Sea trials - a test of your systems.

Well, I've just bought 20 Arbitrator hulls (because they are cheap) and fittings for five of those hulls (because they are expensive!). I'm feeling pretty space poor right now, but if I'm honest I could always start selling frigate hulls if  I were desperate for the cash.

I've been trying to decide on a format for presenting (and learning from) my kills. I could always follow the Punisher Plan format, but that seems a little dull - I've been there and done that. Equally, I'm experienced enough that my mistakes will (hopefully) be harder to catch. Not noticing I've neuted out my opponent's point, for example, is something that, by definition, I've not noticed. Hard to catch that from memory.

The obvious solution, then, is to simply record my fights. Having downloaded FRAPS, I now present a test video. Edit: Now a much improved video from youtube.

Now, the video itself is nothing exciting. I'm just flying around a little bit, setting up my overview, and testing out my new hot keys (I have more modules to manage than I did in a frigate, so some shuffling has been necessary). I'll possibly do a post on hotkeys later, if people are actually interested.

My HUD

As far as my HUD is concerned, there are a few key features. First, none of my windows actually touch the side of my screen, which means I can always see where the targeting icons are (often crammed against the side of my screen). Second, my module HUD is up top, not at the bottom. This is because I want to be able to focus on as small a part of my screen as possible when fighting. By putting my modules at the top, I can focus on the top right corner of my screen, as it has my targeting (which is vertical), as well as my overview.

The scanner is just below the overview, so that I can quickly keep an eye on the local area if I'm worried about being mobbed. I'm tempted to switch that for local chat, as that's often a better indicator of what is happening that the scanner. I've also been known to miss comments from my enemies (like "Ransom!") just because I'm not looking at that part of my screen.

I'm not terribly happy with the location of the drone screen, but then that's a new addition. I'd like the box to be taller, so that I can control flights of drones without scrolling. Ideally, then, it would be at the edge of my screen. I'll play around with that, but it does give you a pretty good idea of what I've been using since my first month or so of playing.

Other issues

Just as I used that flight to work out some in-game issues (like hot keys), I used this video to work out some bugs too.

As you can see, the video becomes very choppy once I launch my drones and get into combat with the rats. EvE also slowed down, which is an issue I've not had before. True, I had a few other programs in the background, but I really need to improve the performance issue or this is just not going to work in combat. Given that I've had to massively compress the quality of the video in order to post it, I can probably reduce my FRAPS settings without impacting the final product.

If the picture seems a little "squished" horizontally, that's because of the resizing after compression. Watching the video in a slightly different aspect (16:9 seems to work well) reverses this. I'll see if I can't gradually improve what I'm doing as I gain more experience.

If any more experienced FRAPS users have any hints I'd love to hear them.