Its finally here, my guide to the overview and the various settings available for it. Read on for a comprehensive guide to probably the most useful window you’ll see in EVE…
What is the Overview?
The Overview is the window, at the right hand side of your screen by default,which displays information about the things that are in space around you. Any item that is in space can be displayed on the overview.
The information displayed by the Overview (and brackets, more on those later) is completely customizable, and multiple setups can be saved to be accessed and used at any point in the future. The Overview can also be separated into tabs, which can also have their own setups saved so that any information you require is no more than a click away.
Items displayed in the overview can be ordered by any of the overview columns. Most people stick with ordering items by range, but if you can display the column in you overview, you can order the items by that column.
The symbols displayed on the overview give you an at-a-glance idea of what is in space around you, these symbols are the same as those which appear in your main view as brackets
Overview Range
The effective range of the overview is usually known as ‘the grid’. The size of the grid is defined as a radius around your ship or the nearest large celestial such as a gate or station and can be as high as 700km depending on where you are and the individual celestial in question.
Large objects like stations, gates, planets, moons, belts and beacons are visible on the overview from anywhere in the solar system. Smaller items like NPC ships, wrecks, individual asteroids, collidables, other players and drones, are only visible within the grid that you are currently on.
I have determined (through some not so extensive testing) that the grid is an area around your ship of approximately 515km. This was tested with a covert ops frigate at a safespot away from any large celestial objects. If anyone has done their own tests and wants to share their results drop me a line.
The Overview Menu
The overview menu is accessed by right-clicking the white arrow in the top left of your overview and is separated into section with a variety of options in each.
The first section displays all the various presets that you have saved for your overview and will load the one you select into the currently open tab.
The second section allows you to load the default overview settings.
The third section has an option to delete specific presets and options for showing and hiding all brackets
The fourth section has an option to save the filters applied to the current tab as a preset. These filters can be edited on the fly through the right-click menu using the “add/remove <item type> from/to Overview” option and then saved using this option.
This section also includes the option which opens the overview settings window which we will be getting to shortly.
The last two items on this menu are for backing up and restoring your overview settings. It is advisable to do this regularly and keep them somewhere safe. You can also transfer them easily to another installation of EVE if you have them exported. To restore backed up overview setting use the Import option.
Overview Settings
There are quite alot of things to take into consideration when choosing your overview settings. What information do you want to be able to see about what’s in space around you?
Miners will want to see the asteroids in the belt around them and possible other belts in the system. Mission runners will want Rats, wrecks, cans and LCO’s (Large Collidable Objects).
There will be a huge variety of PvP overview set ups depending on your role in PvP and the situations you find yourself in. For example; if you’re in a gang and are serving a specific purpose (ie keeping drones and frigates off the slower moving ships) then you need to tailor your OV to that particular role. I’ll be including my overview settings at the bottom of this post so you can take a look at how I use it.
First things first though, you can’t set up your overview without knowing what all the various settings do. To access your OV settings, right-click the white arrow to the left of the title of your overview and select “Overview Settings from the menu that appears. This will open another window with multiple tabs for the different OV settings.
Filters Tab
The filters tab sets the top level of what actually shows up in the overview. There are two sub-tabs in the filters tab of the overview settings. Once you’ve set up what you want to be visible you can save that preset by right clicking the white arrow next to where it says “Not Saved”. You’ll be asked to name it and then that set of filters will be available as a preset from the main drop down in the Overview menu which you used to access the settings in the first place.
Be aware that if you change any of the settings in either tab (types or states) you will have to re-save the settings, this is indicated by the preset name reverting to “Not saved”.
Filters > Types
The first tab lets you select the types of items visible from other player’s ships, to asteroids and other celestial objects such as planets and collidable structures
Asteroids covers all kinds of asteroid types and allows you to filter them by the kind of ore they yield, useful if your hunting for a specific ore in an asteroid belt.
Celestials covers a wide range of stationary objects in space, many of which are visible across a solar system and not just in your immediate vicinity. These include Stars, Planets, Moons, Gates, Beacons, and Belts but not Stations which have their own category.
The charge filter allows you to see bombs and are mainly used in large scale fleet operations where these weapons are in use. Because bombs are non-discriminatory weapons like smartbombs (they’ll damage anything in their AOE) its usually a good idea to stay out of their way and to do this you need to know where they are.
There is only one option in the deployable folder in the filters tab and that is Mobile Warp Disruptor, otherwise known as a bubble.
Drones covers player controlled drones and is useful if you want to avoid smartbombing your own or fleet members drones accidentally, or want to be able to target enemy drones easily.
