Oolite Bulletins

Something I've been thinking about lately is a way of making ships easier to see. Perhaps y'all find it easier than I do to pick out an unilluminated ship/station/cargo canister against the blackness of the infinite, but I'd like a little help here and there. I find that ships/objects past a certain distance just aren't drawn, even if they are on the scanner - well, if they are then I can't see them.

How about a device that draws outlines around objects in the HUD? (For we semi-blind, obviously, mortals.) It could be as simply done as drawing the edges of the visible objects in white, I guess.

This has been proposed (and indeed, an experimental code branch was made to try it out), but it was felt it was too 'un-Elite' for the time being. The counter agument is that in the original Elite, ships were always easy to see (being bright white), but in Oolite they can be in the shade and extremely hard to see.

I'm very much for it, but you'll have to convince the boss

This is what the experimental branch looked like:

http://www.alioth.net/tmp/targetrich.png

The HUD colours in most cases follow what the scanner does. It is called the 'Advanced Naval Targeting System'. If you can build Oolite from source, you can build the branch to try it out (the FancyTargeter branch).

Well, that's one way of doing it, yes...

But the idea I had would just be to draw the lines joining the vertices of the ship in white, à la original Elite... since the HUD is computer-generated anyway, it could easily do that...

Another thing that would be nice (un-Elite, true, but isn't that what Picky mode is for? ) would be for a shield/hull bar to come up for the object under the reticle. Not the targeted object (which could be different), but the one the player's about to zap ^_^

There have been previous calls for Infra-red / Ultra-violet colour shift goggles, so that in systems with low light you can change which bandwidth of EM rays you choose to look at.

This would make ships easier to spot.

However, the call has received mixed reviews and may be a nightmare to implement.

Could we have a spotlight as equipment (should be faily cheap)?

Ships are hard to make out, but a powerfull searchlight would make them easy to see, whilst mainting the old-elite feel.