I've noticed frequentely i have pirate ships in front of mine I haven't seen until is too late, and they are firing me at will. So:
*Every object must be marked in HUD. We can assume that every class has a diferent marking. For example: squares for planets, hexagons for ships (that are less CPU expensive than circles)
*Enemy objects maked in red, friendly in green... etc.
*The selected object may have a cross, a more brilliant marking, or a animated marking.
*Include a "proximity alert" that sounds when an "enemy" object is near our ship (for example, when it comes close to "scan" range in contraband runs)
And i was thinking about a new sensor model.
*The heruristics radars marks in red not only our real "enemys", also the user defined "enemys" (useful in contraband runs).
And this part is applied to the "cloaking device vs. sensors" competence.
Every cloaking device has a chance of being detected, and every sensor system has a chance of detect a cloaked ship. But this chance deppends of the quality of every one.
Cloaked ship "B" has three variables
- cloak-value
cloak-depth
ship-mass
- blind-value
light-value
sensor-strenght
Let me explain this with an example:
Ship A is trying to detect a cloaked ship B.
1 - B will be detected by A when it takes so "detection-hits" as cloak-depth.
2 - If B's cloak-value is equal to A's blind-value, then B doesn't take detection-hits from A
3 - If B's cloak-value is equal to A's light-value (but different to blind-value), then B takes an X amount of detection-hits from A.
4 - The "X" ammount of hits taken is dependant of distance between A and B, B's ship-mass, and A's sensor-strenght.
At this point it looks like it doesn't have much sense. But let me show you:
"B" can't change its cloak-value whitout uncloaking and re-cloacking. "A" can't change its blind-value without restarting the sensor system (which implies a long time of total blindness). However, A's light-value may be set to rotate (which consumes more power)
There's a difference between using low and high quality sensors/cloaking device: High quality sensors offers higher rotation speed (for light-value, wich implies spreading more hits to everywhhere) and higher sensor-strenght (which implies better long-range detection). High quality cloaking devices offers higher cloak-depth (whick implies most time undetected).
It looks like a bit confusing, but i thing that reading it twice anyone can get it.
Bye
