Feature Requests + Praise

[Artnez]

The last space game I played was Star Wars: X-Wing when I was a young kid. Since then I've tried a few space simulators and was bored out of my mind due to terrible graphics, unrealistic gameplay, etc. There hasn't been a game to date that is like Evochron Renegades - it looks great, plays great and is truly open ended (landing on planets.. WOW!). Needless to say I bought a copy. I just want to thank the creator because he has truly made a small party of me really happy inside Thanks!

I have some feature requests after playing for a few days:

1) I use the mouse pointer to fly -- can you create an option to remove the mouse cursor? It serves no purpose for me other than being in the way. When I fly with the mouse, I use the central cursor as my mouse cursor. The mouse cursor that I can move all over the screen gets in my way a lot and sometimes confuses me.

2) Can you create a way to filter through what I want to mine? Since I'm still new and want to build up my ship, I haven't left the Sapphire system yet. My strategy right now is to pick up a mission to destroy 20 asteroids. I fly to the asteroid field and mine up as much as I can, then destroy 20 asteroids. This makes mining even more worth it for me as I'll earn an extra 12,000 credits on top of the 60,000 or so credits I'll make while mining. I like to stock up on Platinum and Diamond, but I have no use for Metal because it's so cheap. However, whenever I fill up my 5 cargo bays with Platinum and Diamond, I keep getting an annoying message telling me that I have no room for Metal so I have to keep hitting the "clear last message" button so it doesn't fill up too much. It would be cool if I could set something that says "I only want to mine Platinum and Diamond".

3) I'd love it if I can have atleast 3 saves. Sometimes I create a set of objectives for myself that will take considerable time to accomplish. It would be great if I could create save point when I start, and a couple of save points while I'm doing it. No need for 100 save points, but 3 can help me revert back further in case I make some really bad decisions (ie: I'm afraid of making alliances right now because I don't know the true benefit of each faction so it would be great if I can set a "failsafe save point" in case I really screw I up... then I don't have to start from the very beginning if I do something really stupid by accident).

4) Is there a texture pack somewhere? I have a fairly high end computer and can handle a lot more detail. It would be great to see even more beauty than there is now (particularly when looking at planetary landscape textures). It would be great if it were easy to install.

5) Can you allow targeting of asteroids? Mainly this would be used to see how close I am to one. Since asteroids have a small gravitational pull I'm sure this would still be realistic. It would be cool if when you target an asteroid you could see what metal contents there are. This would work great with the request above. You could target an asteroid, select the "Platinum" subsystem, and get to mining only platinum!

6) Is it possible to create 3 or more new cockpit styles? The thing that bothers me the most about the current cockpit is that it's too packed together with bars and such. I can't really see as much as I'd like to sometimes.

7) (This would be REALLY cool). Create "recon camera" under the spacecraft. It doesn't even have to modeled in either. The way it would work is, you would switch to the camera view and it would kind of fuzzy but mostly clear. The camera would be located below the spacecraft and you can turn it in any direction you want and also zoom in a little bit. This would be awesome for doing some quick recon on the area around you to look for objects. It would also be more realistic. The spacecraft in that time would definitely have something like this so they wouldn't have to spin the craft all over the place just to take a look at their surroundings. The view Left/Right/Top/Rear works well, but it really isn't enough to get a really good view of the area (and you're still constrained by the view inside the cockpit obstructed by bars, panels, etc).

Lights! Would be spectacular if the spacecraft could a simple lighting system (just like headlights). When turned on, it would provide some visibility in front of you.

9) "Low altitude indicator". It sounds awesome and makes a lot of sense. It would be great if you could turn it off though because when mining on a planet, that thing keeps going off so many times it drives me nuts.

10) More variety in comms. This isn't THAT important but would really add to the atmosphere. It doesn't really bother me that most comms are the same voice, but it would be great if there was more variety in communications between ships that you here. At some point after hearing the same transmissions over and over (ie: "this system is quiet"), it slightly takes you out of the immersion.

