anyway, on with the main purpose of this post - i realised that on hardware that supported it, oolite, while already very pretty, could be made a lot prettier. this would probably take quite some coding, maybe enough to justify or work towards a 2.0 release? the specific graphical features i'd like to see (all optional, so as to not make oolite suddenly unrunnable on computers that can handle it as-is but couldn't handle these new things) are:
- ship textures having lightmaps (for glowy parts!), bumpmaps (for raised/indented sections), and possibly a map for reflectivity if this is even possible (shiny reflective chrome is surely manditory for boy racer ships, and could be a pretty neat effect if used sparingly for other ships)
similarly, damage textures - laser fire and other damage causing scratches, scorch patterns, holes etc to appear on hulls, which only get removed by maintenance, would be nice to see randomly battered ships flying around :)
slightly more glowy lasers, with a more smoothed gradient of lightness and transparency, perhaps approaching white in the very centre of the beam? and laser fire being able to briefly light up (reflect off of) the hull/surface of the beam's origin and target (if this already happens, it would be nice to have it a little more noticable)
slightly more pronounced shield impact effects would also be nice...doesn't even have to be too flashy to work, perhaps just causing more of a diffused energy pattern in a slightly bigger radius from the point of the beam's impact, or a dramatic ripple and/or flash for missiles
smoother engine trails - more of a gradiented transparency would make a pretty huge difference
- turning off textures and using simple filled colour polygons, or turning off texture smoothing, or using lower res textures
use simplified explosions (sprite based, perhaps?)
turn off lightsourcing
(etc)
like i said before, these features (at least, the ones for more prettiness) would probably take rather a lot of time and effort to code, but i think they could be really worth it :) an ultra-ultra pretty oolite would be a joy to play, and certainly something to show off for the side of open source community developed games...i'd help with said coding if i could, although right now my C knowledge is limited to not much more than "oooooh, i can take a string of text and write a function to reverse it!", though i'm still learning, and really would love to help if i gain the knowledge necessary to. i don't even know if all i've suggested is possible :) but it would be so nice to see...
anyway, thanks for listening to (or at least, reading) me go on and on about things i'd like to see! you must get plenty of "i want a better oolite!" suggestions, so feel free to ignore mine if they're silly, and do remember that i think oolite is already fantastic as it is, nothing i've said is meant to detract from that :)
marianne ibbotson
http://xmoogle.org
(edited to change the subject line of this post)
name in the author and "prettiness++; prettiness--;" 
in the topic of a combat/trading sim just spells "porno spam".
