Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I spend quite a bit of time in a cloaky ship.

When I'm in my cloaky ship the most important thing for me to know is whether I am cloaked or not.

At the moment I have a faint glowy green light saying the cloak is on which is invisible against certain nebula. If you could replace that with a setup where the whole screen flashes red and a klaaxon sounds and a voice says; "YOU ARE NOT CLOAKED!!!" repeatedly in a doom laden voice, when I'm not cloaked and nothing when I am, that'd be dandy. Failing that a background for the flashy green light so that IT IS ALWAYS VISIBLE!!! regardless of which direction I'm facing or what sky I'm in.

The next most important thing for me to know is whether I can cloak, and that indicator a) occupies the same space as the pervious one, and b) sometimes bugs out when jumping thru a gate so that it seems to say you cannot recloak but in fact the timer has run down and you can :|

Now your indicators are all very subtle and cool looking, but quite frankly what I want is 2 little lights (like leds) one green one which is on when I'm cloaked, and one red one which is on when I can't recloak, and I want them to be on a black background (so I can see them easily) and I want them to always work, ie show the correct state of my cloak.

The other thing I'd like is two buttons for the cloak, one to cloak me, and one to uncloak me. Unlike guns, or reps or a variety of other modules where you might like a single cycle I never want a quick burst of cloak. It's a state changing experience and it should have a bloody great throw switch. Of course that's tricky in a virtual environment, but the closest thing is having two buttons to make it significantly harder to accidentally double click and turn your cloak off when you meant on.

Finally there's often a warning when you click the cloak just after aligning "Your cloaking interferes with the operation of that module" or some such. This is the most irritating warning ever "You cannot cloak becuase you are cloaked." I appreciate that you want some mechanics so that gate campers have a "fair chance" vs cloakies, but having the button greyed out, or some other visual indication that I won't be able to use it shoudn't be too much to ask.

Basically the UI for cloaking is bobbins, it looks very sexy and suave but it doesn't provide me the pilot with the warnings and functions I require. If these spaceships were real I'd be banging on the makers doors demanding the controls I describe above.

Wow, okay.

I too spend a great deal of time in a cloaky ship. A Cheetah, to be precise, fitted to warp around absurdly fast and scan things down even faster. Being a Cheetah, the act of simply being target locked is enough to kill the ship - no application of DPS is required. Given your corp, I imagine you spend a lot of time in a Blockade Runner. Mine is a Prorator. It's completely anti-tanked but it aligns fast enough and I'm pretty quick on the cloak button so I've never had a problem.

First, your doom-laden silliness is ... silliness, I assume.

With respect to the green light, I've always found it sufficiently visible but maybe you're in some sort of region where the local nebula interferes and is greenish too. I'll have to travel around and see if there are any places like that. However, the most reliable thing I've encountered is using your own human intelligence - that is, a combination of "did I turn the cloak on?" and "is there anything in my overview that's coming close enough to decloak me?" These two questions have kept me safely cloaked in even the most active of lowsec systems. I will grant that it would be helpful for the module area of the HUD to have a faint background to help reload timers and cycle timers show up against bright nebulae, but until that happens you shouldn't have any problems operating a cloak simply because you can't see the green glow.

Knowing whether you can cloak or not should rely more on your human intelligence than on the game. Has your gate cloak worn off? You can cloak. Have you moved? You can cloak, provided you don't send the cloak command too quickly after the "start moving" command. Are you within 2000m of anything? If yes, you cannot cloak. If no, you can cloak. If you're not sure, unfuck your overview so you can see.

Two buttons for the cloak is ridiculous. Why are you double-clicking modules? The only thing I can think of is that you're spam-clicking it because you don't have a good understanding of how server ticks work, which leads me into my next comment..

..if you stop and learn how server ticks work, you'll learn how to correctly sequence your commands and a lot of the "infuriating" errors you get will disappear.

The UI for cloaking is just fine; the module area as a whole could do with a bit of a faint background for visibility purposes with all those white-colored cycle and reload and cooldown timers, but by and large it's not bad the way it is. If these spaceships were real, you'd be escorted off the makers' premises at rifle-point.

TL;DR - HTFU and stop being bad at cloaking.

So you agree that the module area could do with a background.

There's some bright Caldari nebula that make it impossible to see the state of the modules, but you can point your ui at the sun in most systems to emulate the effect.

The bit you seem to have missed about the being able to cloak is that the recloak delay timer is bugged sometimes on jumping a gate and appears to be full and not counting down. ie the ui tells you you cannot recloak. I do not require a proximity warning or anything else you seem to be imagining, just easy to see indication of what is already shown poorly.

As for the 2 buttons, or a toggle switch, even a lockable toggle switch, which pings an alarm when it's unlocked by proximity decloaking you, surely these things are not too much to ask from a manufacturer? Even if they're the kind of rude roughnecks who wave firearms in their clients faces.

I can and do use the cloaking ui sucessfully on a daily basis,so cast your aspersions elsewhere, I was just struggling to see the faint green light against a bright nebula (whilst cloaking exactly when I wanted/needed to) and got to pondering how I'd like the ui to be in a cloaky spaceship, if I were to fly one for reals, a faint green light and a partially broken dotted white line round a single round press button is not it.

I nearly thought that this was just another whine post about cloaks... I was pleasently surprised.

An opaque module background, granted, that would be useful.

For the recloak delay timer, you should file a bug report on this.

The OP is on to something. The UI of EVE has many problems, and displaying the state of your cloak is one of them. A stronger visual indication of when you are cloaked would indeed be an improvement, as would greying out when you are unable to cloak.

I've never actually used that recloak indicator on jumping a gate; I use my own knowledge of how the server works and rely on that instead - as does everyone else who has been cloaking since before the recloak indicator and requires a swift recloak after gate-jump.

This is one spot where the answer really is stop being terrible at the game.

Yes Lugh there is.

To be clear, for the hard of thinking, I am not asking for any more indicators than we already have.

I'd just like the indicators we have to be clear, and accurate. Which isn't too much to ask, no?

Misread title.

Thought "indicators" was "interdictors."

Am leaving disappointed with my own reading abilities.

-1.


On topic: I can understand where the OP is coming from, and I think his suggestion is well thought-out, but I have to disagree with it regardless. The existing border-based indicators that the OP is speaking of relates to the state of your ship. Applying it to cloaking devices would make it relate to the state of a module. I see that as a significant disconnect and reason enough to not do it. And if you want to get into changing cloaking device UI icons to indicate that they can't be activated, I think that should be part of a UI overhaul that provides similar functionality to all modules, not just cloaking devices. Note, that is a big "if" in my book as I think the current system is fine.


-1.

I'll go far enough to simply point out that the module "panel"/"list"/"controls"/"what ever it's called" could use a looking at in terms of visibility issues with certain nebulae/effects appearing behind it.

Bright areas of nebulae, for instance, make it next to impossible to see any activation/deactivation/loading timers on modules and it would be nice to have something to separate foreground and background.

+1, not really just for cloaks, but good idea nonetheless.