Acerus Malum
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Posted - 2006.06.07 06:25:00 -
[1]
1. Those spinning crosshairs that appear around your selected target don't always mark the selected overview item. When a target is destroyed, another target takes its place as "primary." But until you actually click the target with your cursor, it doesn't get selected. There's basically this huge discrepancy between what the GUI says you've selected and what you really do have selected.
2. A good addition to the center module console would be a countdown timer for each module that displays how long until its cycle is completed. From experience, you can eventually figure out how long a module will run for, but I'm sure that for some modules (ECM, repairers, afterburners, etc.) having a definitive time to completion would be very useful in battle. Obviously, if you activated this timer on rapid-fire modules like guns it could get annoying quickly, so let's be able to toggle them on a per-module basis (through the right-click menu, like you toggle manual/auto repeat). The module icons are already circular, so how about a spinning clock timer?
3. Modules which are active but are blinking red can't be clicked. This means we can't change our minds about reactivating them; we have to wait for their cycle to complete and activate them then. Not big but kind of irritating.
4. The UI needs to be more responsive to the mousewheel. By this I mean that there needs to be an easier way to give the mousewheel focus over the window you want to scroll. The mousewheel itself is such an important tool for navigating the UI; it scrolls the overview, it zooms the camera in space, and it scrolls windows from chat channels to the market. Right now, you need to click which window you want to focus, then scroll. When you're dealing with a constantly-moving overview or a crowded cargo bay, a misclick can change your selected target. And mis-clicking in space can change your movement. Yes, this is a game which occasionally requires quick and precise responses, but something as casual as scrolling a mousewheel shouldn't.
5. The action buttons in the overview's "Selected Item" box change constantly based on your distance from them. The lock-on, warp-to, open, jump, look-at, buttons all depend on distance, and magically appear and disappear constantly, shuffling the rest of the buttons around. It would be better if the inactive buttons were always visible, but grayed out when the object isn't in range. |