Proposed Enhancements - MarcelineVQ/endless-sky GitHub Wiki

##enhancements

• Ability to fire an escort has been requested but it would make more sense to fix the issues you'd need that for, for example people want to fire an escort because it's drifted foreverfar away in a system and doesn't have the fuel to jump out, instead just have the fix be that ships too far out in a system are moved close to the center again after some time when you're not there

• swivel attribute for guns
  So for example a fixed mount weapon can only fire forward, but the weapon in that slot might have an attribute like swivel 15 which means that it can track up to 15 degrees away from its facing.

• ^ turrets with a facing attribute and an arc attribute, limiting their firing arcs

• Capture experience for crew, wherein crew for flagship is tracked and their stats improve each time they survive an attack or defend action up to some reasonable limit like 1.5 or 2x base stat

• conversation die option should take an optional parameter for a message to show on death, forced death is a shocker so the content creator might want the option to clarify something via death message

• shift-h should hold fire for fleet, anti-missile still fires

• reputations tab for info panel possibly also including tribute specifics there, allowing you to tick-off a rep you want to track on the main panel

• flagship should be parkable but it moves the next non-selected ship to the top of the list?

• galaxies should probably segregate, you can technically scroll to the pug galaxy if you drag the map to just the right spot because it's all one giant map. it's not an issue itself but it would be easier for content creators to not have to look up where other galaxies are

• the ability to specify the illegality and fine of an item per government

outfit "Illegal Thing"
    illegal 1000000  #generally illegal for 1m, 0 or omitting this means only the following apply
        "Republic" 5000000  #illegal in the republic for 5m
        "!Drak"  #Drak don't care if you have it

• clicking a target on the radar could select it

• right clicking a spot on the radar could send your ships to hold that spot

• some way to see base stats of a ship in game, you should be able to know that your stolen mereti/sestor ship has inherant ramscooping

• planetary storage facilities for outfits you might want to keep in reserve

• mission escorts should show up in the info panel ship list

• the outfit scanner should arrange things by category

• shipyard/outfitter/infopanel should tell you how many ships you have selected

• the space port button should have an icon (!) displayed when a mission is available there, I found the free worlds mission very difficult to start because I didn't know I had to click on a spaceport at all
  the author wasn't thrilled by this idea because these missions are supposed to be a surprise, and people have suggested it would be better to find something more to do at the spaceports than reading flavor text in order to be more likely to trigger this kind of mission

• create a travel route by dragging the mouse

• Create a message log pane that pops up when you click on the message area, stores every message in the current game session. Also allow scrolling the mouse wheel on the message section to refresh old messages you may have missed

• F1 menus that explain what can be done with any given top UI element

• make check [x] boxes with labels next to them for ui tables

• player creation panel with toggles like hardcore and permadeath mode
  hardcore mode only allows one save file or might only allow saves/autosaves at planets with spaceports or reduce cash inflows or other possibilities
  permadeath mode flatly means that when your ship explodes all that captain's saves are deleted
  possibly your captain is added to a list of dead captains, which features a summary of their net worth, licenses, combat rating, and their flagship, between the middle and right panels

• allow clicking on a destination system multiple times on the map to give the next best couple routes within a certain tolerance

• allow a selection of ships to be dragged in info panel or shop panel

• clicking on ship, model, system, shields, etc on the info screen should sort the ship list by that heading, alphabetic in the case of ship name
  should this rearrange the ships permanently like dragging does?

• fleet summary tab or table giving you things like total fighter/drone slots and average fleet dps

• clicking on an outfit in the ship info panel should give you its stats

• when in space and you select a single ship from your fleet on the info screen, there should be a button to exit info screen with that ship targeted or it should just happen

• no-room-for-cargo-on-liftoff dialogue was done by author, good addition but when ask occurs it just says cargo which is vague, reasonable to tell you it's dumping outfits if it is since it may be hard to get them again

• outfitter screen available on any planet, limited to what's on your ships and in cargo if no Outfitter present, possibly mass limits to keep planets with real outfitters more relevant?
  likely too complicated for its actual utility

• add brake key to halt flagship, considered braking using hold fleet button but if you want your fleet to remain in another system this would likely cause them to move around while you're toggling your halt

• prioritize boarding by ship value in some reasonable way, alt b?

• allow planets to move very slowly and also time to pass while sitting in a system? the mechanics exist already so likely the author has considered this and didn't implement it on purpose

• 'total:' row in bank tab might as well be a 'totals:' row and display total principals as well as payments

• outfitter panel of map screen should have tick boxes for outfits to filter locations
  enhancement of very low priority
  alternatively one could use ctrl+click to select multiple outfits and show outfitters that have all of them

• weapons capable of hitting multiple ships at once in a line, weapons that aren't stopped by the first thing they hit in other words. should asteroids count as ship hits or stop it?
  lance 3 weapon will strike though up to 3 targets

• weapons whose projectiles go right to the target or only hit things near the target
  it seems like the gridfire turret was intended to hit its target directly based on how it looks visually but it will still hit intervening targets, this would allow it to hit directly
  warp [pixel radius] radius determines how far away from the target to consider checking for hits, omitting it means the weapon will hit only the target's location

• damage-over-time weapon attribute
  drain <damage type> <damage ammount> [<duration> default 15s]

• conditional damage, such as hull or shield %, enabling something like a missile that doesn't detonate when the target's hull is low enough to be disabled

• mission conditions and text substitutions should have access to your flagship's attributes and fleet attribute totals