This is how tradeskill window should look like (photoshopped screenshot)

[DarthTHC]

That's pretty interesting.

 

But what's the point with such a limited list of things we can make that people actually want?

[janne_josefsson]

Actually i used Paint.NET: http://twitpic.com/9k48p0/full

 

That is how it should look, and trim down on alot of recipies in the list for a better navigation.

Mouseovering one of the icons in the table would give the tooltip, leftcliking would change the top section to the clicked item to include the rare mats when applicable (notice how the mats for prototype and artifact quality are greyed out in the premium quality schematic).

 

What do you think?

 

You know what? This is not a bad idea, not bad at all:)

[RoninUTA]

+1

Keeping this clean mentally in game has been difficult at best. Your example really makes things clear and easy to determine where you are in the crafting game.

 

Kudos to you dude!

[Stradoo]

Actually i used Paint.NET: http://twitpic.com/9k48p0/full

 

That is how it should look, and trim down on alot of recipies in the list for a better navigation.

Mouseovering one of the icons in the table would give the tooltip, leftcliking would change the top section to the clicked item to include the rare mats when applicable (notice how the mats for prototype and artifact quality are greyed out in the premium quality schematic).

 

What do you think?

 

Yep. Looks awesome.

[GnatB]

While I respect the effort that went into this, I'd have to say this is a horrible suggestion. The current UI is MILES better than this suggestion. (although the current UI is pretty bad). This suggestion will make it even HARDER than it currently is to find the schematic you're actually looking to make. They'll all be buried deep inside the tree of a random green schematic. I have dozens (if not hundreds) of green schematics, and the names don't neccessarily indicate if they're offensive or defensive in nature. Finding the right blue or purple for a tank will be horrible if I first have to go through each green trying to figure out which one is the good defensive aim one. At least with the current UI it's limited to the redoubts, and odds are (somewhat) good I don't know the redoubt for the offensive ones.

 

The ONLY thing this suggestion does is help completionists, not actual crafters who are crafting things that people actually want to use/buy. And completionists in crafting in THIS game need to talk to a psychiatrist about their OCD... and are making it far harder on themselves (with the current UI, or this suggested UI) to see the schematics they would actually want to make.

 

How to fix the crafting UI? 3 things.

1. Add a "Hide" button next to each schematic in the list. Once hidden, the schematic is no longer visible. All those worthless schematics you find when trying to learn the one good one? Hide 'em so you never have to see them again. Green schematics you already know the good blue/purple for? Hide 'em so you never have to see them again. For most of my crafters, (I've gotten all the good blues already) I shouldn't EVER have to see a green schematic until new schematics are added.

2. Add a "show all" button that switches mode to a show all mode. In this mode, all the hidden schematics are visible, and the "hide" button is replaced by a checkmark. If the checkmark is on the item is visible. If it's off it'll be hidden when switched back to normal mode.

3. Add an "alphabetical" sort (or just sort by "prefix"). All the tanking redoubt stuff grouped together, all the Veracity grouped together, all the overkill grouped togather, all the expert grouped together, etc. (filter would also work about as well, possibly a checkboxes for which prefixes you're interested in, i.e. show me all overkill or critical items)

[LongGui]

While I respect the effort that went into this, I'd have to say this is a horrible suggestion. The current UI is MILES better than this suggestion. (although the current UI is pretty bad). This suggestion will make it even HARDER than it currently is to find the schematic you're actually looking to make. They'll all be buried deep inside the tree of a random green schematic. I have dozens (if not hundreds) of green schematics, and the names don't neccessarily indicate if they're offensive or defensive in nature. Finding the right blue or purple for a tank will be horrible if I first have to go through each green trying to figure out which one is the good defensive aim one.

 

I agree it would be nice to filter by stat (aim cunning etc) however the rest can be done by filtering by level (alll items of the same level have the same stats right?) and slot, this can narrow it down to at most a handful of schematics straight away, and thats including adding schematics for the the rest of the models in the game.

 

You can tell at a glance what you have unlocked and can either work to unlock the one you want or go down the now short list until you find one you have unlocked.

 

This is the trade off in UI design, have options in the interface or enumerating every option individually. Going from one click crafting to choosing options means the system is much more scalable and can add a lot more options but requires a bit more input from us to use well.

Edited May 14, 2012 by LongGui

[GnatB]

(alll items of the same level have the same stats right?)

