Control/HUD Ideas

[AVBJim]

Just some suggestions.

In a fighter cockpit, the HUD, puts a box around anything in visual range of the pilot and the targeting carrot (the little diamond). In the game, say anything with in 1K or so. Maybe make range selectable. Have the box color coded for IFF signature of the ship. For example, green for good guy, red for bad guy trying to kill you. This should be a standard feature on all fighter designs and optional upgrade for other ships. The reason for this is simple, you are heading along, and something starts shooting you, but who? Obviously a bad guy, but where is he? Right now, you have to cycle through the hostiles list until you find, hopefully, the one nearest you doing the shooting. Or you toasted one guy, but the auto target jumped to a guy 1.5 light minutes away instead of his wingman who is still pumping energy into you. Again, you are trying to manoeuvre while toggling through the hostiles list again. This system would give you instant visual display. You can still have target selection, as now, with direction indicator and the + on the scoop for desired target/objective.

Other features to think about are color codings based upon hostile/non hostile, with selectable settings. This is already done with the messages. Say I am try to kill Luddittes, so make them red, but ULN are also hostile, but I don't want to shoot them, so make them some other visible color, but not friendly.

The last feature to consider is a friendly fire lock out, this would stop guns/beams from firing when a friendly is in the kill path. It is nice of him to block the other guy from shooting you, you should not thank him by pumping rounds up his exhaust.

Well now. We have a system, with three levels, that can keep us earning money to run in to buy.

[Dawe]

Continuing on HUD ideas,
It would be cool with being able to upgrade to additional colours on the radar, I agree. Those pesky Ulns are in the way too often.
Anyway's my idea here would be that one could buy software updates to the HUD. Instead of having everything from the beginning that is.

An idea I'va had for a software upgrade in the HUD would be a wayfinder. A wayfinder would be a tracker that has the ability to guide you through the clusterous star systems and gates that makes it real hard to, say backtrack your tracks back to Cephid 17 when you're in Rlaan space.

A second idea(/ or first depending on how you see it) would then be to have these additional colour markers for different factions or the possibility to mark some ships extra somehow.

Edit:

A third idea: Autodocking computer. Works by targetting a planet or station and giving a commando and then the autodocking computer takes over. Creating less hasslein the docking bay!

Fourth idea: A continuation to the wayfinder upgrade, the wayleader. You put in the coordinates where you want to go and the computer flies itself. (then just press the time compressing button and hope for the best). This could make things easier when one is doing big cargo runs. But it also has the risk of dulling the gameplay as it takes away some of the plying experience. But hey, I'm just brainstorming.

[chuck_starchaser]

Guys; all the original engine developers are gone. This is not the time to come up with ideas for new features. Maybe this forum should be closed or renamed. We're having trouble enough making cubemaps work, when most of the coding for them was already done. And we're facing an uphill battle, going forward, with getting the engine to compile for windows; which it has refused to do for many months now. And we're lacking programming help in a big way. Don't want to discourage you, but I want to discourage you. Ideas in this forum hardly ever made it into the engine in the best of times; and these are the worst of times.
Find us C++ and Python programmers first; then we might have a chance. But a docking autopilot is AI work, and the AI parts of the engine are the most convoluted and inscrutable of all.

[Dawe]

i know chuck... the state of the game is bad, worst ever. I was just posting some things that came up to me when doing some brainstorming about VS, and i thought its best to get them down on somewhere official so the ideas could be used in some distant future

[charlieg]

I don't think there's anything wrong with brainstorming on what you want in the game. I mean, part of the way to get contributors invested in the game is to have them help imagine the glorious future of it. However we need to be practical and know that our current goals are fix bugs, document code, and integrate content. Still, there has to be hope that we can create some kind of momentum with the development, no matter how far away that momentum is, and then if there are clearly agreed frameworks for new features, that have been hammered out by new contributors and aligned with the capabilities of the codebase, that's potentially useful.