Bridge Option for Tactical Map

thetratz · July 2012

I'm fairly sure this has been brought up...but for warp speed travel, it would be cool to be able to plot courses and navigate while in the ship interior as an optional alternative to the tactical map. You could hypothetically adapt the windows/view screen to reflect the relative views on the outside as they appear on the tactical map as well.

jardail · July 2012

this is something that should have been in the game from the outset. I can't remember one episode where the captain or any of the crew sat their TRIBBLE on the left or right nacelle and travelled from one system to another. It was all Interior

sumghai · July 2012

This has been requested by the community many, many times. However, this will probably never happen is because it would require a fundamental rewrite of the core game engine.

The game simply considers the player as one entity, simply making you appear as either a toon or a ship. When you switch between space and ground maps, your last known position is simply forgotten.

In order for bridge-based navigation to happen, additional data would be needed to track the "persistent" position of the ship in Sector Space, and to modify it from the bridge interior map. There have been no plans by the devs to do so, however.

Even if they *did* have this feature, a minor issue would be what to show on the viewscreen upon arrival at a star system. For instance, some missions have you bouncing around from planet to planet within the same system, so which one would be viewscreen show first? The one numbered first? (e.g. Galor I out of Galor I, II, III & IV in the Galor system) Or an arbitarily-determined one? (e.g. Earth in the Sol System)

thetratz · July 2012

sumghai wrote:

This has been requested by the community many, many times. However, this will probably never happen is because it would require a fundamental rewrite of the core game engine.

Ship interiors weren't originally in the game, either. It can be done. Anything other than "yes" is simply admitting they don't want to do it because it's not important enough to them. Solutions are what good business models run on, not problems. Sure, it would be difficult, but I'm sure they're making enough money to spend some resources on it :P. ******n lock boxes.

archer586969 · July 2012

If this could be pulled off, I think it would be amazing! It would be nice to see things from the perspective of the bridge crew.

tankalot42o · July 2012

if they cant charge u for it in some way they wont do it.............................

eiledon · July 2012

It would be nice if you could - via the helmsmans console on the bridge, bring up a window where you could plot your course across various sectors. Then when you activate your course you automatically return to standard sector view and the ship autoroutes to your location (and automatically skips/accepts the warp dialogs where crossing borders). This would be a nice compromise and would also give folks some time to get up and stretch their legs/make a coffee etc while their ship heads to a destination.

Think of it as the slow boat route versus transwarp.

cpthardcover · July 2012

thetratz wrote: »

Ship interiors weren't originally in the game, either. It can be done. Anything other than "yes" is simply admitting they don't want to do it because it's not important enough to them. Solutions are what good business models run on, not problems. Sure, it would be difficult, but I'm sure they're making enough money to spend some resources on it :P. ******n lock boxes.

No, actually it quite literally is nigh impossible to do in the Cryptic game engine.

Your ship and your captain uniforms are, in the view of the game engine, the same object. There's just different environments and movement modes, rather like how travel powers work in Champions Online. Back in the olden days of yore known as "closed beta," there were times when extreme lag would cause characters to appear in ground environments as their starships, or in space environments as their captain.

In order to have the ship be "pilotable" from the bridge interior would actually mean that the servers would have to basically do double the work for each person performing such an action - showing your captain on the bridge, and your ship out in space flying along. Because of this - and because it would necessitate rewriting huge portions of the game's base code, the general consensus and word from the devs is "ain't gonna happen."

About the closest thing you might hope for is an interactive item or console in bridge interiors that would pull up your transwarp destination list, then trigger a map transition from the bridge to whatever destination you selected. That is, I would suspect, much more doable than ship piloting a la Bridge Commander.

johnsteward · February 2013

although this topic is quite old and in all likelyhood senseless i still want to add that one of if not the first star trek game ever had all its space combat controlled from the brigde, the captain sitting in his chair, looking at the viewscreen. Dont remember the name, it was like an adventure with extremly hard space fights and hard riddles, but this kind of controlling the fight would be awesome.
I dont really care for technical difficulties, but adding a bridge setup that would allow this kind of control for say 2k zen cant be that hard or like this david stahl said somewhere that they where thinking about doing stuff with kickstarter to finance stuff the community really wants.. so i would say there are lots of possibilities to make this work, technically for sure and also financially for them.

cptvanor · February 2013

johnsteward wrote: »

but adding a bridge setup that would allow this kind of control for say 2k zen cant be that hard

Clearly you have no idea how hard it would actually be. They've made it quite clear, they being the people who actually know what they're talking about, the ones who created the game in the first place... That doing so is not an easy thing to do.

haldan1968 · February 2013

BUT!
They could always fake it.

Have the game calculate how long it would take to get from point A to point B, and then you can roam around your ship for that length of time, while your character and ship interior basically sit in limbo. Once the time is up, your ship would simply be placed in the correct zone/sector.

They would need to include an interface on your bridge (at the navigator station), that would allow you to pick your destination (point

while the sector you are in would be considered point A.

One drawback is that your ship would not appear in sector space for the duration of "travel", and the other is that you would probably be locked in for the duration as well and would not be able to leave your bridge.

Considering this is offered as an optional way to travel the galaxy, and not required, I don't see either drawback being that significant.

p.s. I would rather they fixed Beam Overload first however. That 2 minute cooldown is brutal.

altechachan · February 2013

haldan1968 wrote: »

BUT!
They could always fake it.

Have the game calculate how long it would take to get from point A to point B, and then you can roam around your ship for that length of time, while your character and ship interior basically sit in limbo. Once the time is up, your ship would simply be placed in the correct zone/sector.

They would need to include an interface on your bridge (at the navigator station), that would allow you to pick your destination (point while the sector you are in would be considered point A.

One drawback is that your ship would not appear in sector space for the duration of "travel", and the other is that you would probably be locked in for the duration as well and would not be able to leave your bridge.

Considering this is offered as an optional way to travel the galaxy, and not required, I don't see either drawback being that significant.

I think Tumerboy talked about this a few months ago. It boiled down to what you said but there was additional tech that they would need to make this happen. I'll try to find the link but it was a-ways back.

p.s. I would rather they fixed Beam Overload first however. That 2 minute cooldown is brutal.

Seems more of an Engineering Team bug. This went on Tribble a couple of days ago: http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showpost.php?p=8161861&postcount=1

Using Engineering Team no longer puts all abilities into a 2 minute cooldown.

haldan1968 · February 2013

altechachan wrote: »

I think Tumerboy talked about this a few months ago. It boiled down to what you said but there was additional tech that they would need to make this happen. I'll try to find the link but it was a-ways back.

Seems more of an Engineering Team bug. This went on Tribble a couple of days ago: http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showpost.php?p=8161861&postcount=1

OUTSTANDING! Thanks for the update on the 2 minute cooldown issue!

Bridge Option for Tactical Map

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