Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hi,

Since so many people have been posting their discontent with the new overview icons released with the Carnyx update, I have been thinking of ways to improve upon them.

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My first thought is to add two new overview columns that people can add/remove just like the rest. Lets call these two new overview columns "Ship Role" and "Ship Size." (Notice we already have an overview column called "Size." This column should be renamed to "Signature Radius" to avoid confusion.) Both these new columns would be able to be displayed as an "Icon" (or shorthand) and as "Descriptive Text" through the overview options settings.

The "Ship Role" column would display the ship's role on the overview; such as logi, hauler, combat, booster, etc... If the "Ship Role" column is specified to be displayed as an icon (or the overview column is shrunken beyond a predefined size) then the "Ship Roll" column would switch to an abstract display like the current overview icons. The difference is that all we need to inform people on this column is the ship's role. Ships of different sizes can use the same role icon leaving us just a handful of icons to think up of that should be easily distinguishable form one and the other.

The "Ship Size" column would display the ship's size; such as drone, small, medium, large. Or even name it "Ship Type" and tell us whether it is a drone, shuttle, frigate, cruiser, etc... and change the "Type" column to "Ship Name" to avoid confusion. If the "Ship Size" column is specified to be displayed as an icon (or the overview column is shrunken beyond a predefined size) then the "Ship Size" column would switch to an abstract display and show us icon like: XS, S, M, L, XL, etc... The T2 and T3 variants may be distinguished on this column by ending their descriptive text with a T1, T2 or T3 and their icons may have a number of dots or dashes across them depicting what tech they are at a quick glance.

This system would allow people that do not need the information for "Ship Role" like ratters to simply remove the column from the overview options. People who can not discern from small variations in a very small icon can now determine effectively if a ship is a drone, small, medium, large, etc... and what role that ship may provide with a quick glance at the overview since one set of icons do not have to depict every role in every ship size out there.

You may say we already have the "Type" overview column. But this column shows the ship's type name; such as Crucified, Omen, etc... There are people out there (including myself) who do not have all the ship's name and roles memorized yet and having an overview column to tell us the ship's main role is very helpful.

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My second thought is to use simpler icons to differentiate ships. Ships are still represented by their original squares, but this time around all the squares are the max size allowed by the overview. Inside the squares we will display the T2, and T3 symbols we see on all modules and ships as well as a letter and some bars over the letter. The letter will depict the ship's role in shorthand. So a logi will be an "L," a combat ship will be a "C," etc... and the the bars over the letter will depict the ship's size. 1 carrot bar is a frigate, 2 carrot bars is a cruiser, 1 flat bar is a shuttle, a circle is a pod, etc...

Eve Online Overview Icon Prototype
Sorry for the misspell on cruiser... too late now :-)

Keeping the shapes simple and intuitive. Right now some shapes are too similar to other shapes and hard to discern between them on a 90% scaled UI and I believe we can do better.

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On another note; I would like for player ships to have a different icon color (or let us pick what color) this way we can distinguish ships from any other space object just as quickly as we can distinguish rats with their red icon color. Right now I have set my backgrounds for all ships to a particular color because the new player ship icon's are identical to non-rat NPCs. The background color is a bit overwhelming at times. But it might just be me getting used to it too.

Well, that's what I could come up with so far.

Cheers,
Wilj0

I'm fairly sure that "size" simply refers to how large the ships collision model is, rather than signiature radius (there was a huge ****-storm in a thread asking for sig radius to be available on overview a little while ago)

I think we should all Go protest in jita for a week to get the old icons back.

I honestly liked the old-new icons that were on the test server for a while there, a little better than these.

Better looking chevrons. On the test server I was still a little oblivious to ships being ships, but at least they didn't look like little monopoly hotels. I think I could have gotten used to those. They were cool looking at the very least.

These icons are seriously weird. Not a fan.