Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
Tags

I have been thinking about ways to better organize the list of in-world bots. I primarily use the bot list panel to find and access bots but as the list grows bigger and bigger it becomes more troublesome finding the right bot.


Here's my suggestion for a better way of organizing the bot list:

Once at least one named beacon is placed in-world, add a third tab to the list panel using the beacon icon for the tab.

When that tab is active, list all named beacons as expand/collapse headers (similar to how the Visual Studio toolbox groups WinForms controls for example) (ordered by name ascending/descending - the current arrow button can work there too).

Under each of these beacon name headers, list all bots that have at least one link to this beacon. 

At the bottom of the list add another header for all remaining bots that are not linked to any beacon.


This way the list of bots is grouped the same way we have grouped them to their beacons, thus making it easier to find and access the bots that belong to a certain area - for example all the tree farming bots would be linked to a single beacon that covers the tree farm (beacon: "Treefarm").


I think adding this organizational feature would greatly improve the overall management of our bots while still staying in-sync with the spirit of simplicity :)

Great idea! thanks :)

If you give your bots Name Tags and then name each bot by their beacon group and their job, you can then find them easily.  For example, I have my 100 Folk grouped into 6 "Neighborhoods" and the bots that support the Folk in Neighborhood 1 have names such as "N1Home1" which indicates that this bot in "N1" takes Folks that have just been cleaned back to available homes, as shown below.

So far I've been doing exactly that to try to arrange the huge list of bots in some meaningful way, though with a list of bots as long as yours and mine the list can still be a bit difficult navigating when searching for that one specific bot. Organizing the bots this way works but imho it is not optimal. I still beleive that having the added option of bots also being arranged by the beacon they are linked to, would make it easier for us as players and managers of this army of bots :)