Originally from Massively.com by Brendan Drain

Since it can often be hard to find or click on something in three dimensional space, EVE Online provides a useful tool called the "overview" to make life easier. The overview window lists objects and ships in your general vicinity and is one of EVE's most important tools for providing situational awareness. Whether you're mining, running missions, pirating or engaging an enemy fleet, almost every activity in space relies heavily on using the overview. In this two-part guide, I break down the overview settings and examine the best way to set up your overview for activities ranging from fleet warfare to mission-running.

Why is the overview so important?:
In addition to the convenience of clicking on items in a list rather than having to locate them in space, the overview has some essential functions. Information such as a ship's speed, name and distance from you can be displayed on the overview. Items on the overview can also be differently colored or filtered out based on a wide range of factors from security status to whether they're in your alliance or not.

With all of these options, setting up your overview can be a confusing affair. In part 1 of this guide, I explore the various overview options and what they all do.

Filtering the overview:
To open your overview settings, click the triangle on the left hand side of the overview's title bar (pictured right). The first menu in the overview setting screen is the "Filters" menu, which is split into the two separate tabs "Types" and "States". The types tab determines what types of item will be shown on your overview. Everything from veldspar asteroids to dreadnoughts are listed here and only those things selected will be shown on your overview. This is extremely useful for de-cluttering your overview of items you don't need to see. If you're pirating in an asteroid belt, for example, having asteroids on the overview will make it harder to quickly spot and target your prey.

There are two main schools of thought when setting up your types list. The first method suggests hitting the "Select all" button and then manually removing types you don't want to see as you encounter them. This is easy because the option to remove a type from your overview appears when you right click something of that type. This method will ensure that nothing accidentally slips by you unnoticed and is recommended for most activities. The alternative is to hit the "Deselect all" button and manually add only those items that you absolutely need to see. This is popular with 0.0 alliances engaging in fleet warfare, who typically instruct their pilots only to add ships and a few other essentials to their lists.

The states tab is a handy addition to the filter menu. This allows you to filter out items based on variables like security status and standing. Most pilots will leave all of these checked but depending on what you're doing, it can be very helpful to deselect some options. If pilots in your corporation, fleet or alliance show on your overview, for example, you may accidentally target them in the heat of battle. To help prevent friendly-fire incidents, having the option to remove fleet members or corpmates from the overview is extremely useful.

Appearance menu:
The appearance menu allows users to customize the appearance of items on the overview. The "colortag" tab allows a variety of tiny icons to be associated with pilots. Icons can be set to show under conditions such the pilot being in your corporation, having a bounty on his head or even having negative standing with your corporation. If two of more states apply, such as a pilot in your corporation with a bounty on his head, the one higher up in the list is applied. Items in this list can be moved up or down as you see fit, allowing you to determine the priority given to each color tag. The most useful property of the colortag list is that the icons appear next to pilots names in chat channels, including local chat.

The "background" tab does the same job as the colortag tab but applies a more visible colored background to items in the overview. This makes it very easy to distinguish between friend and foe in an instant, helping you make quick decisions that could make or break a PvP encounter. Colors used can be customized and the option to make a color blink is available, making the color pulse to make it more noticeable. The only color which flashes like this by default is the red background applied to pilots with security status of -5 or below but the blinking effect can be applied to any color.

The "Ewar" tab is a fairly recent feature addition to the overview. If an enemy uses any form of electronic warfare against your ship, a small icon will be added next to the pilot at the rightmost edge of your overview. The ewar tab lets you deselect any types of electronic warfare that aren't important to you but in general keeping all of this tab selected does no harm.

Columns menu:
The columns menu lets you select what information you want to be displayed about each item on your overview. You can add everything from distance to size and velocity but keeping the number of columns to the bare minimum is recommended to avoid clutter. Depending on what activity you're doing, you'll need different information immediately available. If you're part of a sniper gang, for example, you'll want to add angular velocity to your columns. Angular velocity tells you how fast your turret tracking will need to be to hit a target, which can help you avoid attacking targets that are moving too fast to hit.

The most useful columns to enable are "Icon", "Distance", "Name" and "Angular velocity". When running complexes or missions in a group, the "Tag" column can be useful too. By right clicking on an enemy and selecting the tag option, the gang leader can tag enemies with a number or letter. This tag is visible to all gang members, making it much more clear which targets their gang leader is referring to when he gives orders. In PvP, the often overlooked "Radial velocity" option is actually a very good indicator of how quickly enemy ships are closing in on your position. If an enemy's radial velocity is positive and matches his total velocity, you know that he's heading right for you.

Default settings:
The default overview settings that exist when you first log in are less than optimal. They can fill your overview with extraneous information that make it difficult to find what you want. No matter what activity you're undertaking, you'll benefit from creating a new default settings list. With the overview settings menu open, click the "select all" button on the states tab. This will enable everything that can possibly appear on your overview, allowing you to manually deselect those things that are useless in your everyday life in space.

