These are pretty silly... but who knows they might make you laugh, and I'll bung in some more serious ones if I think of them!

Basically, I was just transporting cargo, and as a kind of joke that I posted on my Facebook and that, stuck "Truckin" by the Grateful Dead on in the background... which got me thinking that an in-ship music player might be pretty sweet :)

And THEN... we were kind of laughing about it in the chatbox... and it was suggested that we could have... custom BUMPER STICKERS! lol Like "Keep on Truckin'" on the back of an Atlas, which I think would be very funny :)

What else erm.. I've always thought visual representations of some kind of a person's character would be cool, kind of a bit like Eve but I was thinking more in a stylish Starfox-style, where it comes up at the bottom of the screen. I think there's a lot that can be learned from the more arcade-y space shooters like Starfox, as they tend to be MORE style over substance (ie things are more commonly there because they look nice and not because they are functional). I think taking ideas from those games and incorporating them well could results in a VERY stylish and eye-catching interface in the Vendetta ships.

Ok, that's all for now! Sorry to bore you with my randomness - I've been a Vendetta player for actually 6 years on and off, so I guess I'm just interested to see what can be done with the game going into the future :)

Cheers guys and keep it up - I love VO!

DS

It is possible to make a music player plugin, and I've sort of done that already, though what I made is a little bit different from what you are probably thinking of. Unfortunately, however, the API for dealing with music through VO is very limited, so it becomes a lot more hassle to set up a general purpose music player. The main problem is that there is no way to know when a song has finished playing. The game doesn't give plugins a way to check how long a song is, nor a way to see which sounds are active. The way I handle it in KombatTunes is to manually create a list of song lengths and filenames outside of the game, and then hardcode that into the plugin.

If they would add a way to know how long a song is, or which sounds are active, or a way to set a callback function to run when the song finishes playing, then it would be possible to make a music player plugin that is easily usable by non-technical people.

If they also added a way to scan directory contents, it would be even easier (otherwise players would have to manually add the filename of each music file).

hm, yeah :)

I guess even having a small selection of in-game tracks to listen to (that you choose between) would be cool, although I guess it would be a shame to drown out the really good game music...

I think it's worth considering more though and/or working on!

What a long strange trip it's been.

I like the idea of some personalized form of advertisement in game, whether it be on a ship or on one of the neon signs outside the stations. Even if it were only in GTS, a greater variety of signage would make things interesting, and I would love to write out my own hidden messages on a station or ship.

As far as having a cartoon character stand in as avatar, I've heard it explained very simply in the past: the ship is the avatar.

Since ships ARE our avatars, it'd be cool to have more customization, so +1 to bumper stickers/decals and even a variety of paint schemes, even if that just started with base color and accent color. Tho rate this low priority compared to say, faction redux.

-1 for an ingame music player, just to save the dev's time. Make your own vo playlist for each character on your media player of choice. If you want to go oldschool, make a mixed tape.

Humanoid avatars visible thru the canopy? I used to want this too, 'cause yeah, that'd be totally cool, but the reality is I wouldn't give up 1 frame per second rendering it. I can't see this being worth chasing unless/until vo adds in-station 3d environments, which is unlikely and we don't expect it. Maybe the community should get a vo second life project going, and space will be even MORE empty.

We don't need the devs to make a music player anyway, we just need them to add a small improvement or two to the existing music API. We could do the rest ourselves.

There are advantages with playing music through VO over doing it externally - probably the biggest one is that VO will automatically quiet your in-game music when somebody speaks over voice chat so you can hear them. It can't do that with external music. When your music is controlled through VO, it's also possible to set up plugins that change tracks based on the happenings in-game. You could set up your own sound tracks for different systems, for example, or have it change from peaceful to aggressive or frightened when a hostile enters the sector.

Didn't someone write a plugin to control MPD and VLC from within the game?

Edit: found it!

Yeah, I'm pretty sure they did.

That sounds awesome Pizzasgood, and I agree about the ship decoration Conflict Diamond!

I'm glad this thread is coming to something a bit anyway ^^