Navigation targeting, weapon targeting

[KiloZulu]

It would be nice to be able to set a target for navigation purposes that is separate from the targeting used by BobbyAI when they are set to fire on my selected turret. Often I like to target a ship or station so that I can orient my ship towards it, or pick it out from a group. It is not my intent to fire on those targets, but if I have forgotten my BobbyAI settings, I end up tearing apart the place I wanted to visit (or going to war with the Trade Guild.)

 

[Sachys]

Yeah, I tried using "selected target" before - only to be greeted with disaster.

Ideally I'd like to see three variants:
1. Navigation Waypoint
2. Target "scan" (so you can see the details of ships / stations etc without losing navigation or opening fire).
3. KILL! (though I suppose this could be #2 with a kill command).

Edit: though thinking again #3 would be useful to consider your next target.

 

[Edymnion]

A simple change to the AI for "Don't automatically fire on targeted non-hostile" would suffice for me.

If I want the turrets to shoot at my target, I'll shoot it first and it'll be sure to go hostile on me on it's own.

 

[jayman38]

I'm wondering about the best way to handle the player interface. Schine would probably come up with better ideas, but I'm thinking....
0. Instead of having separate selections, would it be better to have the AI prompt the player, to verify that it can fire on the selected entity? This wouldn't work well with more than two turrets; many turrets would create a message queue in the heat of combat; exactly where a message queue is not needed.
1. Nav Screen: Two buttons next to each contact, one green for nav-targeting, and one red for combat-targeting. Or just keep it as-is? Nav-select only possible in Nav Screen? At least that would reduce re-learning and accidents, because generally, if you just want to "check something out", you will be willing to take the time to work on the nav screen. It would also need a special "nav-target-under-reticle" bind to view entities that you can see, but don't yet know about or identify on the nav screen.
2. Single-button selections: One push to nav-select, a second to combat-select? That might lead to accidents with accidental double-pushes. Plus, you want quick and easy combat selection in the heat of combat, not relying on a toggle.
3. HUD: instead of changing the color of the contact, maybe draw an additional triangle around the contact chevron, with the color of the selection-type.

Also, it would be a very interesting game mechanic to select explosions, weapon fire, and other temporary, non-entity events as nav-selects, to track down cloaking ships that fire. (Or possible, invisible singularities, like hidden wormhole portals, which might be introduced into the game, specifically to take advantage of such a nav mechanic.)

 

[uberadiant]

What about adding in fire groups -

The weapons screen could show a list of turrets currently docked.

Also in the weapons screen is an "Add Firegroup" button.

Clicking on the button adds "Firegroup 1", "Firegroup 2" etc. to the weapons screen, displayed in much the same way as individual weapons are now. Firegroups can then be renamed i.e. missile group, forward beam group etc. AI can be set per group, or per individual turret.

Turrets can then be dragged into a particular firegroup. When at least one turret is added to a firegroup, a new icon appears in the hotbar (or in a specific weapons bar maybe?)

Activating the firegroup icon in the hotbar commands all turrets in that group to fire on the specified target. Clicking again orders them to cease fire. No weapons are fired until the icon is activated.​

This would allow players to order specific groups of turrets to fire on command. Perhaps useful if you only want to fire specific types of weapons, say to bring shields down without causing too much hull damage. And nothing would fire on your target until a firegroup is activated, allowing you to select a target and see all of its information without opening fire. Thoughts?

 

[Nickizzy]

It would be nice if you had different types of select targets. Select Turret target. Select navagate target. Select combat targets.

Turret target would be one target, it wouldn't pop up anywhere.
Selected Nav target would only show you relative speed and allow plane alignment with the target(you align with the target's point of view, like galactic north)
Selected Combat target would give you the Shields, armor, health and power, as well as the largets weapon system and how many turrets they have. You can have up to 3 of these, so you can keep track of different ships. When a ship is Combat locked, it gets a warning, and AI get wary.

All numbers are up for grabs, all features are give and take.

 

[Lone_Puppy]

I wish we could have pop-out windows for this sort of thing.
Then we could have a turret pop-out with turret select, targeting options.
And with a tablet or phone setup as an additional screen on my gaming rig, I would use this as my control screen.

 

[KiloZulu]

I've seen many simulations that offer both "target ally" and "target enemy" options. Starmade doesn't use a lot of hotkeys during piloting, so it seems like they could add hotkeys for the different functions, or simply do a combo hotkey such as Shift+T to cycle through targets for navigation purposes.

(The use of "simply" is for the idea, not the implementation.)

 

[Valiant70]

Keep it simple. Add another hotkey to tell turrets to kill what you've got selected.