Here's my $0.05AU.
I basically want the original game, but with:
- More vertices on the wireframe models. No fancy curves or wings or anything silly like that, as I liked the hard-edged clean lines of the original elite ships and would prefer a slightly more detailed versions of ships but with a similar style.
- Larger structures, ships. So large that they have docking bays (or multiples of). Remember the starting scene of star-wars? I want see a massive ship and (if its friendly) fly into its hanger and dock to trade.
- Shaded polygons would be totally fine with me for ships. Actually I'd even go so far as to say that most ships be shaded in a dark colour (in regular space) and that the only bright thing you would see would be glare of the their engines or lights shining through windows if you were close enough. The Last thing I would want to see is rainbow coloured ships. Space is vast, dark and mysterious.
- Beautiful looking planets. Here we can go crazy with what ever the latest graphics techniques are. I want to drool every time i arrive at a new planet.
- Make the sun at system be the correct light source. I want to dart in and out of the shadows of planetary bodies, eclispes etc. And see the dark & light sides of ships when dogfighting etc. Fly in and amongst a fleet of capital ships and hide in their shadows... that sort of stuff.
- Be able to enter the atmosphere and dock in space-ports/cities planet-side (both above and below oceans)
- Repeat: Space is mostly black.
- Giant (and I mean GIANT) planets, some so large that you must avoid or go around else get crushed. (Same with massive suns). Not sure how I feel about black holes though...
- Generation Ships.
- Ability to have a homeworld (with garage) to store ships as I get wealthy.
- Ability to buy many types of ships. Some days I want to be a bounty hunter, others I want to be a smuggler, other days I want to be a cop and patrol around orbiting space stations, other days I just want to shuttle people from orbiting space stations down to cities on the surface and back again.
- Stay with the procedurally generated universe but seed it with new races for me to discover over time.
Thats enough for now, it's late and way past my bedtime.
I'd also like to see weather on planets, wind, rain, snow, fog