Originally posted by Turnsky
large-destructable parts of warships.. (like blowing the "wings" off a hecate)
Already doable with Bobbau's non targetable subsystems.
engine flicker-multiple explosions- then burnt out derelect hulls, instead of having big lumps of debris floating hither and yon..
the "bloom" effect.. if you've played bridge commander, and halo2, etc.. you'll know what i'm talking about..
Dunno about the bloom, but the other stuff sounds good. Variable debris would be very cool, too, so that the ships don't always have the same debris...one capship explodes more or less totally, leaving only a few chunks behind, the other one leaves a burnt out hull behind.
transforming vessels..as well as swing-wing desgined.
Yeah moving parts would be cool for vector based engines(that means that the engine mounts are moveable to further increase the ships maneuveability)
in-engine, character-based cutscenes! (yes, like freelancer)
I could imagine that being incredibly hard to implement, but yeah it'd be cool, especially WCS could need something like that, otherwise the download size would be larger with prerendered cuscenes an all that.
Ther are free or abandoned shooter engines out there that could be adapted and implementedfor that...Quake1 with source mods could do the job .
with debris, dead people to float about said debris.. like in starlancer.
That's one odd request.
And AFAIK the people in SL weren't dead but ejected pilots in their spacesuits
different huds, for different ships
Should be doable with WMC's HUD_gauges.tbl. What I'd like besides are HUD gauges that aren't restricted to the HUD color palette(I want a multicolored gun energy counter FFS!)
.. i know this may seem a little silly considering how well our current one works,
That's boubtful, IMO the FS HUD is one of the worst HUDs I've seen in any space shooter/flight simulator. It's cluttered with useless stuff, is incredibly ineffective, and on the technical side it could use some work too:
The HUD transparency: I like to play with a deep blue HUD but due to the transparency I can't see **** most of the time because the background always shines through. The gun energy counter doesn't need to to be transparent because usually there isn't *anything of interest* behind it.
FS HUD uses multiple guages that could be combined into one without loosing information: A targeting VDU might be nice and fancy, but it serves no real purpose. All the information in it like ship type, name and health could be put over the shield indicator, the ship graphic in the shield indicator serves already the purpose of identifying the ship type(at least I know shipsfrom their silouettes), and it could change color according to damage status(green -nominal/ yellow-moderate damage/ red- heavy damage) and simply put the damage counter from the VDU in the middle of it if you want to know it exactly.
The same with that mini shield/HP icon. You already have a gauge that indicates all that info. Why do you need another one saying
exactly the same? Communication window/menue: You abviouly can't communicate while you receive a comm, so there's no need to spread those things over the HUD. I'd put them on th same place on the screen to save screen space.
That ring thing around the HUD: I don't know about the others, but I don't pay attention to any of the warning indicators there, I even only discovered them when working on the HUD. To me, they are useless andserve no other purpose than to block my view.
Speed gauge: Why do you need a large indcator going up and down when the speed changes? A single numerical counter in the edge of the screen does the same without blocking my frontal view.
weapon/afterburner energy counter: The same. Why fo they have to sit near the reticle? Visibility would be better if they were at he boreder of the screen left and right to the radar.
Kill counter: Useless. I can always check in the pilot room how many kills do I have.
See, the HUD is far from perfect.
a more diverse, and richer "universe" as far as freespace is concerned
Not sure if SCP can do that
the option to be able to upgrade/redesign your own fighter...? 
There should be borders..FS is a mission based space shooter and not Privateer. Too much freedom is not good for gameplay, the player needs certain leads/rextrictions.
If you give Joe Average the ability to do something stupid he does and complains afterwards.
