Diss Traction
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Posted - 2007.08.31 18:06:00 -
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Edited by: Diss Traction on 31/08/2007 18:10:21
The word "map" is quoted because the term barely applies to what you currently have in the game. There's so many problems with it I barely know where to begin.
Map should remember tilt, rotation, and zoom level between uses. Currently it's analogous to having a car map that refolds itself and jumps back into your glove-box everytime you look away for an instant.
Map should give the option to lock-in a particular tilt or rotation. For instance, I'd like the map to always have "North" as the Branch region. Once locked I'd still be able to fully rotate the map in any direction but it would spring-back to the locked position once the drag operation was complete. Or better yet, add two buttons to the top of the map options dialog called Store and Recall. The Recall button would reset the map to your stored rotation -but without touching current screen center or zoom level.
Map should not spam the viewer with hover popups while he/she is trying to simply drag/orient it.
Map needs to remove zoom limiter planes that often keep the player from properly zooming in on a system at the "back" of the map.
Station and agent info, system security levels, and even sovereignty info should be downloaded one time per day AT MOST, and stored on the client. There's no excuse for having the map stall because it needs to constantly re-query for this basic info.
Once the hover feature is gone and you've returned to mouse clicks to bring up system infomation, now get rid of the popup itself. It almost always manages to get half of itself buried underneath another window anyway, or run off the screen entirely, so just axe it and create a scrollable, positional, dialog, similar to the map options dialog. Give it tabs for celestial, stations, and agent info, and route, -use the "fan-fold" windows like you do for bm's or skill training windows to fold-out agents within each station, etc. The route tab would show the complete auto-pilot path, as currently shown on the side of the screen, but without being truncated if path is overly long.
System map should not be locked with your current location as the center of rotation, but any object you double-click on should become center.
System map refuses to let me zoom out so I can view all planets within the viewable area in the center of my screen (all the sides are covered in chat windows, overview, map options, station windows, etc.
Clear pane in top left showing current route info needs to remember its window depth level instead of always popping to the top. I hate it when it forces text over the top of my nearby chat windows. Consequently, when I do want to see it on top, I'd like to be able to click within the top corner of that invisible pane and bring it back to the top.
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By the way, nice job on showing the jump-range sphere for capital ships. Perhaps once you've gone to a separate dialog for showing system info, you can also add a Jump tab that would show: LY to each waypoint, Total LY, fuel required for each waypoint, and total fuel required for both a single and round-trip jump. Please stop making capital pilots use 3rd-party apps or pull out a calculator for this basic info.
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