Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The hallmark of a great UI is that you can see everything at a glance...

What could it mean for Eve's in-flight UI?

Right now we need to move our eyes from the overview, to the 3d rendering, to our modules and to the targeted ships to know almost everything that is going on.

That's a hell of a lot of eye movement. 4 glances, not one, FOUR.

Well, now that we know the problem, maybe we can alleviate it a bit...

We mostly look at the locked ships, most of our time is spent looking at them, I think we can mostly all agree to this... So it should be the one giving the most clues as to what is going on right?

Alright:

-Aggro indicators on the locked ships would be a BIG PLUS. Less eye movement between the 3d rendering, overview and locked ships. Maybe the same style of brackets that are on the 3d render and overview, yellow = lock, red = firing.

-Angular velocity/tracking/hitting chances bar on the locked ships would be another BIG PLUS. Make it a bar, under or beside the target, smaller it is, greener it is, better chances of hitting, better hits. Then it could lenghten and lenghten until your guns begin having a hard time tracking, falling gradually into the "yellow" color, bar is at half max-lenght, now your DPS is halved and so on until you get almost a full bar, below 10% ( or whatever you guys decide ) it turns gradually to RED and if the bar goes full lenght, impossibility to hit, well you get a white bar, don't even bother because you wouldn't hit it in a thousand shots.

Well, we reduced a lot of eye movement there... Let's see if we can reduce it even more!

-Guns cycle time, why not have a timer with a countdown to zero somewhere on the locked ship(s) you're hammering?

Say: (1):1

(1) = gun 1
:1 = 1 second remaining

<1>:1

<1> = group 1
:1 sec remaining

Well, what did we just do? Even less eye movement? OH MY GOSH! BETTER UI! :O

I guess you guys could come up with even more ideas like these... For tags/ship locked that is hitting the hardest on you/etc.

Cheers!

I refuse to believe that would be too much information in too little space, look at the old total war, Rome 1, the unit cards, they had it perfect. We could use the same refinements here and make everything much more elegant.

I understand the concern about duplication, and it is relevant, ofc I don't pretend that I have every issue solved, but I can see my ideas working for the better. Anyway, the heart of the matter is the way human brains work and trying to play on the strenghts of these workings rather than ignoring them.

I know for a fact from my RL studies that brains work best when they can focus on one thing only in their field of vision for a given task, not that there aren't examples where we still can't optimize our works/tasks efficiently enough and we work it out anyway and don't complain too much about it. But, I really think that playing to the strenghts of the way the brain works, rather than ignoring it, would be a lot better on the whole.

Take for example the attention to detail for the dashboards of cars, how it got studied extensively and how most now agree that having it go HUD instead of the traditional dashboard could cut on accidents and make cars overall a lot safer.

Don't you think we could apply the same principles in the game to make the game more brain friendly and streamline it to make it more efficient by looking where we spend the bulk of our attention/focus, like in car driving, and adapt the UI to the behaviour of the players rather than have the players adapt to the UI?

I feel like you and I have different definitions of what makes a "good UI"

To me, a good UI isnt one that shows you all the information all at once, in most cases that isnt even possible or would make the screen incredibly cluttered. In a good UI you can easily find and access the information you need when you need it.

That being said, I think the Eve interface could use a hotkey to switch between tabs in the overview