Dev blog: Changes Coming To Planetary Interaction

[Average_Space_Elf]

The way the camera tilts makes it difficult–if not impossible–to click structures at the poles at full zoom.

It’s also making me nauseous.

I can either stay zoomed out or induce the need to vomit. Not ideal.

Decommission button good, though.

[Vatrushka_Gr]

few notes about changes allready launched.
–hologram of structures are too large - useless and hiding everything around
–very big, huge the planet production window with all that nice but useless pictures and information, wich i can get streight from the colony overview
–the effect of fast zoom spining planet to show the colony make me feel dizzy
–when i looking at structures(processors) i can’t undestand wich one working and wich in stoped (no resourses). in old version that was indicated by non-bright yellow (or orange may be) color of circle around the structure. so visual i had that important information without click on processor. now all have same color.
thats is for now

[Ageanal_Olerie]

SUGGESTION

Put on the right-click menu for installations “Expedited Transfer”.

I use this function a lot (as I suspect do others), and it would be nice if on the right-click menu we had “Expedited Transfer” if not other relevant functions for specific installations.

Currently the only thing you find on the right-click menu is “Show Info” and “Create Link”.

[Ageanal_Olerie]

I agree with others, the holograms are neat and all, but they can make it difficult to work on colonies. It’s nice you’ve included times where they will be hidden.

However, I would like to propose that the holograms only appear briefly when you select an installation. For a second or two. And then they automatically hide themselves. There is enough indication afterwards as to which installation you have selected.

Perhaps make it an option, for those who like to always see the holograms.

[Nana_Skalski]

Somebody on reddit made this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/8nz8t2/simple_graphic_showing_what_changes_pi_interface/

[zluq_zabaa]

@zluq_zabaa

on the plus-side there is no lag inside that mode and the Custom Office Window doesn’t seem to close for arbitrary reasons anymore

I have to correct myself, sadly. Not only does the Custom Office Window still randomly close, but now also the PI mode randomly freezes.

Seems all we got is more bugs and more clutter. “Improvements” to PI, hmm…

@Average_Space_Elf

The way the camera tilts makes it difficult–if not impossible–to click structures at the poles at full zoom.

It’s also making me nauseous.

Agreed.

[Imustbecomfused]

Just to refer the comments and ideas expressed here

Thoughts on new PI Interface

Is it just me or are the colours of the factories too bright. Also the small difference in shades of yellow between where resources are flowing and where they are depleted to your factories needs ot be more pronounced.

[Nunosh]

@CCP_Falcon thank you for the return of the right click shortcuts (warp to customs etc)

[Eva_Arzi]

another few notes on PI changes(I’m producing T2 in wh):
(plus)making a new colony is really faster. Thanks!
(plus)I can see what planet requires immediate actions
(major -) huge planetary window that hides the half of my interface on my laptop
Can you please add option to return to old 5-6 string window?
(minor -) scan button has annoyng highlight about the planetary skills and I need to specially avoid to move the mouse cursor over this button when pressing Submit button.
(minor -) Extractor main window - it is autoclosed when I press “install extraction programm” and autoopened when I installed the programm. What for?
(bug) warping to the planet directly always makes me bumping on custom office, so I should use old rightclick-custom office-warpto

[Ceris_Angerran]

Hey CCP,

Love the changes overall so far. A few things I liked better before, hoping you would consider tweaking or reverting:

1. The Planetary Production window is far to large. I love being able to view them this way but I really wish I could collapse and open them one at a time so they take up less space, or have the old planet list back.

2. The camera view when you enter PP planet-mode is not as good as the old view. It feels very tilted (as if I am looking up or down at the planet as opposed to just…directly at it from a distance) and makes it more difficult to view all your facilities/extractors at once. I cannot seem to adjust it via camera settings.

I have been loving a lot of the other changes and having more visibility on the planet structures quickly has been a great improvement. Thanks for all your hard work with this!

[Rin_Vocaloid2]

@Ceris_Angerran

The camera view when you enter PP planet-mode is not as good as the old view. It feels very tilted (as if I am looking up or down at the planet as opposed to just…directly at it from a distance) and makes it more difficult to view all your facilities/extractors at once. I cannot seem to adjust it via camera settings.

I miss the old camera angle where it was more shallow and made the 3D holographic models of the installations stand out.

[Imustbecomfused]

maybe an individual and a corp pi ledger, graph, thing, for keeping track of large projects? cheers. also, a timer for each planet, in the PP window, would be nice to have a visual there so we dont have to check each planet , we can go to that main tab and see the program ends in said time. for that planet/

Another note, it seems kinda ridiculous to have to destroy and rebuild and re route a new extractor head… why not just allow it to be moved around, keeping the link and route established, once established, allowing me to move it when needed and not have to redo the mechanical stuff. seems rather pointless. Understood the resources move, fine, let us move the head. redoing the link everytime the ext head needs to be moved is a but excessive.

