Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Overview:
Change the current eve client HUD (the windows, notifications, lists, etc) to be based of HTML/CSS/JS within the eve client.
The look & feel can remain exactly the same by default - and would provide the same functionality as already exists.

Why:
It would provide a launching point for community participation and customisation of the UI. Which in turn would allow for a faster turn-around of changes/fixes.

An example would be localisation - the community could localise the game assets into their own language - and provide a complete package for other users to download & use.

Another example might be combining data from other sources for the currently locked target: a miner could see how long a rock will take to harvest, a mission runner could chose to pull data from eve-survival to highlight the triggers or for those combat oriented you could pull information about the current targets general ship fit for the type of ship currently locked.

Implementing this type of technology would enable the community to drive the eve client in ways not currently possible.
The new fleet changes coming in Rubi are a good example of that. Many of the changes have been requested for years.
Kakkur (excuse the bad spelling if it's wrong) has done a top notch job with it - it's really is amazing - but with the implementation of the approach I'm outlining - the community could have built & implemented it within a week.


Technical:
The ig browser currently uses an old version of the webkit browser with a thin(ish) wrapper on top. ccp are able to control the type of access JS would have to the assets (js objects & methods) that they provide - reducing (but maybe not eliminating) risk of automation. This risk already exists with the eve client - this type of implementation wouldn't increase or decrease that risk. ofc - a risk analysis would have to be performed by ccp.

The look/feel of the UI itself would come from assets under the eve client install - this would include html/css/js files that can be changed to achieve whatever you are aiming to achieve.

The more recent versions of the webkit engine perform very well - so performance shouldn't be too much of an issue.

Take a look at the peroidic table and imagine now that instead of the elements - it's your contacts, or assets, or the ships you have available at the current station.

One of the goals of this - is to free up ccp/csm from the mundane everyday UI stuff - allowing them to focus on content & core gameplay - while allowing the community itself to participate & enrich the UI in unexpected ways....

Anyway.. think it over - lemme know what you think. I checked over the "commonly suggested" thread and didn't see anything like this listed..

There are some simple ways to ensure that automation wouldn't be trivial to do.
As the browser is running in the eve context - ccp have control over what's exposed and therefore usable.
An example would be the mouse click event - which would be generated by the eve client - and then consumed by something like a button. The client should be able to connect the dots between the 2 - and therefore reject anything was outside these params.

Generally - with things like observable objects - performance should be good.

As a concept - it would be worth investigating.