I don't know about anyone else, but I make extensive use of the waypoint system. Even on a small server with a small system, there's always so much stuff to go get and it's hard to keep track of it all. Only thing is, once you tag almost everything in the system, your hub becomes a mess. Now, sure, you can toggle off waypoints by hitting F6 once. But that toggles ALL waypoints/markers. Including enemy ship/shield markers, and everything. So, here's my suggestion: Allow a toggle for different levels of visibility for waypoints. Let me explain. Currently we have on/off. I'm suggesting the following options. All System Local Non-player Off -All, would function as it does currently. -System would show only waypoints within the current system. But it would show all waypoints in that system. -Local would show only the ones in the current playfield. And before you tell me that you can just select "show on HUD" for something to only be visible in that playfield, that doesn't stop you being able to see every distant waypoint across the galaxy while you're in that playfield. -Non-player would toggle off all player made waypoints, only showing stuff like drones, POIs, deposits, other players, etc. -Off, would obviously turn all waypoints/markers off. I think this alone make the waypoint system so massively more useful. Or rather, make it a lot less limited, and stretch its functionality to the point of alleviating a whole host of other issues. As it is, there's only so much you can use waypoints for before they all overlap and become self-defeating. And guys, before you're temped to respond and tell me how to use waypoints. Just take into consideration that I've been messing with them for a long while now and I'm quite confident I'm not missing anything in terms of functionality. My suggestion comes from, as I've said above, the fact that I've run out of functionality for them that doesn't involve me going around the game's capabilities and doing the extra work myself. This suggestion is simply to give more options to players and help make navigating a lot easier and less convoluted.
I was just thinking of this yesterday (more then a year after this thread). It would be good to have a system to manage, not only what waypoints are visible on the HUD, but also how far each waypoint is visible (system only, local only, a combination of the two, etc).
I heavily second that suggestion. I use waypoints far less than I would like to, because the mess on the screen makes the game unplayable at a certain state. The seperate switches by levels of galaxy, system, sector, playfield, non-player and off would be perfect and for my understanding it would be not that hard to implement. Additionally, the choice in visibility of 'real' waypoints and simple labels (such as "I mark this POI for later raiding" or "here the flowers I love grow a lot") would be great.
If you're inclined to code, there is a way to implement feature/functionality similar to what you describe (with a bit (!) of irritating modes switching pain) in a single player game where you are hosting the global.db locally. The source of record for waypoints is the bookmark table. By inserting, deleting, and updating entries in this table you can set, clear, and modify the specifics of any bookmark... Code: "insert into Bookmarks " + "('type', 'refid', 'facgroup', 'facid', 'entityid', 'name'," + "'sectorx', 'sectory', 'sectorz', 'posx', 'posy', 'posz'," + "'icon', 'isshared', 'iswaypoint', 'isremove', 'isshowhud', 'iscallback'," + "'createdticks', 'maxdistance') " ...but the downside is that this data is only read at gamestart. After performing these changes via a mod or external tool your client needs to drop back to the lobby and reenter the game to see the new/modified markers. Having a bool .ReloadMapMarkers() method added to the IApplication class would be (hopefully) a pretty simple way to open up the marker environment to the modding community. This would facilitate things like pathfinders and resource target-by-type sorts of tools.
