On Screen Parameters

After I opened APEX today and noticed that the new release is live, I immediately rushed to try out the new screen parameters feature. I didn’t want to change my base screens - I like the separate, so that I can tinker them to base’s specifics and leave reminders to myself. So my next thought was - hooray, I’m gonna get rid of 5 CX-specific screens and have a single one! But unfortunatelly, that was not the case, because turns out I have a lot of commands there that do not depend on CX ticker.

And that got me thinking that probably a lot of other players have the same issue, and that to make screen parameters as powerful as they are, all the commands in general should probably get overhauled too. And I mean a big, systemic overhaul, that will make all commands more consistent in their use of parameters.

What I mean by that is re-designing commands with new screen parameters feature in mind (with keeping all the existing use-cases working, ofc). As parameters now have 3 available types in them (plus generic “string”/“custom string” aka “list” options), every command should accept an option of that type, where that makes sense. For example, if there’s a command that shows all your fleet at specific location - it should accept a location as a parameter (which it kinda does now, with FLTP and FLTS commands, although there’s no way to check all your ships parked at a CX, for example). If there’s a command for base workforce - it should accept the location of the base (as players can only have 1 base per location). If there’s a command for CX order list, it should accept a CX as a parameter, so that a CX parameterized screen can use this command too.

In general, what I think can be done is walking over all existing commands and rethinking, if some more parameters can be added to them to utilize them better at a parameterized screen. That is probably a giant amount of work to do, but it also will yield spectacular results with the parameters feature! I also read in the devlog that it is an issue that is being looked into, so maybe my wall of text (manually written btw) will help a bit :slight_smile:

I would also like to leave a particular note about inventory-related commands, as they are probably on almost every screen (my screens are like 30-40% inventories on average :D). There are commands that show you list of your inventories that can accept locations as an argument; and also there’s a command that shows you inventory content, but it accepts a specific inventory id and is practically impossible to parameterize in any meaningful way. Maybe we can get a special inventory command that accepts a location, and inventory type, and then displays either a list of all matching inventories, or a content of the single matching one? Something like INVF WAR-OT-580b, or INVF BS-OT-580b, or INVF WAR-NC1, or INVF SHP-OT-580?

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