11) Collison course warning. If you're going at a very rapid speed towards and object and start getting very close (without reducing speed), it would be great if there was a warning telling you that you're on a collision course with something. This would work the same if a ship was doing it to you. There have been times when I'm sitting around, mining peacefully, and a huge ship jumps out of nowhere and bumps into me. It would be great if I would a warning indicator saying that an object is on a collision course with me. There would be an option to turn this off if it really annoys people.

--

That's all I've got! Thank you so so so much for the game and hopefully one day you'll get enough funding to make it even better!

[Edited on 3-9-2008 by Artnez]

[Edited on 3-9-2008 by Artnez]

[Edited on 3-9-2008 by Artnez]

[Edited on 3-9-2008 by Artnez]

[Vice]

Hello and welcome. And thanks for your support. One thing I'd suggest is reviewing this forum as several of the matters you've posted about have been discussed, debated, and addressed in previous discussions. Here are some of my initial responses to each point:

1 - The mouse point mode needs the cursor visible so the player can gauge the degree of their input. But there is more than one mouse control mode, so I'd recommend switching to the Mouse Direction mode, which removes the pointer used in the 'Point' mode and instead treats the mouse like a joystick and responds to movement as the degree of input rather than pointer position. Many players prefer that mouse control mode.

2 - You can actually do that now. Manual player control over material sorting from mining is part of the interactive gameplay equation. You need to prime each cargo bay for the material you want. Simply discard anything you recover that you don't want until at least one unit of the material you want is in each bay, you can then continue to mine and the tractor beam system will only apply the material you've put into each bay. When a unit of a rejected material is discarded, the text message is displayed to simply make you aware of it. If the text is getting in the way, you can edit the text.dat file to remove line 806, the text will then simply appear as blank '>' lines without the notification.

3 - Simply copy your pilot profile to other slots for each save point you want to keep. This is actually recommended as a generall backup procedure as well.

4 - No current 'pack', however, you can import your own textures for a desired detail level using the mod options.

5 - Not with the ship targeting system, asteroids require visual awareness to avoid, part of the skill set a player needs to develop rather than relying on subsystems to do it for them. This is an area that you'll quickly gain skill in though and pretty soon, you'll be able to quickly pan your view around to watch out for them and plot safe travel paths.

6 - Yup, very moddable. If the cockpit struts are something you want to remove, use the nostruts.txt option described in the instructions to remove those. You can also download and use the same customizing option for Arvoch Conflict which removes the glass strut textures for a more bubble canopy appearance: http://www.starwraith.com/arvoch/downloads.htm

7 - There are several view options, one of which works much like you describe. Press the V key twice for the pan view in 3rd person. Then use the Insert, Home, Page Up, and End keys to pan the camera around the ship and look all around. Use the Delete and Page Down keys to zoom the camera in and out.

8 - Pondered for asteroid caves, but generally avoid this as if you were a mercenary in the future, the last thing you'd probably want in free-for-all space would be flashing/bright lights alerting everything around you of your presence. Kind of like a virtual 'kick me' sign on your ship.

9 - Simply use the alerts folder in the mod kit and place a blank sound in it using the filename bb-lowalt.wav

10 - Added for immersion, so it can be tricky to get the right balance with something like this. The voice samples are altered to add some variety, but they obviously are very similar. May be expanded in the future.

11 - It's a good idea, but yes, it could become annoying. Many players would probably think the alarms occurs too close, some too far away. I'll keep it on the concept list, for now situation awareness is the key.

[Artnez]

Thank you for responding so quickly!

All points taken.

[rivalin]

Originally posted by Vice

8 - Pondered for asteroid caves, but generally avoid this as if you were a mercenary in the future, the last thing you'd probably want in free-for-all space would be flashing/bright lights alerting everything around you of your presence. Kind of like a virtual 'kick me' sign on your ship.

