Forum - Space Odyssey MMORPG - a massive free online space game

Due to this becoming a stickied post I will change the intro. 

This is a place to collect ideas and issues with the current user interface and propose improvements.  A lot of the initial ideas were mine, but Ive since trolled the boards and collected and compiled ideas of others.  So if you see your idea here, please dont think Im stealing it - Im just compliing this to make it easier for Emi, and hopefully your idea will have a better chance to be implemented.

Sometimes the interface is ok, but it has to handle a lot of different things.  For example, items.  Each item behaves in a slightly different way, but are all operated from the same interface - this means that some items are very difficult to use effectively - especially mining and warp items.  So if you see someplace where the inteface is struggling due to complexity - post that also.

A great example of a very successful change to the interface was the Fleet Formation idea - where selected fleets now remain selected.

The list is basically organised as follows;

# Title or subject, Proposal, Current Issues.

Current list.

1. Bases.  An UNLOAD ALL button.  Typing in and refreshing for each ore and credits is painful.

2. Exclusive Check Boxes.  Remove exclusive check boxes where possible and replace with fields for "number of runs".  Theres a number of places where these are used and you really want to do multiple things at once.  Current list; Sell ship designs, delete ships, install modules on bases.  You have to do it one at a time, time consuming and messy.

3. Warp items.  Change the warp items to a number of turns of free travel.  One way to convert them would be to assume their current percentage was applied to a 50 turn jump - so a 10% item would give 10%x50turns = 5 turns free travel.  When you activate the items, the turns go into a "Warp Travel Fuel" pool of turns.  You can then travel for free while you still have "fuel".  For items less than 2% they would have to be rounded up to 2%, yielding one turn of free travel.  This is partially a functionality issue, and partly interface.  This would eliminate a lot of the messing around with, and general uselessness of warp items.

4. Mining Time.  Make a similar change as with Warp Items.  Have a "Mining Turns" pool.  Activate your mining items to add to the pool, then mine away to your hearts content until your pool is empty.  Also - instead of putting in the target amount of ore to mine, put in the number of turns you want to spend, players then dont have to calculate it themselves.  This is partially a functionality issue, and partly interface.  At the moment you have to recalculate how much you want to mine wih every item you activate - you have to keep track of whats activated, and iterate the mining process over and over.  Its a lot of database queries, where one would do, and a great deal of tedium.

5. Activating and selling items.  Extend the list to a lot more items, maybe 100.  Make sure the sort button still works when you change pages.  Also if you type in 5 runs, but only have 4 items then just activate or sell all those items instead of reporting an error.  Have an activate all button - that selects all items even ones on the next page, and then an option to sort them into ascending or descending order.  This interface is very average in all respects, its tedious, and difficult to use.

6. Secret Base.  Withdraw all and deposit all button.  Just a nice thing to have, makes it easy.

7. Pages with Lists.  List pages are invariably too short, extend them to 50 to 100 items on a page.  This includes resupply for ships, upgrades, designs, buying marines, view/edit ships and so on.  In some cases the options and controls could be moved to the top of the page to prevent uneccessary scrolling.  Its a lot easier and faster to scroll down then it is to click to the next page.    Sometimes you want to select several things at the same time - and they are on different pages, so you have to update or buy, then change pages and do it again. 

8. Filtering missions.  Allow players to type in an upper and lower limit for encrypt level.  Being able to filter by level and by distance woud be excellent, and being able to sort by level and also by distance would also be very useful.  The filter is extremely limited,  its capped at 150+ which makes it fairly useless after a short time playing, and you cant set it up the way you want - also you cant filter by distance.

9. Clicking on missions.  Please add mouse-over details on items.  To reduce clicking.

10. Alliance leader stickies, or separate board.  Allow alliance leader to sticky a post in their boards, or give them a separate posting area.  Sometimes people yabber too much and critical info is lost.

11. Outstanding Counters table.  Put a table on the attack signatures page showing who has an outstanding counter on the player, and the remaining time for that counter.  Its hard for some people to remember apparently ..

12. Add Upgrades when buying a Fleet.  It would be nice if you can just select all the upgrades you wish and build the ship from the buy screen.  At the moment when you buy a fleet your prompted to select a power core only.    THis is just a nice thing to have, its simpler this way.

13. Commander Abilities and Mothership modules displays.  Show the maximum bonus available for each modifier, for example if you have +5% attack, then show the cap or limit as well.  Eg +5% (80% cap).  Show commander XP needed for the next level.  At the moment you have to do a subtraction to figure how much XP you need for the next level.  Its nice to know the caps for things, and displayed XP required makes it easier.

14. Display Raw ship values.  Show the raw values for a ship in the view/edit page along with the adjusted values.  Its sometimes difficult to work out what your base ship design is, and is very useful if you want to modify it to know exactly what your raw scores are.  Also a displayed fleet power in the view/edit screen would be useful.  THis is nice to have.

