Bookmarks. From Sidewinders to what?

Rock Hunter · Apr 4, 2019

I’ve just spent several hours sorting out my bookmarks, not something I really wanted to do with my spare time. However after fifteen months of playing, dropping bookmarks on everything from interesting looking systems and good material gathering locations to Allied stations giving high paying missions, my GalMap was a complete mess. I’d even started leaving cheap Sidewinders at the stations that I was Allied with and gave those high paying missions just because they were a red ‘bookmark’ rather than just another blue blob.....something the old timers had no choice but to do.

I’ve now sorted a system as best I can that groups my bookmarks into useable and easy to find sections; Extraction systems with large pad stations, those with only medium pad stations, systems with CNB’s and those nearby with Interstellar Factors etc etc etc and this will work quite well if I remember to use my bookmarks from the bookmarks panel and not simply from the GalMap....where it’s still a sea of blue blobs, if admittedly a smaller sea having deleted lots of unused or no longer needed marks.

Knowing that there is interest around expanding and improving on the bookmarks system and being someone who knows nothing about programming I’d be interested to know what others would like to see happen with the bookmarks system and what is potentially viable. Can we have editable colour coded bookmarks and a filter for those on the GalMap much like for Economy/State/Star Class? Can they be fully customisable and if so what exactly is fully customisable? Or is it simply so much better than the old Sidey system that Devs should concentrate on the stuff that really needs fixing?

Stealthie · Apr 4, 2019

For a start, they could give us a little "palette" of different coloured bookmarks to use.

Rock Hunter · Apr 4, 2019

Absolutely. Being able to colour code, even pretty basically, would make a huge difference. I don’t want to think about what some of the earliest Cmdrs maps must look like.

Stealthie · Apr 4, 2019

FWIW, I "sort" my bookmarks by giving them prefixes such as [ENG], [POI], [TRA], [MAT], [BAS] etc to denote different things.

Also, since the game recognises ASCII characters, you can force it to put something at the top of your list by sticking something like an exclamation mark in front of it.

So, for example, the bookmark for my home-station always appears at the top of my list of bookmarks cos it looks like this "![BAS] Ohm City"

Sapyx · Apr 5, 2019

I've said it before and I'll say it again. I would be pepared to pay real-world cash for a box of additional bookmarks. US$10 for a box of 100 would be nice, but if it cost more than that to implement the system, I'd happily pay more. DIfferent coloured ones would be nice, but not essential.

Yes, I'm an explorer, and I hit the max bookmark level years ago. I'm one of those who had a fleet of bookmarkwinders back in the pre-actual-bookmarks days. Went and sold them all when actual bookmarks came out. Wish I hadn't, because those in-bubble bookmarked systems are now using up precious bookmarks which I could be spending on uninhabited systems (which of course cannot be bookmarkwindered). I'm forced to resort to Excel, and the forums, to keep track of interesting systems I've found.

Lightspeed · Apr 5, 2019

I too am maxed out with bookmarks. We need more and .....
#colored bookmarks
#colored bookmarks
#colored bookmarks
#colored bookmarks
#colored bookmarks

Stealthie · Apr 5, 2019

Sapyx said:
I'm one of those who had a fleet of bookmarkwinders back in the pre-actual-bookmarks days. Went and sold them all when actual bookmarks came out. Wish I hadn't, because those in-bubble bookmarked systems are now using up precious bookmarks which I could be spending on uninhabited systems (which of course cannot be bookmarkwindered). I'm forced to resort to Excel, and the forums, to keep track of interesting systems I've found.

Kind of related but, I was hoping that the Codex would render most of my bookmarks obsolete.
I realise that it can be used to locate a lot of stuff that we probably have bookmarked (engineers, thargoid/guardian sites, important POIs etc) but it's all so opaque that it's way easier to just open up the galmap and scroll down a list of bookmarks.

Dagwit · Apr 5, 2019

People have been asking for an improved Bookmarks system for years - I can recall seeing at least one detailed design proposal on Reddit a good while ago. I also recall being actually quite cross at 3.0 wasting resources on a gimped trading system when those resources could have been spent on this.

It would be nice to think that this would be one of the QoL improvements which are supposed to keep us satisfied until the next big update, but I'm not optimistic for anything that would require any significant amount of actual programming.

Tarman · Apr 5, 2019

Stealthie said:
FWIW, I "sort" my bookmarks by giving them prefixes such as [ENG], [POI], [TRA], [MAT], [BAS] etc to denote different things.

Also, since the game recognises ASCII characters, you can force it to put something at the top of your list by sticking something like an exclamation mark in front of it.

So, for example, the bookmark for my home-station always appears at the top of my list of bookmarks cos it looks like this "![BAS] Ohm City"

I use a similar prefix method to sort stuff by category and to put important or homebase stuff at the top; same thing I do in Starbound or other games with tons of markers that require sorting.

A goodly selection of colours and icons would go very far to improving bookmarks, as well as expanding the sheer volume of them. Kind of crazy that people are back to using Bookwinders again.

Rock Hunter · Apr 5, 2019

I see from this thread that I may not have finished organizing my bookmarks quite yet. Why didn't I think of a simple 3 letter prefix?!

GreyAreaUK · Apr 5, 2019

I find that I've generally got a 'current hot list' of places I'm bouncing between, so I prefix all of them with '-' to force them to the top, then suffix them with something to remind me what they are.

-BONKERS (HOME)
-SLINK'S EYE (MAN) {manufactured material trader)

that sort of thing. Once I've moved somewhere else I initially just remove the '-', then may delete the bookmark entirely.

Arkadi · Apr 5, 2019

I cleared most of my bookmarks some time ago too. It's no use to bookmark something in a ocean of bookmarks, even with prefixes it becomes a mess eventually...

I reverted to out-of game methods to note down interesting stuff.

I only use bookmarks for short-term orientation not for anything I want to mark long-term nowadays.

My only fixed bookmarks are Sol, Merope, Jacksons Lighthouse, Colonia and sometimes my powers HQ. That's all I need for orientation.

DNA-Decay · Apr 5, 2019

I’ve been advicating this for years.
Coloured.
Filterable.
Groupable.
Switchable visibility.
Plentiful.

I’m a BGS wonk. So I’m hugely interested in the “empires” that different groups are building.

“Where are the groups I work for?”
“Where are my enemies?”

The team I fly for has over a hundred stations on its official PMF. We have two other factions we actively support as a group and they are pretty big too. Then there is another Alliance faction that one of our members developed as “a little side project” that runs to 30 pls systems. Then there are the sites associated with the Alliance project out in the California Nebula. And of course there’s another set of stuff around the Pleiades.

So yeah I was doing prefixes, but the worst thing was that I RAN OUT and had to cull.

The Squadron Bookmarks has helped a lot, I was able to do a big cull with that. But even there, the guys who are managing the BGS just bookmark the system, whereas I used to bookmark the main station. Did you know - if you have the station bookmarked in the System Map you can plot a course to it just from the GalMap? You can do that. When you arrive in-system the station is pre-selected.

There’s a LOT that could be done with Bookmarks.