[Rin_Vocaloid2]

When it comes to moving installations, I guess we can at least try to justify moving them through the lore. Gas planets for example should at least be allowed free movement of the installations given that there is usually no solid ground and the 3D models seem to suggest that the installations for gas planets can float which means we could reposition them.

[Zetakya]

OK, so, having just yesterday gone back to my PI setup hoping that the whole thing would be less cancerous…

1. The new Planet Window is too big. Please either make it smaller, or have a compact mode. I use that window while in space to warp to the Customs Offices, and it takes up too much screen estate with having Inventory, Customs Office, Intel, Local, Overview/Selected Item and now the huge Planet Window open simultaneously.

2. You need to institute the ability to add schematics to multiple buildings.

3. Can we please have blueprints to build Command Centres?

4. The Bright Red “Needs Attention” ring actually makes matter worse, because it obscures the yellow half/third rings that would tell me which particular commodities were in short supply.

5. It’s still the case that over half of the PI items are basically useless except as intermediaries.

[dorfsorc]

i had hped that the patch today would remedy some ot the issues with daily PI management. it didnt.
the new PI makes setup easier. (we do this occasionally)
it makes maintenance worse (we do this daily)
can we please get rid of the big planet windows, and get the simple one back?
if we want to add helpful stuff add the following’:
a button for ACCESS
a button for RESTART (extractor heads)
a way to center on a launchpad

[dorfsorc]

a clarification… there is already an access button once you arrive at the planet. the ACCESS button also needs to appear alongside the warp to button. sometimes we just want to move stuff without all the warping around. or we want to do the transfers while we are warping.
again. with more than 80 planets, anything we can do to save time is important

[Dominous_Nolen]

I find (as well as some corp mates have noted) that the camera speed feels alittle jarring, feels like too fast when transitioning to planet view or picking a random spot on the planet to view.

[Imustbecomfused]

I really hate hte upside down view on the bottom of a planet, technically there is no bottom or whatnot because its all relative and in space we would be looking right side up no matter which pole of hte planet we were facing… at least make it so i can have a proper TOP view. perpendicular to the planet surface.

[Rin_Vocaloid2]

I like to make a few recommendations, assuming no one else came up with these ideas.

1. Allow us the option to have the size of the PI icons scale with the distance from which we view the planet in Planetary Production mode. I don’t want to have to constantly zoom in on each and every individual structure just to be able to tell apart a extractor from a processor unless I was that dumb cretin who bunched up all of the PI structures into that one pile because why the ■■■■ not. Which bring me to my next recommendation.

2. Allow us the option to have the size of the PI icons scale with the distance from which we view the planet in Planetary Production mode for specific structures of our choosing if we want to just see specific ones at a glance.

3. This is probably the most important one to me, freedom to color code however we want. Let’s say I have a manufacturing planet (usually tend to be Barren planets) that has 12 processing facilities linked in various ways to take in 3 or 4 different lower-tier PI materials as import to create the final product. It would be extremely difficult, unless you have excellent memory, to tell apart the wetware mainframe chain from the robotics chain from the Livestock chain if all of your processors are yellow. I would love to color code them individually so I can tell which ones are which without having to zoom in really close.

4. You gave us simulator mode for ship fittings. Is there a way you can implement a simulator mode for Pl? I can only go so far without having to hit the “Submit” button in Planetary Production mode before I realize that I can’t setup a schematic on the processor without first having to build the structure which cost ISK. And considering how much it costs to build a level 5 colony I want to be sure that the ISK I invest on that specific planet will have a positive return.

[Trader_Hansen]

@Buster_DoggPL

When in Planet View mode it shows tooltip when you hooover the cursor over the Scan button. However it can obstruct the apply changes button. Can you delay the tooltip a bit?

Yeah, this is doing my head in. I have to actively remind myself to move my mouse cursor up and to the left to get to the apply button, so that I avoid hovering over the scan button and blocking apply with the stupid tooltip (which seems pointless - I already know what my scanning skills are).

@JuuR_Zibaoo

when in space the “warp to poco” should be there without rightclick
when in space the “access poco” butten should be there without right click

Yes. We get buttons for half the functionality, yet other functionality gets hidden in menus. This actually reminds me of the chat window as well…

Why is Clear Contents hidden in a menu (and everything else), while show users has it’s own entry on the [completely empty and just asking for more buttons] horizontal bar.

Any why was ‘View Item in Market’ button removed from the buy/sell window 6 odd years ago and never put back in? Most useful button ever.

CCP needs to hire UI designers that actually use computers for stuff other than playing games and browsing the internet. And don’t hire “UX” designers, which is how we get atrocities like The Agency window (in which the theory is nice, but the implementation means the window takes several seconds to apply every change since it has to redraw the stupid map over and over and over in realtime).

I appear to have gone off topic.