Theres a lot of really clunky controls in all the interfaces - they really do detract from the game - having to iterate things when you know exactly what you want from the start is annoying - lots of places that happens.

Can people post any other things that they find annoying with the interfaces.

EDITED** Integrated some posts.  Updated the mining turns idea. Integrated Kens idea's.

Selling items, same as activating.

When you sort items and want to go to the second page it is not sorted anymore.

Removing ship designs are selling several fleets you can just select 10 fleets and wipe them all in one click.

In secret base withdraw all or deposit all.

I'll be monitoring this topic to update the interface, it is one of the important tasks.
Please post all the interface / control suggestions here and they will be implemented based on difficulty to implement / urgency, etc.

Thank you

Hmmm .. mining pool .. Nice idea .. Not that it will matter in a few months .. there won't be anything left in the Universe to mine.

Agree with the mechanic change on the other items too.

Might be a good ideal to sticky this topic so that it stays handy as time passes.

Done :P

If for some reason making the lists go to 50 or more is a problem could we at least have them all the same lenth as in 20 entries each page ?

And good job looking for other suggestions amagon

Could we have a log for station attacks ?

1: Being able to select Shield and Computer combinations when you buy a ship just like you can with a power core.
2: Showing the max % for skills on the commander skill screen. So if you have 5% Ship Resupply it would look like:Current: 5%: Max 80%
3: Being able to delete more then 1 ship design at a time
4: Showing a ships power on the View/Edit Page
5: Being able to sell more then 1 fleet at a time
6: A Experience required to gain a level field on your commander page Example: Current XP: 386.929.956 XP Total XP to Next Level: 387.858.000 XP to Next Level: 928.044
7: The Ability to sort the order items are in after you use them. I find that I quite often have my low attack items up front and the high ones later in the list or vice versa. Could you add a Ascending/Descending button like you have for Mothership Missions?

Amagnon feel free to add these to the First post.

Also you said "2. Exclusive Check Boxes.  Remove exclusive check boxes where possible and replace with fields for "number of runs".  Theres a number of places where these are used and you really want to do multiple things at once.  For example - when installing modules for a new base, when selling ships or designs - you have to do it one at a time, time consuming and messy" it should be easier for Sir Emi to change these if we list them specifically.

Just thought of another one:
8: In a ships view/edit screen add of spot for the ships base Attack/Accuracy/Hitpoints/Adsorb this would be quite useful for me as I am a gear head butt. I'm too full of junk food today to think straight about why It could be useful for other players but if it is for me it should be for others.

I assume you mean so that you can see the stats before the commander/mothership boosts.

That and swarm mods/Ship Experiance I know right now I can do that via looking it up with my gold account but it might be useful for players without one and its more convenient.

Yes it would be nice especially for designers who do customs for other players.

Can we get some of these implemented anytime soon? Or do you need us to go through and say what needs to happen to each and every web page ?

Heres my short list of things I REALLY want to get implemented (in order);

Mouse over items
Unload All button for bases
Warp Items
Mining Items
Filtering Missions
Activating/Selling Items
List Pages

Being able to view how much cash it waiting to be giving out as royalties to you and how much you get each day.

Secret asteroid base:
Workers function, converts made cash directly into workers.
Hire marines function, puts marines onto ship with new funds/stash.

I wouls like to see mothership missions able to be sorted by exact level you would like instead of a range of levels.

Single system scan for mission contracts.

The cost of a ship based on weather or not you have a gold account and your Commander/ Mothership Modules cost reductions. This would be in addition to the base cost being listed.

Personalized fleet stacks, so you choose what goes in what order.

id say no to that because you can put weakest first when you log off and only really rish your weak ships, the revese is also true attack with weak fleets so they die so you could use a 1 space ship to get around a well defended swarmer fleet, this would ruin things, if i have miss understood please let me know

yes....just posting what I sent you emi on the sea-o private account message system...

Change alliance board to resemble splits in information ....section for market alliance talk,combat talk,general alliance talk,leader announcements, and one for emi notifications.

I know a way the game interface can be updated by adding a search to the rankings like they have for the intel terminal.

I said this in seperate topic but it deserves to be mentioned again here...

a thing to tell you how many workers you can support max before going into negative growth in your secret base please :)

doesn't have to be fancy, just something to let you know so you don't end up hiring 50 billion workers just to find out you could only support 100 million more...

I second these ideas. My personal hate is having to sift through the ~150 pages of galaxy mission contracts to find a suitable one - hence I'd like to suggest, in addition to the current option to filter by encryption level, the ability to filter by reward type (segments/workers/credits/all) and sort by distance from your current position (shortest first).

edit: How did I miss the fact you can already filter by reward type... :/

These could be very helpful :)