As I explore the systems I frequently have the urge to write notes. I prefer to play in fullscreen mode and I am pro the paperless workspace ;). Alt+Tab traditionally cause a lot of crashes and grief, so; I have three suggestions listed below in the order of my personal priority.

First of all I would like an ingame "notepad". The simplest will do, but what would be really great were to integrate it with the maps so you can make notes stick to Systems and Sectors.

Second, when I have visited an "empty" square in a sector that turned out not to be empty, the map should update to reflect what I have discovered there (spotted bots that are stationary and graphic update of unknown astroid fields).

Third I would like to be able to rate sectors with a color scheme (Suggestion: Red, Yellow, Green, Grey or No Rating). The rating could be indicated with a tiny X in the corner of the sector. Default should be No Rating. I would use this to plot safe routes and mark good hunting spots, places to avoid etc.

I like this idea. In the old universe we used to have hidden wormholes to hidden systems too. Once that gets reimplemented into the game professional explorers will be able to spring up and sell their off-the-market maps filled with more detailed info on bot locations, roid fields, and secret wormholes.

It will be glorious!!

I'll go one better. I've been trying to find the best trade goods for free trading to raise my trade license quickly, but there's no way I'm going to remember all the items from the "Local Items In Demand" list for every station even in one sector, let alone several. We need a logbook to which we can download the trade manifest for each station that we visit, sorted by sector and station. Naturally we'd have to keep visiting the stations to re-download the manifests and keep the logbook up to date, but this would make things a lot easier and more convenient than writing everything down by hand on a paper notepad.

In the same vein there ought to be a way to log onto a "HyberWeb" or something similar that stations would use to put out advertisements of what they need, categorized again by system and station, so you could scan through a list of what's needed and where it's needed before leaving the docking bay. Also, have a filter so you can search for specific products (say you've picked up some Purified Water by chance and want to get the best deal, for example). Naturally all of this would only be accessible in-station, you'd have to download it to your logbook to take it with you.

you haven't found the secret WH in Pelatus yet??

Sable Phoenix, talk with TGFT, Im fairly certain that they have a pulse on the entire universes market and which items are at what cost almost in real time. Though I know it's for guild only, but they may be selling off tid bits to small time traders for a fee. Worth a shot till something better is implemented ingame.

Love the idea, been suggested before, and I'm still all for it! =)

I don't know what TGFT is, I'm kinda new here...

The Guild of Free Traders, the largest trade oriented guild. They're legitimate traders, not smugglers, despite the name (of course, that may in large part be due to the fact that there is no smuggling in the game...).

We're looking at these sorts of features for the next couple of weeks, actually. It goes along with the whole UI-system redux that ray is right in the middle of implementing.

im all for these ideas as well...

Hey! The idea of an logbook sounds great! Is there any news, or is it already implemented?

It appears that it might be in the UI.

I've wanted a whole "ship computer" or "PDA" type thing that would contain this, among other things.. for several years. I'm working towards that goal. In-game notes are definitely good, as well as notes per sector and so on.

Is it going to be part of the new UI in the initial release, or added later?

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Also, /me thinks it would be pretty cool if we could use GTS for in-game notes.
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One little addition to the sector map idea, it might be good to have a line that says "Last Visited: 1020040 hours 10minutes 32.359273 seconds ago" or whatever, because as the contents of sectors change, knowing how old your data is would be very important.

CP, all such databases have "last updated" stamps. =)

yes, but this is in a sense, a database of a database. Or whatever. At least, the developers are going to be creating this database with only what we post here as indications of features that the userbase wants. If the userbase doesn't say that they want timestamps, then they might not include them (for whatever reason).

In any rate, it's always a good thing to state the painfully obvious because those things often get overlooked.

This feature could be implemeted without much use of the server at all. All of this can run and be stored in the player's computer. The only time the server would get involved is if a player is selling their information to someone else.

Yeah, it would probably all be kept client-side. The only point to putting on the server would be to propogate it across multiple client installs (like if you played at work/home, it would be the same), but I don't think that would be worth the resource usage on the server.

Also, I don't know if this'll make it into the initial release of the UI or not. I'm guessing it won't be, at least not the whole thing I want. But, parts of it might be easy.. I'm still getting a feel for how long it takes to implement stuff in the new UI.