A fistfull of ideas.

Thinking about improving the Artwork in Vega Strike, or making your own Mod? Submit your question and ideas in this forum.

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Squalid Blaze
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A fistfull of ideas.

Post by Squalid Blaze »

Hello folks. I installed Vega-Strike a little over a week ago, then joined the forum as I had some problems with it which are now resolved. In passing I made a suggestion about graphics and to my surprise was taken up on it, cool, and asked to post it here. Having messed around with ink scape and gimp, which are also new to me, without coming up with anything post-worthy as the idea is simple I'll just describe it.

It's about displaying inertia, thrust, targeted direction of travel and actual momentum on the HUD radar. Imagine an analogue clock face, with the usual three hands. The second hand would point at the intended target. The minute hand would represent the actual the direction of travel. The hour hand would show thrust. To show the relationships between forces, the length of the thrust hand would vary: the force of thrust being expressed as a percentage of the momentum. Perhaps when all three hands line up there would be a colour change. Then imagine that idea in 3D. As a standard it may be too cluttered but as a turn on and off feature ( inertial display? ) could be handy. Perhaps part of some new sensor.

For people using a mouse there is already the alteration in the shape of the green circle, which is very helpful. I had an idea about that circle too. What if instead of deforming to an ellipse it deformed to a tear drop shape, the pointed part indicating the actual direction of travel. Maybe even the tear-drop elongates as the discrepancy between actual heading and where one is thrusting increases. In this sandbox of a mind I can imagine a little detail like that really adding to the feel of the game as one is hurtling towards a huge rock in some low powered heavily laden brick desperately trying to drag the ship off an impact trajectory.

To make up for not actually submitting pictures here's another idea. When in travel mode one is moving at very high speeds indeed. How about blue shifting the front view and red shifting the back view to show this? As the effect would apply to the whole screen bar the HUD so it might be an easy tweak; just tie velocity to an overall colour shift above a certain speed.

I'm running Vega Strike 5.0 on Ubuntu 9.04 and hadn't found any issues when I last posted, there is a possibility that there may be some compatibility drift after all. Only little things. When using the right button as a fast way to find the click-able parts in places when docked, the shipyards one is always slightly missed. If I use the escape key to pause in flight and leave the game for a while it resumes whilst leaving the quit/escape icon on the screen. On one mission I got blown up and was in the escape capsule, the enemy kept shooting at me and there was also the sound of, I presume, micro-meteors bashing into me but the escape capsule was invulnerable, I turned my speakers off and even after half an hour of assault no damage at all.

Ah yes that's another. This may be due to my operating system but the sound of the micro-meteors hitting the hull is a bit over the top. So much so that when it starts I turn the sound off. If it isn't just because I'm in Ubuntu 9.04 how about making a thin yellow line flash on the edge of a shield to show that an object has hit but that it's not critical, maybe a quiet fizz like a fly being fried in one of those electric fly traps, and save the clanging ( which really is a good alarming sound ) for serious hull damage?

It would be helpful to be able to access the navigation computer when docked, it would also be more realistic. This may be a 9.04 bug but during flight, even on a scanning mission, I get the names of what is in a system but no data.

I'm quite new to Linux and all the programs I can download for it so I'm sorry I can't offer much at present. Vega Strike is the best game I've seen in a long time and thanks to all of you. Be nice to give something back someday. So far all I have are ideas. Meanwhile if I find any more Ubuntu 9.04 bugs I'll let you know. I can write a bit and have lurked in the documents section so hope to contribute words when I understand the game and setting better.
Turbo
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Re: A fistfull of ideas.

Post by Turbo »

Can you post pictures that illustrate your concepts, even if they are not game-ready-quality, so that we can more easily understand your idea? New ideas for the UI are much more rare than artists to execute and refine them.
Turbo

There are two speeds in combat: stopped, and as fast as you can go. Unless you run into something, going fast keeps you alive more often than stopping.
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