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In the images for this post you'll see a collection of four older mockups that were mostly done last year when I was thinking about how to best organize a dedicated filtering UI that could appear over the top consoles on demand to allow you to filter the labels in real time.

The iteration at the bottom was the final one I arrived at, but since then I've been thinking more about the potential for a search feature and how that could be even more flexible to allow for both searching and filtering via a single text interface. As such we now have an even newer mockup which would instead replace the HUD's parts list and inventory on demand with some new windows to facilitate those actions.

Simply typing would start to filter all known items for matching substrings, eliminating irrelevant labels on the map while also listing those items that match (since of course many could be off screen as well), each with their distance (in blue) from your current position. As per the help text at the bottom there would also be access to additional filters and search criteria if you want to be more specific

I think this would be an even more robust implementation, combining the searching and filtering, although on reviewing this it's also a lot of work, much more so than either a simple search feature or the original filtering concept I had planned, so I've decided this particular feature would have to be a (2) on the voting list. Note the voting hasn't closed yet if you'd like to modify your votes in response, though this feature does currently lead the pack, hence my work on developing the concept further here.

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Comments

Eltons Kūns

Hey there! Thanks for the insight, this looks really promising! While being fully aware this is a mock-up for a feature that might not even end up being implemented, wouldn't the inventory scrolling shortcuts (as opposed to Log) make more sense here in terms of UX consistency? Probably an edge case somewhere of wanting to open/scroll the Log and search for an item.

Eltons Kūns

That's exactly what I meant by shortcuts, yes. Thanks for the reply! I think part of me was wondering this because your mock-ups tend to look more polished and thought-out than some final AAA game UIs, haha. Cheers! :)

Joel Collins

Looking good! I've been wondering about one thing though. In cogmind items are usually stored in stockpiles so you would likely get a lot of annoying repetitions in the search as it lists every item in each bunch consecutively. On the other hand the number of items in each stockpile can be quite important so removing the repetitions wouldn't be ideal either. Listing each 'stockpile' and the number of units in it would fix this problem, but I'm not sure the added complexity would be worth the effort.