Pioneer dev forum

Here are some ideas that have been rattling around in my head, up for grabs if anyone want to implement or brainstorm further on these.

Day/night cycles This came to me when I was, as usual, dreaming of walking on base, where it would be natural to have fewer people moving about during night time. For our current system one could imagine that during 22:00-07:00 the Ship market, Equipment market, Ship repair, and BBS(?) is closed. The latter feels strange, as reading a BBS should be possible 24-7, but then we have the "fake" conversations when clicking them. If wanting to ask questions adverts could say "come back in X h". But I do think this is a case of over-thinking it. Police is open 24 h/day. Maybe fuel/propellant and ship repair is available during night, but more expensive? Also: perhaps orbital stations use a three shift system, with artificial day/night for different inhabitants, thus open for space business around the clock. So only day/night cycles for stations on planets with a period approximately 20-30 h, or else they use artificial day/nigh cycles as well? Anyway, this idea has two main problems: 1. this gives the player an even lower incentive to go through the hassle of landing on a planet side station; 2. I don't see how this necessarily would make the game more fun.

Certificate for illegal goods There could be missions (or just certificates) for trading in otherwise illegal goods. I.e. they would allow the player to have X amount of Y in two systems (the exporting and importing ones) for a limited time. I'm not sure how this would be fun/interesting game play. Will player need to do something, reach some certain level, before being trusted with a certificate? Maybe after receiving certificate and having carried out the mission the player might have time to sneak in some extra trips of lucrative trade?
Maybe it makes sense that these certificates can only be bought in systems where they're legal, thus extending the "legality" of a good to some other system (for limited amount and time)?
(Also, this idea makes more sense once I've implemented customs routinely boarding your ship when landing, as currently there is no mechanism for getting caught owning/shipping illegal goods)

AI Bounty hunter Once player reaches some level of bad standing with the law, that faction might hire a bounty hunter that will pursue you through systems. I imagine that if your ship is faster, you could out-jump him, but also that he can "cheat" and sometimes wait for you when you exit a jump cloud, or else the player would increasingly outrun the bounty hunter, and never notice they're on ones tail. Also, maybe there should be some message or something indicating to the player that he is actively hunted now. Bounty hunter is contracted to hunt for 1 year? Maybe there is actually a BBS advert created for your life? (One that you can not take.)

Player bounty hunter Each pirate ship is associated with a bounty (shown by Radar Mapper?). Once destroyed, an action/gun camera "document of proof" is created showing time, tonnage, ship, bounty of destroyed ship. This would be shown in the inventory list or some special purpose list? Player can cash this document in at a police station, and receive the bounty.

Customizing stations We currently don't have any customization options for stations: be able to set custom tech level, station size, and station model?

BBS clean crime history Code is already there to do it, just a BBS advert that makes use of it needed. I imagine this advert would only be available in special "pirate stations", that I am/was working on. A flavour example: "CLEAN SLATE?" / "RESTART FRESH!" --> "I have a contact in the SolFed police, who can make past sins disappear...". Once "cleaned" the payed fines list is removed, and it is as you never had any fines. Also: my future "customs searching your ship"-stuff will happen more often if you have a past crime history, so once clean, you'll be searched less often.

Elite "Safe" indicator This should be simple once imgui is in place. Just some HUD/cockpit lamp indicating when ship is in law enforced space (i.e. laser fire illegal). It was useful in the origial Elite, and I felt the need for it in Pioneer as well.[/list]

Appendix
Just to collect some past ideas, for potential new readers, but the below listed topics are best discussed elsewhere.

Mining Machine Discussed: Link

Damage system Link1 Link2 Link3
In short: we need to figure out how each damaged component behaves. What is 50% working landing gears? Or 70% life support? Or 10% radar mapper? e.g. It flickers? or shows inaccurate data for the scanned ship? Or some info not shown?

Energy system Engine produces wattage, used by shield, laser, life support, radar, charging hyperdrive, repairing systems. Thus potentially connected to damage system.

