually shifts the tone of the image whiter, combined with added contrast this could make for a decent low light vision option. Brightness all the way up or down just blinds him in either pitch-black darkness or blinding white. You could use lower brightness as a kind of sunglasses effect maybe?

Well, those are sure some interesting sensory experiences. He tries not to get too sick and to keep the experimentation restrained.

The experiment with Contrast and Brightness makes Franklyn realize that he is not sure if the interface is somewhat visual. Is it affected by him closing his eyes? Going somewhere darker or brighter?

Closing his eyes blocks the interface, if he tries covering his eyes though the interface remains. If he is focusing on the interface and closes his eyes it remains. Seems it blocks when you blink or are closing your eyes to block visual stimulus, but if you are trying to continue using it it stays up.

Going somewhere darker does not reduce the visibility of the interface at all, in fact, it seems to be giving off light if he sets the interface colour to something bright. If he asks the hobbits if they can see the light it is giving off when he stands in a dark corner they will shake their heads. So it isn't true light shining on things but illusory and related to the interface.

Huh... can he use the illusory light to read things? Or at least notice details enough that he can tell it is a realistic illusion?

The light acts like normal light, except only he can see it.
Put something close to the glowing interface and he can see detail and read whatever. If he set the interface colour in the RGB sliders to bright white with full opacity it could be used as a weak flashlight. But it wouldn't reveal his position to anyone else.

Neat. He makes a mental... no, an actual note to the fact on the note function.

"It sounds like a good idea to test other limits. But I am not sure. Distance? See if I can add people that are very far away?"

Bilbo looks pensive. "Well Gandalf will be showing up soon and he travels all over, can ask him if you can send him the magic once he leaves town and travels a fair distance away."

Frodo looks eager. "If it's far enough, I can run to the other side of Hobbiton and you can try!"

Awww. Must. Resist. The. Urge. To. Pick. Up. Adorable. Person.

"Both of those things work and would be useful."

Frodo runs off as fast as his short legs will carry him, out the door and down the road to the other side of Hobbiton. Hobbits he passes by shaking their heads at this already an Adult running like a child. "Acting like a darned Took he is." a grumpy old lady says as he runs by.

Bilbo just smiles fondly at Frodo's eagerness.

"So Franklyn, how about we finish off some of that honey cake in the meantime, it'll take young Frodo maybe 20 minutes to get to the other side of town at that rate." Pulling out plates and cutlery from cupboards.

"I would love to." Franklyn helps sets things up. When he is not distracted, he checks the map to see if Frodo shows up in it.

Yup! Party members have their name highlighted on the map, makes them easy to keep track of. It is what you would expect from a modern memo interface. The option for highlighting party members could have been turned off in the interface menu, the way almost everything else in the interface can be customized.

If Franklyn zooms in far enough he can see that Frodo’s sillhoute outline is also highlighted, even when he runs underneath tree canopies.

Bilbo brings out the honey cake and cuts it into generous slices, a man-sized slice for Franklyn even, though Bilbo’s is not much smaller. It is less sweet cake than someone from 21st-century earth would be used to, but the honey flavour is deep and complicated and the quality of the ingredients is noticeable, the crumb is also quite dense compared to the fluffy cakes you would get in a supermarket. It's sort of like a very good banana bread but tasting of honey instead.

Bilbo sighs in contentment after having a few forkfuls of his slice. “Just the way my mother would make it. Tooks make some of the best beekeepers and they know their honey cakes, never found a recipe for it that I liked better.” 

"Family recipes are the bests," Franklyns says in the tones of some deep wisdom, though meant completely seriously. Nom. "Still seeing Frodo on my mental map," he reports. "He is quick on his feet."

“It’s all the practice he got running from farmer Maggot and his dogs every time he would get caught stealing mushrooms, Frodo and his friends have had the luck of fools escaping those terrifyingly large hounds.” He relays the story fondly even as he calls them foolish. “To you the dogs might not even seem that large however.” He chuckles at the friendly jest over this mans height.

Bilbo strokes his chin thoughtfully. “Though... I suppose... For our stature Hobbits in general are quite quick ln our feet, able to keep pace with longer-legged folk like dwarves and men if they aren't sprinting.”

"Being tall doesn't make bites hurt less. I hope the hounds are not that dangerous. I guess being light-weight would help some with speed. Fewer bones to weight you down." He appreciates the jest with a chuckle of his own.

“Oh the dogs are well trained, they might bite to trap a limb but they don't crunch down. That doesn't make the barking of animals as tall as I am any less scary. Maggot got them as pups from a man up in Bree, our dogs are usually more appropriately sized.” Bilbo has finished his cake and is sipping his tea, enjoying the company of this stranger that might be from another world, though he still had doubts about that.

Franklin gets a party chat message from Frodo, who figured out how to send messages on his own. [Does it still work? Can you still see me on the map?]

Franklin can in fact see Frodo on the map, waving his arms to the sky while Hobbits around him stare at his strange behaviour. It seems that over the length of the entire town the party system still works.

Franklin, however, might not be observant enough to notice that in that area only the map around Frodo is being updated in real time, Hobbits and animals over 100 metres away from Frodo are not moving on the map.

"Ah, that makes sense," he sips the tea. "Though, I bet that if you train one to be delicate it must be appropriately more adorable," he muses like it's a deeply philosophical question.

[Yes! I am seeing you in the map. Waving your arms. And around you.]

He catches the lack of real time update if there are some obvious inconsistencies? Like a hobbit appearing at two places at once or apparently teleporting (from walk in and out of view). He reports this to Bilbo.

If Franklyn is paying close enough attention he might notice as someone who was elsewhere walks into “frame” as it were and suddenly appears. But only if zoomed out far enough to see the “edge” of where the image updates around frodo.

Bilbo gets out his pipe and starts to pack it full of pipe-weed. “Things keep getting curiouser and curiouser. But, I suppose there is no reason the magic would have a distance limit anyway, or if it has a limit it is wider than the village at least.” Bilbo gets a small flint and lights his pipe, giving it a few big puffs to get the embers blazing.

[I’m coming back now.] Frodo messages through the party chat, and on the map he can be seen sprinting back to Bag End.

[Noted. Going to take a look at the map from farther out.] 

Franklyn shrugs. "I could see having limits, but I mostly don't know anything about magic." He looks curiously at the pipe's smoke. "And Frodo is on the way back. Also, I noticed the map only shows a updating picture if I or Frodo is nearby."

Franklyn’s map updating radius is much further than Frodo’s, a full kilometre.

Bilbo notices Franklyn watching him smoke and decides to show off, blowing fancy smoke rings. “If it showed everyones position no matter where in the world that would be the kind of artifact that would rival any from elvish legend. Though even now it seems very useful, could see who was coming to your house before they even knocked on the door.“ Bilbo sighs at the pleasant thought, it would be so useful for avoiding those grubbing Sackville-Bagginses.