A few of the ideas I have are:
Interface and Display
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When selecting a body from the search window it should drill down to that actual body in the system data tree and not just the system. This can be bothersome in a multiple star system because then you have to go through each star/planet/moon etc to find the actual body you are looking for unless you have the default naming scheme (I, II, IV, etc for planets, .1, .2 for moons, etc), then it makes it a little easier to find it.
As a side note to that, maybe have two separate fields, one for the bodies designation and one for it's name. Depending on where you want to put the load the designation could be stored, thus adding to file size, and updating it dynamically when new bodies are added, the systems name changes, etc. Or generating it on the fly, thus chewing up more cycles, when a system is selected.
Smaller Bodies probably don't need to be displayed in the dropdown list in the Travel Time Calculator as it really doesn't make sense.
Asteroid Belts could have something similar to the Atmosphere Components for Planets/Moons that show the percentage of of different asteroid classifications that comprise the asteroid belt. C-Type, S-Type, and M-Type would probably be suitable for most peoples purposes but it would probably be good to give it the same number of rows as atmosphere composition in case someone wants to go more in-depth with Tholen or SMASS classification.
On the System Diagram have Asteroid Belts display as thick bands similar to how Rings on a Plants are displayed. Maybe not as a solid band but perhaps as a polka dot or hatched pattern to show the general area covered by the Asteroid Belt.
Multiple Spheres of Influence. The Federation of Do Gooders has three main branches; Space Boy Scouts who sell Space Popcorn, Space Girl Guides who sell Space Cookies, and Space Little Leagues who sell Space Raffle Tickets. Piggy Puff III is the centre of operations for the FDG in the Couch Potato Nebula. Booming sales of Space Carmel Space Popcorn and Tipple Stuffed Space Chocolate Space Cookies have allowed the Space Boy Scouts and Space Girl Guides to purchase and maintain a fleet of Space Buses to transport them to their Space Camping Trips and Space Community Service Events anywhere in the Couch Potato Nebula. Unfortunately poor sale of Space Raffle Tickets with a grand prize of a Space Home Gym and Space Personal Trainer have left the Space Little Leagues with only a few volunteer Space Moms driving Space Chevy Astro Vans and Space Ford Windstars to a few neighbouring systems to play Space Soccer and Space Baseball. Reports say the Space Boy Scouts and Space Girl Guides are not doing so well in the Diabetic Cluster.
Multiple Political Affiliations for basically the same reasons as multiple spheres of influence; being part of different pacts, trade agreements, alliances etc.
Placing stationary objects in a system. What I mean is objects that don't have an orbit, kinda setting specific, but maybe if you had jump points that didn't move thus travel to them would take more/less time depending on on your place of departure and where it was in it's orbit. I remember someone mentioning the idea of not having separate views for the sector/systems/bodies it all just depended on your level of zoom (I really like this idea by the way), if that was implemented then it really wouldn't be an issue because you could just place the Marker or whatever as a separate body and not a child of another body.
Plugins and API
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Support for subfolders in the plugins folder. It would be handy for things like my GURPS Suite to be able to reside lumped togeather in their own folder in the plugins folder.
Being able to create sub menus in the Plugins and Popmenu menus. I have plans to add more features to my GURPS Suite but it's starting to get a little cluttered in the menus. It would be nice if I could create a sub menu for them like how Subsectors work in the Filters menu or Change Body Type works in the popmenu, then I could have GURPS Suite > {list of plugins}.
Easier management of System Data Config Class. Unfortunately I'm not sure what the best way to go about doing this would be. Currently I think my GURPS plugins and the old one written by Robert Crawford are the only ones that change the System Data Config but I don't really like the idea of my plugins clobbering changes made by somebody else's or vice versa. Although the data isn't harmed if more plugins start to do it it would be a very annoying and possibly deal breaking experience for a user that is constantly getting the data display modified by multiple plugins every time they are run and having to go in an manually re-add fields to be displayed each time.
Custom Filters. 'Nuff said.
Being able to refresh the system data tree from the API.
Being able to more gracefully deselect all currently selected bodies. In my Plot Jump Route plugin I had to use this kludge
- Code: Select all
tempObj = sector.SelectBodies(Empty, Empty, 0)
It works, but I don't know if it's really suppose to work that way.
A Listbox Widget that supports multiple selection via the shift and control keys would be nice. In fact it would be nice to create more robust GUI's over all. Being able to preform event handling like OnChange for dropdown lists for example. I don't know if maybe HTA's may be a better way to go then just VBScript because it would allow for a lot more freedom in building and scripting the GUI, but I'm not sure how difficult it would to hook it into the AS API.
Those are what I can think of right now. I probably have more for the API but can't think of them right now.
Best Regards,
Alan Bartholet
