[Suggestion] Ability to add categories or tags to player assets

[Daerogami]

Managing large quantities of assets is _still_ daunting.

I would like to see the addition of a taxonomies system (an idea I got from a CMS called Orchard Core, I'll refrain from linking to the docs as it's a super simple concept and their docs make it look more complicated).
Provide the ability to add tags to an entity (stations, fleets, ships, etc). Could be a csv string, space-separated string, or a string array, just needs to be tokenizable, most OOB search packages probably work best with a single string data type instead of an array.
Then there would be a search page added to the player property tabs. You could favorite a few tags or tag combinations for convenience.
Now you have a dedicated field for player categorization and you don't have to fudge the entity names to get usable sorting.
You could even have tags attached to ship presets and station templates so they come along for the ride when building.

Here are some simple mock-ups of what I have in mind:

[flywlyx]

It certainly looks interesting, but without the ability to modify behaviors simultaneously, this function isn’t as useful as it could be.

[Daerogami]

I would think the current context menu that shows up when selecting entities on the ships page for example would be sufficient.
There certainly is room for additional improvement, but as a first step this would do a lot of good.
What do you have in mind?

[grapedog]

There is a custom tabs mod that just adds like 3 extra tabs to assign assets too.... something simple like that would be SOOOO useful. Add 3 or 4 custom tabs to organize assets in the vanilla game, and I'd be happy as a clam!

[vvvvvvvv]

Managing large quantities of assets is _still_ daunting.

<snip>

You can add stuff like "#Escort", "#Trader", "#Builder" to ship names, when you rename or build them. That also allows you to search for those ships on the map.

[Brinnie]

There is a custom tabs mod that just adds like 3 extra tabs to assign assets too.... something simple like that would be SOOOO useful.

Just in case you are interested, it is up to 9 tabs now. Custom Tabs by Mycu

[grapedog]

There is a custom tabs mod that just adds like 3 extra tabs to assign assets too.... something simple like that would be SOOOO useful.

Just in case you are interested, it is up to 9 tabs now. Custom Tabs by Mycu

lol, when it was just 3 tabs I was kind of wishing for 4 or 5.... i don't know what I would do with 9 tabs... but I'm sure I'll figure it out! Thanks for the update!

[Brinnie]

lol, when it was just 3 tabs I was kind of wishing for 4 or 5.... i don't know what I would do with 9 tabs... but I'm sure I'll figure it out! Thanks for the update!

Well, yes 9 can be a bit of a challenge to fill (at least at first) but it is customizable so you can put as few tabs as you like. I believe Mycu has also added other features since the time when there were only 3 tabs.

There is another one of his mods "Map Hotkeys" which is unfortunately unavailable since the v.7 update, that has to be IMHO the most direct way to "add categories" or "tags to player assets". It managed that by letting you assign Ships, Station or player assets to hotkeys like all RTS games do. One click of the hotkey would select the assigned asset and second would centre the screen on it.

It came with 5 hotkeys as standard but with a bit of rough cut and paste to edit one of the mod scripts you could take it up to the traditional 10 or more hotkeys. It has to be the most overlooked mod/feature in X4.

That category (with the assets assigned to the hotkeys) would be the most manageable and accessible one of them all.