Stackable Blueprints
Posted: 2012-02-27 Filed under: industry, screenshot | Tags: bpc, bpo, database, Incarna, sql 6 Comments
When I started doing industry jobs, I found it very annoying to constantly look up the item details for each blueprint and I often lost my BPOs in a sea of BPCs.
After looking on the forums, I found that many people were asking for a icon change. CCP’s response was that their look-up query for blueprints was very database heavy (costs a lot of resources) and there would need to be some major reworking of their database structure and query code to give the client the ability to quickly differentiate blueprints.
Here I was in 2008 getting annoyed while I found forum posts dating back to 2004 asking for this change!
With Incursion 1.5 (May 2011), the icon change for BPO/BPCs hit Tranquility and I rejoiced because my industrial life was forever changed. Simple change with a large impact. I believe than when they transitioned to 64-bit numbers for items, some work was done to rectify the database query and code was cleaned up.
I would like to rally all industry people for another change. For any person that does industry, you work with a large number of blueprints. I would love if there was the ability to stack items of similar ME/PE.
Here is a mock-up of two versions of stacking for blueprints:
The version on the left seems to be easier on the eye as the information is displayed in a banner format at the top.
CCP, here is your Agile user story:
As a person that performs industry jobs, having a way to organize a large numbers of blueprints would declutter the UI and simplify working with them.
Put that in your backlog and work it into a Sprint planning meeting.
k162space 
Esp since there is a hard limit to the number of individual items you can have in storage….!
Want.
You can achieve some of this functionality via the Science & Industry window, where you can sort the Blueprints tab by ME or PE (as well as filtering BPOs vs. BPCs). However, that only works as long as you are in the same region as the blueprints. I’d think that stacking would work only so long as the blueprints are identical in terms of ME, PE, and number of runs (for BPCs).
Perhaps it would be easier for CCP to expand the functionality of the S&I window (allow you to see ME/PE inside containers, moving blueprints to/from containers, etc.) than to add stacking of blueprints.
Loading that window for me takes 15 seconds 😦
Then again, opening the corp hangar also takes forever 😦
Nice idea. Wouldn’t work with locked-down prints though, I would guess.
Unless it was a purely visual wrapper, like “show statistically identical items as stacked”. That could work. That would be resource intensive as well though, and since people like to actually move things from time to time, it wouldn’t be overly effective to keep the data cached; at least I wouldn’t think so.
Food for thought either way!
I do invention, so I regularly work with groups of 100+ identical BPCs. I WANT this.
Today all my BPCs are in one place. So I user small containers named after each BPC type /w ME and PE. Of course stacking them would be kick ass and save the need for 100’s of small cans. I support this idea!