Shadow of Cerberus EVE Community Forum

Drone UI Improvement And Some Additional Suggestions

There's the Drone UI window. I've already separated the 20 drones into four separate groups. You can name those groups however you wish, I simply named them after the drone type contained in both. Ignore the Primary/Secondary/Tertiary flagging, that's part of a suggestion which I'll talk about a little bit later.

The big new functionality addition, and it is a welcome addition, is that once you have drone groups set-up, you can simply drag a group from the Drones in Bay section to the Drones in Local Space section and that drone group will launch.

Conversely, you can drag the group from Drones in Local Space to Drones in Bay and they will return to your ship. Although, there's some trickiness involved in returning the drones via this method. I would suggest just sticking with your hotkey to return drones. But, if you want to drag, and if you have other existing drone groups, make sure that you drag the returning group onto the Drones in Bay heading; dragging anywhere else and the group in space will become part of one of the existing groups already in your drone bay.

It's a good addition to the drone UI, though. Especially dragging a group from the bay into the local space section.

There was an excellent suggestion on the forums that I'd like to repeat. Dragging a drone group into space to launch them. CCP Karkur seemed to like the idea, given there aren't any development hitches it could find its way into a later Odyssey 1.1 build on SiSi. It would certainly make dragging quicker for most people.

I have another suggestion (though not for 1.1, maybe Winter), which involves using hotkeys to launch drones. Something we've never had because many ships can fit far more drones and drones types into a bay than can be launched. I suggest using drone groups and tie hotkeys to them. Being able to assign each group either a primary, secondary or tertiary indicator. (Which could be done via the right-click contextual menu.) Then we assign hotkeys to the drone primary, secondary, and tertiary groups. (If you have more than three drone groups in your bay, then the extras will not be assigned a hotkey.) (If you only have one group in your bay, it is auto-assigned as the primary group.)

Another idea I have for hotkeying ... rather than use up three hotkeys, one for the primary group, one of the secondary group, and one for the tertiary group, instead just use a single hotkey and then base group launches on quick taps. A single tap launches the primary group. A quick double-tap (tap-tap) launches the secondary group. And a quick triple-tap (tap-tap-tap) launches the tertiary group.

The dragging-dropping is a nice new addition to the drone UI. I hope we'll see more such additions come the Winter expansion.
Source: Drone UI Improvement And Some Additional Suggestions