A lot of replies from people being disingenuous or simply indulging their desire to say “No you’re wrong!”.
For the ones saying “you can zoom in on your ship” - you know this is bull, because it’s strategically more effective to play in zoomed out / tactical view. Nobody’s going to keep zooming in and out for no reason other than to see their ship up close.
For the ones saying “I don’t want that on my screen!” - it’s amazing how many people in this “massive sandbox game” are utterly intolerant of anyone else’s gameplay preference. “Only what I want and like goes in the game, nothing else!” seems to be the rule for many.
Pro tip: UIs have a little thing called “options”, with “toggle on/off” being the simplest one. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. If you have the ship avatar and the zoomed out mode, then you have both the close and the environment views.
It’s literally the easiest and fastest thing to code because it already exists and they’d simply be duplicating one UI element to another location at higher magnification.
But “If you want it for fun, it must be bad!” rules the day it seems.
I just wish CCP was known for adding toggles for such features…
(I’m still waiting for a toggle for similar ‘aesthetical nonsense’ like to turn off the avatar in my character window, and a toggle to turn off the docking animation.)
It’s a fine idea as long as it can be turned off, as I have nowhere near enough screen real estate free to handle that. I have 2 overviews, a drone window, 2 chat windows, broadcasts window, d-scan and the fleet watchlist all up most of the time.
It’s kinda like the full avatar view, some people really like it and that’s great but it’d be nice if I can turn it off and speed up the loading of my character sheet window.
The idea is … not bad. Could be useful. The implementation, being up to CCP, might well slow your game down, pause gameplay every time an effect was applied to it, and crash your PC if you toggled it on and zoomed in at the same time.
However, that’s implementation, not discussion of the idea itself.
Usually when I’m solo, for example when hauling, ratting, mining or exploring I play all the way zoomed in and can enjoy seeing my ship any time I’m not doing anything else. A feature like this would be redundant in this case.
When I’m in more intense large PvP fights where I need to have a good grasp of the battlefield I like zooming out all the way. I usually turn down my graphics and sound for optimal performance too in this case, and would in such a situation also turn off a feature like this too, so then this feature wouldn’t be useful for me either.
Naah, I don’t play for the isk. I play for the fun. I don’t mind grinding NPC pew-pew at all and mining is okay… when I’m on my meds.
It’s a very interesting game. Just discovering what all there is to do and all there is to fly in, the lore and the armaments… It’s worth to spend time on it.
Subscription is expensive as hell but no one forces me to spend money and CCP is gracious enough to allow to play for free so no complaints here.
Just use the 3D preview from the Ship Info window?
Neither of your UI mockups make the UI in any way better. They make everything harder to read, harder to use, harder to see at a glance, they waste tons of space for added benefit other than fancy, useless graphic gimmick. AS if Photon wasn’t bad enough at this already.
You can tell the difference between ship sizes at a glance if you look at the capacitor or at the amount of modules, and the type and amount of modules tell you a lot about the type of ship itself. Many guns on a small ship? That’s a destroyer. Blasters on the destroyer? Probably a Catalyst or Hecate. Does it have a probe launcher? Hecate.
Sure, there’s many combinations, but I only use a few fits myself and can easily recognise my ships based on the modules. Perhaps I don’t see the difference between my Manticore or my Nemesis based on modules, but I do know it’s a torpedo bomber I’m flying!
(Not that zooming in would work in that case, it would be cloaked.)
uhh… practice? Identification takes skill, took me a good while to learn.
This is a good point.
Overall I support this idea. Having a collapsible window not unlike inventory and chats and things like that where you would have a litle representation of your ship that you could manipulate into a certain orientation or set it to spin slowly would be pretty cool. It would certainly save a couple youtubers from some tedious animation.