I understand if it's actually due to engine limitations, but I can't see how small utility lights for something like mining would attract any more attention than having a foot wide glowing plasma beam arcing a hundred meters out of the front of your ship melting the side of an asteroid and a huge glowing engine trail spewing out the back. In any case sensors are clearly able to detects ships thousands of kilometers away, or would the pirates be like "y'avast, he can afford headlights, his ship must be weighed down with booty!"

[madmax]

Of course headlights are for rich people, seeing was ahead is over rated.

[Daedalao]

Just a thought, but tying a spotlight to a disable low altitude warning option would definately be nice. (btw, most of the time in aircraft, pilots will turn off the low altitude warning for take offs and landings)

[tha_rami]

Why the heck would we spend resources on something as trivial as headlights? I'd rather see them used for important stuff later on, honestly.

I'll check your other points later today, got to run, lol. Just those headlights... no, thanks.

[Drache Rott]

I too do like the idea of a light on the front of the ship you can turn on and off, the the ability to track your distance from a given asteroid. space often does not give perception of distance and unless your saying all asteroids are giant things... the size of the item your approaching getting bigger is only so helpful. You could be running up very fast on a small asteroid thinking your still a very long ways from a large one.

The interactive side of things whern mining is great but I personaly thought having a way to tell your science officer what stuff you dont want to mine would make them worth more of thier pay, though on the same token it could make mining take longer as your science officer only pulls the things you want, or at the very least a good science officer could ajust the rate at which you pull better matierals as thay have more experince in useing the beam..something along that line

[MMaggio]

You know, that's not a bad idea!
I don't know if it could be implemented, but having a Science Officer affect mining, even in a small way, makes sense and would be a good reason to hire one.
Let's kick this idea around and see what we can come up with...

[MMaggio]

Excuse me gang, but did this idea of a science officer affecting mining just "die" or was my post missed?

[Artnez]

I think it just got buried since the original topic didn't cover that, maybe start a new thread just for this?

[Exeneva]

Originally posted by MMaggio
Excuse me gang, but did this idea of a science officer affecting mining just "die" or was my post missed?

Maybe it should be an option if a science officer had a certain skill rating...

[Mechanical]

I like your mining idea a lot. Probably just mining a little faster would be the most balanced option in terms of difficulty. Maybe the Science Officer could give you some of the benefit of panning the beam around without having to do it yourselfl- that seems like a good job for him.

-I also like the headlights idea but mostly just because I think it would look cool. It could be useful on the dark side of planets or asteroids though.

-Maybe the altitude threshold for the Bitching Betty could just be reduced so she only starts up when you're at 1000 meters or so or maybe just beneath the mining beam range rather than 6000(?).

[Mechanical]

This wasn't worth starting a new thread for, but I was daydreaming today and I had a thought. It's small, and perhaps too radical a change, but I like it nonetheless. Sorry about the bump. It's not original at all, of course. (I also have yet to try out cloaking devices, so I'm not sure how redundant this would be).

Anyways, it would be sort of neat if you could power down all of your ship systems to make you more difficult to detect. Not completely invisible of course, but enemies would need to be considerably closer to pick you up on their scanners.

The flip side would of course be that your scanner wouldn't be active, nor any of your other systems. There could even be a required warm-up interval to recharge your weapons, engines, shields and reboot your ship computer. So you could potentially avoid a fight, but you'd be pretty helpless if you couldn't pull it off.

I think it would be cool to add a 'hide' option to the already existing fight/run options. It might be cool in multi-player too. Just a thought.

Also, I see a lot of threads with feature requests and ideas. Maybe it would be a good idea to have a sticky thread to make it easier to see what's been brought up already.

Thanks.

Cheers,

Mechanical

[rivalin]

Sounds like a good idea, in I-WAR 2 they had the option to power down your ship integrated with the general power controls, so you could direct power to weapons or engines or shields, or spread it equally among them, or send no power to anything, although I think after a while life support would begin to fail and you had to power back up again. It would add a really cool aspect to multiplayer as well, it would be kind of like submarine warfare, with people powered down coasting along, and everyone unsure whether to power backup. If there was a time delay then it would really enhance the tactical depth of multiplayer.

