General Esylium
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Posted - 2009.03.25 19:23:00 -
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Title: ideas for making eve maps very usable and useful.
Category: UI
Description:
In-game maps are almost useless, since I started playing eve a year and a half ago I never found them useful and always used other maps (e.g ombey), but all hope is not gone, there is a lot of room for improvment and here are some suggestions:
All these options have to be optional, checkable!
1- this is the most important feature: make only the region you're in visible, when I am in region x I don't care about seeing all 5000 systems in eve, I only want to see my own region.
2- make system names always appear above a system even when it's not connected to my current system.
3- make all lines visible always but in low contrast.
4- make passive lines between systems colored by constallation (e.g constallation 1 ->lines soft yellow, constallation b -> soft red), I know it already exists in some way but the colors are too few that it's hard to distinguish constallations in the same region.
5- when we click a system make it high light in high contrast and remain highlighted even when we mouse-over other constallations, make the mouse-over lower contrast than selected, but higher than passive lines in bulletpoint 3.
6- make a window with immediately connected regions, let say my region x is connected to 3 other regions, a, b and c, let there be an option to click-check displaying each of these regions according to our need.
7- give each system informative icons like in ombey, number of belts, station, important services and security status, ALL CHECKABLE!
8- make each region's space filled by a certain colour in 3D, which both helps identify the 3D location of each star in relation to others without having to rotate in all directions first; star colors are not enough to distinguish a region out of multiple (when viewing more than 1),
9- this one may be difficult but I think it's one of the most useful ones, new tactical maps:
make this map openable in a separate window, in 3D and movable like any other window!
tactical maps (f11) take a huge portion of the view and only 1-2 parts of it are usable in some situations, let us choose what tactical map we use, how many, and where we put it without losing half the screen.
10- let Sov be visible on top of region fill with suitable colors with the icon of the alliance on it; the color can be the average color of the alliance logo.
11- I don't know if this one works, but experiment with patterns and don't be afraid to use them if colors are not enough to make it easily visible!
I believe these ideas will dramatically improve the game experience, make the game more self dependent and could remove the need for external maps outside of eve!
Goal: to make the eve maps usable and remove the need for external maps to navigate properely in the game.
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