About the technical question: using some of Svengali's techniques you can make a ship move in very specific ways onto a mission screen, instead of just rotating in the middle of the screen. You could combine his technique with a new trick: you coud have 1 'ship' made up of one adder as the main body, and 2 other adders as its subentities, placed some distance away... 3 for the price of 1!
The only drawback with missionscreens is that the entities have no speed - means they have no (or are not showing?) exhausts .-)
But Kaks is absolutely right - a lot of things are possible. -> examplevideos.zip (3.3MB) Flashplayer required.
hmm.
IIRC one can have a special mission screen pop up at any time and under all sorts of conditions, the ones I specified above would even be pretty mundane.
when docked
and no mission screen
and say...tradingscreen is selected.
what type of socialplace would be present could be determined while docking according to type of dockable, type of system, reputation etc.
even a list of possible places togoto could be.
Still to be useful a lot of content would be required.
rather than:
== The Bruisian Brawl ==
a drunk local tells you a tale of a random planet, apparently
Divan is well known for its parkingmeters and love of ancient sitcoms. (i.e. a random planet description)
Something interesting needs to be added as well:
"At Divan they would pay a million bucks for these Bob Saggit Special betamax tapes...unfortunately I have no ship as I could use the money for my spawn mother, who has recently fallen deleriously ill! Anyway I need some monies fast and you look like an enterprising type, would you buy these tapes from me for the sum of C.2500?" [Y/N]
But this could be too much like that first internal mission we all trigger.
Maybe fairly simple descriptions only for ambient would be more usefull.
Or a cooperative oxp in the style of YAH would be the answer; everyone adding locations and interesting encounters in a shared framework.
