Quality of life improvements

Anthony de Araujo shared this feedback 4 years ago
Submitted

I'm a developer, so the way I see things, some things "sound" simple (i.e. I was the developer that contributed the pull request to have 9 hotbars for blocks instead of the 4 that were in the game originally), but I can't really offer an opinion as to how hard some of these things might be to actually implement. Before I get into it, how about you guys update the git repository to the latest version and let your community deal with some of these little annoying things? :) Or pick a subset of people, maybe people who DID contribute when it was originally put on Github, to be your "minions" :)

So...

1) When I press "I" to go to the inventory screen, the cursor isn't "focused" anywhere... 9 times out of 10, I click on one of the search boxes (and a lot of times, I don't know why, I miss) and start typing. If I missed the click in the search box, and happen to type something that has an "I" or a "K" in it, the window closes. My suggestion, upon opening the inventory screen, set the focus to the Search box (if I had to pick one of the two, I would make it the right one, but it could also be an option in settings i.e. right or left). That is EXACTLY the functionality that exists in the "K" menu... whenever you open it, your cursor is in the search box.

2) GPS screen.... where to start... so many problems...

a) Allow multi-select in the list of GPSs on the left, that way I can select a bunch of them and toggle "Show on HUD", "Always Visible", "Delete", etc and other operations. (see below)

b) Allow sorting of the GPS list (not sure what order it uses now)

i) by name

ii) by distance from current location (preferably showing the distance in the list, like:

Ice (6.43 km)

c) Allow some kind of exporting of the GPS list. A lot of us use datapads to store GPS coordinates to share among faction members. "Copy to clipboard", switch to inventory, find datapad, edit, paste to datapad, 100 times is really cumbersome. This, in conjunction with the multi-select above, would make it a lot easier to give someone a list of coordinates. A simpler functionality, as long as multi-select is working, would be to have the "Copy to Clipboard" copy all of the SELECTED GPSs to the clipboard as a series of lines of text.

d) A "Show All" and "Hide All" option would be awesome! Assuming you can get multi-select working, we could just Ctrl-A, then check or uncheck "Show on HUD", but why make it harder?

e) The "Coordinates" boxes that show when you have a GPS selected, (X, Y and Z) don't need to be as big as they are. Shrink them down and use the newly created free real estate to put a field for the "Distance".

f) This one might be harder.... but here goes... The distance to "current location" really should be distance to "current location" OR to some GPS that I designate as my reference point (i.e. my main base, etc). Conveniently, there is space, right next to "Show on HUD" for another checkbox "Set as Reference Point" and if I select a particular GPS as my reference point (you could only ever have one, so if one is already set, and I click it on another, it would have to "unset" it for the previous one) all distances, as suggested above, would be calculated in relation to that "set" reference point. If none were selected as a reference point, distance calculations would be based on current location. Maybe use the space below the horizontal line (right below the "Delete" and "New from clipboard" buttons to display "All distances calculated from current position" or "All distances calculated in relation to GPS marker 'My GPS marker'" based on whether they have a reference point set or not.

I hope some of the above suggestions make it into the game as it would make life SO much easier (kind of like how you guys incorporated an Easy Inventory-ish functionality as the build planner, which still needs a little work, but we can get into that later).

And seriously, if you guys want to make the code available, either privately or publicly (as you did in the past) I know I would, and probably a lot of other members of the community, help implement some of these features, leaving you guys to do the real heavy lifting like adding new blocks, new functionality, etc.

If necessary, I can be contacted at anthonyaraujo@gmail.com

Replies (1)

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Two years already... Keen, please comment on this

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