[CS-ACI-]

Hello,

Unless I missed the control for it.

Auto minning, press "B" to start and stop instead of keeping your finger on the key.

Steve

[tha_rami]

Auto-mining: ALT+B.

[Berdyon]

Hey Mechanical,

You wouldn't happen to have watched the Firefly episode on "Scifi Channel" last Tussday, would you?
Where they are looting some old wreck of a huge passanger ship, then detect an Alliance Cruiser approaching, shut off all systems, and are not detected (untill the cruiser detects a warmth residue and does a full scan on the wreck offcourse).

Oh BTW, since above story would be really cool in ER: in favor! Would need to have Navy Cruisers added though, and some kind of scan that spots the cruiser before they spot me... Then I could replay it

[CS-ACI-]

Hello,

Originally posted by tha_rami
Auto-mining: ALT+B.

Thank you.

Steve

[Mechanical]

Originally posted by Berdyon
You wouldn't happen to have watched the Firefly episode on "Scifi Channel" last Tussday, would you?

You know, I've never actually seen that show. I keep meaning to but never get around to it. I'll set the DVR to save some for me.

I've been thinking about the shutting-down idea, and though I still think it would be a very cool feature, it might just not be that useful.

The trouble is, at least so far, I haven't really come across many situations where I couldn't just run away by turning off the IDS, leaning on the afterburner and hightailing it out of there. Likewise, it's nearly always possible to do a fulcrum jump to an empty sector to escape.

Multi-player might be another thing entirely though, but then it would be more for offensive ambushing situations rather than hiding. I could imagine some cool cat-and-mouse situations where one ship appears fires a salvo of missiles, zips off and disappears again in the confusion. That could make for some interesting PvP scenarios.

Of course you could work something like that in single-player by giving the AI that ability as well. It's rare that I don't have a lot of warning of impending attack. If you were wandering through seemingly empty space and then, all of a sudden, a squadron of red blips appeared just outside of gun range- that would be interesting.

Hmmm...

I dunno. Cool, but maybe just not workable.

[Vice]

I could imagine some cool cat-and-mouse situations where one ship appears fires a salvo of missiles, zips off and disappears again in the confusion. That could make for some interesting PvP scenarios.

One step I'd suggest is trying out cloaking devices. ER features a new way to use them that gives you much more control over how and when they can cloak your ship and the scenario you describe above is exactly the kind of thing they can be used for. In fact, a certain player used this technique on me today, twice! lol

[Berdyon]

Wait, there are cloaking devices???
Drool drool...

[tha_rami]

Yup, there are cloaking devices. And WMD's. Which you can use to produce a offensive manoeuvre called "the Star (of doom, death and everything)".

[CS-ACI-]

Hello,

First off great game, been looking for something like this for a long time.

Now for a feature requests.

I read in another thread that there is limited space for information, it was about the new build and adding the faction name.

Well first off, I play at 1680X1050 and without the cockpit overlay. I find it gets in the way, and I would rather see the scenery.

Anyway, what this does is leaves lots of space.

My first thought is to re-organize the data screens at the bottom too look more like a console and add a fourth screen.

This fourth screen could be a MFD, displaying all sorts of data scrolled through using a key press.

Screens that could be used include some already in the game but some others too.

News (real time)
Faction information (local information)
Personal status (kills, money, reputation {local and more generally})
Current contract
Recently visited co-ordinates (easy refference instead of using pen and paper)
Text messages with scroll bar and or tabs (system messages, crew and other ships)

My second thought was to add a screen or two, top left and or top right.

My third and final thought for now, was to have an additional pop-up window with other information in it, but a smaller permanant window would not get in the way of game play.

Steve

[MMaggio]

Yeah? And what would I be able to see at 640X480?