Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Introduction

As many of you well know general navigation in EVE sucks.

Part of the problem is that since there are so many damned things you have to navigate too, the only possible organization for such elements are nested trees of options.

This in itself is not a bad thing, but the problem is the implimentation. Using the mouse is a pain, and even the current shortcut method of using "D" and then clicking in the overview is hardly user freindly given the number of objects in the overview depending on how it is set up.

So here is an additional OPTION OPTION OPTION OPTION to right clicking.


NOTE: I made this with an online editor. So if it doesnt look so hot, bear with me.

So. What to do? Well here it is:

IT STARTS WITH A SLASH*

My new shortcut system is simple. You open the right click menuwith the NUMPAD SLASH* key like so :

http://i952.photobucket.com/albums/ae8/keyser_soze_2009/Nav01-1.jpg

This sets the first highlighted option to "Reset Camera" since it is the safest option. NUMPAD SLASH also closes the context menu.

JUMPING THAT GATE

Now having opened right click, each of the navigational elements now have an assigned number, and in order to select that element, you just click the corresponding number on the numpad:

http://i952.photobucket.com/albums/ae8/keyser_soze_2009/Nav02compfinal.jpg

So in the above example we are wanting to jump through a star gate. NOTE THE NUMBERS next to each element. You simply select the corresponding number, which will bring you to the next nested menu as so:

http://i952.photobucket.com/albums/ae8/keyser_soze_2009/nav03final.jpg

When you come to the last element on the nested Menu, in this case the "Warp to"or "Jump" option you once again select the corresponding number and hit ENTER:

http://i952.photobucket.com/albums/ae8/keyser_soze_2009/nav04final.jpg

ET VIOLA!!


ARROW KEYS

Arrow keys can also be used after hitting NUM PAD SLASH for those who prefer that method. Final confirmation is still via ENTER. Arrow keys will also be used to navigate to those few elements that number more than 10.

PERSONAL LOCATIONS

Personal Locations will now simply be a nested tree, with each short cut made assigned a number, sorted by Alphabetical order. Simply put, if you want a particular Safespot or location at a particular position on the tree, you can always rename it to begin with "A" or "01"


*FINAL NOTE

As per current EVE settings nothing is bound to the main number key sequence of the keyboard, all of the above can be easily done with the main keys instead of the Numpad, with "~" instead of Numpad slash

All comments and trolls welcome.

Congratulations on being unable to read a post. Look at Final note.

You want to keep using the mouse no problemo. This does not change that, and the amount of work you have to do to move your mouse through a narror nested tree that sometimes skips you out because of some involuntary movement , makes mouse work that much more time intensive.

Umm what? Other than the right click menu - which is not a short cut, or the overview warping, there are no shortcuts, maybe you misunderstand the meaning of the word shortcut then, if all you can use is that which is the primary method anyway.

While I don't see this as a needed thing at all, it's certainly not the worst idea out there. It's something that wouldn't hurt the current users to have (since it simply adds a column of numbers in the current right-click menu, which you can use if you choose to) and would help certain other people.

My two concerns, however, is that it would make things even easier for botting and that it would be mostly wasted dev time which would be better spent elsewhere.

So, while I don't think this would be flat out bad for the game (as so many ideas on here are), I don't think it would be useful enough to spend the dev time it would take to implement such a system.

ON your first point : Yeah I can understand your worries there. The thing about bots as I have seen on youtube and elsewhere is that it primarily the business of warping to a belt, locking on to an asteroid and mining it.

In each of those elements, only the first has the actual possibility of abuse, wherein each consecutive step has to be done via the overview, however it should be noted that since most bot programmers have this down to a T, and its unlikely this would make much of a difference to the population of bots in EVE, since most bot programs have these aspects covered anyway. The difference I suspect, will be marginal. Go to youtube and type in EVE mining bot and see for yourself.

Secondly about CCP devs wasting time on this...well. There is a long long list of things we both can cite about what would be considered time wasting activities - walking in stations, the new inventory UI, Dust...you get the picture. My suggestion is building on an already established framework without changing any aspect of it, merely adding more functionality - and I doubt anyone can say we have enough of that.

I dont hate the right click context menus, but what I do hate is when you are say warping to a moon or something and you have to go through like planets>Moons>Moon 10 all without getting your mouse pointer off the selected line or else the tree closes. It can be very frustrating.

I think the UI can be cleaned up in this respect by updating the interface for actions that take place a lot more than others (Warp, Jump, Approach, etc) and leave the other things that are not used so much as right click contexts.

I think I would prefer a UI button near the Ship Control panel called Navigation, when you click it, a spiral menu opens where you click either "warp" "approach" "Jump" "Orbit" etc, and once you click one of those, the list of things you can do that to pops up, either as another spiral menu (like planets, then you could click moons, and the one you want) or a list, like when you click orbit, it pops up a list of the things that are orbital on your grid.

Either way, it would be several clicks in rapid succession instead of the mouse over maze of narrow context menus.

/bump

I don't always troll, but when I do it's a lot more involved than that.

To be honest, your proposal has some rather limited uses. Not to mention using the numpad with most people use a right-handed mouse means that either you're using the numpad left-handed (counter-intuitive and takes your hands away from all the existing hotkeys) or you're taking your hand off the mouse to perform keystrokes. Either way, it doesn't seem any more efficient/effective than the current right-click context menu.

What's your solution for a system with 13 planets? Or a planet with 21 moons?