Posted - 2009.09.18 10:47:00 - [1]

 

Edited by: Luminus Aardokay on 09/10/2009 15:19:24
With the release of Apocrypha we've seen corporations who took upon colonizing w-space, and found out how important Bookmark usage to navigation is. For most of those corps the daily routine is a scan of their home system, bookmarking sites and wormhole exits and then share the bookmarks with the rest of the corporation through the usage of a hangar in a POS.

However, this approach is highly inefficient as copying of bookmarks becomes tedious (Move the bookmark to your ship's cargo hold, transfer it to People and Places, then make a copy from your bookmarks back to the corp hangar) and the information presented on the bookmarks themselves while in a container or hangar is practically non-existent, even if you check the info of a bookmark leading corps to devise naming schemes for their bookmarks that relay the information lacking by the game to the corpmates.

Finally, corp bookmark management will become even more tedious as the preliminary patch notes for Dominion state that bookmarks will no longer be allowed to be stored in corp hangars in POSes.

A suggestion there would be a new Bookmark handling mechanism for shared corporation use, similar to the saved corp ship fittings one.

- A corp role for "Corp Bookmarks" access is created with View/Modify permissions
- The "Shared Corp Bookmarks" (SCB) tool would work pretty much like the People and Places (P&P) one.
- SCB should support folders and subfolders for organization purposes
- SCB entries should indicate time of the bookmark's creation as well as the system they've been created in (much like the P&P tool does) and finally the first creator of the Bookmark.
- When adding a bookmark, a user should have the option to add a description for the bookmark (much like what happens with every other user transaction), which would be visible if a person hovers the mouse over the bookmark in SCB or P&P.
- Right clicking on a bookmark in SCB should have an additional "COPY TO" function which would open a tree of the user's P&P bookmark folders to copy to, much like the tree of available chat channels when a person right click on a player and invites them to one. A destination should also be "SHIP CARGO HOLD" if the user is not in a pod.
- The same functionality should be implemented on bookmarks found in a user's P&P, such as COPY TO -> CORP BOOKMARKS -> ALL BOOKMARKS or COPY TO -> CORP BOOKMARKS -> USER DEFINED FOLDER
- Dragging a bookmark into a chat channel should create a link to the bookmark. Pilots who click on it get an information window with the bookmark's details (name, coordinates, date added, system, description, first creator). Right clicking on the link, should pop the usual functions along with the COPY TO one.

Suggestions found on various sources:

(Idea by Den McConan)
- Ability to "Align to" a bookmark location

(Ideas by Kirith Kodachi)
- Make "Add Bookmark" able to be bound to a keyboard shortcut for precise bookmarking during mid-warp.
- Allow pilots to show bookmarks in the present grid, both in the bracket and in the overview.

(Idea by Wonko)
- Allow Squad/Wing/Fleet commanders to warp fleet at any distance between 0 and 100km from a bookmark, rather than just 0.

This bookmark management idea ties in perfectly with the game lore as well, since bookmarks are nothing more than an encapsulated set of information including vector coordinates and textual descriptions are entities that can be transmitted through communication channels and there is no real need for them to be exchanged as physical items. In fact, (and this being an educated guess here) if bookmark management and sharing got totally disengaged from bookmarks being treated as inventory items it could help with the stress the database undergoes when bookmark instances are created as items (Need for speed initiative anyone?).

Your thoughts?