Hello CCP & Fellow Capsuleers,
As we all know, you can organize your modules and other asset tiles using a station container or cargo container. These tools do a great job storing your assets. What they are not great for is fitting your ships using the in game fitting tool. You need to go in and pull out what you need first and then use the fit to ship button.
I wanted to make a hanger UI suggestion that could help organize a fleet hanger and allow for quick ship fitting at the same time.
Introducing: Hanger Tabs.
Currently we have tabs for Ships & Items. I am proposing to allow players to make Sub-Tabs, and allow modules to be assigned to Sub-Tabs. This could be as simple as allowing us to right-click the tab, and choose a tab name. You would then assign items to the the tab using the right-click context menu, and choose select tab → tab name.
For Example of the hierarchy: Items Tab → Right click and create tabs for Lows, Mediums, Highs. Then right click a correlating item and choose either Low, Medium, or High. So the ending hierarchy looks like:
Items → Lows → Nanofiber Internal Structure
Items → Mediums → Micro Warp Drive
Items → Highs → 150mm Railgun
When you click on the Low tab, it would only show you the Nanofiber Internal Structure. When you click on the Mediums tab it would only show you the Micro Warp Drive. Likewise when you click on the Highs tab, you would only see the 150mm Railgun.
That is a high level example. However, the tabs can be more granular than this. What if you create a tab called Rifter Fit.
For Example:
Items → Rifter Fit → 125mm Autocannon, 5mn Micro Warp Drive, Warp Disruptor, Stasis Webifier, Damage Control I, Gyrostabilizer, Overdrive Injector, Nanofiber Internal Structure.
When you click the Rifter Fit tab, all you would see are the items you listed above. This would allow for two subsequent actions.
- Determine your shopping list, easily and effectively. As you would be able to determine what you are missing from your fit.
- Allow you to easily fit your Rifter using the ship fitting tools already in the game, without needing to sort through your cans.
But wait, it doesn’t stop there. Since you can create other tabs, you can create tabs for your Industry Items, Mining Items, Planetary Items, etc. This system can be used to easily sort and organize your hanger without the use of station containers or storage containers.
If you wanted to take it a step further, you could combine the Ship + Items tabs so that your entire Rifter Fit is in 1 tab.
As it goes right now, we just have a plethora of item tiles that you can stack, sort, and search, but I believe our station hangers can be much more organized.
Coding wise, this should be able to be accomplished using JSON or XML, and the tabs information could be stored client side in the My Documents folder similar to the Overview information. This way there is no extra load on the server side databases, just the procedure calls going to and from the server to represent what is on the server and how it should look on the client side.
Anyway that is my idea, don’t know if it has been suggested before. If so, it is merely a case of great minds thinking alike 