Just to collect ideas which were proposed by the community and by me:
- I proposed the feature of planetary flights and a higher travelling freedom
- As I understood, the community wants also (maybe primarily) a capability of procedural generation, independently from any planetary flights and so on.
We can implement the second idea much faster than the first one.
My idea to start with it is to make the engine a little modular(only where needed) and make it capable to load plugins or to be extendable by using some OOP like "class derivations".
For example the objects in Freespace are grouped into different classes: "OBJ_SHIP", "OBJ_FIREBALL", "OBJ_SHOCKWAVE", "OBJ_DEBRIS" .... Each of them has it's own rendering methode and collision behaviour and things like that.
At this point we can make the possiblity to add new classes or derive existing classes: As we know that FS2 uses only BSP like models we could derive any class, for example, and make it use of each custom model type instead. One customization could be a procedural generated model.
The most important thing is that the downwards compatibility doesn't suffer, because you can switch between different implementations.
