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There's a biological reason that fighter jets, etc, don't use circles in their HuDs. The human eye is just not that precise- as soon as you go off the center of focus, the level of detail the eye can discern drops VERY fast. You don't notice because your brain is constantly filling in the gaps with memory and assumptions- this is how most optical illusions work. Even colors fade and all you will see are grays and shapes toward the edges of your vision. The upshot is that circles are bad, mmk? That's not really a style opinion either, but based in biology.

Here's a great educational frame about field of vision, it' was linked earlier but here it is again:
http://xkcd.com/1080/
Science!

So, in a user interface, shapes are of much more important then color. EVE obviously wants a futuristic look, so squares are out. But squares are not the only option. Here's a mockup I did with my leet (aka, terrible) shop skills and manual painting.

http://imgur.com/FCaKM

I think it's pretty obvious how much easier that is to read then circles. And it's almost as simple to make the art for (polygon tool instead of circle tool. whoa). The clipped octagon creates a clear visual shape, even in peripheral vision, and that chape changes as the bar turns red. It even maintains the circular target bracket shape; only the health bars need to be affected. Actually, to my eye, it looks more technical and futuristic then plain circles do anyway. Top down, left to right reading order makes shield>armor>structure intuitive as well. This or something like this would be the ideal answer to the circle issue IMO.

The current locked target squares aren't broken so please stop trying to fix them.

this work is completly usefull ! the current systeme is working very well. Why forcing player to change their habitudes

you should better focus on most importante task as bugs we can see around, or thos ******** capsuleer who pissed of high sec players who dosn't care about your broken pvp!

come on ccp, stop sucking players with your incrarna barby stuff, 20 plex bid for a joke tournement or even a dust 514 exclusive on ps3 who will be blow up by planet side 2.

give us new ships, new moduls, new pvp games modes, new things to play into your sand box !!!!

Continue ignoring requests such as these, CCP. Fix bad code. Fix inefficient code. If that means UI has to change so be it. The core of what makes Eve Eve isn't changing, so don't worry about it. You, I, and some others out here know that some of these bugs people want fixed can't happen until other pieces of code are re-written...it's the nature of the beast.

As luck would have it, we're not discussing peripheral-vision graphics either (not that the circles on a HUD are necessarily fixed in the centre anyway, but can move around quite a lot to match the target). And let's not even go into the flexing-circle-segment bank indicator tucked away at the very bottom of some HUDs…

Oh, and the same circles are used for various purposes on fighter (and other) jet MFDs and fixed instrumentation, much of which is for peripheral-vision use.

No, because they are inherently discontinuous shapes, unlike circles. The “better proportions” would be to make it as equilateral as possible, trying to approach the proportions of a circle. There's a reason why circular displays are used for exactly these kinds of things in machinery and information displays across the world and why octagons are languishing in the same field.

It's simply not a shape that suited for this purpose. Circles and lines are; squircles, oblongs and other inconsistent forms are not, and if you're going to argue “peripheral vision”, then circles are definitely vastly better than those shapes since their continuity, consistency, and all-axis symmetry (to say nothing of familiarity) makes them very easy to evaluate at a glance.

Interesting. I find the opposite to be true, but that's probably because they're drilling rather than cutting and have much larger drill bits than I do….

And anyway, now that we've (long since) moved beyond mechanical displays and onto digital ones, such considerations are no longer a problem and we're still using circular dials because they simply convey some information better.

In particular, we have this very common need to display a linear, continuous scales counting from “nothing or very little” to “a lot” and wanting to do it in a longer distance than a single straight line would allow in the space allotted. Bending that line into circle or segment neatly solves that problem while losing very little in the informative department.

Can't be arsed to read 40 pages of comments to check if this has been suggested, sorry:


As a user of long range, poor-tracking guns, I'd love a visual way to see if a given ship's angular velocity is such that my guns will actually hit it. In combat, I pretty much just stare at my Overview trying to pick targets within range that are also below a certain angular velocity (which I have to calculate myself for targets with small signature radius). This is exactly the sort of thing a combat UI should be doing for me, and displaying in an easy to read manner!

