I always thought that the storm radar effect looked pretty lame. How about showing only the outline instead of the polygon edges.

It would look kinda like this: http://kitchen.nfshost.com/ven/stormradar.jpg
Even better if the outline was all fuzzy like in the image.. although that's due to my bad editing.

If a player is close enough that the actual shape of objects matters they are probably in within visible range anyway.. So this change shouldn't have any effect on gameplay.

Personally, i think the wireframe looks kind of cool, though some sort of glowy/fading phosphor effect would be cooler :)

/me hears the 8-bit Asteroids theme and wants to shoot big roids into small ones.

Yeah.. I had to think of asteroids too when I saw the result. :P

vendetta needs a 2d mode

Spuck is right the current storm radar effect is lame, but wrong that this is somehow better.

aww

What about something like predator vision then? https://www.google.com/search?q=predator+vision&tbm=isch

Not sure if that could really work though

The second one is better by a little.

They could do predator vision with shaders. Heck, Left4Dead looks like that when i run it in wine because the shaders get messed up.

I think it should only allow you to see things on radar, not visually

That would make sense if asteroids actually showed up on radar instead of a little dot in the middle of them...

It might not be that much slower to do some kind of predatory-thing, albeit probably grayscale because a heatmap would be dumb. The wireframe effect is not the fastest thing ever, because real wireframe vector graphics aren't really "possible" on modern hardware, so you have to like.. render the mesh to texture and then overlay the texture and blah.

Anyway, I concur it's not the best thing ever. It is interesting and "different", and not very well utilized for gameplay at present. But it's probably not going to be my top priority either.

I welcome ongoing ideas of cooler ways of portraying the info. I'm not big on the object edges either.

(Yes, it would be preferable if radar showed objects and not just dots, but that's a whole other render to texture pass and it would slow things down considerably on fill-rate limited PCs and devices).

Crazy ideas to improve storms:

-Make all objects textures change while inside storms. Replace with faded/blurred/darker/lighter/lowres textures... sort of ghostly visuals... some simple parameter change that does not require to use another texture.

-Add radar glitches. Alternate moments of real info, then lots of false echoes, then nothing...

-Make whole HUD glitch ramdomly, like storm interference on screens. Quick flicks.

-Make DARK storms, lighted up eventually by a "lightning"... like flying inside a heavy cumulus-nimbus

-Cut off all comms while inside storms. Maybe leave only /1 reachable. Isn't that an ion storm? radio interference...

-Add noises while in storm. Hissles, crackles, hummings...

-Get rid of wireframes They're ugly and primitive. Instead, use flat but translucid surfaces to represent Radar Extenders effect.

We cannot be using radio. Radio only crawls around at the speed of light. We're using ansibles or something. Not that it actually matters.

for distances of 5km radio based radar should be fine, when your talking about max closing speeds of 470m/s

I wasn't talking about the radar. I was talking about chat, in response to this:

-Cut off all comms while inside storms. Maybe leave only /1 reachable. Isn't that an ion storm? radio interference...

Chat is universe-wide with no delay other than network lag, which doesn't count. Ergo, "radio interference" would not happen with regard to chat (other than perhaps sector chat).

Ion storms could very well interfere with our communications tech, but it would probably be due to the same effect that pulls us out of jump and forces us to jump out from a specific location, not due to the presence of ions disrupting a radio signal.

But I'm just being nit-picky.

Chat is magix. :)

Inc, wouldn't there be a way to render just the low-poly collision mesh as the "radar", fill it with a solid color based on z-depth and skip out on the texturing/shaders/etc since they're not needed for radar images?

What you're describing is basically flat shading. I think that might look even worse.

Something more elaborate (radar "blobs" or some such) could be possible. Some techniques might be fillrate intensive. There's a whole tradeoff of making this look cool, vs slowing everything down.

Inc, can you mess with Alpha channel, make objects translucent relative with distance?
Colorize textures, like if illuminated by storm's color?

And flat shading with fog in front of it can be interesting...