U and I - Together we continue our little improvements
Hi space friends!
CCP karkur here to tell you about a few often-requested changes that are coming your way in Phoebe.
Asset Search and Advanced Search
Many of you like organizing your assets into station containers, which is all well and good, that is, until you need to find that Polaris Engima or that 'Nibelung' Mining Laser you have misplaced but know you have somewhere. The Asset Search you are used to has not searched inside your containers.
That's changing in Phoebe-- items inside containers in stations will be included in the search results.
I should note that for those who have thousands and thousands of neatly organized items in containers, fetching the information on the items might take a bit longer than you are used to. However, after the data has been cached the searching should be really fast, and you can actually find the items you are looking for :)
Some of you may know that we have pretty powerful advanced search functionality in EVE. However, I've found that surprisingly many citizens of New Eden either don't know it exists at all, or don't know how to use it.
We wanted to raise the visibility of this powerful tool, so we have added a little question mark icon in the Asset Search tab, which will show a handy tooltip that lists all the keywords you can use and how to use them when you hover your mouse over it. For further information on the advanced search, please take a look at this dev blog by CCP Frellicus.
The Overview States and “Always Show”
The ability to have a "war target"/"fleet member" only Overview has been a commonly requested feature and it is arriving with Phoebe. We will be adding a third entity display setting called "Always Show" to the overview. Before I explain what that means, let me go over how the display settings currently work:
Entities (ships, drones, etc.) on the same grid as you in space are displayed in the Overview as long as they do not match a state that is filtered out. This can be quite tricky and confusing because any one entity commonly has multiple states (war target, outlaw, etc).
For example, you can have a corp(1) and alliance(2) mate in the same fleet(3) as you, but is also a supspect(4) with security level below 0 (5), and he‘s neutral(6) to you. If you filter out any of those 6 states he matches, he will not appear in your Overview, which is not always ideal. This has for example caused war target hunters some issues, because in order to have war targets in the Overview, they cannot filter out all those random neutrals they meet on their travels, since their war targets might be neutrals too.
So what is this new display setting? As I mentioned above, we refer to it as "Always Show", and what it means is that if an entity has a state that is set to "Always Show", it does not matter if any of the other states it also matches are filtered out, the entity will always appear in your Overview.
If an entity does not have an "Always Show" state, it's displayed by default as long as it does not have a state that is filtered out, just like before.
To summarize:
| Always show | Entities with this state will always be shown regardless of the display setting of additional states they may have |
| Filter out | Entities with this state will be filtered out unless they have additional states that are set to always show |
| Show by default | Entities with this state will be shown unless they have additional states that are filtered out |
These changes are compatible with all current Overview profiles, which are simply treated as having no state with the "Always Show" setting.
It‘s worth mentioning that although we talk about "Always Show", nothing will override the settings in the Group tab. That is, if you have chosen to not see Battleships in your Overview, your fleet mate in the Raven will not be in the Overview, no matter how your state display settings are.
With this change, we've had to change the interface where you control the display settings of the entity states. The states are back to being in one list, but now you have 3 radio buttons ("Always show", "Filter out", "Show by default") to choose from for each of the states.
You can click each of them individually, or select many states in the list and set them all at once by clicking on the header icons.
Scanners
Many have asked for the ability to have both the Probe Scanner and the Directional Scanner open at the same time, but none have pleaded more than the wormholers among us who are not only constantly scanning with probes but also need to be on the lookout for someone sneaking up on them. These two very useful scanning tools have lived together as tabs in the same window, along with a lesser used tool, the Moon Analyses tab. In Phoebe we will be splitting them apart, giving each its own window, and these can of course be stacked just like any other windows.
Shortcut for Directional Scanner
We have added a shortcut to directly open the Directional Scanner.
The Rest
Lastly, I want to mention a few small changes we have implemented recently but not had the opportunity to tell you about:
- Added a Booster Timer that clearly shows you how much time you have left on your active boosters, their benefits, and side effects. This timer is displayed next to other timers such as Weapon and Limited Engagement timers.
- Added the ability to select which overview preset to use when scanning with the Directional Scanner.
- Added a visual timer in the HUD on modules (such as micro jump drives and cloaking devices) that have cooldown time to indicate how much was left of the cooldown.
- Added the ability to name your jump clones. This can be done through a right click option on the jump clones in the Character Sheet
We hope these small changes make your stay in New Eden a little bit more pleasant.
Fly Safe,
@CCP_karkur
