not sure how hard this would be to add but here goes,

I would like to see fog trails behind objects in fog sectors. Ships, missiles, rockets and even energy (burning fog?) should leave trails in the fog. This would help in aiming and avoiding shots in ion storms and any new sectors that will have fog in the future. If this isn't hard to add it would make fighting in fog sectors much more interesting.

Adding a short lived tail effect to various objects probably wouldn't be too bad. Something simple that is meant to blend into the fog effect. But they'd have to fade out quickly (probably at the same time as the object that created them, or around 5 seconds for engine trails), or you'd lag out a sector just by firing a few batteries worth of blaster shots.

In fog sectors, objects don't really show past 500m anyways. I'll bet this would balance out fog trails for schtuff.

Sounds like a cool idea to me.

Actually, I had long planned something along these lines, but maybe a little different. I basically wanted to do really long-lived trails, like some sort of "signature" of an engine having passed through, which might live for minutes at a time. This might allow people to track each other in the fog. Then there might be other addons that reduce engine-trail lifetime and so on.

Anyway, global trails for everything might be interesting. But, yes, it might also really slow things down. We've actually just redone part of the particle system engine, so I'll be looking at "trails" in general later this week. I can't easily add anything fog-specific (Ray would have to write some new code), but I'll take a look at the performance impact at least.

Fogging and trails are both in need of some coding to improve performance on higher-level cards. Both are kind of "baseline" implementations right now, intended to function on the lowest common denominator of board, but not exactly the most optimal.. especially for modern Vertex/Pixel Shader 2.0 video chips. It's something on our list.. but doing some performance testing will have to go hand in hand with adding features like this.

Yeah, like the trails that ships leave in Homeworld?

The homeworld trails are more like glorified.. engine graphics. And they're mostly so long so you'll be better able to see all the ships when you're zoomed out, owing to the RTS nature of homeworld. The "trails" I'm talking about would last for minutes, not seconds. So you could jump into a storm or fog sector, run across the "trail" of another vessel, and follow them.. potentially up to the point where they jumped out. Persistency of that sort of thing (after they leave the sector) might be a little problematic. But anyway. That's the general idea.

Maybe "trail" in the sense of following the footprints of someone who has passed by some time ago would be a better analogy than the concept of a normal "missile trail". Something that would allow you to "track" an enemy, or prey?.. through an otherwise opaque atmosphere. And maybe add another element to strategy.

that would be awesome.

but after kourrier. :d

After a lot of other really important stuff like faction system, friendly fire restrictions, new nation ships and weapons, new factions, new ctc, economy, etc, etc.
Year 2010 is a good year for fog trails. :)

Well, if it can be done easily by adding a persistent particle effect and will stay even AFTER a ship has left the sector, then swesome. As long as that's easy to do. (But I'm betting the "make trails last even when the player is no longer in-sector" will be Hard.)

If it's easy, it could be implemented soon, I guess. But yeah, I'm with Bojan - faction system/friendly fire/stationkilling fix FIRST. Then economy. Of course all this after KOURIER... At least, that's how I vote.

Would be nice.

And for performance, I'd suggest to remove the "blue ion particles" (whose goal is now fulfilled - better - by fog), so to free ~300 particles per frame and let them become the trails.

Ionized particle trails?