Suggestion: Variables to make radio chatter consistent
Posted: Fri Feb 17, 2017 5:45 am
Not sure where's the best place to post something like this...
I watched a ship depart a station, spin around and come right back in (probably that shouldn't happen, of course, but that's a different subject) -- all the while, the stationmaster voice, the ship pilot's voice, and the ship's numerical designation kept changing. It seems the game uses random numbers to select voices and ship numbers on every call.
It would be a nice bit of immersion "atmosphere" if, for as long as you're in a station's sector, that station could have a randomly selected variable of 0-7 (or 1-8) assigned which would be used to set just one of the eight voices as its stationmaster for that period. In addition, as long as a ship is in your scanner range, perhaps it also could be assigned variables that would be used to set the pilot voice and a consistent numerical designation for the radio calls. (If the routine could check to see if a number is already being used and make sure each ship has a different voice -- until such time as all voices are already in use in cases of heavy traffic, in which case start the random selection over again -- that would reduce the likelihood of hearing the same pilot in multiple ships at any given moment.)
I watched a ship depart a station, spin around and come right back in (probably that shouldn't happen, of course, but that's a different subject) -- all the while, the stationmaster voice, the ship pilot's voice, and the ship's numerical designation kept changing. It seems the game uses random numbers to select voices and ship numbers on every call.
It would be a nice bit of immersion "atmosphere" if, for as long as you're in a station's sector, that station could have a randomly selected variable of 0-7 (or 1-8) assigned which would be used to set just one of the eight voices as its stationmaster for that period. In addition, as long as a ship is in your scanner range, perhaps it also could be assigned variables that would be used to set the pilot voice and a consistent numerical designation for the radio calls. (If the routine could check to see if a number is already being used and make sure each ship has a different voice -- until such time as all voices are already in use in cases of heavy traffic, in which case start the random selection over again -- that would reduce the likelihood of hearing the same pilot in multiple ships at any given moment.)