I am not a game designer, nor have I ever tried to design a game.
So I know there may be a lot of issues involved that haven't even occurred to me when it comes to making suggestions, especially on the technical side.
I just wanted to state that up front. This game already does so many ridiculously detailed things, I'm always wondering how close to the knuckle it's running in terms of resources. So I know all the suggestions I make could easily be blown out of the water by some tiny factor I hadn't even considered. This is very much just brainstorming and wishlisting.
Okay, enough time wasting. I'm going to make suggestions in a series of stages. First, hopefully, a very basic level. Then expand on it to an intermediate level. Then outline a resource-no-object sort of implementation, which I know is not likely to ever happen. So if you don't feel like reading some pie-in-the-sky type suggestion, it's colour-coded so you can avoid it.
Basic
Could we please have the heading indicator for planets appear at a much higher altitude? When orbital cruise kicks in at least, but preferably as soon as the orbital HUD kicks in? Currently, the heading indicator only appears once you go below the 'drop' altitude, which means you basically can't check your heading when in orbital cruise (for clarity, the heading indicator is the small box with your bearing in degrees for the nose of your ship, above the targeting reticule and forming the top of a box with the attitude ladder - there's also some lines beneath it that act as a compass)
I know there are issues with this. At orbital cruise speeds, especially at extremely high altitudes, the bearing could change so fast as to be unreadable. Also, the greater the altitude, the more questionable the usefulness of the bearing, especially near the poles.
However, I would say firstly, it would be nice if this usefulness was for us to decide, and secondly, the cost in terms of HUD cluttering is pretty trivial - if it's not a problem at the planet's surface, why is it a problem higher up? Especially when the attitude ladder already appears, and takes up quite a bit of screen real estate already. A small addition like the heading indicator really does seem trivial, especially when it already appears closer to the ground.
This really does matter while playing the game - it would make a huge difference in navigating over a planet's surface in orbital cruise. Of course you could work out a rough heading from your Lat/Long as it changes, but this is a clunky and horrible way of doing it - fly in a direction, see whether Lat changes positively or negatively to establish whether your direction is partially north or south... then try to work out the same from changes in Long for east/west then try to mentally imagine your bearing based on the rates of change. Even worse, the prime meridian (the dividing line between the western and eastern hemisphere, or where Long is negative or positive) is presumably arbitrary just as it is on Earth in real life (Greenwich). Even if there is some methodology to how it's determined, this isn't going to be obvious to a pilot on approach from space, and nor even is it readily apparent which pole is north or south, since that will depend on the pilot's approach too. Knowing these things from the moment the orbital HUD kicks in would be very useful.
A second and for me more important reason to have this is for wing flying over a planet. I have repeatedly been in a wing with a friend, and as we approached a planet, we've tried to establish landmarks and interesting drop areas to head for. Trying to explain to someone how to establish their heading from the way Lat/Long is changing on their HUD and then give an estimated bearing off their calculated heading for an object is... well, it's just a nightmare. It tends to degenerate into, "NO OKAY FORGET IT LEFT JUST GO LEFT WHAT WAIT THAT'S RIGHT WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU'RE FLYING INVERTED WHAT WERE WE LOOKING FOR AGAIN OH GOD I LOST IT..." (and yes, I know flying inverted is a very good way of approaching a planet since you can look up from most ships... but it does reinforce how much easier it would be if we could call bearings)
I know that if wing-mates are separated by a significant distance, then calling bearings to each other becomes less useful, but actually it isn't that hard to fly in a pretty tight formation even in orbital cruise and also it has less tangible benefits than the obvious calling of bearings - once everyone has their head straight on where north/east/south/west is on a given planet's surface, you can say "Look at that gigantic black crater, the main visible feature of the planet... now look west of it... see that canyon running north-south?" and it's suddenly enormously easier to give each other cues on where to go.
Intermediate
To expand on this, there could be some useful elements on the Planetary Map (accessed from the System Map). I'm extremely impressed that your position on the Planetary Map updates in real-time. I've sat in the Planetary Map while flying on a 0 bearing and watched the little dot under the blue claret blink in and out as its position crawled up the curve of the planet. And when I rotated the Planetary Map sideways so my view showed my ship off the planet itself, the dot even seemed to have an altitude off the curve of the planet that changed as I gained and lost height. This is awesome.
My suggestions are that if you click on or mouse over a settlement or port on the planet surface, it draws a line on the shortest route around the curve of the planet's surface and then also lists the bearing you would have to fly to get there ("Bearing from current position" or some such). It would also be nice if it showed the distance in km. You could then call your position to wingmates in relation to ports and settlements on the planet surface.
A further natural development of that would be as you move your mouse pointer over the planet's surface, it updates a display in the Planetary Map with the Lat/Long of where the pointer is, plus an updated line that gives you a bearing and distance to that point. If you click, it creates a 'waypoint' that is visible as a target at the surface at that Lat/Long when you return to your ship's HUD. Perhaps this would be a toggle in the Planetary Map as a measuring/waypoint tool.
