Author Topic: Ship List Filter  (Read 1221 times)

Flatline

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Ship List Filter
« on: May 20, 2011, 12:40:29 pm »
No idea if it's called Ship List or not but.. The list shown on the attachment in red..

Is there a way to filter it ?

I have no real need to have it show My Allies ships in a system for example.
What I would like is to able to toggle between:
A) Show all My Ships
B) Show My Miltary Ships.
C) Show My Non-Miltary Ships
D) Show All Enemy Ships

Something like that.

Before someone says it.. I know it is colour coded. But when I'm trying to find that 1 little Decloaker (As an example), in a heavily defended system, with Hundreds/Thousands of ships, turrets etc the list can get pretty damn big and a simple filter would help.

Offline x4000

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Re: Ship List Filter
« Reply #1 on: May 20, 2011, 03:26:50 pm »
It's not filterable, but inside each color coded category it is alphabetized. Also, you could just select all the ships on the planet and then use the textual selected ships window to filter down if you really want. First time this has been mentioned, to my recollection -- you know the backgrounds of the ship icon panels are color codes in addition to he icons themselves, right? Mentioning just in case. ;)
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Offline Nalgas

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Re: Ship List Filter
« Reply #2 on: May 21, 2011, 12:19:17 pm »
What if your colour blind ? (Like one of my fellow players..) He has real problems distinguishing between them....

Ah, the many fun variations on color blindness.  I'm partially color blind, too, but while I do have problems with some games sometimes, AI War has generally not been one of them.  Must be a different type from his.  It's pretty much impossible to account for all of them when choosing a color palette, unfortunately.

It is alphabetized, but it has it's issues.. See attachment. I'll use the Decloaker ship again. It puts them in with tachyon beam emitters.. Why?
So I would be looking at start of the list for "D", but it's right at the end as a "T".. And again as it puts them together it doesn't help me find the Decloaker as it highlights both ship types...

Yeah, that's kind of a problem.  I never actually noticed that it was alphabetical in the first place (I just go by the icons themselves, because I've learned to recognize most of them at a glance by having it display them instead of the ship graphics at all zoom levels other than "too far zoomed in to be ever useful while playing for any reason").  That would make it rather difficult to find, though.

oh and another issue.. Warp gate attacks seem to be occuring from planets without a warp gate.. Is this a bug or can they happen from something other than a warp gate?

Some other structures/units can act as warp gates.  The AI Eye is one, and there's also a Warp Gate Guardian, which is kind of evil because it's portable.  It will always tell you in the upper left corner of the screen if there are any warp gates of that type in a system while you're looking at it, though, so at least you know to expect them/hunt them down in that case.  The "reinforce" ones are just things like guard posts that accumulate reinforcement ships over time, and the "wave" ones are the ones that are causing your problems.  I had fun with that, too, before realizing that about AI Eyes and whatnot.

Offline x4000

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Re: Ship List Filter
« Reply #3 on: May 22, 2011, 07:05:53 pm »
Yeah, the reason most people don't have trouble with color blindness issues on AI War is that we specifically worked with colorblind players and solicited feedback until all of them were happy.  Of course, there are so many kinds of color blindness that there's bound to be people falling through the cracks still.  The art images are directly in the RuntimeData\Images\PlanetarySummary folder, though, so  you can always edit their hue/saturation to your taste if you're unable to see them.  That's maybe not the most graceful thing from a consumer standpoint, but I don't think there's any way to make it perfect for every kind of color blindness, and the flexiblity is at least there.  Oh, and of course there are also the little patterns in the upper right corner of each panel that give a non-color-based indicator of what the ship type is.

In terms of the alphabetization, I should have mentioned that it's based on ship type name -- decloaker is of type tachyon beam emitter (given that it's function).  It also shares a visual icon with the tachyon beam emitters, so that's part of why it's collapsed into that same icon on the sidebar.  Most ships have the same type name as their individual ship name (fighter is fighter type, etc), but with some of the odds and ends that can get combined like you mentioned.  Otherwise the sidebar tends to just explode with ship types.

As for the selected ships window, just select some ships and it appears at the bottom right area of the screen.  It shows text names of ships, not combined, alphabetized.  Clicking any line item in the list selects just those items.  Shift plus right-clicking any item in the list removes that item while keeping all the rest.  Etc.

And Nalgas is quite right on the warp gates -- look for the Warp Gate - Full or Warp Gate - Warp Only abilities on ships (as opposed to Warp Gate - Reinforce).  Only a few have it, and AI Eyes and Warp Gates are the main ones.
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