Crew Crew needs something to do, and we need a reason to have them. Possibly this is connected to damage system, in that crew increases performance of individual components, and when damaged they perform less well. E.g. What is 110% functional landing gears?

Turrets Fluffy wrote the code for it, #2844

I thought I had already written a module for cleaning crime history for your "pirate stations"? I guess you weren't happy with it?

@clausimu, sorry, I haven't seen it (I think).

I remember suggesting you write it, but I don't think I've tested it.

You still have it in a branch, I hope? I'm sure it will do fine.

Now I feel bad.

No problem. It's been a while since I wrote it (late 2015?) - so I don't remember how thoroughly it has been tested. It is in my "wipe_crime" branch. If you want me to do anything with it, just let me know.

Oolite has a 'Weapons safe' toggle that disables weapons. Useful to help you avoid accidentally firing weapons while in controlled space...

An idea for missions, and a bit of an incentive for doing them: discount at a specific parts or ship dealer. For any mission, there could be a chance of a random tip upon completition: "Hey, thanks for the lift. I know a guy at the Torvald's platform Equipment dealership. Mention my name, and he will give you some good discounts.
So when you get there, and has a discount tip (or two) for that dealership or ship market, then a dialog pops up about it, where you can choose if you want to use it at that time. If you choose to, then there will be a one time price cut for your next purchase.
In some lucky cases, like rescuing somebody, this could be a quite nice deal, or a very meager one for a simple not urgent courier job.
Heh sometimes, very rarely even a charity could tip you off with something like this.
I'd say this should not be visible to the player. I mean there should be no list about the dealerships where he/she has a discount. So the player should take note or keep in mind.
Maybe there could be some variation too: some of these could mean a 1-2%, or a fixed amount. And if the thing is cheaper than that amount, then you get it for free, but the remainder is gone.

Which brings up another idea: a notebook, where the player could do entries about whatever that comes to mind, and maybe even tag them for later search/filtering. Kinda like the notes in the first Deus Ex: All important things got into it automatically, but you could make your own entries too. Maybe those discounts could generate an entry too, but not sure.

I like all those ideas.

I wonder if modules then sholud be able to create / register "discounts", that are then some core mechanic. Would be implemented in a similar way as "rumours" would be.

I like all of these ideas, I see nothing that wouldn't be cool to try!

What abut:

Modular Ships/Stations/buildings
Having something similar o what Dual does https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/0 ... struction/.
In other words, being able to build everything (ships, buildings, stations) ingame.
You will have available some basic building blocks such as:
- ship core
- cockpit
- engines
- power systems
- whatever it can be considered basic elements

It can be launched in "creation mode" or ingame in specific places (ship factories, etc.)

I think I asked about it to some of you already, so if you can provide some reference t what it was already discussed will be cool (couldn't find it, apart from some mentions in a thread about the redesign of space station).

Personally I'm not a big fan of modular ships in general (from the visual POV).

There are quite a lot of games that offer this already (at least four comes to my mind, if not more), and they don't really look that good in my opinion. Maybe KSP is an exception, but only with a bunch of mods.
Which alone won't be a case against it, but even then I don't see much point giving another example of something already existing. That's how Pioneer started, as a Frontier remake, but thankfully we are starting to diverge from that for a while now.

It's also a lot of work to provide proper parts, and you have to make sure that they work together properly in a lot of arbitrary combinations (and you can't test every possible one of those combinations either). Especially if ships could be procedurally built from the pool of parts.
And most players would get bored with it I think and would turn to pre-made ships.

Sure, it could make asset creation somewhat easier, since you are working on smaller stuff, but it would also make it more boring in my opinion and more tedious in non-creative questions.
/visual POV

I'm suspecting, that implementing modular ships properly would be quite a lot of coding work, and double that to have a proper ship editor people wouldn't rage-quit from after a couple of minutes.