[Bonehead]

Presently, there are only three radar levels available - 2,000, 10,000, and infinite.  Could we have two more, at 5,000 and 20,000, available as an option in the launcher (that is, you check it in the launcher and in the game you now have five radar levels)?  The 5k  would be useful when focusing on a smaller theare as well as to roughly gauge targets available to launch Trebuchets at.  The 20,000 would be useful for the last missions of the main FS2 campaign, so as to filter out the Sathanas Juggernauts which you don't care about but they nevertheless mess up your radar display.  Hopefully this shouldn't be too hard to implement.

[Wanderer]

This could be done... Though if the change is made then it would kinda likely be a table controlled thing..

[headdie]

any chance of doing something daft like being able to set the sensor ranges on a per fighter basis in the ship tables so for example a recon fighter could be set with a larger range than say an assault fighter

[General Battuta]

Please, please, no launcher options. 

[Sushi]

any chance of doing something daft like being able to set the sensor ranges on a per fighter basis in the ship tables so for example a recon fighter could be set with a larger range than say an assault fighter

That actually seems a lot more useful, although you could probably get the effect with clever FREDding anyway.

[The E]

IIRC, the HUD rewrite is supposed to allow per-ship HUD layouts.

Even if it doesn't, adding an entry to ships.tbl like "$Radar Range: <x, y, z>" shouldn't be that hard.

[chief1983]

It should almost certainly allow per-ship layouts if it follows the path the existing HUD stuff was taking, in terms of feature support.  And I like the per ship ranges in a table option myself.

[Trivial Psychic]

Just one potential issue with that.  Lets say I have something akin to a TVWP campaign, where you start out with comparatively weak technology, and all ships have shorter radar ranges.  Then, a technological improvement comes along, allowing all fighters to be upgraded with radars capable of greater ranges.  I don't want to have to have to make a second entry in the ships table for all fighters to account for the upgrade.  How about a section within the ships.tbl but not part of any specific ship entry, where a sequence of radar range groupings are defined.  Something like:

Radar ranges: 4 (the number of different levels that a radar can be upgraded to

Level 1: (min range, medium range, max range)
Level 2: (min range, medium range, max range)
etc.

Then within each ship entry, you can define which which radar levels that the ship will support.  Then, part of the ships editor to indicate what level that ship should be allowed in that mission, and campaign sexps to allow a new radar level for specific ship classes.  This for example, if new fighters start out with the newly improved radar, but older fighters don't have the upgrade yet, or may not support it, then you can specify this, without a global make-new-radar-level-available-for-all mission flag or something.

Later!

[Bonehead]

How about also adding a feature whereby the higher your radar range (controlled by you) the more detectable your ship is?

[Aardwolf]

How about also adding a feature whereby the higher your radar range (controlled by you) the more detectable your ship is?

How would detectability work? Target-normally, on-radar-but-doing-that-shimmery-no-target-thing, or visual only?

Edit: that'd probably require improved control of targeting, and some AI changes as well.

[Bonehead]

How about also adding a feature whereby the higher your radar range (controlled by you) the more detectable your ship is?

How would detectability work? Target-normally, on-radar-but-doing-that-shimmery-no-target-thing, or visual only?

Edit: that'd probably require improved control of targeting, and some AI changes as well.

I don't know how exactly it works right now but I was thinking of adding a ' innate stealthiness' factor for each ship; this characteristic would impact the two things you mention:
1.  Detectability on radar.
2.  Ability to target (also impacts the length that the ship can be targeted)

'Stealthiness would be also a function of distance from target.

Increasing your radar range would lower your 'stealthiness' factor, thus making you more detectable and more targetable

I actually thought that at the moment the system works just like that, except that last part above.

Separately there's of course also visual detectability which just depends on the ship (like Pegasus is not that visuallly detectable in nebula environment).

About the Ai - this might be diffcicult to program but AI should basically limit itself to the radar range that it needs, and not go beyond that.

EDIT: I would like to add however that my primary concern was simply the number of radar ranges available, as described in my first post.  I don't want to sound like I'm demanding that anyone improve the system further, though it could be a great addition to the game.

[chief1983]

Well, I've always liked the way EVE did it and wouldn't mind some elements of that coming over.  Things like stealthiness of a ship could have an affect on the lock on times from other ships.  Targeting ability of a ship could also be a multiplier to give ships vastly different targeting abilities.  Radar could be treated the same way, either you can or can't see a ship, or possibly you just get the fuzzy untargetable dot if your ship is incapable of targeting it due to weak radar.