It's not scripting necessarily which is the answer to this, though a more powerful theme engine could be considered. I will be looking into something like this for the Netrek Unlimited client at a later time. However, if you go to fullscreen mode (or even if you don't) there may be some good way to put some of your ship data into overlays at the corners of the screen - this is how most games which have an active main game area deal with it. The trouble is that the ship status takes up relatively little area compared to the message and status text itself. Real screen area wins come by reducing that. Some of the text which is currently shown I consider optional. If it were me, the bits of text info I would show would be: 1. Team and personal messages mixed into a single stream 2. Condensed player listing, showing player number/team, kills, ship type, and name. The other windows (global chat, damage) and data (DI, rank) are not generally used to make decisions about how to play the game so could probably be safely removed as an option for the user. To the 3D option, I really don't see using 3D to any good effect except for... er... effects. Changing the perspective adds nothing to the game, in my opinion, and makes maneuvering and targeting less intuitive. Netrek is inherently 2D. Using 3D to achieve cool effects provided by todays video cards seems to make more sense. I don't have a problem with allowing players to have multiple weapons configurations like that. However I wonder if a good player would use it at all, and would it just make a newbie use more fuel than they might otherwise use? I think we've already discussed and come up with a solution for the Metaserver issue. We will be constructing a task tray applet, see previous emails. - Cliff -----Original Message----- From: netrek-dev-bounces at us.netrek.org [mailto:netrek-dev-bounces at us.netrek.org] On Behalf Of Narcis Sent: Friday, April 13, 2007 1:16 AM To: netrek-dev at us.netrek.org Subject: Re: [netrek-dev] netrek ideas > This could allow for very nice large > readouts. Or use widget/gadget/growl javascripting to achieve this. (alternative would be to make the windows client a fullscreen app, as we are basically talking about optimizing screen layout and available pixels.) > * Add dogfight tactical mode which could be toggled on/off by 1 > button, in > this mode the tactical screen would be greatly magnified as well > as the > ship graphics, this could allow for very richly detailed modern > ships > (could even use 3D models with textures applied and other OpenGL > effects) > and very exciting dogfigts. MacTrek has a scaleable zoom (mouse wheel) which sort of does that, but i see more "excitement" in switching to isometric or 3D view for dogfights. (butt torping would become more difficult though :-) > > * Add alternate fire for phaser and torp. Some possible choices: > o Alternate fire torp produces two parallel torp streams: | | > each group of torps would be located on the far left and far right > area of the ship respectively > o Alternate fire phaser produces a rapid burst in quick > succession of > varying phaser strength such as short-long or long-short Very nice idea, sort of full spread thingy. > * Have metaserver be minimizable to the system tray: > - Play a sound when t mode is reached on a defined list of server(s) > - Mousing over the system tray icon will show: > o green (t in progress) > o yellow (t minus 1 to t minus 4) > o red (4 players or less) again, widget/gadget seems more suitable for this task > Zach great ideas Zach! cheers Chris _______________________________________________ netrek-dev mailing list netrek-dev at us.netrek.org http://mailman.us.netrek.org/mailman/listinfo/netrek-dev