Oolite Bulletins

I remember Elite for amiga/st having a lot of graphical menus, i.e. F7 planet info with a thumbnail of the planet inhabitants etc.
The best thing was a graphical display of my cobra (done in 2D) with pointers for weapons and addons.

What about this?

Hi Evil Juice, i agree with you whole heartedly. Earlier i mentioned kinda the same thing, but you have put it more succinctly. A graphical representation in the menus, would add a lot of atmosphere to the game, without changing the game. There is such a lot mentioned on this site, which in my opinion detracts from the ethos of Elite, what it is about, trying to make it another game. rather than enhancing the idea of Elite. the graphical menus idea is a very good one, which does not go down the route of FFE / FFE2 which is progressively occuring.

Hmmm... Nice idea, but...

With all the OXP models around, that could cause some headaches, I guess. I mean, it's probably not overly hard to write a routine that translates the model-files to a 2D representation, but where *exactly* (coordinates) do you put all the expansionrepresentations on every ship? That would/should go in the OXP data itself, forcing the existing OXPs to be adjusted with some extra data. Not a biggy, probably, but some modelers, like 8bitapocalypse seem to be gone from the boards, so their models would then lack such graphical representations, or (fallback) Giles (or someone else) could write a 'generic' placement routine, which will look okay... Most of the times, but not always.

(Oh, if this would be implemented: damaged equipment too, please! )

Well, OXPs can already specify a lot of positional things about where forward lasars/missile launchers/view points go. If you don't specify anything, you get the default settings. The only things which don't have an actual x,y,z position that I can think of are NPC ship things like subentity lasers (which fire out of the centre of the front plane of a bounding box wrapped around the subentity model, IIRC).

Ahruman's Drydock also shows that it is perfectly possible to do an x-y-z set of projections for any ships, given the data. I'm not sure it is something that I would do, myself, because - although I can see where you're coming from - I don't feel motivated enough to do it. I'm sure someone like me could do it, though, with enough effort. And the license under which all the softwre we're talking about exists would permit such work. However, I guess I'm saying that all the code and all the settings exist... so pitch in, oif you wish . I'm sure no one will complain.