Utremi Fasolasi
The Jagged Edge
Rebel Alliance of New Eden
248
   |
Posted - 2013.06.01 03:19:00 -
[1] - Quote
Some considerations that come to mind:
1. Being able to organize drones into flights or wings when docked beyond just dumping them in the drone bay is important. Some kind of mini palette like the ship fitting service. Organizing them should be separate from deployment to keep things simple and clean.
2. We know each flight or wing of deployed drones is going to be a max of 5 drones. (except for Carriers and we can't forget those)
3. We know bandwidth is a thing. A flight in the drone bay organizer should have a bar showing the bandwidth used, to make this visible and mean something like PG and CPU do for ship fitting and PI command centers and POS's.
4. Another indicator for # of drones possible per flight based on Drones skill. Max Drones and BW are the PG and CPU of drones in effect.
5. Radial menus for acting on an individual deployed drone or flight. Down with nested right click menus. And down with the separate Selected item windowette.
6. Having each preset drone group as a UI button near the module racks would be good. Click a button for deployment that pops the deployed drones onto the HUD with the info you need to command them. Click that button again to withdraw them. Or click another button for another preset to automatically recall the last set and then deploy the next one.
7. Since a ship will always have a limited number of drones in the bay, pre-organized into preset flights, the number of deploy/recall buttons will be restrained naturally.
8. Likewise you can only have 1-5 drones in space at a time for a flight, so you need an area that can display the info graphically for these 1-5 and act on them. A circle an outer ring divided into 5 for the max of 5 drones, with a circle in the center where the "attack" and "return" commands can be buttons.
9. On this ring or polygonal shape, a border of a drone element would flash yellow if targeted, red if red boxed/shot.
10. Each drone element would have your three health bars. Each one can be left clicked for radial menu love.
To recap:
1. A drone organizer palette similar to ship, POS or dropsuit fitting to pre-organize drones into flights, with each flight naturally constrained by Drones skill and ship bandwidth.
2. On the space HUD, one button to deploy/recall each group near your module buttons/central ship wheelie thing.
3. On space HUD when drones deployed, an array of the 1-5 deployed drones, allowing you to see their status easily and command them with radial clicks. |