EVE Information Portal

in general all of this is awesome.

But the POS module icons become too difficult to differentiate when they are all attached to that magnet symbol and the tiny corner blur is the only thing differentiating them.

Ok first of all I agree ship icons have needed updating for more than the 7 years I've played, because for the whole time the frigates/destroyers and cruisers/bc issue has existed, so an attempt to fix that is welcome in principle... but oh god why must you throw out everything and start from scratch each time something needs a few small tweaks to work better?

Going by the image in the blog frigates/destroyers are still not super easy to seperate, sure at least there is a difference now but it could be better, cruisers should be much wider as they are still too close to the frigate icon for me, and if you do that then the battleship icon needs to change. Also are there any battlecruisers in that image? I looked several times to compare and couldn't see one but maybe it's just hiding. Also battleship/dreadnought/carrier are also all the same shape with very minor diferences between them.

Why not have different shapes per ship class? It would instantly fix alot of the problems, and you could have a larger distinction for the frigate/destroyer issue if you wanted to keep using the same icon for them, without treading on the toes of other classes.

Having a directional icon at all is silly and will lead to newbs asking why it isn't showing the direction of travel properly in space. I don't want them to rotate to do that, but making them so clearly directional as using triangle variations suggests it.

Why have SO many different icons, you are showing too much (useless) information, and as a result ending up making very small changes to the same base icon instead of a small number of clearly distinct versions.
A rookie ship and a mining frigate are both frigates, they do not need their own icons.
Drones oh god what are you doing, shooty drones, ewar/what you call utility drones and logistics drones are all the distinctions it's remotely usefull to make at the icon level (and mining/salvaging drones too for the sake of consistency, not that anyone cares what that icon looks like any time it matters), 5 distinct types (sure give fighters/bombers their own shape too as they are sufficently distinct from other shooty ones) and relevant sizes for them, rather than 14 types now.
Asteroids/ice really need size icons now? Does it show the visual size, how much resource is left in it, how much was originally in it?

Some of the changes seem needless/counterintuitive, why change the neut battery to a less-visually distinct icon? Ok you want to create a uniform set of icons for similar structures, but that's form over function 100%. Same with changing the sentry gun icon and ewar battery icons, firstly why change sentries at all? If you're worried about them looking too much like moons, put the dot for moon icons to a different side. Ewar batteries is making a whole bunch of things use the same icon again, with a tiny feature to distinguish them, essentially there are icons on icons which is getting into supertiny invisible details.
Sun/secondary sun, moon, customs office, corp hangar and wormhole are all being changed for seemingly no reason other than for the sake of it. Why change extra things and create additional stuff for people to relearn when there is absolutely zero reason for doing so?


Somehow I doubt much will be changed, but hey, we only post in these threads to have something to point to when people say we should give feedback rather than ***** about bad decisions, here's yet another whole thread of feedback where nearly everyone is saying the same thing, STUFF LOOKS TOO MUCH LIKE OTHER STUFF.

I asked for this when the ship identification system first came out. I thought it was a shame that the great icons you spent time on weren't being used in game. I've always felt that npc icons should have some relation to player icons so that new players would have an easier time relating the two.

I'd like to point out that currently the "brackets" in the overview give no information at all, so if someone doesn't want to learn the new symbols, they will not be any worse off. But for those of us that will learn it, it will provide more information at a glance. Shape identification happens much faster than reading.

I'm a huge fan of the drone icons especially. In engagements with smaller ships engaging your enemies drones can be pivotal in turning the battle. These changes would make it easier to identify what kind of drones are on field and where they are being directed. For example, you engage an enemy fleet and then observe them drop sets of ecm drones that fly towards your logi. You would see this all from a glance rather than having to hover over the small, moving brackets of the drones to identify their type, or worse, load an overview with drones and sort through all the drones on field.

For me the important thing is that currently icons give very little information, so a change will allow more information to be received at a glance, which I think is a vast improvement. And if you don't like the added complexity, you don't have to use it. You can still look at the ship's name in the overview or mouse over the drones, etc.

My only concern was that the icons were readable, which I think the screenshot shows that they are.

Overall I believe this is a fantastically executed ui change that will allow skilled players to see more information about what's on field than they have before. It's similar to having different graphics for different turrets, a skilled player can look at their enemy and see what turrets or launchers they have fit.

Really cool but it is a lot of added complexity for little gain. You could easily trim 1/3 if those and get a better / same result. Also.. Just say no to that many drone icons.. Damn.

These new icons remind me of a very good spaceship game.
It really looks like another great step into the future!

Switching the Red Crosses for ship classes to the new icons is a great idea, since it links to ISIS.

However changing drones icons is a bad idea, it will crowd/convolute the presentation of flying icons in space.

So leave drones as Red Crosses, the size may vary according to size of drone used imho

Overall, I think they look good and even on smaller screens they'll give more information than the present ones do. I do have a couple of niggles though:

1. Little plus signs aren't enough to differentiate between NPC and Player ships unless they shift the rest of the icon to the left causing the alignment to be slightly shifted (can't see it from the example given in the blog). Player ships represent a whole lot more potential danger than NPC's and it's imperative that we know the difference at a glance.

A couple of suggestions to fix this would be to make NPC's hollow like you do with looted/non-looted wrecks and have the plus sign added inside the hollow icon. You could invert the previous so that the icon is filled in but the plus sign is subtracted out. Whatever works as long as they are plainly distinguishable in a mixed NPC/Player environment.

Edit: Upon looking at the screen shots posted a little later in the thread, the pluses aren't as bad as I thought they were. I'd still like to see something a little more obvious but the way it is at present isn't tooooo bad.

2. I'd like to see the icons that are in space fade or move to the top left corner of the bounding box as the ship gets closer to the camera. For me, at a certain distance, the icons are no longer necessary because I can identify the ship class by the ship itself. At that point, the icon is only serving as a visual distraction and/or obstruction.

I am waiting for a CCP post which tells us that the reason we think the icons are indistinguishable is that we haven't used them for long enough.

Though I'm not crazy about the current overview "border" icons, I can at-a-glance distinguish them.

The proposed ISIS-style icons actually require me to look carefully, as they have fairly similar weight. Only in comparison or upon close examination can I differentiate them.

Truly, a single letter would be more useful for rapid recognition.

Challenge:
1. Create a random overview and view it for at most 2 seconds, and report on all ships in it.
2. Change one ship, and note if it is detected.

EDIT: I currently play on a 15 inch wide-screen laptop in window mode, so less real-estate than full-screen.

Interesting concept... I can tell them apart from their size and outline: the left ones have an angle on the top, the middle ones are double-angled and the right ones are rectangular, and they have different lengths. Can't see well the inner lines and barely can't see the tiny features of the middle ones (drones?) without focusing a lot on them.

The only potential source of confusion would be between 1st and 2nd in the left column, maybe one pixel more of length for the second or a pixel less for the first would help giving them more different weight.

BTW, left ones would be military ships and right ones be civilian ships? Would make sense that military ships had a general arrowhead shape...

Nice work.