Vendetta's radar projections are very good at conveying the direction of other ships and objects in the sector.

Unfortunately they're not very good at conveying the distance to other ships and objects. Distance is represented by the relative brightness of radar blips, which isn't very precise considering the wide range involved (0m to 5000m). Things that are fairly far away often blend in with stars and nebulae on the transparent background.

This is especially a problem where something is rapidly moving towards or away from you.

Suggestion: Add some visual indication to the radar blips to show if they're moving towards or away from your ship. Maybe change their shape or size?

I once made a plugin that hijacks the hostility determination to do this. I don't remember if I finished it or not, but I'll dust it off later tonight or tomorrow, maybe make some adjustments, and post it to voupr.

+1

+1

Here's a thought: What if, instead of representing whether objects were "moving toward" and "moving away" in a relative motion sense (compared to your ship), we just singled out objects that were "moving" in an absolute sense? I'm not sure how trivial it would be to add, but it would make a ship pop out of a field of asteroids a lot more easily.

Unfortunately, scaling with size was tried, a long time ago, and the small amount of size variation wasn't super useful either. But I imagine we can find other ways to winnow down solutions of improving visibility of higher-importance radar contacts.

Maybe a colored border around the radar blip?

Singling out objects which are moving seems kind of a weird approach to it, since knowing whether something is at a dead stop in relation to the sector's coordinates isn't particularly useful. What a pilot needs to know is: "Is that ship coming right at me or flying the other way?" Even if he's traveling at 160m/s in relation to the stationary sector objects.

Vertical bars could be used to indicate relative speed of a target. It would probably be necessary to to have a bind to toggle it, though, since at times it could make the radar cluttered.



I also don't see having an indication of absolute motion as being very useful since all that would really do is help distinguish players/NPCs from asteroids, but it is already possible to simply not display asteroids on the radar.

I do not think we have a firm definition of what we are trying to accomplish here.

The OP started by talking about distance, and ended by talking about relative motion.

Personally, I think the distance is more important. If a ship at 300m is moving away from me, it can still shoot me. A ship at 3000m is not a threat this very instant, even if it is moving towards me at 225m/s.

Doppler, and distance, should be represented differently.

Distance: Using size, or color intensity for distance can make distant objects hard to find. I suggest that all objects are dots of the same size, but distant objects are a hollow dot, and close objects are a solid dot. The distance division between hollow and solid can default to synchronize with the audible warning distance setting. Even if you have audible warnings turned off, you may wish to set a distance, so you can see in radar when someone is too close for your comfort.

doppler can either be a color shift (red/blue), or it can be a timing shift. For timing shift, things that are stationary relative to asteroids do not blink. Things that are moving relative to the asteroids blink. Things that are moving towards you blink faster, and things moving away blink slower.

The human eye is so attuned to motion that our eyes automatically perform micro-movements even while we think we are staring at one thing. Our brains are designed to pick out moment in comparison to a background. Things that we wish to stand out on the radar will need to change position or otherwise alter a property that will trigger the natural detection mechanism of the human brain.

Meridian, that actually seems like it would work very well. :)

tinbot, I started off talking about motion. I mentioned how distance is represented on the radar to explain why it's difficult to notice sometimes even very large changes over a short time. (Like a Greyhound coming right at you at 225m/s from across the sector.)

Good idea, depending on how it's done. Whatever you do, please consider ppl that are colour blind. I still can't tell what fricking keys are even active. (as a example)

I think I like tinbot's hollow dots more than meridian's tailed-dots, although I'd rather they have a separate set of fields for tweaking their parameters rather than piggybacking off the proximity alarm. Ideally there would be two fields specifying the distances at which the dots should be fully solid and fully hollow.

Don't dismiss that target 3,000m away. If both the player and target are traveling at a speed of 220 m/s with the target off from the player's heading by 30 degrees, then the target will have a relative velocity of +424m/s and be within 300m of the player within 6.37 seconds assuming the proper intercept course has been plotted.