More Sisi

Well, I've been playing around with Planetary Interaction on the test server. After a lot of forum reading, spreadsheet viewing, pin dropping, I can say that I am thoroughly disappointed.

It seems that the round circles are in fact the graphic for these Planetary Command Centers, Extractors, Processors and Storage facilities. Yeah, you can click on them and up pops a nice floating view of whatever you happen to be working with, but overall it is meh. Linking these circles (pins) are dotted lines that, once routes are set up, move in the direction the route is going.

Hold me down, I'm getting blown away!..........or not.

I guess an argument could be made that we are still too far away to view the planet surface that close up, but still.

On top of this, the UI went from fairly straight forward to pretty damn complicated. Right click is no longer your friend (even though Eve is almost entirely based on this one mouse button!), and menu selections are hidden from the obvious place to look. Eve gets quite a bit of flack about their poor UI, but this is not a step in the right direction at all.

One more annoying feature is the dreaded time delay for everything. Like changing ships in station, if you want to do anything quickly, it will not happen while managing your colony. Currently, there is no session change timer indicating the amount of delay left, so you find yourself spamming the submit button (which is still poorly placed!) to see how long it will be before you can continue on building, scanning, linking, and routing.

Speaking of the submit button, why the hell do we have to confirm all of our actions? Sure, some actions would be nice to confirm, like pin placement, but linking, routing, really?

I don't think that I will participate in PI when it goes live. It is dull and tedious. I am just not interested in more tedium. It isn't even fun to look at. Being promoted as something akin to SimCity, it falls flat. Tyrannis? The only tyranny here is the fact that CCP is forcing someone to partake in this because it is going to replace the NPC seeded items that are necessary for many other tasks in Eve.

On a brighter note, the new Scorpion model is beautiful, and hopefully Eve Gate will deliver it's promise to be an efficient communication tool outside of the client.

More on PI

So not many changes have been put up on Sisi, but they did add silos since the first time I messed about with it. Last night I started some more testing, and from what I can tell, it seems to be coming along nicely. Here are some screenshots of what you can do. Take note, it will be more complex then what I have done, but this is the basic setup, no sense in cluttering up the screen until they seed more resources.

This is the first thing you see when entering the Planetary Interaction UI:

Using the right click, here I am placing an Ore Extraction facility to obtain aluminum, which will be sent back to my control center, and on to the processer:

Here is a more complete setup, the blue icons are extractors, both for ore and vapour, the red icon is the control center, green is the processor where the nitrogen and aluminum combine to make aluminum nitrate, and the new orange icon is the storage silo, where I have the processor dumping the finished product into it:

Here is a zoomed out view, showing that you can place extractors on the other side of the planet if need be:


The lines connecting all the facilities are links, and it is with these that you establish routes and their directions. You can also limit their bandwidth, but I haven't really determined why you'd want to do such a thing. Isn't the goal to get as much out as possible, to make the most product, to bring the most isk in? It seems the deposits are time limited as well as quantity limited, so I have yet to figure out what the purpose would be to limit the routes total volume.

Well, this is just a quick rundown, hopefully they will be posting more content sooner then the 3 weeks they said, so I will keep you updated as more comes onto Sisi!

Tyrannis on SiSi

Some quick thoughts on what has been put on the test server, Sisi, so far. Planetary Interaction is awesome! The UI was a bit of a mystery at first, but I was able to figure out what was needed, and how to operate it after about 1-2 hours of fiddling around. Since only silver, gold, nitrogen, and aluminum are seeded for resources, so far the only reaction you can produce is between aluminum and nitrogen for aluminum nitrate. Once water, silicon and carbon are seeded, you will be able to start reacting for nanites and eventually nanite paste. I was impressed with the interface so far. I am glad I was able to spend some time with it though, because in typical Eve fashion, it wasn't something that you can just plop down and get working efficiently the first go. I will post some screenies once I get back on tomorrow and play with it some more.

This was my first time on Sisi, but I will be back. I was able to play around with PI, ship setups, and feel like I accomplished something all at the same time. If you haven't already, set up your Sisi client by following this forum, Test Server Feedback, and start playing around with it!