Overview Setup

Copyright Sanfrey Statolomy & Agony Unleashed

Introduction

This article assumes you are familiar with the content of Configuring the EVE client for PVP

This article describes how to add functionality to your Overview through the use of filters, tabs, and brackets. Firstly, some quick definitions:

• Filters – Presets which can be saved and loaded, which determine the objects shown to you in the Overview or highlighted on screen with brackets.
• Tabs – In the same way as a ‘tabbed browser’ like FireFox can display multiple web pages and provide a tab to get quickly to each one, the Overview can be configured with up to 5 tabs with unique names and settings. This lets a pilot very quickly change the items listed in the Overview.
• Brackets – The small squares, triangles, diamonds and circles displayed in space around your ship to highlight the location of ships, gates, planets and other objects.

Filters

You may remember on that glorious day when you rolled your first character and undocked, one of the first things you saw on your Overview was probably a CONCORD Commander. At some point between then and now, you’ve likely discovered that you can right click those and use ‘Remove from Overview” to reduce the list of items down to those you actually care about.

This is a simple way of creating a filter. In effect, you’re telling the Eve client “Out of all the things that are out there in space, I only care about these ones – don’t bother showing me the others on my Overview.”

After removing all the items you didn’t think you wanted to see, you might have discovered that in some circumstances, you wanted some of those items back. In fact, as you engage in different activities in Eve there are times when it would be convenient to have different items displayed in your Overview. You can do this by setting up and saving filters.

Think about the three or four situations you most commonly find yourself in. For example, you might like to run missions, salvage them, and indulge in occasional low-sec PvP. Tuning the Overview for each scenario would be a great help. The process involves setting up a filter to display only what you want on the Overview, saving it as a preset filter with a name, and then loading the different filters as you need them.

An example – A filter for Missions

• Right click the white triangle next to the ‘Default’ tab in the Overview, and choose ‘Overview Settings’.

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• Select the Filters, then Types tab. At the bottom of the box there is a "Deselect All" button - click that.

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• Under "Celestial" select "Warp Gate", and "Stargate". Under "Entities", select the various mission ships, and the Rogue Drones. Under "NPC", select Pirate and Mission NPCs. Under "Ship", select all the ship types. (You can control whether you see friends/enemies/neutrals in the States tab). Under "Station", select the Station option if you like to see stations on your overview during missions. These are the basics of a mission setup, they may be tuned to suit your preferences.
• Right click the white triangle beneath the word "Presets" and choose "Save current type selection as..." and give it the name "Missions".

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• Now under "Celestial", add Cargo Container, Large Collidable Object, and Wreck. Save this as "Salvaging".
• Thirdly, click "Deselect All" once more. Now add the following types: Celestial: Stargate, Warp Gate. Charge: Select all these. Deployable: Select all. Drones: None, though this is a matter of preference. * "Drones" filter is useful to have, but drones tend to clutter a PvP overview. NPC: Pirate NPC. Ship: Select all. Save this filter as "PvP".

Now you’re able to run Missions with the minimum distractions on the Overview, and easily load a new Overview filter when it’s time to salvage or fight. The PvP filter above is a 0.0 setup - in Low sec it will be useful to add gate sentry guns.

Tabs

You may have noticed that the ‘Default’ tab has a frustrating habit of returning to its default settings. Never fear! Five more tabs can be added to your Overview, and once configured, the Default tab becomes irrelevant. Each tab can be configured with a preset filter, so your most commonly used filters are always just a mouse click away. Other filters can still be loaded temporarily onto any tab as well.

To add a tab, right click on the “Default” tab, and select “Add Tab”. Give your new tab a name. Add as many as you like or need.

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To set a default filter for each tab, right click the white triangle next to the “Default” tab, choose Overview Settings, then “Overview Tabs”. The menu presented will allow you to select a preset filter for each tab, along with the brackets setting (explained below.) When finished, click "Apply".

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Brackets

Objects in space are difficult to see. Have you ever noticed that the further from the sun you are in Eve, the darker it gets? Your client helps you locate items in space by marking them on your screen with symbols, and in Eve, these symbols are called ‘brackets’.

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In exactly the same way as the Overview can be configured to display only certain types of object, the brackets can be configured to highlight only certain types of object on the screen. In fact, the filters created for the overview are exactly the same filters as are used to configure brackets – Eve doesn’t distinguish between the two. When you set up a filter to display certain items, then save it, that filter could be applied to the Overview, the brackets, or both.

Some players prefer to always display a consistent set of brackets on their screen, regardless of their overview setup. To do this, set up a filter to select the objects you’d like to highlight, using the instructions above, saving it exactly as if it was for your Overview tabs. Save it with a meaningful name such as “my brackets”. Then in the Overview Settings, select this filter in the ‘Brackets’ drop down box for each of the different tabs.

When selecting the “Mission” tab, Eve will display the objects you’ve selected in your Mission filter on the Overview, but it will display the brackets on screen according to the filter named “my brackets”. When you change to the “Salvage” tab, the Overview will use the “Salvage” filter, but the brackets will still highlight the same objects on screen, dictated by the “my brackets” filter.

Other players prefer to use the same brackets on screen as the objects selected in the Overview – to do this, select the same filter name for both the “Overview” and “Brackets” setting of each tab in the Overview Setup.

The most advanced users of brackets like to fine tune their filters, usually by having different bracket settings for each tab, by adding or deleting a few extra items. For example, in a Mission filter, I may not want Stations, Gates and Wrecks to display on my overview, but I would like Stations and Gates to have the icons on screen so I can find them quickly if I need to. I would create a filter that only displays the NPCs and other mission objects, and save that as my Overview filter, then I would add the gates and stations and save that as my mission brackets filter. I would then set up my Overview Settings for the Mission tab to use the Overview and bracket filter I’d configured.

Hints

• You’ll end up with a lot of filters doing this! I prefix my bracket filter names with “b-“, so I have them in pairs.. “Mission” Overview tab will use the ‘b-mission’ bracket filter.
• ALT+X - toggles bracket for Moons and Large Collidable Structures
• ALT+Z - toggles all brackets
• Always, Always, Always target from your overview. This is a thousand times easier than targeting in space. There are a very few special circumstances when you will target in space, but by the time you need those, you'll know the game well enough to know it's the right thing to do. So for now, always target from the overview. This helps avoid shooting gates, friendlies etc.
• Control-Click targets someone, control-double click targets and approaches.

Suggested Filters

• Miners may like to use different filters for different ore types to simplify finding the best 'roids.
• Drones and Fighters - Using a separate tab for these is very useful. Being able to quickly flick to a Drones tab to see what drones are on the battlefield without having them clutter your main PvP Overview is a big help.
• Planets - Covops like to use a planets-only filter to quickly see ranges relative to each other and relative to the ship's scan range. This can double as a 'safeish plances to warp to' filter.
• All Celestials - anything a player can warp to, (gates/planets/belts/stations/moons) - Covops use this to help them locate players in space by range
• Selective PvP - If you are in a ship that specialises in combating other ships, or if you have a specialised role in a gang, a filter that only shows you valid target ships is useful. For example if you're a destroyer, you may want interceptors/frigates/drones. If flying a Crucifier with tracking disruptors, you may only want to display ships the carry guns.
• "Spare" - Keeping one of the 5 tabs free for you to assign things to on the fly, without having to worry about your regular tabs, can be useful.