[athropy]

I've been thinking about this a bit (commanding a capital ship). I really dont think it would be that difficult to add a few interesting features if someone familiar with the source code would have time to look into it. I think these are at least my wish list, and we've got a crude solution for these for our live roleplaying project

http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,8599.0.html

We need
  ¤ To divide control over more than one people, that means we need several players to control one ship. That may sound boring, but some people enjoy the tactical side of fighting and not the constant laser show. We have a screen and some control for captain, navigator, tactical, pilot, engineering and crew. As is, because we desided best not to mess with the source code (too much work), we've accomplished this with multiple keyboards and non-freespace engine huds for everyone except the pilot.
  ¤ To have a "big ship feel". The actual flying is pretty good actually, the freighters we've tryed acted out nice and slowly, but it still doesnt feel that you're actually flying an enormous vessel. The collisions for example could be more realistic. But then again, its good enough.
  ¤ More control over the functions designed for the AI, like turrets, docking, waypoints, beams. We've done this with really heavy scripting and it works well enough.

But all in all, we've pretty much made it possible at least in our project to have a relatively believable 'big ship'. Its not a capital ship, we though it more entertaining to have a smaller, more vulnerable ship. But our problems could also probably be solved in a more elegant way, especially a way to really multiplay one ship would be excellent.

[Stryke 9]

Emperor: The reticle isn't code, it's graphics. If you want only one type of gunpoint positioning, you can do it yourself in Paint. Any code-based solution would mean a hell of a lot of work for a buggy result, for an advantage not even you would be likely to notice without looking really, really hard.

I think the idea of a loading ani with some kind of warp, rather than, say, the Red Alert briefing screen would be excellent. It's all you really need, and it doesn't seem the sort of thing that'd be too much of a stretch- after all, movies ALREADY can play immediately after jumpout, and it'd simply be a matter of finding a way to eliminate the briefing part and skip right to the mission. Has a lot of applications, actually, and need not be some special function, simply a setup like red alert- player jumps out normally (or even not), movie plays, next mission loads and starts.