Jita Shortcut

I’ve had a play around with the new D-Scan / Probe window.

As I have said before, I prefer having the map and scan window separate. The D-Scan aspect of the tool is particularly good. I found it easier to use with much better visual ques.

Turning on the Scan Cone option shows you the D-Scan range – although the colour really should be different so as not to clash with signatures.

Turn on camera tracking on the HUD.

Lower the scan angle to 5%. Now you can click on objects in the Scan window or on a suitable Overview Tab, and if they are within range, you can very quickly and accurately D-Scan them. Finding ships in sites or POS around moons is a breeze.

I know that was possible before – but as I said, it just works better. I can imagine newer players finding the concept easier to grasp and quicker to master.

You can also use the option to “Align with Camera”, for a “look behind the cone” view of D-Scan. It is more useful where objects are above and below the horizon. If doesn’t work entirely as you might expect with Camera Tracking turned on. If you click on an object in the Scan window your ship view will swing around to align with it. If you just move the angle of your view around in the Scan window, your ship view will move, but will then keep trying to return to the last selected object. If you release your mouse, it will snap back. It doesn’t feel quite right.

The probing aspect of the window works pretty much as it did before. It does highlight the arrows on the movement box when you are hovering in the right position, and the option to save layouts seems easier. I do not however like how little the signatures are once you start to get a hit on them. Above you can see a tiny red dot and a tiny yellow dot. They should be much bigger.

This is in contrast to the strange large cones that appear as you are resizing and moving probes around.

There are some pretty specific bugs people have reported about the scan window. I found for general day to day use it worked, although with a caveat. It was at times glitchy. Sometimes I would go to click on a menu icon and it would not respond. I would have to click on something else and come back to find it working again. Sometimes the Directional Scan result window would update when you did not expect it to, and wouldn’t update when it should. You were not entirely able to trust the results – you basically had to re-scan every time you moved the camera angle.

Overall I am pleased, but it requires polish.

Otherwise, I spent a chunk of yesterday out in space. There was a Hi-Sec to Hi-Sec Wormhole in my home system. It had that telltale blue nebula colour. As luck would have it, when I poked my nose through I found a route to Jita half the length than usual, which also bypassed a couple of those more dangerous systems.

I then spent a lot of time ferrying loot, excess supplies, and a bunch of speculative items I had sat on for some time which were now well worth turning over for profit. My Alt’s Exequror hauler got quite a workout, often shuffling 1+B ISK worth at a time. It is likely that over its life that single hull has moved more than a Titan’s worth of value around space.