EVE Information Portal

First of all, again, I am a software engineer and systems analyst with at least a decade of experience, and an Associate's Degree (with a Bachelors' on the way) to back up that experience, which is spread across multiple operating systems, programming languages, scripting languages, and dozens of released products, one of which is a commercial product. Now that I've qualified myself:

You're absolutely, positively full of **** and I'm beginning to wonder if you know what the hell you're doing or even talking about.

It is absolutely possible to refactor the code to run either of two UIs, one being your fancy, smooth, and broken UI pet project that most everyone hates, and the other being the old but working UI everyone apparently loves.

Let me demonstrate with some vaguely python-like psuedocode:

# In your startup methods somewhere:

# Does our user want to use the new UI?
if 'wantsOldUI' in userConfig and userConfig['wantsOldUI]:
    InitializeOldUI()
else:
    InitializeNewUI() # Default to new UI if they don't want it or haven't specified a preference.

You can do the same exact **** for all your events that you receive from the server.

If you can't figure it out, I'd be absolutely happy to work on it in what little free time I have, under any NDA and without payment, as long as you douchebags give me credit. Yes, it's absolutely possible you have done something on the server to break the old UI, but I suspect it wouldn't be very hard to work around that.

EDIT: And please don't whine that maintaining the old inventory system would be too hard with the new window included. All you're doing is rendering a window with a few sorting and display options. I could write that in my ******* sleep. The new UI is far more complex because of the treeview crap, and we're not asking you to revert THE ENTIRE GAME'S UI, just the inventory, because it has the usability factor of a nunchuck made out of C4, and the efficiency of shaving your head by plucking out every hair with tweezers.

First off , thankyou for the reply.
However, it pains me to say this, you are straight up liying to us now.

Player feedback for the most part was ignored. Dont come here trying to pull the wool over our eyes. Zagdul commented himself as well as others. This is the proof we are being liyed to.

You agree that it was one of the systems not terribly broken and other things were worse. So why did you as a company decide to purge the old UI? Considering other systems are of much higher importance to the general community?

So in your mind, when a player has to use a system with reduced functionality and then decides to post bad feedback - this is them not giving the new system a chance?

Have you actually used the new system? We cannot even see our active ship in the hanger. Such basic things missing.

-> Persistant ship and item hanger windows that remember if they're open in station so we don't have to re-open them every single time we dock. <-

You know what would be sweet? Have a single window split into several columns/rows, one for each new container, making a sort of table so we could drag from a cell to another. Individual cells in the table could also be dragged out to span as new windows if necessary, and conversely windows could be dragged into the main inventory window and become a part of the "table".

That would save screen space and would make easier the basical "drag from A to B" operation.

Admitedly, i am not a Ui designer, but that kind of "split window" interface is something i miss a lot in present day computers. Navigation tabs are fine, but sometimes i just would like to have several windows open at once in a single window space, much as the primitive 3D Studio Max interface did.


BTW, I am aware that we can drag from the active window to the tree so having multiple windows open is not necessary. Yet, regretfully that action is a precission movement and the Ui is so slow that often I end up expanding the tree beofre being sure that the cursor is in the right place to not drop my stuff in a wrong container (which iv'e done too often as even with the Ui at 110% the tree is too small for my eyesight)

Comfort is not one of the UI's strong points.

This, a hundred times this ^^^^

I'm adding my voice to this as a way of marking my vote against the current UI.

How did this pass muster I wonder? Are there only 2 people working on the overhaul of Eve's UI & its code hooks?
If it is only 2 people with understanding then that's the problem, not enough cooks & too many dishes.

My issues are the same as most regarding the UI but i'll add some others that need attention as well.

The Tree list needs a overhaul, the text is barely readable with some colour schemes.

The scroll bar need sorting, to be better defined + I should be able to grab it with my mouse.

The Estimated ISK value is useless. Example :- Found a Dread Guristas Copper Tag.
It was estimated to be worth over 400k upon docking I realised that that is not an average price & it certainly isn't being
brought/sold for that price in my current local region. Pointless get rid of it. I can find markets well enough without being spoon fed by the client phoning home to work out the value of crap I'm only going to scrap.

