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Suggestions
1) I find when I'm rotating my cubic sector to always know which was is positive or negative for any axis. It might be nice to have a label or marker automatically created during generation of a sector (as an option at least) that would sit just above the point where an axis passed through the edge plane of the sector (just outside the sector) and thus the label/markers would be: +X, -X, +Y, -Y +Z, -Z. Yes, I can do this manually, but it would be a nice 'navaid' created during sector generation. (In thinking about this, it could work for spherical sectors too).
2) If subsectors are defined and the filter code can figure out what which systems are in which subsector, would it be possible to write this into a field in the DB? When in the DB, searching or editing with an external tool, it would be nice to be able to find all of the planets in a particular subsector. Right now, that's not an obviously searchable thing in the search dialog without doing some if/else logic on all 3 axes instead of just saying 'in sector Alpha' (or whatever you might have named it).
3) Would it be possible to add custom fields to subsector definitions just as we have for sector definitions?
4) With the hand, I can rotate my sector around and zoom in and out. But I think at times I'd like to be able to move the center of my sector with respect to the viewport (the display in which the sector appears). Is it possible to shift the whole sector in that view without using scripting? It would be nice to drag the whole sector.
5) It would be nice to have a 'select' menu similar to some graphics handling programs (select all, select by subsector, select by sector, select like , select none) - I know one can identify those systems in the search builder, but to be able to make all of them selected in the star display with one quick menu option would be handy.
6) I think I recall it being said there is VBScript driving some of the scripting. I have noticed some scripts will hang busy (either stuck or just being asked to do something that takes forever). It would be nice to have a button on top of the display to 'kill scripts' or 'stop scripts' or some such. I have found in the cases of scripts gone awry or being asked to do way too much, I have to use Task Manager to kill the program and I lose unsaved progress.
That's my ideas for the moment. Of course, I realize there are limits to time and effort and some of these (or all) may either not be simple or may not be desirable in Ed's eyes. But I thought they might be at least worth suggesting.
Comments
I thought of another:
7) to have a filter (check/uncheck) to hide/unhide spheres of influence
8) I noticed that the Sector Report, when it reports the details of a Megastructure, is pretty sparse. Particularly, it fails to report population. I'm assuming that population still counts in the population total collected for the sector, but I haven't verified that yet.
9) It would be nice to have a mouse-drag type of action to move one's sector in the available viewport or have rotation style movements act from the origin vs an outside vertex of the sector. I particularly notice this when I have my cubic sector and rotate it... in some rotations, when I want to have it fill the viewport, I can't because the rotation point appears to be an outside corner rather than around the origin in the center.
10) I think you've mentioned this before - for the sector report, custom properties along with other properties of a body.
11) I would really like a preference to be able to set text sizes in the system viewer. On my 30" 1920x1200 screen, the font looks like what I'd call 4-6 point if I saw it in my code editor and it's just not readable without a magnifying glass. If I could set the point size larger, I could actually read the text in the system viewer, which otherwise is pretty cool (to see the orbits and eccentricities and all that good stuff).
12) I way to show the 'goldilocks' zone for a system. Why? Well, if I want to know where to insert a body so that I can reasonably expect a hospitable result, being able to see the band of orbital distances that I can locate it at.
13) Would be nice to have parameters to control hospitable, habitable, inhospitable, etc in the generator (or in preferences and attention paid to that by the generator). I understand the rough basis for why you call some places hospitable or habitable but I think these are pretty subjective (I have a much dimmer view or our ability to truly put any sizable populations on any place with a gravity much outside of our normal human long term range or to deal with atmospheric pressures, contents, or other factors than the software is setup for). I'd like to be able to tighten down the parameters when generating and labeling.
Aside: I figure if we do go to these kinds of places, terraforming would be a) expensive, b) risky, and c) a long term proposition so the most likely colonies would be large orbital habitats like Babylon 5 at the lagrange points plus a network of energy collecting satellites for extra power. If we did manage to find places with decent gravity but the atmo was lousy or temp was, we could build above ground or undergound habitat domes on a large scale (like an ant warren for one example).
14) A way to attach a political bloc ownership to routes and to then filter them on or off by said political ownership (I suppose if you define the type of route using a bloc/faction/service indicator, you could do something similar, but that could be different than political, but it may be able to use some of the work done for route type)
15) I was thinking about how I would like to take a collection of systems with inhabited planets and routes between them and make everything else invisible so I could get some nice map exports and good images and so on. I think everything (or at least things in bodies or routes) have a visible field in the database. If there was an ability to have a left click entry to 'hide ' and another with 'hide ' and 'make all visible', something like that could be pretty useful.
I've got a sector with subsectors. If I turn the subsectors off, my sector is empty regardless show all. If I bring the subsectors back, I need to go get rid of their grids (useful at times, but in this use case not - just visual clutter) in order to see the stars I want to see and I need to be able to filter down to a small subset...
16) Similarly, when I use the query builder and the display of a bunch of systems comes up, I can only single select or select all. If that's a standard-ish windows list box (or the VB equivalent), if it has support for it, having multi-select (not all, just ones selected with ctrl or shift held down), that would be amazing. Then making a route could, instead of being pick one entry out of that list, visually locate the other one, navigate through to select it in the 3D view ( finicky ), I could just pick the two query return rows I want and then they'd be selected and I could invoke create route.
Similarly, you could use that method of selection via the query returns with a multi-select capability to hide or unhide particular bodies. That would also be pretty handy.
Unless the grid/list control you're using doesn't have support for multi-select, those would be some pretty good UI improvements without a huge amount of code (in that it would only be triggering multi-select or unselect).