Can your own ships appear in the star map? Some folks leave ships all over the Persistent Universe — wrecks, hulks, some still fully intact. What are our options or plans for showing our own detritus on the star map?
TL;DRTechnically own ships can be shown, but for now only your current ship is tracked, ships in station storage stay in inventory menus, and floating objects are more likely than owned ships.
Well, we definitely will have the ability technically to do it. This is sort of a design decision about what you can track. We already have a thing for tracking with the AR markers anyway, so there's no reason why anything that's on the AR wouldn't also be integrated into the mapping system to show exactly where you left it floating around some moon somewhere.
I mean, for now, you'll definitely be able to see where your current ship is. If you just got out of your ship and you're wandering around, you'll be able to see that on there. For ships that are, say, locked up on a space station, so it's not actually in the game world, that will probably, for now, live in your inventory and the other menus.
But yeah, stuff flying around is much more likely than the ships that are associated with you.
One thing, we never really showed the radar very much at CitizenCon, mainly just because it didn't really fit with the flow of everything, but we've improved the radar generally, and you can zoom into that and see it full screen the same way you can with the star map. So the kinds of things that you would see as contacts on your radar, you'll also be able to see in the big version too.
Yeah, that's another use case for a ship hologlobe, actually: the radar, and you're seeing all the ships and possibly the whole fleet and planning a battle.
Yeah, it's so cool for multi-crew gameplay if you're stood around and you can see your friends flying around you and wandering around.
So it's very much a pervasive UI throughout the game. It serves many, many purposes.