The Necrorant Take One, or EVE, EVE, What have you become?

Bold Pilot Log, Entry # 32

But I have returned. And I know you better... wait that's another line... Ahem.
There are things that you never guess. You don't guess some people who barely know you will remember you. You don't guess that after stopping to not only post but to log in to your dusty old blog people still visit it. You don't guess that you can start over what you abandoned... But guess what? They do, and you do.

So I'm back in town. First I want to say thanks for those that really keep visiting everants.com. It's not a big thing, but it feels good to see you want more. And more is you going to get. EVE, this cruel mistress have changed much in the past months. Yet the core things remained the same. After a few month's break I found that I can still enjoy EVE. Just not on my own. It is the key thought in all of this - I have returned because I'm certain I'll have people to enjoy my gametime with. With this, EVERANTS will also be reborn. I will have a lot of topics to rant about I'm sure. There will probably be people joining me. Will you?

First off, there's yet again a controversial change in EVE, this time in the interface. With it, the community has a kind of love-hate relationship. We want it to be simpler, yet we don't want radical changes... Then what do we want? Well, certainly not exactly this, do we:


Actually, the idea of solving all inventory problems in one window is excellent. The core of the problem stems from the limitations in dimensions. You see, the inventory itself, be it in any game is a table of items. And that's already two dimensions taken. Your average monitor doesn't have an extra one. For that matter, the valid technologies are few and far between to show a third. So how do you resolve a problem of list of inventories? In most software, the multipage approach is used. Which is usually eligible, feels natural and is handy. Inventory in inventory problems are easily resolved by the tree view. What, then, you might ask, is the problem? What does this approach miss?

Well, in EVE, this too is a special things. In its current form, we miss cruicial information that the many windows approach gave us. The biggest setback is that we now can see the contents of only one container. Then we only can see the name of the container, and after looking carefully and no other information in a flash.

But there's a solution. I would, if I could, change the following (not in any particular order):

• Display shorter names for containers. For example, Station, Ships, ETC. Also, if I named a container I probably did so because I wanted to see its name, and nothing else. So exile the descrption (Large Secure Container) to the back of the line.
• Implement horizontal slidebars everywhere already...
• Instead of displaying only the dropdown arrows, draw lines that show clearly where the container belongs.
• It should be possible to see multiple containers' contents and capacity information at once. Suddenly, Dividers! Thousands of them! Okay, maybe a limit of sixteen will be enough? Just buplicate the right-side part of the current window with vertical sorting.
• Add checkboxes in front of the containers, so we can easily select which ones we want to always see. This information should be saved, so when a container becomes inaccessible, it disappears from the list, but when it comes back, the divider comes back, too.

The speed improvement for the Unified Inventory is so visible. It could do so much more for the user than it currently does. It would be amazing.

Sessym out.