 

Nope. IIRC For Heavy'/light classes there's usually a good defensive one, a good healing/offensive one, and 1 "balanced" one. (I think sometimes even more, same primaries with different secondaries) can't remember for sure whether or not medium even gets multiple options in a level range. (think it does for smugglers, doesn't for sentinals. Guess the devs think healers should be geared differently than DPS, but the difference is so small I learn (and use) the same gear for both. IIRC, Primary stat is pretty much always better for healers, power is better for DPS than primary stat once accuracy/crit are at soft cap.)

 

Note: I usually only buy the good defensive one and the (IMO) best healing/offensive one, just to keep my list as uncluttered as possible. If I really wanted to target specific builds though, I'd probably have more that just those 2 in a particular level range.

[gaming_ogre]

+1 <---

[PugX]

For the love of Jabba, YES YES YES!!!

 

This would make life so much easier. Maybe little numbers over each of the boxes to indicate how many of any of them you could craft given your current resources.

[GnatB]

Wierd. I *still* don't understand why all of you think this tree view, (well, basically. Except even more cumbersome than just a pure tree view would be... instead of the items fitted all nicely together the leafs off the base node are all icons off to the right) is really such a good idea. K.I.S.S. people, K.I.S.S.

 

All I want is the good recipies right in front of me in the list, and the bad/worthless ones nowhere to be seen. This design buries the good recipies miles deep, and doesn't do anything to hide the bad. In fact you HAVE to go through the bad to get to the good.

 

Though I'll concede that a tree view (and I mean a normal tree view, not this click on an item and the tree is graphic icons off to the right) where you could actually hide selected elements would be useful. In particular if you could hide the base green, and the leaf blues (if not hidden) would become the new "base". So once you learn the right blue you could toss out the green, (so any green that's visible means you haven't learned the right blue for it yet) but if there isn't a purple under the blue you know you haven't learned the "right" purple yet for that blue, since odds are you don't really want to toss the "right" blues, they sell fairly well. (except at the highest levels)

[DeltaEkotte]

Great idea! The devs say that they read the forums and take our sugestions into consideration, but just to make sure you might want to drop that pic in the sugestion box of the general section.

[Philosomanic]

Definitely /signed.

 

I'd also like the list to start out with categories (e.g. Heavy Armor, Medium Armor, Augment) collapsed, and have it remember our sort option. I always sort by level, and it irks me that I constantly have to reselect my sort option. And an option to filter by slot (like we do at the training NPC) would be awesome as well.

[ThiborF]

It's one feature that is needed in it and I like the "tree" idea. The "strikethrough" I'm not fond of though. Personally I'd like the tree to be a clickable button next to an item that creates it in a pop-up/slide-out window. As to what Blattan suggested ...

 

It wasn't that I was looking for a specific schematic, but that I look for what needs to be worked on. I'd like that to be easy to see "at-a-glance," rather than click on each item to see how far I have researched up that tree.

 

What if there was a column that showed X/Y next to an item so you knew how many in the "family" of that item had been learned? The OP has it in the upper right corner of the right side of the window but, I'm envisioning it possibly as a column in the list on the left.

 

And to what the OP has suggested to go along with other folks, it needs some other tweaks as well. And sorry to use it as a reference but, I'm going to reference that which shouldn't be named. Sites for WoW like Thottbot allowed you to search for items in their database by level, stat, etc. Having a similar though maybe a bit more limited for spacing reasons, would be useful. Perhaps for level you could either choose from preset ranges grouped by 10s or enter a low/high number. Have two stat selectors (optional to use) so you could further say, "Show me ones with Defense on them" or "Show me ones with Defense and Absorption". Also have a rarity filter and a name search. With those 4 you could easily pare down the list to what you're looking for.

 

And for the granddaddy of suggestions (imo) give us an interface window that easily displays character info server-account wide (+guild mates) like the WoW addon Altoholic. Across your own characters you could see:

What was equipped

In your inventory

In your bank

In the guild bank

Quest (mission) log

Auctions

Mail (with about to expire warning)

Recipes (schematics) known including required mats for the items

Talent spec(s)

(+ lots more that is more specific to that game like achievements, etc.)

 

And with guildmates using the same you can see the schematics they've learned.

 

All of this regardless if that character is logged in or not. And it allowed to search across your account and told you where and how many of something existed by mousing over. So in TOR as an example you could search for Quadranium and see a single listing stating you have 224 total and if you mouse over it, it might tell you that you have 20 in your sniper's inventory, 99 in your sniper's bank, 50 in your bounty hunter's bank, and 55 in your warrior's inventory. No more wondering which alt had what or if you needed to hit up the GTN.

 

If you played lots of characters in WoW this addon was a godsend (imo and many others that I know.)

http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/altoholic

[GnatB]

It's one feature that is needed in it and I like the "tree" idea. The "strikethrough" I'm not fond of though.

