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vegastrike / Vega-Strike-Engine-Source

Vega Strike Engine
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Better dock coordinates and marking. #880

Open royfalk opened 1 month ago

royfalk commented 1 month ago

When flying, the dock markings are two dimensional. It make it unclear where we need to fly to. For planets, making a rectangular dock is meaningless. We should remove it. With planets, the dock should extend from the planet surface up. Right now it is at a certain altitude, This makes no sense and if you miss this altitude, you can keep going lower and not be able to land.

evertvorster commented 1 month ago

I have never had issues with missing the dock on the planet. My issue has always been that the planet dock is "busy" and so unavailable for landing. Planetary objects, in my mind, should have nearly limitless docking bays available. I presume the game engine treats all docks the same, and so if a ship is in the planetary dock, it is unavailable for docking of the next craft. Since the planet dock is already special, it should also not be able to be "busy" Docking, in general, has some room for improvement. Instead of just docking, the camera should leave the cockpit and show an external view of the ship as it does the final few seconds of docking, showing the docking procedures from the outside. Then fade to black an pop in on the planet or base where you are docking.  The game also is missing out on cutscenes in general. In other types of this game there are cutscenes when going through jump points and docking. Playing a well-rendered video clip masks the loading of a new universe, and looks really polished. Anyways, that is really off-topic. Thanks for your time and effort

BenjamenMeyer commented 1 month ago

Yes, we need to do something here.

Agree we're missing the cut scenes which WCU had.

Can certainly understand planets having limited docking ports since generally many would not want to have a ship land just anywhere outside of space ports; that said - the space ports should be so numerous that it should be hard to fill them.

On a rare occasion I have had issues with docking at planets; but did not know why. If the planet is too busy we should give a response when docking is requested so the player knows docking has been denied.

Also agree we should remove the docking rectangles for the planets; and it would also be helpful to give a 3-D pathing - perhaps a series of docking rectangles with a line down the center so you know better where to go.

Certainly worth some discussion and thought on how we should do this.

royfalk commented 1 month ago

The real, elegant solution for a planet should be to add cities to them. The dock limit should be solves via the code. Limiting each dock to one ship sounds cool but comes with a host of issues. Honestly, I prefer the WC system of touching a base to land there and that's it. Probably something to put in the configuration file if it isn't already there.