Thoughts on new PI Interface

Industry Gameplay Center Mining & Extraction
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Hi,

had a look at my planets tonight and so far the new system seems a very mixed bag:

  • On the plus side, the blinking red circle around a factory to show sth wrong with it seem to work fine and will certainly help any PI newbs.

  • The fact that after choosing a product you automatically have to route it also avoids errors and saves a click.

  • otherwise the click savings are not great…

  • when feeding ingredients to a factory, the visual feedback what factory has received ingredients in the form of half- or third-circles is gone (or invisible due to the red blinkies).

  • the new Planetary Production window with the planet image and the production and stockpile icons is quite frankly an abomination. I understand you want to make it easier for beginners, but the new window takes way too much real estate per planet, cannot be made smaller easily (jumps erratically back and forth) and for good measure the scrollbar jumps back to top from time to time without reason.

Can we please get back the old text based view in that window as a config option? Just for quickly choosing planets - us PI pros tend to know what’s being done on which planet…

Zoltan

2 Likes
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I maybe missing something in the update but I still cannot route more than 3000 unit from the extractors. For me that was the greatest thing against PI. I hope they didnt left it untouched.

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I concur with the above stated thoughts. some good stuff in setting up planets, but the oversized partial display of the planets is terrible.
the view and warp to buttons are a nice touch, but the ACCESS button would be more useful here than buried in a menu sublist.

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The first post pretty much hit the mark, but I would have liked one additional item.

At the bottom of the PI window there are two selectable buttons for showing the selected planet in planet mode and setting destination to the selected planet. Nice. But I would like one extra button there called “Restart all idle extractors” and Bing, all your idle extractors across all your planets are restarted.

Even if it is ‘select each planet in turn and restart the extractors for just that planet’ without having drill down further levels into the interface to restart would be nice.

I have heard the argument that it would make PI to easy, but at some point you need to clear PI off the planets or re-position extractor heads, so you will not always be able to do a fast restart. It would depend how much you like to micromanage your PI.

Anyway, that’s my two isk worth . . .

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Hi,
i also like the update to PI. But it still needs some work to be a really good update.
The zoom in on Planets has gotten faster, bur for me it is not really better, because it zooms in too much.
My “daily” work on PI-Planets is to restart the extractor and before that, check if the heads are on the right place. So a good zoom-in would be to see all extractor-heads on my sceen.

Also that Planetary Production Interface needs far to much space !

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And maybe another thought about the interface…

I ask myself, why we have the Buidl and Scan Interface completly different behaviour than the Planetary Production window (the one with the planets). And why (the hell) the submit button is on the build/Scan part.
Why not move it to the extractor UI or the Planet UI ? Or stop using it for Extractors anyway !

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The new PP window is too big. The old version was much better. This is the only thing I didn’t like in the update

1 Like
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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.

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Ive been setting up my entire plan for a full time production facility and have had quite a bit of PI this week. Id love to give my thoughts too.

I love the patch work. Great Job CCP. There are a few things that stand out to me. I like that you can zoom in more. I dont like how the zoom behaves and how the view appears, when at the top or bottom of the planet however.

I struggle moving around the camera “accurately” when zoomed in, seems like its jumps from position to position, rather than a smooth movement? This is annoying for people who are ocd… just saying. Id like my setup to be square, and have right angles… Though it doesnt have to be perfect, I do put in some effort to make my setup look professionally constructed. Maybe either fixed locations across a grid may be an idea? So no matter where I put my set up, it will always be in divisions of equal distance or size, length, and angle.

I like that the routing is semi automatic once schematic is selected. Is there objection to making it auto route to all processors that have that schematic allowing such resources to be inputed? can save more clicking…

I love the new planetary production window, I like how I feel I dont need a spreadsheet just to check everything is in order… I dont mind that its size can be changed, but I do mind that I cannot organize or stack the planets in the window, how I want. It will stack them as you lay the command centers down, so in order of warp, or order of material by name, etc… it would be nice if I could just click and drag them up or down to stack them as I see fit?

I do not like that you took away the old text version. I do think you should have both. I used that text window to warp to, EASILY… now its a pain in teh ass… the size of the PP window is larder, its nice it shows all the info clearly, waht is being extracted, processed. I actually stack this with the overview… so I have to toggle overview or PP window, and that will interfere with my security of operations. please bring back the text window, and let us choose which ones we want to use and for which reason.

I dont feel there is anything wrong with the extractor control window, the slider was moved, teh buttons changed, looks good. I love the graph and color intensity…

In the scan tab upper left, can you display the percentage next to the bar showing the level of material on the planet? and or some other stats, like au, number of total pi on the planet, idk if thats stupid or what not, but could be useful info to some. Im aware I can view all networks, but I think some textual data display will be nice. can stick a number or % just left of the intensity bar, right of the resource name.

All in all Im happy with the PI setup.

ATM I just renovated and improved my setup: 72 planet extraction plus 78 planet production, all 8 p4 items across the board.

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