Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Introduce station containers that are different colors.


When I open up my hangar, there are anywhere from half a dozen to fifty giant secure containers sitting there, all completely identical to each other. The container names will let me find what I am looking for, but only after my eyes uncross from being presented with identical objects completely lacking visual cues.

I'm no programmer, but I suspect that it would not take many man-hours to clone the normal giant secure containers, but change the icons to be tinted a different color. With a variety of colors to choose from, we could organize our containers by color as well as name, and quickly skim for the desired container.

Mac OS has long had the ability to "highlight" folders and files, thus tinting them a brilliant color. I don't know if PCs have this ability as well, but it is an incredible tool for organizing large lists of files. It would do the same for EVE hangars.


Advantages

-More visual cues in the hangar. It would be a de facto improvement to the UI.

-Less hassle finding and sorting containers.

-The drab monotony of my overwhelmingly gray hangar would be enlivened with brilliant chromatic hues.

-Producers and industrialists (or anybody that relies heavily on containers) would find life to be generally more convenient.


Drawbacks

-Hangars with a rainbow of assortment containers might seem to fit in less with EVE's overall art values or general presentation. If the new colors are carefully selected, I suspect this could be minimized (no pastels!).

-It would probably take up some man-hours that otherwise would be dedicated to more important pursuits.

-Based on my limited understanding of the way EVE's item database, each color of GSC would have to be its own item in the market. I guess that could be annoying? Having more kinds of containers could clog up the market. Then again, how much activity does the largely NPC-seeded container section of the market really see?

-Depending on how OCD CCP is, they might want to change the in-space versions of the containers. I really don't see that as necessary, but the people in the art department might.

-Color blind/color impaired people are screwed, once again.

Simple but usable and usefull. I'd support.

Market clogging indeed is a problem but not exactly big one.

Good idea. Could use the same interface as corp emblems. Symbols, colors and assorted do-dads.

not emptyquoting

red container for my pvp modules, grey for random loot and blue for my PVE stuff, i like.

this is a really good idea.

I tag the containers with certain abbreviations to mass manage some ships, mods or ordinates. this would be a nice convenient feature though.

I support this.

As I know many of us, rather than having endless piles of crap laying around in our hangar, we organize things into cans. Adding a slightly different hue, or allowing us to color code our containers by contents would be useful.

HOWEVER:

As useful as this would be, pretty far down on the list of priorities if you ask me.

While this would obviously be more helpful, it is an added function to the game and not necessarily even possible with their current database. In short, a major undertaking. Based on conversations with my CSM rep and some coders with knowledge of CCP's item database, having tinted containers should not be. It is possible that we are wrong, but otherwise this is a very minor amount of work. That's the only reason I advocate it: i think it would make a big difference without more than perhaps a day of effort on very few peoples' parts.

The problem with them fixing BPO/BPCs is how the item database handled them - they are all the same object as far as the server is concerned, so it could not have a different icon. The current situation must involve some kind of workaround.

If they just wanted to change the icon for all bpos of a given type (to, say, be red-tinted) they could have done that very easily. But to actually differentiate BPCs from BPOs required some kind of retrofitting, quite probably separate from their item database. When my computer is running slowly, I still sometimes see BPCs briefly load with BPO icons before fixing themselves to the lighter color.

Making different colored containers should theoretically be as easy as copying the GSC item in the database (probably quite easy) and then changing the art (also likely easy). It would sure help me and many others sort our hangars and sift through containers faster.

I support this. Perhaps the color could be selectable in the can configuration popup. While changes are being made someone should look at the various settings not being propagated to different players. I'm talking about the locked/unlocked issues.