While it's nice that you're improving the drone UI, what the drone UI needs isn't improving. It's re-doing. And, before that, re-thinking.

And I fear that adding polish to the current (fundamentally flawed / limited) drone UI will make CCP less likely to consider a full overhaul in the near future ("What, and waste all the time we spent polishing the old system?").

For example, the drone UI should allow players to:

• Quickly and easily launch, recall and activate specific drone groups directly (using both keyboard shortcuts and on-screen icons).


• Have a simple, unified "default action" shortcut (ex., pressing "F" should make mining drones mine).


• Also allow players to assign keyboard shortcuts to specific drone actions (ex., create a shortcut to "repair target" that will not make your combat drones "attack target", or a shortcut to "salvage target" that won't make your combat drones destroy it, and so on).


• Allow individual drones to belong to more than one group (ex., I might want a group with all my light drones, one with all my heavy drones, and one with all my thermal-damage drones, which includes drones from both of the first groups).


• See drone HP while drones are docked.


• Allow grouping of drones of different types (I know this is a problem with the current UI / command structure, but it wouldn't be if the other changes mentioned here were implemented).


• Target-lock own drones instantly (they're in constant communication with my ship - that's the whole justification for "bandwidth" - I shouldn't have to wait 20 seconds to lock one before I can start repairing it).


• Allow logistics drones to repair my own ship (yes, there are gameplay implications, but objectively only for logistics ships, and they can be dealt with by tweaking those ships; the idea that my repair drones can't repair my own ship is just nonsensical). Ex., telling logistics drones to "repair" with no target selected would make them repair the owner's ship (so there's no need to allow self-locking, which I guess would require too much debugging; alternatively, they automatically repair the parent when orbiting).


• Etc...

I don't think the features listed above are particularly hard to implement (from a UI design point of view), but they might be incompatible with the way Eve does things internally (and they're certainly incompatible with the current UI design).

To implement these things, "drone groups" shouldn't be treated as containers, but rather "indices" (essentially presented as a "virtual drone", whose orders are then relayed to every member of the group), and there should be direct access to specific drone actions through icons in the drone UI (draggable to the module shortcuts), instead of making players go through sub-menus.

For example, next to each drone (and to each group), there would be small icons for:

• Deployment button: Launch / Return to bay (ctrl+click to "disengage and orbit owner" instead of returning to bay, alt+click to "scoop drone", ctrl+alt+click to "abandon").


• Action button: Engage (perform default action for that drone type). The icon would be different depending on the drone type (combat, logistics, salvage, etc.) and would be draggable to a target. Simply clicking it would perform it on the current target. On a mixed-type group, the icon would send a "perform default action" command to each drone in that group (or be a bit smarter and figure out which action the player is more likely to want, but the generic command would generally be fine).


• Behavior button: Rules of engagement (click multiple times to cycle between "passive (orbit parent)", "guard (defend parent)", "assist (follow parent's attacks)", "aggressive (attack any enemy in range)"). This would also apply to drones assigned to someone else.

Each of these icons would be draggable to the "module" icons (right side of the HUD), and that would link it to the keyboard shortcut currently assigned to that slot (ex., if I drag the "engage" icon from group "MyDroneGroup" onto the first module icon, then pressing F1 would cause an "engage" command to be sent to the virtual "MyDroneGroup" drone, which would then relay that command to all drones in its index).

It sounds more complicated than it is (hard to explain just using text). The whole thing would take up the same amount of screen space as the current drone UI; the damage indicators would be smaller (circular, clock-style) and half the space would be used for the new direct-action / draggable icons.

I know this is unlikely to happen any time soon, I just urge you to not think of current UI "polish" as a long-term solution. The drone UI needs more fundamental changes to stop feeling like something out of the 1990s.