Solomon Dawn
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Posted - 2009.04.13 02:37:00 -
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Docking (and undocking) looks pretty blah right now.
I would like to see a ship cruise right into the station once docking was selected.
The player would see the ship enter some 'dark tunnel', which is a corridor into the internal areas, so you would see the ship move into that "increasing screen darkness" corridor which finally fills the screen as all black - seeing it is totally inside the corridor then.
That point allows the transition jump to the actual dock. Rather than now where you still see some station you are approaching and then suddenly appear in a docking area.
This is just to tidy up what you see, to be more what reality would have shown you.
There would then still be a small shortfall in the "Corridor getting to dock area" jump, but taking the ship ALL the way into a dock is far more involved - yet that could be done also. Transisiton from cruising from outside space into the black corridor, then out of the black corridor and into the dock area.
Vice-Versa for the Undocking process.
One part to fix (explain?) in the undocking, seeing it is just a sudden jump from dock to space now, is WHEN are you actually in space and visible to others? You yourself don't know because you can't see anything until you are actually in space and then you get the ship view.
By doing the above mentioned transition process, you know you are moving out of dock, then into a corridor, and then at that stage is when the game mechanics can do all the loading stuff the do (progress bar on screen) and once that loading is done is when the 'corridor out into space' sequence is shown.
Thus you see yourself come out of the dark corridor and enter space - and that is exactly what everyone else outside already sees too.
Then StarGates....
The same sort of tidying is needed there too.
The entry to a gate now is fine... a bubble and zap, gone...
But the exit side of the gate is a bit lacking.
Possibly the space view you are going to be put into (now appearing all of a sudden) should be faded in from the black.
So do the progress loading stuff as required, THEN go from black to the scene as a fade-in.
Also... those Progress Bar screens, could be removed and the coding/loading going on in the background is then interwoven with that docking process animation time.
All in all, not a very difficult task to add. Simple enough coding, and a bit of animation addition needed.
For a much more realsitic end visual result.
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