Ship icons should reflect relationship

[nutomic]

For example:

red: enemy
blue: neutral
red: ally

This might also be good to be display on ships themselves, as an icon/border or something

[knowknowledge]

We also want to show the Ship's Alliance.

The current radar color shows how damaged the ship is. This is pretty useless most of the time.

What if we had a way for the player to choose what the Radar image represents? Say, an outfit upgrade or something?

I don't think that this is a big concern, but right now the radar color is calculated by each sprite, but calculating the color based on the relationship to the player would kind of break the Object abstraction. The whole game (including the Radar) should be able to run without the Player ship being there.

[chris]

There are a lot of room for outfits here.

First, I think the basic radar should be quite basic. Maybe 8 screens wide, showing only dots, plus a blinking dot for your target.

Upgrade: Density scanner. Dots are different sizes depending on ship size.
Upgrade: Precision scanner: Ability to determine the class of ship
Upgrade: Subatomic scanner: (making up tech here, maybe someone's got a better idea) Able to scan a ship's internal electrical flow to determine software types, which indicates which alliance it's a part of (or some other tech to determine the alliance)
Upgrade: Scanner radar sizes: Scan farther

Etc etc