I felt clever with blogpost titles today. For those that play with their map settings a lot, there is nothing new here.
When I was going through mail of little things and various things sent to me I noticed one particular thing I could answer immediately.
Malkin Devan said:I asked him if this was what he wanted:
Maps are quite hard to read in this game, add a background clearly marking sovereignty.
I'm going to give him credit for this one because when I discussed the intuitive UI features with others they stared at me in shock, not knowing that this particular function existed. I know about it from a conversation in Eve Uni chat once when someone said that the only way to view the map was tiled. I personally love the three dimensional starpmap and had no idea what they were talking about when they said a tiled map. I dug through the UI and found it.
The bright points on the second image are areas of Sov change. While this is not a map like dotlan, it is a very flexable tool and frankly, its pretty as hell to look at.
In the MoMA exhibit that was shown at Fanfest I believe, CCP recorded a 24 hour view of the star map and sped it up. Over that twenty four hours the map glows and changes colors as each time zone starts and ends. Its absolutely beautiful and I can't find it because I suck at searching video. It is probably in the keynote. It was amazing however and stunning.
I need to write some further chatter on UI thoughts. When asked about one of the most important things needed in Eve, I said the UI. The UI as in the User Interface that cover's all aspects of our interaction with Eve. There is way to much of Eve that we miss out on becuase of it. But, that is the start of another blog post.
I am not sure how useful the maps are, at least to my day-to-day operations. (Except maybe the view that shows where other fleet members are when I am late and trying to catch up.) But as kind of a nerd tool to goggle at, I find the various map views to be almost a game of their own. I like the view that shows me where I have left all my stuff over the years along with the systems I have visited.
ReplyDeleteI agree. It very much is a mini-game. I spin it around sometimes because it is so pretty and detailed.
DeleteI learned something new....it burns...it burns! :)
ReplyDeleteHmmm... The only thing I really 'use' the ingame map for is intel really. We are spending more time ratting and PvPing in low nowadays instead of just passing thru when hauling L&S out and fuels etc. in.
ReplyDeleteFor ratting and PvPing, we check rats kills, players in space, in station etc. so we can hopefully find some fights, and for the other, we for check gates camps, kill spikes, players in space, in station, etc. are in order to avoid them when making store runs.
That and the occasional look at where I've been and such I don't use the ingame map at all, I use Dotlan for trip nav and detailed intel and Chruker's Online Section for well.... it's Chruker's, not much you can't find there.
You know what map I really do like? This one.
But its cool!
DeleteDotlan FTW
ReplyDeleteActually I found this view a week ago .. while explaining my girl eve .. because I needed to show her were caldari space is .. hard for an newb during the tutorials to find some ores needed without that info ...
ReplyDeleteHoly crap, that's two hidden gems in two days. Consider the bar raised.
ReplyDelete