Station Improvements

[StellarAmbition]

With the current functions that stations have it leaves much to be desired. I feel that with just a few improvements stations / bases / player shops can play a bigger role. Here are a few ideas that could make owning or using them more fun.

1) Announcements- Just like how servers typically a message displayed once you log in it would be cool to have a message displayed once a player flys into the sector containing the station. These announcements could advertise things the shop has, act as a welcome message, or could be a great recruiting method for factions.

1a) Billboard / Signs- An expansion on the announcements. Just think how many times you would have liked to place a sign in your massive ship to give directions or possibly name rooms or something similar. Signs could be a single block that has say 30 characters max but by placing another adjacent to it you gain more characters and billboards couls use the same block just scale along the X axis for more characters and along the Y axis for larger font.

2) More Than One Shop- This is pretty straight-forward. I want to be able to have more than one player shop block allowed on a station. I see this being a great way for a community to come together at one location and allow individuals or factions to set up thier own shops. When more than one shop is placed the large shop radius could be disabled or shrunk down to a small radius encouraging players to dock their ships and interact with others,



3) Expanded Options / UI- Once a station has been claimed it would be nice to be able to control certian aspecs about said station. The faction block could be the hub of these options because it governs ownership of the station. The faction block could have more options like the previous announcement suggestion and others like being able to disable combat ( station could still be attacked just players can't die will in the sector ), or maybe a give players permissions similar to whitelisting.



Edit: Another possiblity with the recent update could include AI roles on the station like managing a shop, maybe give him dialog to access the shop.

 

[Fishbreath]

For #2, maybe have a separate kind of block for a small shop? You have to walk up to it and interact to use it, but you can have more than one on a station.

 

[Zovc]

Love it, add this with small movement

 

[NeonSturm]

I like #2 (shops)

For #1, it would hurt the reaction time to attacks if you have to click away that annyoing window.

I suggest it to be a hud area with text and possible links (like on a website) to dialogs.

I think it would be better to use info bacons in sun systems for this (registered/loaded from sun-system data).

Closest one (for the case there are multiple per sun system) is the primary one. Others may be accessible via tab-page2

 

[Doomsider]

You make some good points and I will adress them.

1) Yes a message system for shops as well as sectors and other bases would be great, although I would like it to appear somewhere else other than chat. Moving Billboards would be very cool and probably do-able. These would also be cool on the outside and on the inside of ships to display information.

2) This is already in the works. I talked to Schema about this and he said shops will soon be randomly generated (not their location, but they way they look) and also he will add a directroy for custom stations/shops so you can personalize these structures when they are randomly generated.

3) This is a no brainer, since ships have these type of control panels it makes sense to have it for stations as well

 

[Angus and Alexis]

Add all of them.