Short version: Highlight targets with slow enough angular velocity that I can actually hit them.

k so im gonna post a ton and a half of overview issues and suggestions ordered into groups based on where the issues most likely lie. Most are not my suggestions, a couple are but consider it a collection of issues and suggestions and if you like them plz quote them and/or like my post!

cheers!

Overview Upgrades

Underlying code

• The all to famous Overview Bug - possibly due to standings lookup, possibly lag from server to server request and results coming through too late (call query expiration reached?)
• Huge amount of filter types and states - needs to be simplified in some form.
• States particularly complex and liable to lead to death if set incorrectly (hostiles not appearing on overviews due to states order - no standings / neutral standings confusion) CCP Karkur knows of this and has acknowledged that its confusing to newer players.
• Columns (radial velocity / traversal velocity practically useless information - CCP, is it derived locally or sent by main server?) - either way removal could improve performance.
• Contact ‘Size’ column, is it required? (does not show MWD bloom or Sig radius, only bounding sphere - no real use in combat, haven’t heard anyone needing to use it ever)
• Custom Bracket Profiles - Prone to break under heavy lag for some reason. Can anyone shed light as to why this happens?
• DScans ship name and type (model name), should it be used to only show ship class eg battlecruiser, not claymore or hurricane?
• Probing filter groups should stay being able to differentiate ship model name eg vagabond rather than Heavy Assault Ship if Dscan switches to Ship Class.

UI Graphics

• Iterate on the floating Ship Info: pilot name / ship type / ship name / corp / alliance etc... currently allows HTML tagging.
• Applicable to the above point is POS mod online / offline / incap'd / anchored / unanchored status and the fact it convolutes the overview to confusing levels.
• Appearance of colour tags & backgrounds (Can CCP dispel myths of higher CPU clock cycles for using solid colour backgrounds to colour tags)
• Customisation is great but it leads to situations where people get confused by some aspects of the Overview - eg red colourtags and backgrounds (flashing/not flashing) - can i kill it in highsec etc? Possibly Lock some important aspects?
• Tagging, FC’s Need tagging to have keyboard shortcuts - please allow full alphanumeric tagging (no symbols), not just select letters and numbers. Maybe have a toggle key to write up to 8 characters per overview contact if needed?
• Certain aspects of no bracket profile needs tweaking - showing hostile/friendly locked animation brackets when ‘no brackets’ profile active, required in big fleet fights to see aggression as most fly with brackets off to reduce Client and server lag.
• DScan ship name one of the few remaining areas where racist / homophobic / bad language etc... can appear to minors playing Eve Online, with relative anonymity for the offender.
• Optimal / falloff and tracking indicators. Colour coding for multiple gun groups. Use graphics on the gun groups themselves based on actively selected object/target (cannot use outer glow so
like overload icon, range/tracking can be placed on the underside of gun/missile/ewar groups/mods to show red, blinky orange and green for hit potential) Gun Grouping Range/Tracking Indicators

• Effects bar. If you’re inside a bubble should show a graphic of some form saying you’re warp disrupted by the object.
• Turning on autohide on neocom affects overview brackets and for some strange and annoying reason is affected by TiDi.

Applicable Issues with features in both above areas

• Custom colour coding on floating ship should be kept or expanded upon, and import / export function very valuable but still buggy. eg some XML commands default to true regardless of XML coding saying false in the imported file..
• EWAR icons showing contacts applying ewar/ecm to me has become obsolete with Karkur’s effects bar, could be utilised showing fleet only ewar/ecm effects on contacts in overview.

Cant tell whats shield/armor/hull unless tagret start takindg dmg can u at least make it recognizable somehow? Seems like if i have 8 tagrets for examle targeted and they all have some type of dmg on them, how can i tell if theyre hull isnt damaged and theyre shelds or armor are restorered or opposite? By picture looks confusing but if there was no picture to compare i would assume they had armor and shield dmg not armor and hull like picture shows.

Riight. So the new round target UI is "so nice", just like that useless unified UI was also "so nice". Epic fail coming, not to mention all kinds of bugs and lag then.