Matrix Games Forums

Goodaye,

The ship design system is excellent. One thing I've noticed - as have others - is once you start adding multiple identical components to a design it quickly becomes a bit of a pain to constantly scroll through the ever expanding list to see what you've got.

So I'll offer up a suggestion.

Where-ever you have multiples of the same component you could display them as a single component like below. (These are just tweaks to the existing in-game descriptive text strings. They are on seperate lines 'cause I can't figure out how to use and display tabs here and replicate the actual display)

Name: Reactive Armor (x2)
Size: 9/18

Only takes up a single line on the component list, tells you how many you have, what size each is and the total size for the aforementioned like components. Same thing for the Weapons display where you've got multiples of an identical weapon.

Cheers,
Lancer

That's a great idea. I think we'll probably end up doing it that way Lancer.

Thanks for the tip!

Yes. Good idea, Lancer. It's like some other games.

I reccomend simply to use parentheses for "the total size for the aforementioned like components". That way it matches the quantity which is in parentheses and might make it more understandable.
For example:

Name: Reactive Armor (x2)
Size: 9 (18)

(There's a space between the 9 and the (18) for clarity.)

I hope that makes it into a patch soon!

Depending on the design, shouldn't be that difficult to manage, either...  I think.  (I like to theorycraft these things; I'm a student, and I figure that that's one way to learn a bit... the more important one to, eventually, start 'doing' rather than 'thinking'.  I'm working on that stage... slowly!)

Another thing I wish the ship design screen would do:

In the upper center section that shows what the ship needs, if you could click on it and it would narrow down the list on the left so that it only showed the items that would fulfill that need. After you fulfill the need, the list on the left would repopulate with all choices and you could click on the next red need and pick the next item.

I am sure, after much play, I will know what items are what, but at the beginning, I am spending way too much time trying to figure out which component is actually a reactor, which is an engine, which is a hyperdrive, etc.

Just my thoughts.