Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Without picture-in-picture or frantic zooming, it's really hard to focus on the many important things that need to be focused on in a fight. Don't even get me started on if you are dual or triple boxing, because then you can forget a lot of play styles.

Give us FLIGHT VECTORS. Personally I would like to see something like an arrow representative of the velocity (recall that velocity is speed in a direction, therefore a vector) with the tactical overlay. I want to see it on my ship when I'm zoomed out (would be REALLY great when orbiting a target and looking for align points). I also want to see other ship vectors -- at least the ship I'm selecting.

First of all, this will allow me to remove radial and transversal velocity from my columns (well, I would keep radial on one toon but I wouldn't need it on all of them anymore). Second of all, it will give me a much clearer visual indication of when a ship slows down. I know we're playing spreadsheets in space, but I want to be able to see useful information... IN SPACE.
Furthermore, if you force us to get 99% of the information we need from the overview, some smart fuc­ker is going to realize that you can automate PVP based on the overview and API alone and start selling sov defense bots to the renter empires.

Some people might disagree with me, claiming that you can see plenty by looking at space and using the tactical overlay. I don't believe you. At least I don't believe your opinion comes from a fair place. Not everyone can afford high-resolution monitors and screen real estate problems are real. With local, fleet, chat, overview, HUD, selected item, drones and about 20% of the top left for navigation, there is very little space left to work with for looking around in space. Give us the visual aids we need, for the love of bob.

I don't really want a game that shows you everything so a no from me.

The major problem here is as you correctly point out screen real estate, and in a game where there is a huge volume of information to display some monitors simply do not have enough real estate to show it all and that will never change not even with your idea.

I am not specifically against your idea as posted so you get neither a thumbs up or a thumbs down from me because I do not care.

With that out, some general thoughts on this.

I can only see one advantage to this over what we have and that is a simple indicator about the direction your ship is headed. Keeping track of this has never been a problem for me primarily because my direction of travel is determined by those I am fighting and where I want to be in relation to them. Which way I am traveling in relation to the celestial objects around me is not relevant.

Even with this idea you will still need all of the things you listed AND your tactical overlay to make this work so I cannot even begin to understand how this is going to address the screen real estate issue.

This is not an issue when you only render the vector of the selected ship and your own ship.




The one advantage you mentioned is already a very potent advantage. And now with the new camera controls, it will become even more important to know where your ship is actually heading. Probably unlike most of you guys, I often fight outnumbered... vastly outnumbered. For those kinds of fights, it's really important to change course regularly and pretty important to do so in the direction of something that you can warp to just in case. Maybe you never fly those kinds of roles that need to warp out frequently, what do I know. I often find myself zoomed all the way out with the tactical overlay on, aligned to something like an anomaly. After moving the camera around a bit, I sometimes have to zoom all the way in to see what item I'm aligned to, just to zoom back out. While multi-boxing, this increases the difficulty of effective piloting drastically.

Finally, this addresses the real estate issue simply by requiring less zooming and camera panning.