Labeling was my only real question
The jump system as it exists is fine where the jump points themselves indicate a call it a weak or a greasy point between systems, but you're right in another way if a ship powerfull enough to jump without a jump point i'de agree with you about massive power required but as of yet that kind of behaviour does not exist in the game or even within the "dreamers lounge" to the best of my knowledge.
Bill
gfx/nav in dire need of documentation
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pht
- Trader
- Posts: 17
- Joined: Sat May 17, 2008 8:13 am
Exactly!safemode wrote:3d wireframe is confusing, not clear, and takes more time to navigate than a flat 2d representation. Try to resist the need for it to look cool, and think about what a pilot in space would want from his nav map. They want to see the path from point A to Point B. They dont want to have to rotate things around and have stuff in their way and make things take longer than they have to do get the job done.
Being quite new to VS, i noticed almost immediately that planning path from A to B is almost impossible with the current navcomp.
The 3D view is too complicated to apprehend, the 2D view is cluttered beyond recognition.
Now, can you actually? The wiki says that SPEC may be used as an alternative to "front door" jump-in.the locations of systems in 3d space is irrelevant with jump points. Maybe if you were speccing from system to system, but with jump points it's pointless information.
Maybe they would make sense as an advanced feature to be played with while docked and not while having hands full of enemies.3d view just doesn't make any sense at all.
In system view doesn't make any sense at all.
In-system map is something I'd love to play with, especially if you could display the map of any system, not just the current one. I could look up what planets/moons/installations there are, maybe a tiny bit of history of each one and generally researching before actually travelling somewhere. Maybe this could be directly linked to VS wiki so that you wouldn't need to maintain two information databases separately. And maybe it need not to be the navicomp at all, just a separate galactic database, accessible only on bases, but with the ability to link with ship's targetting/waypoint system ...
You could refine the 3D map to display the galactic/ecliptic plane, as most of the stuff is usually near that, with perpendicular 'height' lines for ships etc. Also the ability to remove display and/or labels of every object would unclutter the map.
Perhaps you (or me, or whoever) could implement a generic note-taking and/or bookmarking system ... that would let every pilot use it in their way.You could have a little circle around nodes that you have spent time on a base in. Signalling possible repair areas.
Destinations could be selected from the map (if you had that option in your particular cockpit) or from a list of system names.
As for the upgradeability of the navcomp, it would be a good idea, especially to emphasize the I'm-making-progress feeling. But beware to strip too many features from the basic model, as that would render it as frustrating as the current one.
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Keller
- Merchant
- Posts: 50
- Joined: Sat Jun 16, 2007 2:23 pm
Quite honestly, what I'd like to see in the nav comp would be to create paths of different colors, representing trade routes. (these could even be purchased as a commodity)
The star map itself needs filters; i.e. you should be able to constrain which systems you want to see (faction, sector, etc).
In cockpit, the nav comp and star maps should likely be view only (i.e. you're not trying to plot a route while in space; I've been jumped by pirates too many times while figuring out where I need to go). The bigger, more complicated versions should be available as a screen in bases.
Finally, the star map itself could use a finer detail level below system. There are too many times I'd like to zoom in on a planet and its satellites, because I can't see anything due to there being far too many ships in the system cluttering up the list of what you can see.
The star map itself needs filters; i.e. you should be able to constrain which systems you want to see (faction, sector, etc).
In cockpit, the nav comp and star maps should likely be view only (i.e. you're not trying to plot a route while in space; I've been jumped by pirates too many times while figuring out where I need to go). The bigger, more complicated versions should be available as a screen in bases.
Finally, the star map itself could use a finer detail level below system. There are too many times I'd like to zoom in on a planet and its satellites, because I can't see anything due to there being far too many ships in the system cluttering up the list of what you can see.
Nothing is uninteresting. 
