[Suggestions] Crash Site/Event Time Info

[0xEBJC]

Here's my scenario:

There's a lot going on I just completed a mission and there are four other events going on a terror site, another crash site, and two landings.

I want to know which one is the oldest;

It would be nice to have the following info when you click on event

TERROR SITE
Occurred: 1 Jun 1999 12:53:01
Time Lapsed: 2 Days 0 Hrs 10 Min 7 Sec

This way I could identify which event is oldest and should be targeted next.  There could be an option in advanced configuration to enable this or not to hide it when a true vanilla gameplay is desired.

[Meridian]

Here are the 3 screens that need redesign.

Feel free to propose a new layout.

[Meridian]

If you just need to know the oldest mission site, you can use the "Tracker" window.
Mission sites are sorted there by their creation time.

"Tasoth Factory" is the oldest, "Hybrid Storage Facility" is the youngest.

[0xEBJC]

If you just need to know the oldest mission site, you can use the "Tracker" window.
Mission sites are sorted there by their creation time.

"Tasoth Factory" is the oldest, "Hybrid Storage Facility" is the youngest.

This is what I was looking for, so no extra effort needed to change anything, thank you.

[psavola]

While the order is usually "good enough", in many cases it can be difficult to keep track when the mission site is going to despawn, especially in mods like XCF where you can have timers of 100's of hours. (Obviously the player will need to also have ruleset information on what the timers are for specific missions for this information to be useful.) With these kinds of missions the player will not necessarily do the mission right away, but wait for something (e.g. some manufacturing project to finish, some soldiers to get healed up, etc.) Therefore some small QoL improvement could be useful (I would certainly turn it on). But the priority would probably be low.

It seems to me that information could be provided in the same manner as in "ETA"-feature, in format and precision of hours, like "23h" or "3d3h" (special case 0h if you click on a new mission).

The information could possibly be provided as follows:
 - in the landing site screens, add a new line after "speed" that would say something like "TIME............. 7h ago" (or alternatively, replace "SPEED" with "SPEED/TIME").
 - for moving targets, don't print information (or always 0h ago, i.e. the location is constantly changing)
 - this information would be most useful in "global tracker", but including the information could be challenging (little or no space) without redesign. One way to redesign this would be to rephrase "SPEED" as "SPEED/TIME" and for stationary targets print out the spawn time like ago "1d11h ago" or just "1d11h". In global tracker all the columns meant for moving targets are useless anyway.

[0xEBJC]

I think if anything the most useful added feature to have all the info in one place would be a column in the global tracker that showed despawn penalty, so you could see by order the time, oldest to newest order, but also which possible to go after first if you were most concerned about the despawn penalty.

[psavola]

Now that I have thought about this a bit, I will outline a way to potentially restructure the global tracker by splitting it to two parts (with an empty line between the parts) with each part having its own columns for the relevant information:

1) The first part would include all the immovable mission sites. The first heading could be "site", and the following ones "time" (as above the spawn or detection time) and the last one "despawn penalty".

For enemy bases it could count down from the time the base was detected (rather than when it was spawned, as the player doesn't know it). If the detection time is not available, this information could be omitted.

Later more columns could be added if there are ideas what information would be relevant. I'm thinking of in particular whether there should be column "restrictions" which could include "craft", "unit" and/or "equipment" or just "X" or "YES/NO" if there are any. Not mandatory but some indicator might be nice.

2) The second part would include the movable targets. The first column could be renamed "target" and the rest could be kept as is.

The order of these two types could also be reversed. I have no preference. Playing vanilla or similar mods (with few mission sites) would make sense to have the moving targets on top. With XCF-like mods with lots of immovable sites it could be slightly more convenient to have them first.

I think it would make sense to print out both parts even if there are no missions at all or there are only missions for one part. But this could be argued the other way as well (print out only as needed). The downside then would be the question of what should be printed if there are no sites or targets at all. This issue is avoided if both would always be printed out.