These forums have been archived and are now read-only.

The new forums are live and can be found at https://forums.eveonline.com/

Warfare & Tactics

 
  • Topic is locked indefinitely.
 

Suggestion: how to improve the combat scanning experience
Author
Previous Topic Next Topic
Omar Ser-Amon
Imperial Shipment
Amarr Empire
#1 - 2012-01-20 08:35:23 UTC
I have had my first tries on combat scanning in the game yesterday and I'd like to provide some views - certainly with both the advantages and limitations of looking at this with 'fresh eyes'.

I think the most limiting factor in making this an enjoyable excercise is the way the directional scan works, especially the fact that your scan - a 3-dimensional cone - is visually illustrated with a 2-dimensional elongated triangle in the bottom right corner of the side map.

Consequentially, when scanning in the 'plane' of the solar system (say: looking outward from the sun towards the planets), you get a feedback on where you are actually looking, but when your objective is above or below the 'plane' of the system and look (in this sense) 'upward' or 'downward', you have have no feedback on your side map on where you are actually looking.

My suggestions for features that would make this a more enjoyable and intuitive experience would be one or more of the following alternatives, depending on feasibility.

1. Show your green directional 'cone' on the normal game space view (similar to the overview 'grid', just in 3 dimensions). This would help in having a better guess on the possible objects your target may be close to.

2. Show your green directional 'cone' on the (large, F10) solar system map in 3 dimensions. This would make the placing of combat probes also far easier.

3. Provide on the side map in the bottom right corner a 3 dimensional map instead of the 2 dimensional map currently there.

4. Provide another 2 dimensional map in addition to the existing one on the side map, but use a different spatial axis for it (if the current one shows, say, the XY axis, let the second one show the XZ axis, providing a 'side view' of the solar system instead of a 'top down' view).

Another issue I find somewhat limiting is the fact that measurements in the directional scan vindow are given in kilometres (km), consequentially, constant calculations for conversions to AU are necessary. It would be handy if measurements could be given in AU and also if there would be some kind of a slider to change values instead of typing.
Cannibal Kane
Viziam
Amarr Empire
#2 - 2012-01-20 10:24:52 UTC  |  Edited by: Cannibal Kane
When hunting war targets the last thing you care about is how it looks. You want to complete it quickly as possible, right click and changing views to check negative or positive plane of a red dot is simple enough.

All good ideas but It takes me less than a minute to scan a ship down if I have on directional. I don't want things getting in the way.

As you get used to scanning down ships the AU to KM gets so entrenched you can recall it from memory when your scanning or busy with directional.

and use 5 probes for the best results.

"Kane is the End Boss of Highsec." -Psychotic Monk
Hathrul
School of Applied Knowledge
Caldari State
#3 - 2012-01-20 11:54:09 UTC
i like point 2. the only thing that annoys me is that the dscan cone is visible on my small F11 map, but not on my F10 map.

having said that, i tend to still get 100% hits on my first pass, so it works fine as it is