Greetings!
First of all I want to say that I was very happy to hear the announcement that PI would be getting a QOL pass. I did an article some time ago that got featured on crossing zebras about QOL changes for PI and a lot of the issues I wanted to bring to light is being addressed in these changes. Some other issues not so much, but I appreciate that the changes had to be done with limited resources. I have tried out a couple of mock setups with the changes currently on SISi and I have a couple of points of feedback.
The bad:
- The extractor Program duration bar. Moving it to replace the “current cycle” progress bar when the program is not set didn’t really improve things. I can only agree with what Base Haver wrote about this in his feedback post: PI Interface Feedback - Good Stuff, But Please Fix the Parts that have been made Worse
- The holograms are still painfully obscuring to facilities when you are doing setup. You have to understand that in order to use the least amount of cpu/pg on links we all build our facilities as close to each other as possible and that means that if the hologram is larger than the pin it is going to obscure everything around it. This is especially annoying for routing where you need to have the launchpad selected.
- Overall there is a lot of focus on the setup phase and not enough on the day-to-day maintenance. This would be the customs office window and the extractor control unit window.
Suggestions:
- When you are routing resources from launchpad or storage to facilities is it possible that when you click Create route and then click a facility, that it auto-confirms the route and remembers that you are doing routes with -this resource- from -this launchpad- and lets you click the next facility without having to click create route again sort of like how it remembers schematics?
- Could you improve the customs office window? It would be great if it was re-sizable and if the contents of all the launchpads were displayed in the right column (instead of having to click the drop-down menu for each launchpad). I don’t think anyone has so many resources in launchpads that it would be cluttered and even then just allowing the window to be resized and a scrollbar should help prevent any issue.
- Ice planets: still annoying as hell to use. I clicked through a couple of planets and in some cases the build/scan interface was partially or entirely obscured because the text was the same color as the planet.
- Extractor heads: Shift-select so you can select more than one head at a time so you don’t have to move them all around individually.
- Extractors: An option either by shortcut key or on the menu of the extractor unit to rerun the previously installed program without having to open up the extractor program window.
Best improvements:
- Memory on facilities. This reduces clicks and improves the workflow of setup. Excellent!
- The new planetary production screen and the “Attention required” sign. Good stuff!
- The bug that caused transfers to randomly close the customs office window seems to be fixed! Feels good man!
Don’t listen to all the people saying that you should make templates or presets to one-click setups. You don’t need do the setup phase often enough to actually justify this. The changes on SiSi are 90% in the right direction.
