All posts by CCP Optimal

EVE

All hail the Info Panels

Pop-quiz: What do the Autopilot Route, Current System, Factional Warfare, Incursions, Agent Missions and Planetary Interaction have in common? I’m sure it’s possible to engineer various clever punch lines to that question, but the boring, logical answer is that they all fight to conquer the screen real estate next to the Neocom. To avoid casually referring to them as the user interface widgets that fight to conquer the screen real estate next to the Neocom (it really slows down meetings) we decided to re-brand them as the Info Panels. Even though our uncanny ability to give shorter names to things would easily justify a dev blog on its own, I’m happy to announce that this is not all! As with many other parts of the UI, things have grown somewhat organically here, and we are currently in a situation where the worst case scenario (all panels visible, lowest screen resolution) will fill up the screen vertically, effectively inhibiting us from introducing new panels if needed. Also, there was almost a complete lack of a clear system; some of the panels could be configured, others couldn’t and the aesthetics didn’t really match up so well in many cases. To amend this, we’ve designed and implemented a new mechanism that gives you the power to decide what information is important enough to you, and your play style, to have it in front of you at all times. Also; sexier look and feel.

Configuration

To begin with, each panel now comes in three flavors; normal, compact and collapsed. Normal mode is the most verbose one, compact mode only displays the most relevant stuff, while collapsed mode will minimize the panel to the top icon row, where it can be accessed by hovering over the relevant icon. Going between normal and compact mode is accomplished by single clicking the panel header or the arrow in front of it, while collapsing is done either by double clicking, or single clicking the top row icon. We’ve also introduced the ability to re-order the panels, which is simply done by dragging the top row icons around.

We are also recognizing that the importance of information is highly scope specific. What I mean by that is that information that’s relevant to you while your viewing the space scene, may not be important at all while you’re, say, navigating the map, or clicking around in PI, and vice versa. Hence, the info panel configurations are view state specific, meaning that your configurations are persisted per view (the different views include station, space, PI, map, etc.). We have designed what we think are good defaults for each view state, but there is absolutely no need for you to agree with that verdict since configuration is so easy.

That’s fine, now get to the new features

Sure thing, boss.  While we were mainly focused on getting the old content into a shiny new system, we did manage to drag in some cool new stuff, the most significant thing arguably being the migration of the autopilot settings from a place that makes practically no sense at all (the map panel) over to a place that actually does (the new Autopilot Route Info panel). As a result, the old routine of multiple clicks, confusion and moderate swearing has been replaced with a single click. We must admit that we were very tempted to do a more extensive cleanup of how you manage the autopilot route (see mockup below) but that will have to wait its turn.

Another neat new feature, which is toggled through the new autopilot settings menu by selecting “Show route path in space”, will reveal one of our best kept secrets; the stars in the space scene nebula actually represent the solar systems of New Eden. By plotting the route in space you’ll feel more like you’re actually travelling through space while burning up your route, rather than just appearing at arbitrary locations. In the near future we’re hoping to add some neat stuff to this feature such as making the stars interactive.  Also, we (as in Team Game of Drones) didn’t really do any of the hard route plotting work. CCP Mannapi did. We’re just here to rob the credit. That’s how we roll.

Other minor tweaks include clearer, more iconic icons, smoother animations and improved UI layouts.

More later

Finally, I might tease you that we’re already plotting to do more Info Panel work in the future, both introduce completely new ones (a new notifications panel that would allow you to read the headers of all incoming notifications without opening a separate window), improving current ones (adding current system location entries to the System Info panel) as well as migrating old UI over to the new system (map panel anyone?). Here are mockups for some of those; it would be very interesting to hear your thoughts.

The new Info Panels are already live on our test server, Singularity, so please give them a spin and report back to us with your delicious feedback.

Hope you enjoy!

 

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Uncategorized

Remember the old new Neocom?

A year ago we published this devblog, where we made all sorts of promises about a brand new, customizable neocom. Well, better late than never, right? To begin with, I would like to apologize for the latency and assure you that the blog was in fact not a poorly timed April fool’s joke. We did decide to push the Neocom project a bit back, as we felt it hadn’t received all the love it needed, and then, well, last year happened, so the project kind of got lost in all the turbulence.

Most of the promises made in the old devblog still hold. You will now be able to fully customize the Neocom according to your own play style; If you never use, say, the Corporation window, you can simply remove it from the Neocom. If you later get dragged into some serious Corp business and feel the need to put the Corporation button back in front, you simply drag it back from the EVE menu, which is accessed by clicking the new “E” button at top of the Neocom or pressing the appropriate shortcut key. This menu holds pretty much all the fundamental windows of EVE that can be accessed globally, all of which can be dragged to the Neocom for quicker access. What’s also cool about this new design is that we can stop placing new windows and content at weird locations, just because there isn’t more space in the Neocom. Instead, we just add a new entry to the EVE menu and let you decide if it’s useful enough to deserve its own Neocom button. We’ve already added a few new buttons, such as Agent Finder, Certificates Browser and Sovereignty.

Our previous attempt to upgrade the neocom looked something like this:

Click to enlarge

But a lot of people felt it should have looked more like this (warning: photo may have been digitally enhanced by a programmer):

And for this very once, we decided to listen to you guys! (but this is the last time, ok?):

Click to enlarge

Yep, it’s a full 100% more vertical than before. The heartbreaking part (for some of you at least) is that for this first iteration, you’re only going to be able to have the Neocom aligned to either left or right and not top or bottom of your screen. The main reason for this is lack of time, and we’re hoping to add this feature later on. This raises the obvious question of “Erm … didn’t you already do the horizontal implementation you lazy excuse for a dev?!?”. While the answer to that is obviously yes, writing the code that supports BOTH types of alignment just takes a bit longer than writing code that only does ONE. It also takes much longer than rotating an old image of a Neocom (see above). It can obviously be done, but just takes a bit of time. Prioritization and all that boring stuff.

The time we HAVE had we’ve used to properly polish the Neocom, adding smoother button effects and animations (screenshots are not the optimal medium for showing off that kind of stuff, so you’ll have to take my word for now), and making the EVE menu look less operating system, and more space game so it’s not likely you’ll encounter many strips of buttons sexier than this. The Neocom now also takes care of hosting minimized windows, so the unreadable slab of buttons that formed at the bottom of your screen is gone forever. We’ve also changed the toggle-close window behavior of the Neocom buttons to toggle-minimize. This, accompanied by a smooth new minimize-animation that makes it easy to follow where your window was minimized to, we’re hoping to make minimizing windows a more feasible action in the war against windows. Not the operating system, but this:

This time around, we’re not releasing a beta version, so what you see above is what you get on TQ and the “when” is this January, as part of the Crucible 1.1 release. In case of force majeure, you can at least look forward to a brand new version of this devblog in a year’s time.

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