I'm making this post to educate you all on overviews. Three things you need to know:

1. Overview settings can mean the difference between life and death.
2. Certain overview settings should never be used because they are shit.
3. Some options are customizable, and you can make multiple different settings, but the ones I am about to show you should never be changed.

Now to show you settings that work for general use.

First, types. This is everything that will actually show up on your overview.

Generally for standard combat you should have all ships, and mobile warp disruptors, selected, and nothing else. Types selection is the main thing you can have variations on, for example you can make overviews that have stargates selected for quick aligning, or only battleships for fleet combat, or fighters, etc. You can save your settings by right clicking the little triangle at the top of the overview, clicking “save current type selection as”, and saving it with an easy to remember name for quick switching. You switch presets quickly by right clicking the triangle and clicking on the name of the overview preset you want. For example I have my overview settings in a screenshot here:

The more the better.

• Capsules: only capsules, switch to this as the last enemy ship is about to die, for easy podding
• Combat + drones: Same as standard combat but with drones and fighters
• Corpses: corpses only
• POSes: Same as standard combat but also shows POS stuff
• Recon: Standard combat + corpses so you don't run into one and get decloaked and pwnt, might have poses too, cant remember
• Standard Combat: Ships + bubbles
• Travel: Standard combat + gates

More the merrier. I'm gonna add more I think.

Second, states.

This is the one that can fuck you up badly and should almost never have anything deselected, because for some reason, things that are deselected take everything with those parameters off your overview, even if they fall under an option that IS selected. The only thing you should have deselected is gang members, because friendly fire is BAD.

Now we have colortags. These are little tags that will show up next to the guys name in local, and will also show up on the icon tag on your overview.

You'll see a list of various parameters. These are all prioritized. The ones on top will be taken into account first. So using my settings, lets say Ituralde is -10 security status. He will still have the alliance tag because alliance is above outlaw status in priority. You should always have gang members on top, and high standings above low (because we have some corps +10 which are in alliances -10, that way that corp will show +10 but the alliance shows -10.) War targets should be very high on the list. One point to note is that sometimes you will want to have outlaws above -10, that way you will see people who are global criminals AND -10 sec in local, to see if someone can be shot legally. But for general use, have bad standings above outlaws.

Next, background.

These are mostly unnecessary except for two: War targets, and outlaws (below -5 sec, but also counts for people who have done any criminal act in the last 15 minutes). Have war targets as blinky red, and outlaws as just plain red, or yellow or orange or whatever. War target is easy to explain, but outlaws will now have a red background, which means you can shoot them and you know it. HOWEVER, the background setting also allows you to see a -10 standings colortag on their icon in the overview which lets you know if you are allowed to shoot them according to our ROE. So you will never shoot anyone without the -10 colortag, but you will be attacked by sentries and lose sec status if you shoot people without the red background.

Columns are the different rows of information that show up on your overview.

Always have icon, pilot name, type (not in image) and distance selected. ALWAYS. Corp and alliance are very useful as well for quick identification purposes. Velocity and Transversal Velocity are useful for actual combat to know, obviously, how fast your target is moving, and how bad your guns are going to suck at tracking them.

This is the area you choose what information shows up on a ship when you hover your mouse on it in space. It is important for quick intel on what ships an enemy has. Too often I see people say they see a ship “with a brutix hull” or whatever, we need to know exactly what ships people have.

Always have pilot name and ship type selected. I have corp and alliance selected as well for easier log reading and quick intel gathering, etc.

That concludes my crappy lesson.

This guide was written by Selim.

With the advent of tabbed overviews in Trinity 1.1, the following is addended to the Guide.

With the new overview, each type can (and perhaps should) be assigned to a tab with that overview setting and “Show all brackets” for the bracket types. This will allow you to maintain your chosen overview through a dock/log as the default tab will revert to some other setting. The procedure to do this is as follows:

Begining state:

Right click the default tab, choose “Add tab”

Give it a name. I've used the same names as the overviews named above in this guide. 1 overview per tab.

Assign an overview definition (created above) to the tab.

Overview Assigned state:

Assign Brackets (things you see in space as compared to things on the over view). I usually show all brackets. Brackets you have marked not to see don't display icons in space for those things. For instance, drones. If the overview defined that I chose does not have drones visible, and I choose that as a bracket definition, I won't see the drone icons in space either (in addition to perhaps not seeing them on the overview).