Start by deselecting everything in the "Asteroid" section. Then in the "Celestial" section, deselect the options "Planet", "Moon" and "Asteroid Belt" as these are easily available through the standard right-click menu. To reduce clutter, deselect the options "Large Collidable Object", "Wreck" and all options with the word "container" in them. Unless you've got a penchant for collecting corpses, you can also safely deselect the "biomass" option without impacting your day to day activities.

Deselect the entire "Drone" section as seeing them on the overview doesn't really help. In the "NPC" menu, deselect everything except "Pirate NPC" and "Mission NPC". The "Entity" section is mostly fine but you should remove "Sentry gun" and "Billboard" from this list. To finish, deselect everything in the "Structure" menu. Your overview is now free from the major sources of clutter but if you ever see anything on your overview of a type that you don't want there, right click it and select the remove from overview option. Don't forget to save these settings so you can reload them later. The only difference between this setup and a mining overview is that for the mining overview you'll need to enable asteroids.

Missions:
The mission overview setup uses the default setup described above as a base. Load the default setup and open your overview menu to make a few tweaks. If you're doing missions or complexes as part of a co-operative gang, it will be helpful to enable the "tag" option in the columns tab. This allows you to see an alphanumeric tag that the gang leader has assigned to each enemy ship so that he can refer to them in an unambiguous manner.

If your ship uses turrets, turning on the "angular velocity" column will show how fast your turrets need to track to hit certain targets. Likewise, missile ships will benefit from turning on the "velocity" and "size" columns. This will let them know if a target is moving too fast or if its signature radius is too small to take significant damage from your missiles. Both of these will help you avoid wasting time and ammunition on targets that you can't hit.

PvP settings:
Unlike mission-running, your overview for PvP will not use the default base described above. The default base settings are there to ensure nothing useful is missed out but in PvP you only want to see your enemy on the overview. Seeing friendly or neutral ships on your overview could cause a friendly fire incident and additional clutter will make it harder to find your intended targets. Open your overview settings and press the "deselect all" button in the "types" tab to create a blank canvas to build your overview on.

In the stations in the "Station" section and then in the "Celestial" section, enable "Beacon", "Covert Beacon" and "Stargate". The beacons option will show cynosural fields and complexes that you may be asked to warp to by your fleet commander. Having stations and stargates on the overview is always desirable as having to fiddle with the clumsy right-click menu will slow you down when your fleet commander gives the order to align or warp to them. Faction Warfare players will also benefit from selecting "Landmark" and "Warp Gate". Finally, select everything in the "Charge" and "Ship" sections and you're done.

The most important section for PvP is the states tab in the filter window. As described in the first part of this guide, this section allows you to filter your overview by abstract states such as corp standing or fleet membership. Here you should select everything except those you don't want showing up. Deselect "pilot (agent) is interactable", "pilot has good standings", "pilot has high standings" and all of the "pilot is in your alliance/corporation/militia" options.

Appearance:
The default appearance options use a lot of small icons where colored backgrounds would be more appropriate. Coloured icons have the benefit of showing in local and can be useful for quickly assessing the security of a system but they aren't as quick to spot on the overview. In this menu, select "pilot is a member of your corporation", "pilot is a member of your alliance" and all of the standings options. Another useful tip, as described in part 1 of this guide, is to select "pilot has security status below -5". This actually only shows if the target has a criminal flag that allows you to attack them and is be a very handy way to spot pirates in low security space.

If you're taking part in corporate wars and faction warfare, you'll want pilots you can shoot at to be obvious and distinct from those you can't. This is best done in the backgrounds tab of the appearance menu. Deselect all options here and then reselect the options "Pilot has security status below -5", "Pilot is at war with your corp/alliance" and "Pilot is at war with your militia". Next to these options, ensure that the background colour is red and anyone who shows up red on your overview will be a viable target.

Overview tabs:
One of the most useful additions to the overview over the years is overview tabs. This allows you to rapidly access separate overview lists that you might need without having to load new settings. If you want to concentrate on killing enemy electronic warfare, for example, you could save a separate overview configuration which shows only specialized electronic warfare ships and then add this to your overview as a tab. Other useful tabs include options to see only enemy drones and fighters or only enemy frigates.

To set up a new overview tab, open your overview settings and go to the "overview tab" section. Here you can create up to five separate tabs that, when selected, will change your overview settings to match the selected configurations. Add your default setup to the list and then create specialised setups for niche roles that you might need to switch to in an instant. One of the most useful features of overview tabs is that you can select a configuration in the "brackets" menu and this will hide items on the main screen that don't appear in the overview.

Summary:
The overview is one of EVE's most useful tools but like many aspects of EVE, it's complexity means that a lot of newer players struggle with it and don't get as much out of the UI as they could. I hope this guide has helped explain the various ways the overview can be used to best effect.