I'm doing a lot of UI work these days, mostly just trying to take what we have and make it more usable and user-friendly and so on.

I don't want to imply that I'm going to wave a wand and make all of your most-wanted features suddenly appear. Let's assume that's not the case.

But, I would like some feedback on interface-specific features you'd really like to see, that are perhaps specific to Trading and Mining and the like?

This does not include like.. "Manufacturing should be less janky and mission-driven", that's a larger discussion and something I'm already aware of.

This is more like "I'd really like to be able to see a graph of the history of pricing of an item at a particular station" or.. I dunno.. whatever?

I'm just generally interested in UI-related thoughts at the moment, that (in this case) are specific to Trading and Mining.

One of the things I'd wanted to work on myself, but probably won't ever be able to get around to now, was being able to drag and drop items between ship, station, and store instead of using a small button. I'll not bother with actual implementation details, given the new UI toolkit I haven't explored and all, but with the old system I'd targeted something like a panel template where the left bottom listed your ship cargo, the left top had your equipment slots (the slots being just labeled, a ship graph being a separate window), the right being whatever you were unloading from. drag the item to a slot to equip it, drag to inventory to load it to ship cargo. if the right side was the shop, drag down to purchase and send to station cargo. if the right side was station cargo, drag up to sell to station (opens a subdialog to handle amount of item to be sold). If nothing is being dragged, the user could double-tap the top or bottom of the right side to switch between station and shop. the center of the screen is dedicated to detailing the object the player has selected from any of the zones they clicked on.

Huh, so kind of a multi-use combined drag-and-drop interface for either equipping items, carrying items as cargo, loading/offloading content between ship-and-station, and also a way to directly sell items to the station from either ship-cargo or station-cargo?

Just simply being able to sort the commodities for sale list by name would be a huge quality of life improvement.

yes to sorting commods by name, and also by other metrics too, weight, price, etc.! and maybe a viewable table form for it per station??

A GUI front-end for the `/navroute` command.

You can sort the commods by name, or price. Its in the HUD interface settings tho.

Okay, good thoughts, I will be revisiting this over time as I dig into particular areas of the UI.

Incidentally, the first availability of the updated UI will likely be for Windows 64 Beta Testers, so if you want to test that and have a 64bit Windows machine, then apply for the "game-tester" status on Discord with Luxen.

The initial UI update is going to be more about making things "work" without any major code plumbing changes on the client or server. Other UI advancements and improvements are likely to follow after that, once I figure out a prototyping path.

Anyway, continued Suggestions on this topic are welcome..

Inventory:
Separate item stored in stations from item stored in ships
Enable item sorting in inventory
possibility to sort by attribute for items ex damage, fire rate, cu , configurable column to add the sorting attribute

A per item notes section would be useful. It would be nice to not have to find your notes on an item in the PDA or an external program.

It's not really trade specific but having a toggle for auto homing next to wherever you're planning on stickin' the home button is probably a feature worth considering (alternate location would be the game options), might even be a good idea to turn it on by default (at least for a few levels or alternatively until the newb in question leaves nation space or something to that effect to mitigate newb abuse for pks at corvus stations.)

This is functionality that's been typically performed by plugins in the past that said given the way android/ios have been going it's probably a good idea to bake it in.

Often new players are asking where a item may be found. Perhaps a "item lookup" type command would help. This could also be used for finding which ore can be found where, (even though the nav screen does this).
GA

may be a roid mass/density stat. some of us already do this in a round-about way, but actual data from the server, visible on the client.. couldnt hurt any.

I think a set of tickboxes somewhere to allow a character to preset channel, guild, system or sector chat at login would improve the ui.

Saves traders declaring to all that they are in game.

I think a set of tickboxes somewhere to allow a character to preset channel, guild, system or sector chat at login would improve the ui.

What do you mean by that, exactly?

At present chat is always set to channel on login.

So folk login and say Hi to their guild mates, it goes universal to whatever channel they are set to.

Typically 100 "Hi Ecka"
100 "Oops wc"
Guild "hi Ecka"

It has always been that way.

So, some tickboxes, probably under interface like so ;

Set initial login chat channel
Channel Tick box
Guild Tick box
Sector Tick box
System Tick box.

So if guild is ticked The chat selection in the UI is set to guild on login.

To give

Guild "hi Ecka"

First time with no wc

Just an idea ......

Okay, understood. Thanks. Just wanted to make sure I was clear.