 

I was assuming the strikethrough was more an indication of "lazy" photoshop. There wouldn't actually be strikethroughs, but rather only the green version of recipies, (i.e. the version you never really want to make other than to learn the (right) blues) is the only thing that shows up in the left list.

 

 

 

This suggestion is (mostly) functionally the same as a tree view, except less friendly to navigate than a simple tree view would be. Only advantage is you see the stuff you don't yet know... which doesn't much matter. Either it's something you would actually want to make, so it missing is obvious because you want to make it and can't. Or it's something that's completely worthless and you don't care whether it's missing or not and you don't want it cluttering up the works anyways.

[whatthefett]

Sadly they pay designers and developers decent money to do just this and you did better for free. Doesn't speak highly of the Swtor team.

[celldoom]

The point of this is for you to chose the schematic on the left (the cunning dps one) and then browse around for all the variations on the same recipe instead of having to browse trees and clicking on "+" signs all the time like the Windows Registry :|

 

And the lines aren't there to be pretty, they represent the RE path to show you which ones unlock what - the middle blue item will only unlock 5 variations of itself, not all 15.

[okwathne]

This looks perfect....

 

It will be easy to navigate to the correct base item, and then you will see with ease if you have the correct blue or purple learned....

 

The statement someone had about this making it harder too see if you have the correct one for tanks is hard for me to understand, you have 1-3 items to look at, the tanking one, click it, see if you have the tanking gone blue/purple with the stats instead of looking through loads of stuff, and then finding out you have to do some more re'ing before getting it.

[GnatB]

This looks perfect....

 

It will be easy to navigate to the correct base item, and then you will see with ease if you have the correct blue or purple learned....

 

The statement someone had about this making it harder too see if you have the correct one for tanks is hard for me to understand, you have 1-3 items to look at, the tanking one, click it, see if you have the tanking gone blue/purple with the stats instead of looking through loads of stuff, and then finding out you have to do some more re'ing before getting it.

 

So, find which of the several greens is the tanky one. (Lots of recipies, can't remember all the names, have to actually click and compare the stats of all 3 possibilities. Slow, and susceptable to mistakes. Current functionality requires you to do the same thing now comparing the blues, but at least now you're only comparing the *right* one and the accidentally learned ones (which may or may not even exist, so many/most of the time there is *just* the right one))

Click it.

Click on the tanking blue/purple.

 

Lot more complex/time consuming/error prone than simply being able to scroll down to redoubt/veracity, and the only redoubt/veracity ones there on the entire list are the good ones.

 

Note: There is no need to see *if* I have the right one. I do. Soon as a buy a schematic first thing I do is learn the "right blue". Then next I do is learn the "right purple". (if interested in it, anyways). (and in any case simply changing the existing UI to allow you to hide unwanted schematics would make seeing if you know the schematic by function easier to find too. If I scroll down to the redoubts, and there's a missing chest piece at lvl 39, I don't know it.) Just need to do the scroll (or filter). No clicking other places. Minimal eye movement too.

 

And that's the thing. In reality, you want to find schematics BY FUNCTION. This UI is worthless for that. It buries the function step instead of bringing it to the surface.

 

Now sure, they could add tank/dps/healing filters that would eliminate the unwated greens, but we may (or may not) agree with the results. And it would still add more (unneccessary) clicks to get to what we want. (and yeah, I've pretty much convinced myself any sort of tree view is probably bad, even if it's all in the "text" area")

[Elfindreams]

OMG, this is better than cake! +1 support.

[celldoom]

Well, obviously this could use abit more iteration and it wouldn't look EXACTLY like that. But something more evolved is realy needed.

[LongGui]

Necro, but you can't kill a good idea just because it will never be prioritized high enough for it to happen.

[Vlacke]

Necro, but you can't kill a good idea just because it will never be prioritized high enough for it to happen.

 

Agreed, crafting and all that comes with it could use some love from the developers.

[Loladarulz]

I like this. Thumbs up.

[Heezdedjim]

This is not a bad take on it. Add a checkbox somewhere for each base schematic that means "never show this in listings ever again," along with a complementary "show all" button, and it would be all good.

[H-aTreD]

Yeah, this is a great necro that once again has gone unoticed by Bioware. This is something that would be AMAZING to all the crafters and wouldn't be hard to impliment.

 

It would also be nice (like people have said before) to get the option to not show certain schematics once you've learned the upgraded ones and an option for it to keep the filter set where you want it. For example, I like to keep mine filtered by level.

 

Crafting needs an overhaul and this would be a great start.