Overview manipulation: Difference between revisions

== What can you manipulate? ==

[[image:overview_manipulation.png|thumb|Most people edit the overview file to change the appearances of the '''tabs''' and the '''labels'''.]]

While you can make any number of changes to the overview through the .yaml file, almost all of the things that can be changed ingame is much easier and more reliable to change ingame, with the exception of changing colours, font sizes, styles etc of the tab names and the ship labels / brackets in space.

===== Tab appearance =====

The ''Overview Tabs'' settings ingame will allow you to add html-formatting, but most people prefer to edit this outside the client anyway due to the highly restrictive input fields. It's much easier to edit those values in a proper text-editor than trying to do it in a tiny little window that shows but a few letters at a time.

===== Ship labels / brackets in space =====

Whenever you select a target or hover over a bracket in space you'll get some information about the entity. By manipulating the .yaml file you can customize this to show the information in different colours, font sizes or even with personalized linebreaks etc. These changes will affect your combat notifications as well and show the parts regarding players and player owned entities appropriately formatted, which is an added bonus that leads to improved readability of onscreen combat messages. If you decide to add manual linebreaks or other formatting code, be sure to check that the onscreen combat messages are still readable.

You can only change the appearance of players and player items (like mobile depots) this way, celestials, anomalies, NPC ships etc will have their default appearance no matter what you do.

== How do you go about manipulating the overview? ==

[[image:overview_settings.png|thumb|Access your overview settings with your [[Keyboard_controls#Modifying_Shortcuts|shortcut]], chat-channel command or through the regular right-click context manu.]]

== Editing the overview file out-of-game ==

The overview is saved in the .yaml file format and can be edited in pretty much any kind of text-editor, like the commonly used [https://notepad-plus-plus.org/ Notepad++], but of course the standard notepad editor that comes comes with Windows works as well. Simply right-click the file and open it with your favourite text-editor to start editing. The majority of the changes you're likely to make (tab and label edits) will be at the very end of the file.

===== File structure =====

The overview is stored in .xml files where you can write plain html-code and it'll be parsed just fine. Attributes and values are split across individual lines, with {{co|violet|-}} markups identifying and grouping the variables. Here's an example with changes {{co|slateblue|highlighted in blue}} and comments in {{co|lightgreen|-- green}}:

</pre&lt;noinclude&gt;&lt;/noinclude&gt;>

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===== Reloading settings while in space =====

You can easily purge or load new settings while, but in order for the new settings to take full effect (especially ship labels) you'll need to load a tab that doesn't have ships or player owned entities on them (to sort of "purge" them from memory) and then swap back to a tab that does show them. Once you do that, the new settings will be in full effect.

</nowiki></pre&lt;noinclude&gt;&lt;/noinclude&gt;>

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===== End result =====

The above mentioned example will end up looking like this:

| valign="top" | [[image:overview_manipulation_combat_logs.png|thumb|Ship labels affect the combat log as well.]]

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