Entities includes scenery and other items that aren’t covered by the celestials category such as billboards and sentry guns. Mission NPCs are also included under this category so if you want hostile mission targets to show up in your overview they have to be selected in here.
NPCs covers all varieties of NPC, hostile and otherwise, apart from mission rats and NPCs. If you want hostile NPC’s to show up select Pirate NPCs and Mission NPCs. There may be some overlap between the items in this category and those in the entities category.
Ships is where you can filter the types of player controlled ships that appear in your overview. Mainly used in large fleet battles where you may be assigned to target a specific type of ship (Frigate, BC, Logistics, Command etc) I generally have all of these selected.
Station determines whether you want stations to show up in your overview.
Structure sets the filters for player owned structures in space and the various elements thereof.
Filters > States
The States section of the filters tab allows you to filter what is seen according to a variety of states that the items being filtered may be in. This is useful in gang and fleet combat where you might want to remove your gangmates and/or fleetmates from your overview to avoid targeting them inadvertently. It also includes filters for wrecks which have already been opened/looted, and filters for various player standings and security levels.
For example: if you wanted to go out hunting players with low security status then you would set this up in this tab by selecting only that option, add to that the ‘player has bounty on him’ and you would be seeing only players with low sec status who have a bounty on their heads.
Note: If someone can tell me how to make only hostile player’s drones visible on the overview (ie, exclude drones controlled by members of your gang) could they please let me know. Differentiating between friendly and hostile drones is difficult and can be costly if you get it wrong.
Appearance Tab
The next tab along is the Appearance Tab. This, unsurprisingly enough determines the appearance of other pilots in your overview and how various pieces of information about them are displayed.
Appearance > Colortag
The first sub-tab in the appearance tab determines whether a small square tag is displayed next to each player in the overview, brackets and next to their character name and portrait in the chat.
The colours of the tags can be changed by right clicking each item on the list (useful for those colourblind players out there) and their display priority adjusted by moving them up and down.
For example, in the list shown, if a player has a bounty on them, has security status below 0, has high standings with you, but is in your corporation. The fact that they are your corp-mate will supercede all the other states and only the tag for that state (a white star with a green background by default) will be displayed. The interactable state only applies to NPC agents in space, and not to players.
You can also set the size of colortag to use, useful if you run EVE at a very high resolution.
Appearance > Background
Similar to the colortags tab, in that it determines how players with a variety of states are displayed, the background tab affects the background colour of the item in the overview and bracket display. This tab does not affect the appearance of the players in the chat list.
Again the colour can be changed by right clicking the desired item and via the menu presented it can be set to flash or not. In the image the “Pilot is an Outlaw” state is actually a flashing red but obviously this doesn’t come across in a still image.
The priority of each state can also be set in this tab in much the same way as that of the colortags. Used in combination with the colortag options, the background colour of a pilot can be used to display additional information about a pilot, allowing you to determine a players security status or standings whether they are in your fleet/corp/alliance or not.
Appearance > Ewar
This tab determines whether an indication of any electronic warfare is being used on you is displayed or not. I generally leave all these selected as it allows you to prioritise targets in both PvE and PvP.
Unfortunately the indicators are only displayed in the Overview at present and the icons are very small. This currently requires me to mouse over the indicator in the overview to get the tooltip which will tell you what kind of electronic warfare is being used on you.
Hopefully this may be sorted in future with indicators appearing larger, on the left of the overview and also next to any locked targets (along with the icons indicating which weapons/modules you have active on them).
Columns
The columns tab in the setting is probably one of the most overlooked tabs in terms of how people use their overview. A wealth of additional information is available to pilots which can be of great assistance to them, not only in identifying their targets but in gaining the upper hand in combat as well.
The Icon column displays the relevant icon associated with the type of object present in the overview (see the legend at the end of this post). This icon is also the one shown as a bracket in the main view.
Distance should be self explanatory and displays the distance from the player’s ship to the relevant object.
Name is the object’s name. If this is a player it will default to the player’s name but this can be adjusted in the next tab. For all other items it will simply give the full name of the object (ie: Brutor Tribe Bureau – Moon 8 – Rens IIV, giving the name of the station and the orbit hierarchy). Stargates will be simply “Stargate (<destination>)”.
Type is not really useful except for other players, as it will indicate the ship that they are flying (Rifter, Tempest, Brutix etc.)
Tag will display the corp or alliance ticker depending on which setting you have selected in the next tab (Ships).
