digital readouts and planet display

[Ganelon]

The first thing I'd like to suggest is the possibility for digital readouts that could be used in place of or in addition to the standard bars for things like speed, fuel, altitude and so on. It would give some options that could be made use of in HUD/cockpit displays and it wouldn't actually change anything important in the game. It would be nice though, to see how fast you're coming down on a planetfall or sunskim, or what percentage of shields you have left at the moment.

The second suggestion, I'm not sure as it's as plausible. At present, the main scannner/radar/whatever_it_is shows ships and stations, but does not show planets, moons or suns even when they are within scanner range. That can logically be explained away by a bit of handwavium about how it shows the location of ID transponders or beacons in the ships and stations that are there for navigation and collision avoidance purposes. (We'll skip over how it manages to show asteroids, because that's less easy to come up with some bs to explain.)

But it would be nice if there could be some sort of a smaller "scanner" display that would show large bodies that are very near. They wouldn't need any detail, maybe fill in with a single colour to show solid object as opposed to empty space.

It might look a bit like this when approaching a planet, sun or moon..

http://i96.photobucket.com/albums/l186/ ... adio/1.png

and more like this when actually skimming or landing..

http://i96.photobucket.com/albums/l186/ ... adio/2.png

When at close range, like the second picture, it would look and function quite a bit like the "artificial horizon" in airplane and space shuttle instrumentation.

Both of these suggestions are items that seem pretty common in "space opera" control panels and dialogs, and would not add combat advantages that could unbalance the game.

Neither one was present in the original Elite game. But a display showing a planet in close proximity with no detail would have been redundant in Elite, because the main display had no detail anyway and landings on planets weren't even possible. Digital readouts would have been possible in Elite, but with e screen resolution of the time would have added needless clutter to the instrument panel, and the original game didn't require much precision as regards altitude or shield percentage.

So they aren't "Elite canon" items, but they could be used to add additional functionality and interesting "eye candy" to Oolite HUDs/cockpits.

[Kaks]

I thought you could already do a digital readout display for speed or fuel or altitude, at least expressed as a percentage.

I haven't looked at that part of the code in any major detail though, so I could be terribly wrong there...