Can we get verbal cues when the ship takes damage?

[evei2p]

I've just discovered the voice narration feature which is really great for being able to keep track of what's going on during a session without having to keep checking the miner all the time.

However, can we also get an announcement when the ship begins taking damage? There could be options to 1) receive an announcement every time the ship takes damage, 2) receive an announcement only every 30 seconds when taking damage (to prevent announcements from happening every single time the ship takes a volley of damage), or 3) receive only one announcement per mining run.

This would be useful to people who mine in low and nullsec and need to keep track of more troublesome rats. Normally rats are a non-issue because a good fit can tank them, but I've found myself needing to constantly keep checking for rats in the event a dreadnought or jammers appear. My only options to do this are either to switch overview tabs on the mining account manually every few minutes which becomes tedious, or keep an alt on grid on my other computer to monitor the field, which is what I do.

Since a dread can appear at any time and kill a ship in under 60 seconds, or jammers can mess up an entire run, not keeping track of rats on a constant basis results in lost ships or wasted mining time. Having announcements of damage would allow a little more AFK freedom and not necessitate being near the computer at all times to monitor the grid.

I imagine this would also be useful to people who are mining mercoxit and want to know when they are hit by a cloud.

(Also note: I don't know if this is already feature in the narration option to announce all log messages, as I found this was a bit too much information. I only use "most important" announcements.)

Thanks!

[VanGoghGaming]

That's a good suggestion but as far as I remember you should already hear the warning "Detected shield damage" and it's marked as an important event as well so you should hear it regardless of your narrative setting!

[evei2p]

I don't think it currently announces shield damage (if it previously did, maybe the EVE log text changed similar to the ore hold issue). Mined for about 12 hours yesterday after turning on narration and it didn't have any damage announcements despite rats spawning and attacking every 45 minutes or so.

Edit: I also just checked the TM log file, just in case there were additional damage entries that weren't labeled as important, and there is nothing in the log regarding damage received to the ship.

[VanGoghGaming]

If you have a shield booster repairing the damage as soon as it happens then it won't be announced since it will never be detected in the first place... The first few lines of the shield need to turn red for the damage detection to kick in.

[evei2p]

Not using any shield boosters, and shield bar definitely goes red.

Edit: Actually, I'm bad. Do I need to have the shield critical damage check option selected? I have it deselected since I assumed it only checked for critical shield and not all damage entirely. Turning it on now just in case it needs to be on, and will see what happens.

Edit 2: Well maybe not. Just fired on the ship till it got to 75% shield but no verbal cue.

[VanGoghGaming]

You need to select the option to start active modules only if shield damage is detected.

[evei2p]

Ah that works perfectly, thanks! Didn't even know that was an option.

I will say that TM flipped out yesterday when I had critical shield monitoring checked and closed the game even though I had ~85% shield left. Turned it off because I don't need critical monitoring and it looks like the announcements work without critical monitoring, but dunno if that's a bug or maybe just a one-time thing where it went nuts lol (and only happened after it had been working fine for several hours of mining).