Forums » Suggestions
3d radar
This will likely take a lot to develop but It would be rather kewl to have a 3d radar display of sorts.
I was thinking a single planar view like a picture taken of a holo sphere or ball where the player's ship would be in the center represented by a small arrow indicating which way the ship was pointed.
The actual view would be controlled by a trackball or mouse type input which would allow the player to roll the ball around in any direction.
The view could be constructed by ray-casting from a point on the edge of the area covered by the radar. For example if the radar was medium ranged at 1000 meters then the view would be ray-casted from a point on the sphere 3000 meters from the player and would rotate around the sphere relative to the player. The extra distance is needed to flatten out the display so it would not be distorted. The casting could also be done by simply projecting out perpendicular to the view plane and moving the casting point around the plane which may cut down on the math overhead a bit.
The two dimensional nature of the display would also create some occlusion and require a larger degree of operator input making some useful natural limits to its usage.
This type of display should be player selectable and would replace / augment the current front/rear display. It could in fact take up about 75 percent of the screen while in use. It would also be a natural way to include a extra long large port range radar unit.
I hope I explained this well enough...
I was thinking a single planar view like a picture taken of a holo sphere or ball where the player's ship would be in the center represented by a small arrow indicating which way the ship was pointed.
The actual view would be controlled by a trackball or mouse type input which would allow the player to roll the ball around in any direction.
The view could be constructed by ray-casting from a point on the edge of the area covered by the radar. For example if the radar was medium ranged at 1000 meters then the view would be ray-casted from a point on the sphere 3000 meters from the player and would rotate around the sphere relative to the player. The extra distance is needed to flatten out the display so it would not be distorted. The casting could also be done by simply projecting out perpendicular to the view plane and moving the casting point around the plane which may cut down on the math overhead a bit.
The two dimensional nature of the display would also create some occlusion and require a larger degree of operator input making some useful natural limits to its usage.
This type of display should be player selectable and would replace / augment the current front/rear display. It could in fact take up about 75 percent of the screen while in use. It would also be a natural way to include a extra long large port range radar unit.
I hope I explained this well enough...
I really like this idea, and have honestly been thinking something similar recently, but in terms of plugins. Seems like it wouldn't be super complicated to pull off based on the amount of data our current radar are handling. That being said, I'm talking out of my ass, and this is probably incredibly complicated.
Have either two of you played Elite Dangerous? It has exactly that, a 3d radar. It's clearly not that complicated, just needs dev time devoted to it. No, it wouldn't be possible through a plugin. sandox API doesn't provide enough information.
+1 for idea, -1000000000000000 for the implicit suggestion that VO would implement something like this before 2030.
I think you are being too generous, lecter
I've made it super clear that the Suggestions Forum is intended fundamentally to embody Optimism and Hope, first and foremost.
People who just post negative content about how things will "never be implemented" will be kicked off of Suggestions entirely.
I really don't care how "realistic" you think something is. Most of the time, you are not very informed on the development requirements of any given topic.
But you are running completely counter to a major goal of Suggestions, which is to garner feedback from the player base on the level of interest in particular topics.
People who just post negative content about how things will "never be implemented" will be kicked off of Suggestions entirely.
I really don't care how "realistic" you think something is. Most of the time, you are not very informed on the development requirements of any given topic.
But you are running completely counter to a major goal of Suggestions, which is to garner feedback from the player base on the level of interest in particular topics.
Noted.
+1, but if it were faster to develop, I'd be fine with having 3 radars, the 3rd being a top-down view (from current ship rotation, obviously) of everything the radar picks up. But, as Space Pancakes mentioned, is it possible to do this kind of plotting via plugins (i.e. can we retrieve values of a ship's location (relative or positional)?)?
Not really.
There is one way you could theoretically do it, but it would only work for ships in front of you, and probably very poorly even then. There's a function that lets you provide screen coordinates and if there's anything under those coordinates it'll return an ID for it (e.g. in case you wanted to click on the screen and find out which asteroid/ship you clicked on). So you could have it iterate through a bunch of screen positions to build a list of all ships that are in front of you along with their screen coordinates. Then it could target those ships to get their distance. Between the screen coordinates, distance, and FOV setting, it could compute the 3D position of that ship relative to yours. But it wouldn't work with any ships that are behind you or obscured by asteroids, stations, etc. Depending on how tight of a grid you check, it could also have a good chance of missing distant ships; tightening up the grid would fix that, but at the cost of slowing it down. The slower it runs, the less accurate it will be (because ships will move while it's still working) and the more likely it will cause noticeable interface lag. You could also increase your FOV to bring more ships into view, but that will make playing the game difficult.
There is one way you could theoretically do it, but it would only work for ships in front of you, and probably very poorly even then. There's a function that lets you provide screen coordinates and if there's anything under those coordinates it'll return an ID for it (e.g. in case you wanted to click on the screen and find out which asteroid/ship you clicked on). So you could have it iterate through a bunch of screen positions to build a list of all ships that are in front of you along with their screen coordinates. Then it could target those ships to get their distance. Between the screen coordinates, distance, and FOV setting, it could compute the 3D position of that ship relative to yours. But it wouldn't work with any ships that are behind you or obscured by asteroids, stations, etc. Depending on how tight of a grid you check, it could also have a good chance of missing distant ships; tightening up the grid would fix that, but at the cost of slowing it down. The slower it runs, the less accurate it will be (because ships will move while it's still working) and the more likely it will cause noticeable interface lag. You could also increase your FOV to bring more ships into view, but that will make playing the game difficult.
Successful target acquisition costs ~20ms using the API.
You pretty much need full access to the data to make it work right. A plug in would likely be a non starter.