Test Server Feedback

While it's nice that you're improving the drone UI, what the drone UI needs isn't improving. It's re-doing. And, before that, re-thinking.

And I fear that adding polish to the current (fundamentally flawed / limited) drone UI will make CCP less likely to consider a full overhaul in the near future ("What, and waste all the time we spent polishing the old system?").

For example, the drone UI should allow players to:

• Quickly and easily launch, recall and activate specific drone groups directly (using both keyboard shortcuts and on-screen icons).


• Have a simple, unified "default action" shortcut (ex., pressing "F" should make mining drones mine).


• Also allow players to assign keyboard shortcuts to specific drone actions (ex., create a shortcut to "repair target" that will not make your combat drones "attack target", or a shortcut to "salvage target" that won't make your combat drones destroy it, and so on).


• Allow individual drones to belong to more than one group (ex., I might want a group with all my light drones, one with all my heavy drones, and one with all my thermal-damage drones, which includes drones from both of the first groups).


• See drone HP while drones are docked.


• Allow grouping of drones of different types (I know this is a problem with the current UI / command structure, but it wouldn't be if the other changes mentioned here were implemented).


• Target-lock own drones instantly (they're in constant communication with my ship - that's the whole justification for "bandwidth" - I shouldn't have to wait 20 seconds to lock one before I can start repairing it).


• Allow logistics drones to repair my own ship (yes, there are gameplay implications, but objectively only for logistics ships, and they can be dealt with by tweaking those ships; the idea that my repair drones can't repair my own ship is just nonsensical). Ex., telling logistics drones to "repair" with no target selected would make them repair the owner's ship (so there's no need to allow self-locking, which I guess would require too much debugging; alternatively, they automatically repair the parent when orbiting).


• Etc...

I don't think the features listed above are particularly hard to implement (from a UI design point of view), but they might be incompatible with the way Eve does things internally (and they're certainly incompatible with the current UI design).

To implement these things, "drone groups" shouldn't be treated as containers, but rather "indices" (essentially presented as a "virtual drone", whose orders are then relayed to every member of the group), and there should be direct access to specific drone actions through icons in the drone UI (draggable to the module shortcuts), instead of making players go through sub-menus.

For example, next to each drone (and to each group), there would be small icons for:

• Deployment button: Launch / Return to bay (ctrl+click to "disengage and orbit owner" instead of returning to bay, alt+click to "scoop drone", ctrl+alt+click to "abandon").


• Action button: Engage (perform default action for that drone type). The icon would be different depending on the drone type (combat, logistics, salvage, etc.) and would be draggable to a target. Simply clicking it would perform it on the current target. On a mixed-type group, the icon would send a "perform default action" command to each drone in that group (or be a bit smarter and figure out which action the player is more likely to want, but the generic command would generally be fine).


• Behavior button: Rules of engagement (click multiple times to cycle between "passive (orbit parent)", "guard (defend parent)", "assist (follow parent's attacks)", "aggressive (attack any enemy in range)"). This would also apply to drones assigned to someone else.

Each of these icons would be draggable to the "module" icons (right side of the HUD), and that would link it to the keyboard shortcut currently assigned to that slot (ex., if I drag the "engage" icon from group "MyDroneGroup" onto the first module icon, then pressing F1 would cause an "engage" command to be sent to the virtual "MyDroneGroup" drone, which would then relay that command to all drones in its index).

It sounds more complicated than it is (hard to explain just using text). The whole thing would take up the same amount of screen space as the current drone UI; the damage indicators would be smaller (circular, clock-style) and half the space would be used for the new direct-action / draggable icons.

I know this is unlikely to happen any time soon, I just urge you to not think of current UI "polish" as a long-term solution. The drone UI needs more fundamental changes to stop feeling like something out of the 1990s.

Is there any chance that drone groups could someday be assigned to module hotkeys?

By that I mean:

• Drone group would show up in the active modules display next to the HUD
• The hotkey to activate would launch that group
• Activating them again would cause them to attack the currently selected targeted
• The hotkey that would overheat a conventional module would cause the drones to return and orbit
• "Overheating" the drones again would cause them to return to the bay.

Or is the current system, on some level, working as intended? I always figured that, because drones can engage targets semi-autonomously, that the reason there is no hotkey to launch them was that it makes it harder for bots to use them.

This. I love this. Oh please, CCP Karkur, consider this! :)

Super cool.

How difficult would it be to be able to drag/drop drones onto a locked target to have them engage that target?

Meh. Feared as much.



They're too busy buffing their favourite ships.

Icons would be even better (like the little skull icon that appears when an option is restricted by security), but that would probably take time to do (Eve's current neocom / station icons are hard enough to interpret at full size, scaling them down would just turn them into blobs).

Colour-coding should be pretty easy to do (a lot of players already do it for their overview tabs, for example, so I suspect the game engine does support colouring context-menu entries).

Also, not sure if this is (just) a design issue or if it's due to the underlying code, but it's a bit confusing that there are two separate "Invite to..." options in context menus when clicking on a player (one to invite to fleet, the other to invite to chat channels). Has this been changed in Singularity (I vaguely remember reading something about it)? At least maybe rename "Invite to fleet" simply to "Fleet (invite)", so they're easier to distinguish.

CCP I fuckin love you!

Yes that would help. So would dragging the drone group to someone in the fleet window, or the fleet chat window. BUT drones can be assigned to "assist" and to "guard". We need some way to do both.

As for controlling drones, I'm partial to the idea that there are three new hot keys: Go to next group, Go to previous group, and Launch current group.

Playing with the drone UI a bit, and one thing I found missing was the ability to tell a group of drones to engage or return-and-orbit via radial menu. (Also, the ability to access the radial menu via the drone window at all.) Right now we have to order each drone individually to attack a target, which makes the radial menu mostly pointless for them when the vast majority of users are going to want all of their drones attacking the same target at once, and might as well just use the r-click menu or a keyboard shortcut instead.

Which requires a couple things, namely the ability to use the radial menu via the drone window. Ideally, clicking on an individual drone gives the radial menu for that drone, and clicking on the group dropdown bar gives a radial menu that controls the entire group.

Otherwise, drone UI definitely looks better than before. Love the drag-and-drop functionality - that's really helpful. :)

Would you guys mind terribly fixing the memory leak that was introduced in odyessey? This is very noticeable when running missions or plexes, salvaging or selling things on the item. The client starts off fine ( 1 client ) and after a while, you can very well notice degraded performance. The whole client becomes slow, nearly unresponsive and when I restart the client it works just fine. This has been very evident since radial menus and other ui changes were implemented. Before this, my client would run perfectly.

Setup

EVGA p55 classified 200 motherboard
core i7 860 processor
GTX 560 superclocked graphics
GTX 460 graphics
16GB DDR3 memory
Velociraptor 7200rpm 720 GB hard drive

Eve Settings

All graphics on low
HDR disabled
station environment loaded
anti-aliasing as low as it can go.

the drone UI changes are very nice, looking forward to the patch!

and btw whatever you did to the drone window.. awesome work. It is fast and doesn't do random things like collapsing stuff or disappearing for a few seconds.