Corp, Alliance, Faction and Militia will indicate the full name of the relevant organizations that the player is a member of. I don’t find this particularly useful as I can generally get all that information from the tag and the settings in the following tab.
The next few settings are where things get interesting. Size obviously indicates the size of the object and can be useful in relation to NPC ships and other players when selecting targets, though there will be other considerations when making tactical decisions of this type.
Velocity displays the objects raw objective velocity, in relation to the world. If you want to stay on the relevant object’s tail then you should set your velocity to match this.
Radial Velocity, Transversal Velocity and Angular velocity each play a part in determining the accuracy of your guns. The main one to watch is angular velocity, if you can keep this number below the tracking speed of your turrets you are more likely to score more accurate hits on your target. Conversely, the higher your angular velocity in relation to your opponents tracking speed, the harder you are to hit. The maths involved is quite complex and unless you know about such things, working everything out from these raw values and your turret attributes is time consuming and hard going.
There used to be a brilliant flash guide on the EVE Website which detailed how damage and accuracy were affected by each of these three values and let you play around with different values and angles of attack to determine the best combat strategies. If anyone has any info on where I can find this (or even has the original guide/tool available) please get in touch, it was incredibly useful , and gives a lot of insight into effective combat piloting.
Moving the columns up and down using the buttons at the bottom of the settings window determines the order they are displayed in from left to right in the Overview window.
Ships Tab
This tab determines what is displayed in both the Name column in the overview and when you mouse over the ship’s bracket in the main view. Generally the Player’s name, Corp or alliance ticker, and possibly ship type are all you need with anything else just adding clutter to the screen.
The order in which the information is displayed can be changed by using the move up and move down buttons at the bottom of the window.
Misc Tab
This tab allows you to set whether items with broadcasts are moved to the top of the overview window or not. Note: this does not move broadcast targets to the top of the overview (it should, in my opinion), merely the player doing the broadcasting, and only as long as they are on the same grid as yourself. This is useful if you’re the one in charge of providing armour, shield and cap top-ups to your gang mates.
The other button in this tab resets your overview completely, deleting all presets and reverting it to its default settings.
Overview Tabs Tab
This is probably the most useful of all the various overview settings. It allows you to add tabs to your overview which will display different sets of objects. In this tab you can set the name of up to 5 tabs, the filter preset to be displayed, and what brackets to display when that tab is selected. This allows you to switch quickly to different overview presets and get a picture of different objects in space around you.
Miners may want to set up tabs for different types of asteroid, mission runners may want to separate wrecks and cans into their own tab so they don’t clutter up the main combat view. PvP’ers will have a multitude of presets for different situations and fleet tactics, mainly dependent on their primary target type and the ship that they are flying.
I generally have a navigation and combat tab as my first tab which displays stations, gates, NPC pirates and other players and have wrecks and cans, Belts and Asteroids, and Planets (for easy safespotting) on their own tabs.
This tab allows you to set whether items with broadcasts are moved to the top of the overview window or not. Note: this does not move broadcast targets to the top of the overview (it should, in my opinion), merely the player doing the broadcasting, and only as long as they are on the same grid as yourself.
The other button in this tab resets your overview completely, deleting all presets and reverting it to its default settings.
Overview Legend
Here is an image of every Overview and bracket icon. I created it by pulling the texture map for the icons from the game assets using Tri-Exporter, which other players have used to get ship models and textures for use in graphics programs. I then put the resulting image into Fireworks and traced over the symbols to produce the ones seen below. As such I have not encountered all of the symbols in game and some definitions are missing. If anyone can fill in the gaps I’d be extremely grateful. I’ve numbered the symbols I’m missing definitions for if you could refer to them by number to save any confusion that would be helpful 
Conclusion
The purpose of this guide was not to tell you how you should have your Overview set up, but to describe the various settings and options available so that you know how to set your overview up the way you want it. Every pilot is different and will use their overview differently. As an example I’ve made my overview settings available for download here (right-click. save as, or you’ll simply open the xml file). To import them they need to be saved to the overview folder in your default EVE folder (under My Documents in XP, or simply Documents in Vista) and then you simply select the import option from the overview menu. It will ask you which presets you wish to import and the rest is up to you.
The overview is an extremely powerful window and used properly can allow you to become a better pilot, either in PvP or PvE. Learn how to use it, get it set up the way you want and it will serve you very well indeed.
As ever comments and questions are welcome below, and look out for a PDF version in the near future (sometime after the Epic Mission one I would think).
Till next time, good hunting and watch out for the flashies.
