A small update to keep everyone in the loop of some exciting new features currently under development.....
I'm taking a slight break on the orrery feature. I've been working hard on bring this feature into fruition and it's nearly ready; however there is one thing I can't solve and it's bugging me! Scale. Many systems in Elite have multiple stars and trying to organise the display of the orrery so that everything renders on the screen at the same time in a pleasing way is proving....tricky.
Meanwhile I have taken the next giant step - integrated the orrery into the galaxy map. So , when you use the route plotter and create a route on the galaxy map, zooming right in on one of the selected nodes automatically zooms your view into the orrery; similarly, when zooming out the transition back to the galaxy map is seemless.
The galaxy map route plotter is getting an overhaul too. Manual waypoint plotting has been added primarily to help with the visualisation of long range passenger expedition missions - these don't have a final destination (or not revealed until some time closer to the target). Still to do is merge the manual waypoints into the neutron plotter so that a neutron boosted route can be manually created rather than be the result of missions.
At some point, the galaxy map will have access to POIs along with a dedicated Point of Interest user interface and import mechanism.
Taking another sidestep away from the galaxy map and orrery (both of which are full-on time killers) is a new feature. Simulated space chatter. I intend to make a simulation of live radio chatter take place in realtime whilst your ship is in supercruise (and maybe optionally whilst in normal space too). There'll be chatter between two NPCs and some one way conversation towards your ship too, along with background noises. The synthesised voices will be post processed by some filters to make the sounds seem more distant and background and I may even get the effects to pan around the number of speakers the listener has - so stay tuned!
