Mike's Big List

Suggestions for the game engine
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Mike73
Shipmaster
Posts: 15
Joined: Sat Nov 25, 2006 12:26 pm
Location: Perth, Australia

Mike's Big List

Post by Mike73 »

Okay, so while I was up north on my vacation work (I'm home for Chrissie for a little while), I had some time to jot down a whole bunch of suggestions for EH. It ranges from simple stuff to pie-in-the-sky ideas, in no particular order... So no pressure on Paul or anything, they're just my crazy ideas :)

-Sounds! EH needs a bunch more sounds, including things like:
- Warning klaxons (hostile alert, shields failing, etc)
- Hyperspace range alert
- Hyperspace in and out
- Shield/hull hits, so you know when you're being shot at :)
- Thrusting sounds? etc.

- HUD overlay. Sometimes when you enter a system you can see a lot of ships in your field of view; it would be cool to have a overlay that highlights every ship with green circles (or something like that), and maybe printing the name and affiliation next to it.

- Rear radar. Just like the existing one, but facing behind, so I can see who's on my 6. :)

- 3D target pointer arrow. See Matt Burch's Exobattle for a good example, if you still have OS9.

- Nearest hostile target key.

- Extra target reticle. I've seen in a few space sims where a second sight takes your target's velocity into account, showing you where you need to shoot ahead of your target to hit it.

- Ship name. I'd just like to name my ship, that's all :) It'd also be something to use in mission dialogues.

- Entering both a first name and last name for players. As above.

- Ranks. Fairly obvious; get in favour with a government, do a key mission and recieve a military rank. Precludes ranks with certain other goverments, and allows access to extra ships, weapons and missions. There could also be corporate and trading company ranks (eg CEO of GalactCorp, or Master Trader of Universal Express)

- 3rd person view needs the HUD and target sight!

- Dynamic music - it would be cool if the default music was low key, ethereal music, but then it could quickly crossfade into a more pumped up battle tune when a hostile appears.

- Hyperspace effect - probably don't need to mention it, but something more than the fade to black would be cool.

- Shipyard. It would be nice if the spinning planet was replaced by the ship you're looking at in the shipyard. Okay, so I just want to get a better look at my ships :twisted:

- Paint jobs. A way to customise your ship. An extra black and white texture map would define the area of the main texture to be 'colourised'; the game then performs a little colour addition using the two maps and voila, you have a lime green spaceship :D

- Comm chatter. This one's a little out there, but basically you would be able to hear radio chatter in a system. The voice samples would be very filtered and low volume, so you can't actually make out what's being said, and the frequency of samples would be related to the number of ships in the system. Occassionally a pirate attack or soemthing might trigger a slightly more audible SOS sample. I'm not entirely sure if this idea would be neat , or just plain annoying.

- Persons and Fleets. Fairly similiar to EVs implementation, so that I can see Captain Smith of the S.S. Sillyshipname turn up with a 0.1 probability in a given system. Fleets would be of a certain affiliation and could fly in formation (which breaks up if attacked/attacking), and could also contain persons, so you could see Admiral Bob leading a task force.

*deep breath* okay, that's probably enough for now :)
Mikey
DJ Mikey
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Joined: Fri Nov 24, 2006 8:09 pm

Post by Mikey »

Hope u had u've been having a good holiday Mike

Cool Ideas IMO.

Ship name is a must!!

Comm chatter is a really great original idea. The only prob I can see with it is if you have music playing, the two together could become a mess. Also you'd have to have quite a few different audio samples and they'd have to be fairly long... I guess the audio fidelty doesnt have to be very high though. Infact the lower the fidelty of the audio was the more realistic it might sound.

The dynamic music idea is a good one. I wrote a track recently for Paul to use but I'm not sure it would work with this idea. Could re-write it with dynamic music in mind and then write a battle music one. Have just bought an orchestral sound package with sampled strings/brass etc. Might be a good oppertunity to get to grips with it. Lets see what Paul thinks.

Mikey
Paul
Da Man
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Post by Paul »

Excellent ideas! I was actually just about to post a topic requesting ideas. I still will, though, to simplify and pare them down a bit.
Differentiation is an integral part of calculus.
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