Salvaging is a complete pain in the arse now. I went out in a Noctis & tried out the UI with multiple wrecks.. Omfg.. it was taking forever to go from A >B with one wreck.. then I realised i could have got there quicker if I hadn't taken an Optimal Arrow to the knee. ( I don't blame you two :) )

Should have held it on SISI & had a vote/questionnaire in place to gather hardcore players opinions on features options.

I disagree. This is already the purported fix stated on the dev blog. Even once this becomes an option, you still have to find what you want to drag out. Opening a station hangar or a corp hangar in a new window should not involve scrolling through hundreds of items in a tree. And "dragging out" all 7 divisions of a corp hangar every time you want to access said hangar is still a pretty poor substitute for what we had prior with one single click.

end reply/

Scrolling aside, I don't even like these locations being treated like files in a tree. The station hangar is a file division. The corp hangar is a file division. The ship hangar is a file division. etc. etc. Even though we know our hangars are folders on some operating system somewhere in Europe, we suspend our disbelief in-game. When I had a station hangar icon at the bottom of the neocom, for me, it was part of the station. Oooh...the corp hangar icon is over on the other side with the office listings. That was a separate part of the station. Now its all just files in a tree. This is why so many are calling the new UI "Windows 3.1 in space." I think something was lost that goes beyond efficiency and functionality with this change. Why even have stations? Let's just fly to a gigantic CHA in space. We don't even need to dock.

I've been so focused on trying to get the primary interface back to single-click, multi-window functionality again that I haven't even been worried about all the lost right-click functionality. (And I really wish people would stop saying "a million windows" or "a hundred windows" when describing the old interface. I think most people use 3-5 simultaneously.) But absolutely the absence of all the previous ship right click options is a whole other loss of single click functionality in lieu of more scroll hunting. The loss of efficiency in the new UI is just staggering. This is not resistance to change. This is aknowledgement of inferiority.

I'm a little worried that if reducing the number of open windows was done to ease server lag, or to make the shinies like the isk calculator "not" be drag on the server, that CCP may be resistant to giving us basically the old system with the new code - as multiplying shinies would only then increase server issues. They already have lag problems. (But if so many tree-navigation lovers are really out there, this must be a false premise right?) Just in case, I'm proposing that the neocom buttons to the station hangars pop up without the tree or the shinies by default. Hell, make the tree minimized by default in all situations. I'd love to never see it again.

I don't think I like the idea of having one window still with 3 or 4 divisions in it either as someone earlier suggested. A DIVIDED unified interface just sounds like a way to make the current situation worse. A hangar should really be a separate unique location. It should open like a new location. In a new window.

And, when am I ever going to get one of these surveys? I've never been polled and I'd sure like to be a part of all this "community feedback."

Yonis Kador

Yup, I totally agree with you on this point, and it's one that nobody else has mentioned. By the same in-galaxy rationale, wrecks cans, etc. should all be separate windows too, since they're separate objects in space, and not a part of our ship or station.

The old UI definitely made more sense in the context of the separate entities (hangars, ships, things in space) that we interact with, and reinforced the believability/suspension of disbelief much more than the current UI.

It would make a lot more sense for the new UI to replace the Asset finder than the "Inventory" (which, as has been pointed out, doesn't really exist per se in-galaxy).

And you didn't read the entire post. I said that it's easy to work around those differences.

Plus, if they're using a model-view-controller design, there shouldn't be such a huge goddamn problem. Loot All button calls OnLootAllPressed in the form's class, which then calls activeContainer->LootAllTo(cargoHold).

Seriously, this **** isn't rocket science.

Also, I said not to roll back the entire UI, just the inventory, which is the part that CCP changed and totally ****** up.

No one expects that everything will be perfect first time around, and this was so far from being anything like half-way useable.

However, you do your testing and iteration on SISI, not on TQ.

That is why you HAVE SISI, ffs.