In the cockpit, it would be very nice to have a rangefinder tool, giving the distance to the centerpoint (the mouse widget). This already sort of exists for weapons, knowing whether they are in range or not. But it would allow you to measure distance to mountain peaks/across gorges and canyons/to those buildings over there/whatever you like from current position.
A further refinement of that would be a magnifier or the equivalent of binoculars. Now this presumably has heavy technical implications - drawing two different areas of the screen at different levels of detail, especially when moving at high speed.. But it would be very nice to have a toggleable zoom function. Maybe this is being saved for when on foot (that's also nice for balance reasons - if you want to study the horizon or something in the distance, you have to stop and expose yourself), and max speed is extremely low, so the surrounding environment can't change at too insane a rate. In any case, it can't hurt to suggest it!
Advanced
So to take this to a level that is probably unrealistic, let's consider the resources-no-object ideal - the Planetary Map loads up as an actual graphical representation of the planet in-game, with the textures, mountains and craters and everything, that you can zoom in and out on.
There is a toggleable grid overlay that some players might consider an aid to navigation.
You can click on any point on the planet surface and create a 'waypoint' or 'bookmark', which records the Lat/Long. Your mouse pointer continually updates with a Lat/Long display. You can open a text formatting tool to assign labels to a point on the map, naming features, adding notes, having the text options for Bold, Italic, font colour and size (only visible to yourself, on your Planetary Maps - I'm not suggesting these should become visible to everyone else). These waypoints can be saved, deleted, renamed and edited. You can also draw an area using a variety of art tools (circle, ellipse, rectangle, manually drawn boundaries, point to point), and then label that, which places the name onto the curve of the planet's surface, allowing you to name areas, continents, seas, craters, etc.
If your ship is in the planet's orbit, then clicking on a port, installation, settlement or waypoint draws the shortest distance line on the surface, and gives a bearing and distance from the ship's current position.
A refinement would be that unless you have a detailed surface scan of a planet's surface, then all you see is the grid as you see it now in Horizons. This would make having a detailed surface scan a genuine asset above and beyond the extra money you get for it. Obviously, already known systems (such as Earth and most High Techs) have the detailed surface scan already logged in every pilot's nav computer.
This would not only be visually spectacular, but would make exploration of planet surfaces truly awesome - the reward isn't just monetary, but finding actual persistent features on planets that you can return to and name, which for some of us is a reward in itself.
Of course, this is probably beyond the current capabilities of PC's right now, since Horizons seems to be pushing them to their limit already, but I reckon suggesting it is worthwhile if only to get shot down
So I know there may be a lot of issues involved that haven't even occurred to me when it comes to making suggestions, especially on the technical side.
I just wanted to state that up front. This game already does so many ridiculously detailed things, I'm always wondering how close to the knuckle it's running in terms of resources. So I know all the suggestions I make could easily be blown out of the water by some tiny factor I hadn't even considered. This is very much just brainstorming and wishlisting.
Okay, enough time wasting. I'm going to make suggestions in a series of stages. First, hopefully, a very basic level. Then expand on it to an intermediate level. Then outline a resource-no-object sort of implementation, which I know is not likely to ever happen. So if you don't feel like reading some pie-in-the-sky type suggestion, it's colour-coded so you can avoid it.
Basic
Could we please have the heading indicator for planets appear at a much higher altitude? When orbital cruise kicks in at least, but preferably as soon as the orbital HUD kicks in? Currently, the heading indicator only appears once you go below the 'drop' altitude, which means you basically can't check your heading when in orbital cruise (for clarity, the heading indicator is the small box with your bearing in degrees for the nose of your ship, above the targeting reticule and forming the top of a box with the attitude ladder - there's also some lines beneath it that act as a compass)
I know there are issues with this. At orbital cruise speeds, especially at extremely high altitudes, the bearing could change so fast as to be unreadable. Also, the greater the altitude, the more questionable the usefulness of the bearing, especially near the poles.
However, I would say firstly, it would be nice if this usefulness was for us to decide, and secondly, the cost in terms of HUD cluttering is pretty trivial - if it's not a problem at the planet's surface, why is it a problem higher up? Especially when the attitude ladder already appears, and takes up quite a bit of screen real estate already. A small addition like the heading indicator really does seem trivial, especially when it already appears closer to the ground.
This really does matter while playing the game - it would make a huge difference in navigating over a planet's surface in orbital cruise. Of course you could work out a rough heading from your Lat/Long as it changes, but this is a clunky and horrible way of doing it - fly in a direction, see whether Lat changes positively or negatively to establish whether your direction is partially north or south... then try to work out the same from changes in Long for east/west then try to mentally imagine your bearing based on the rates of change. Even worse, the prime meridian (the dividing line between the western and eastern hemisphere, or where Long is negative or positive) is presumably arbitrary just as it is on Earth in real life (Greenwich). Even if there is some methodology to how it's determined, this isn't going to be obvious to a pilot on approach from space, and nor even is it readily apparent which pole is north or south, since that will depend on the pilot's approach too. Knowing these things from the moment the orbital HUD kicks in would be very useful.
