Improve Ship Catalog

[MacThule]

I suggest that Schine would do well to improve the functonality of the ship catalog, particularly in-game. In-game catalogs need ratings. Mods should be able to filter out useless public ships or highlight the most useful/popular as suggestions to players. It would be awesome if the in-server catalog were able to somehow pull in a standard set of BPs directly from the docks catalog if there were a catagory of vetted, highly rated ships within a reasonable mass range. It'd be cool if we could preview the 3D model and see the ship specs at least; even cooler would be if we were able to test-fly everything in the catalog using the same feature already implemented for shipyards.

This is just from a UX perspective; currently if a player starts new on a server that's been running for a while the catalog is just a jumble of ships, they can't be tested in SP, the only way to know what they are is to blow resources on them. A more robust catalog would be super nice. Especially if we could also sell filled BPS through it or something of the like...

 

[NeonSturm]

Community-Content has partially huge file-sizes.
They shouldn't be demanding from a server when being fly-tested when they are downloadable by players.

If mods are able to filter the catalogue (which is a great option) it should be opt-in where the user should be able to choose lists of "public" and "moderated".
If ships were forbidden on a server, mods already can use blacklists (deleting entries) or whitelists (not allowing player-uploads).


I'd like an intelligent tagging system, but it has 2 problems currently (on starmadedock).

1. Tags have no groups/neighbours/childs which specify broader/narrower/similar tags.
2. We have many similar tags once "in singular" and once "in plurals" or once "master-slave" and once "slave-master".

Tags need to be compressed similar to ZIP-files so that the shortest and first-sorted tag works like a group for itself and the others.

i=1, type=GROUP, name="master-slave systems"
i=2, type=BRANCH, name="master*"
i=3, type=BRANCH, name="slave*"
i=4, type=TAG, name="master-slave" or "master slave demo"
i=5, type=TAG, name="slave-master" or "slave master tutorial"​

You see the mess? I am not even including "controller", "selected", … and all the other 100+ choices
​

Perhaps GROUPs need to be moderated so that peoples which are familiar with the system merge duplicates and put

Warhammer > Eldar,Ork,Imperium
Faction > Imperium

Oh crap, now the faction of an unrelated game uploads content to warhammer and vice-versa … critical system failure, blue screen in my mind.
But seriously, this is everything that will happen with a not-moderated tagging system.
​

To solve this mess, it needs both imperium>warhammer>imperium>warhammer and faction>imperium>faction>imperium as separate entities.

 

[eddard_stark]

they can't be tested in SP, the only way to know what they are is to blow resources on them

This can already be done, by just buying the blueprints from the blueprint menu then putting them into a shipyard, from there you can see the ship and test fly it for free.
However I do agree that the blueprint menu could be improved, perhaps even adding a way to test space stations.