PIN Cushion

Following on from my last post, I thought you may be interested in seeing some images from SISI.

DISCLAIMER: These are images from the TEST SERVER – I highly doubt these will be close to anything like what the final Planetary UI looks like.

It was very obvious whilst looking through what worked that everything in place on SISI are placeholders: for example several drop down menus did nothing, or buttons that appeared would work did not.  Equally items look pretty randomly selected.  Dont go out there and spend kerbillions of ISK on Amarrian Wheat because you somehow figure that SISI is predicting the future – its not.  Trust me on this!

You can access the PI interface from space in that system – i.e as it stands currently you dont have to physically be by the planet to access this menu. Yes – all this stuff spins in 3D 🙂

Close up over a storm planet (above).  That red icon is your Planetary Command Center – basically the central ‘node’ and menu interface for what you want to build next.

Scanning: this doesnt work yet but you appear to have a floating window that you can drag across the surface of the planet.  There’s a colour bar running along one side of the scanner – my guess is you’ll get some form of visual clue as to where the resources you are looking for are on the planet.  I think also this ties in with the ‘satellite’ process mentioned in the dev blog as you need to have the satellite ‘active’ for this to do…well anything.

You can see I have got ahead of myself on the picture above as I have already dropped some PINS onto the globe.  Below shows a little better how these PINS can be connected together:

Close up of a ‘faktory’: basically a PIN that makes ‘stuff’.  The UI currently shows what resources this facility needs to operate, and what it will produce as an end product.  ‘Extractor’ facilities look similar but just show what they mine.  What’s not clear (at least at this point) is what you’re missing in terms of resources from the process.

So its all fairly straight forward – extractors to mine the raw materials, that you then link to a factory PIN and then to your PCC.  AS far as I could tell you can place these PINS anywhere at all on a planet – its not “territorial” if you’re looking for RISK / Axis & Allies style continents.  That said I was looking at a Storm World, and I guess they don’t have continents.  Overall its looks interesting, perhaps the kind of thing players will twiddle with if they have just a short amount of time to log on but expandable in the sense you could conceivably create a pretty complex web of interdependent industrial complexes.

Everything is clearly at an early stage.  If you can’t log on to SISI but want an idea of how it “feels” in terms of game play the best approximation I can give is that it “feels” very similar to the exploration and probing system, almost like a mini game in that sense & certainly more interactive than say the “point click and go AFK” act of mining.

Edit:  EVE University YouTube video of the process in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ06wdm8B_0

C.