A second and for me more important reason to have this is for wing flying over a planet. I have repeatedly been in a wing with a friend, and as we approached a planet, we've tried to establish landmarks and interesting drop areas to head for. Trying to explain to someone how to establish their heading from the way Lat/Long is changing on their HUD and then give an estimated bearing off their calculated heading for an object is... well, it's just a nightmare. It tends to degenerate into, "NO OKAY FORGET IT LEFT JUST GO LEFT WHAT WAIT THAT'S RIGHT WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU'RE FLYING INVERTED WHAT WERE WE LOOKING FOR AGAIN OH GOD I LOST IT..." (and yes, I know flying inverted is a very good way of approaching a planet since you can look up from most ships... but it does reinforce how much easier it would be if we could call bearings)
I know that if wing-mates are separated by a significant distance, then calling bearings to each other becomes less useful, but actually it isn't that hard to fly in a pretty tight formation even in orbital cruise and also it has less tangible benefits than the obvious calling of bearings - once everyone has their head straight on where north/east/south/west is on a given planet's surface, you can say "Look at that gigantic black crater, the main visible feature of the planet... now look west of it... see that canyon running north-south?" and it's suddenly enormously easier to give each other cues on where to go.
Intermediate
To expand on this, there could be some useful elements on the Planetary Map (accessed from the System Map). I'm extremely impressed that your position on the Planetary Map updates in real-time. I've sat in the Planetary Map while flying on a 0 bearing and watched the little dot under the blue claret blink in and out as its position crawled up the curve of the planet. And when I rotated the Planetary Map sideways so my view showed my ship off the planet itself, the dot even seemed to have an altitude off the curve of the planet that changed as I gained and lost height. This is awesome.
My suggestions are that if you click on or mouse over a settlement or port on the planet surface, it draws a line on the shortest route around the curve of the planet's surface and then also lists the bearing you would have to fly to get there ("Bearing from current position" or some such). It would also be nice if it showed the distance in km. You could then call your position to wingmates in relation to ports and settlements on the planet surface.
A further natural development of that would be as you move your mouse pointer over the planet's surface, it updates a display in the Planetary Map with the Lat/Long of where the pointer is, plus an updated line that gives you a bearing and distance to that point. If you click, it creates a 'waypoint' that is visible as a target at the surface at that Lat/Long when you return to your ship's HUD. Perhaps this would be a toggle in the Planetary Map as a measuring/waypoint tool.
In the cockpit, it would be very nice to have a rangefinder tool, giving the distance to the centerpoint (the mouse widget). This already sort of exists for weapons, knowing whether they are in range or not. But it would allow you to measure distance to mountain peaks/across gorges and canyons/to those buildings over there/whatever you like from current position.
A further refinement of that would be a magnifier or the equivalent of binoculars. Now this presumably has heavy technical implications - drawing two different areas of the screen at different levels of detail, especially when moving at high speed.. But it would be very nice to have a toggleable zoom function. Maybe this is being saved for when on foot (that's also nice for balance reasons - if you want to study the horizon or something in the distance, you have to stop and expose yourself), and max speed is extremely low, so the surrounding environment can't change at too insane a rate. In any case, it can't hurt to suggest it!
Advanced
So to take this to a level that is probably unrealistic, let's consider the resources-no-object ideal - the Planetary Map loads up as an actual graphical representation of the planet in-game, with the textures, mountains and craters and everything, that you can zoom in and out on.
There is a toggleable grid overlay that some players might consider an aid to navigation.
You can click on any point on the planet surface and create a 'waypoint' or 'bookmark', which records the Lat/Long. Your mouse pointer continually updates with a Lat/Long display. You can open a text formatting tool to assign labels to a point on the map, naming features, adding notes, having the text options for Bold, Italic, font colour and size (only visible to yourself, on your Planetary Maps - I'm not suggesting these should become visible to everyone else). These waypoints can be saved, deleted, renamed and edited. You can also draw an area using a variety of art tools (circle, ellipse, rectangle, manually drawn boundaries, point to point), and then label that, which places the name onto the curve of the planet's surface, allowing you to name areas, continents, seas, craters, etc.
If your ship is in the planet's orbit, then clicking on a port, installation, settlement or waypoint draws the shortest distance line on the surface, and gives a bearing and distance from the ship's current position.
A refinement would be that unless you have a detailed surface scan of a planet's surface, then all you see is the grid as you see it now in Horizons. This would make having a detailed surface scan a genuine asset above and beyond the extra money you get for it. Obviously, already known systems (such as Earth and most High Techs) have the detailed surface scan already logged in every pilot's nav computer.
This would not only be visually spectacular, but would make exploration of planet surfaces truly awesome - the reward isn't just monetary, but finding actual persistent features on planets that you can return to and name, which for some of us is a reward in itself.
Of course, this is probably beyond the current capabilities of PC's right now, since Horizons seems to be pushing them to their limit already, but I reckon suggesting it is worthwhile if only to get shot down