Hi spacefriends,

I am back to tell you about a few little things my team and I are bringing you in The Escalation to Inferno.

Some of you might remember my first devblog, U and I – Our Little Improvements Together, which was published a few weeks ago. The comment thread was very positive and helpful, and I want to thank everyone who participated for the warm welcome! The discussion was constructive and it was fun collaborating with you guys and the overall positive attitude was very motivating. You guys had a lot of great suggestions, and in fact, many of the changes I'm here to tell you about were suggested in that thread.

There is one thing that almost always comes up when there is any discussion about the market UI: You guys REALLY want to see which orders are yours in the "Details" tab. I would love to be able to tell you that we are adding it in Escalation, so I think I'll just do it: We are adding it in Escalation 🙂

This is something we have wanted to do for a long time, but what was stopping us was that we weren't too happy about the extra trips to the server to fetch data. Then finally we decided to bite the bullet and just do it!

We are adding a new checkbox in the "Settings" tab, and if you check it, your orders will be marked in blue in the "Details" tab. Those orders will also have the "Modify order" option added to their menu. We hope this will make the marketeers' lifes a bit easier.

Please note that if you have this option enabled, the market orders might load more slowly at times. The reason is that we are using information from the "My orders" list to know which orders are yours and that list needs to be fetched regularly from the server.

OK, how annoying is it when you show market details on an item, and then you want to take a look at similar items and you have to find the categories/groups yourself in the "Browse" list? The correct answer is "very". Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could, say, have a right click option on the trace text at the top of the "Details" tab that made the "Browse" list magically open on the correct group? I thought so, so I made it so 😛

There is one thing that has bothered my boss, CCP Explorer, to no end, and that thing is the redundant tooltips in scrolls all over the place. Since a few of you were also complaining about this, we decided to finally do something about it. 2 lines of code removed and the result is that if no tooltip has been set on an entry in a scroll, there will be no tooltip. This replaces the previous default behavior of setting the tooltip text to be the same as the text in the entry. We hope this will reduce the tooltip noise a little bit.

In Crucible 1.5 I made some Quickbar improvements.  One of them was to allow you to create a blueprint "shopping list" in the Quickbar by SHIFT adding types to it. You guys asked for the quantity to be listed there too, and since you asked nicely I wanted to add that for you automagically. When I looked better into it I realized, however, that it wasn’t actually a good idea. First of all, there are a lot of complex calculations that need to be done and secondly the required quantities are not constants, which would be problematic. So I took what I had already implemented and made it so if you feel the need to have some note on the Quickbar item, whether it's the required quantity or some other note, YOU can add it yourself from a right click menu option.

Have you ever tried to contract you active ship? Well, as Bairfhionn Isupointed out, you can't. So why does it show up in the item list in the contract creation? I don't have an answer that justifies its presence in the list and it's just confusing. Therefore, after Escalation, the active ship will no longer appear in that item list.

A few of you have asked for the ability to drag characters into special "character" text fields, such as in the mail and the "private" field in the contract creation window. That sounded like a good idea, so that's what you get. This goes for both character names in the chat, as well as all the most common UI elements used to represent players.

You also wanted to be able to drag inventory items into special "type" text fields, such as in the "item type" in the "Transaction" tabs, and that also just made sense so I added that.

We tried to find the all the "character" and "type" textfields and enable this on them, but since I'm sure we missed a few, I posted a thread where I asked if you knew of any more of these fields. I'm still not sure we have found them all, so please let me know if you find any that should have that functionality but don't, and I'll fix them 🙂

Many chat channels have a useful and/or important message for the member in the Message of the Day (MOTD). Have you ever wanted to refresh your memory and read the message again? Well, one way is to ask an admin to post the message again, for everyone in the channel to see. After Escalation there will be a much better way… you will be able to reload the message for only you to see, so all the other pilots won't even have to know that you have no idea what that message said.

Another handy thing we are adding is the ability to clear all content in the chat channel. This of course only clears your content.

Both of these options can be accessed in the right click menu of the chat channels.

Many of you do planning and calculations in spreadsheets, and I think I have something that might make some of you Excel geeks… no I mean Excel enthusiasts, happy. People always joke about EVE being Spreadsheets in Space, and let's face it, there is a lot of spreadsheet-like tables in it. So it would be nice to be able to copy some of those tables, and paste them into Excel (or anywhere else) to do further calculations on them, right?

Well, we liked the idea, so when Escalation comes out, you can use the standard "copy" key combination, CTRL+C, to copy stuff from tables. If the scroll has focus, and you have an entry in it selected, only that entry will be copied. However, if the scroll has focus, but no entry is selected, CTRL+C will copy all the content of the scroll.

When we implemented this, our main focus was to allow you guys to copy data from table-like scrolls, but then we figured we might as well add it to more scroll where we thought it made sense, like in the attributes and materials tabs in the "Show info" windows. So if you guys want to make sure your favorite scroll can be copied, jump over to the Singularity test server and check it out, and if it cannot be copied, let me know and we can see what we can do. I should add that I will not be adding this to the overview right now, since it's very special-cased for performance reasons.

Other small changes you guys have asked for:

• Color coded security status has been added to the "Related Solarsystems" and "Adjacent Solarsystems" tabs in the "Show Info" windows for constellations and solarsystems respectively.
• All market groups can now be collapsed in the "Browse" tab in the market. Before the "leaf" groups could not be collapsed, but now they behave like any other group.
• An extra column, Jumps, has been added to the "Select Station" window when creating remote orders. Right click menu has also been added to the stations on the list.
• It's now possible to drop items on the Quickbar tab itself in the market, and that item is added to the Quickbar.
• It's now possible to add items to the Quickbar by dragging items from Asset window onto the bar.
• It's now possible to multiselect items in the Quickbar, and move them or delete them all together.
• It's now possible to copy items in the Quickbar into another Quickbar folder by CTRL dragging them over the new folder.
• A "Select All" button has been added to contract creation as suggested by Bairfhionn Isu as well as a "Deselect All" button.
• A "Client" submenu has been added to transaction log in the journal as suggested by Seloena.

I hope you guys will enjoy all these small changes, and I hope we can continue our productive and positive collaboration to improve your experience little by little.

That's all I have to say for now. Fly safe and keep smiling 🙂

– CCP karkur