Couple of ideas and things that came to mind after having watched pretty much everything there is of Alpha 4 stuff so far:
1) Constellations: No point about dealing with precession and rotation (galactic) - Nobody cares if Polaris is no longer the actual pole star, as earths north pole is no longer a useful reference (it won't change *that* much anyway).
2) Constellations: How about separate constellations as seen from each factions area, rather than only from Sols reference? Dev could invent their own "figures", and maybe add lore to them. I.e. maybe from Sols reference, the Ursa Major looks nice, but from Achernar some of the stars may form a completely different (and new) constellation.
3) Gas planets: Did I really see a "cloud bumpmap"? From the distances we're at, there is no way we could see shading differences due to cloud elevations (as far as I can imagine anyways). Feel free to prove me wrong. They are okay to have in the game, but should kick in at much closer distances (probably not until we can actually get close).
4) Ring systems: Aren't these supposed to be made of dust and ice? I would expect there to be some specular sheen seen on them, but they appear completely diffuse. Also, would they really be *THAT* dense? Unless I missed something, there still appear to be a bit too much indirect lighting going on. Although in general I'm happy that space at least looks like a pretty dark place.
5) Navigation/selector: The systems I saw appeared to be very small wrt number of orbital bodies and stations. The selector would work in this case, but what about the Sol system with
427 known natural satellites? How would I pinpoint (say for mining) a body in the Kuiper belt or Oorts Cloud (if we can even get that far out in the first place)?
6) Jumping: Distances jumped in videos wasn't very far. So why do I see a whole bunch of stars and even nebulae pass by during the jump sequence? If "witchspace" is not a direct shortest line between two spatial points, that could prove difficult for any kind of misjumps (would have to follow the same kind of rule, possibly sending you to the center of the galaxy - insta reload for just about anyone).
7) Jumping: Sound of thunder on exit? Really? To me this is the only completely misplaced sound I've heard so far. I pretty much love the rest (and I'm pretty hard to please), including the galaxy zoomed out sound and the sound *during* the jump.
8) Trading: In the event that the trading gets expanded later on, it would be nice if category wasn't a header but its own column, and then be able to click on any column to sort on that.
9) Navigational cues: I found it particularly funny that nobody read the body distance and docking distance and immediately tried to fly "through" the body to get to the dock. In some cases repeatedly, not understanding what the hell was going on
With that in mind, maybe color the screen target differently for stuff that is behind or in front of a different body?
10) Information lacking: I'm a geek, I admit. But I would really like to know *A LOT* about the selected body, somehow. See how Space Engine gives me all kinds of useful and useless data (atmospheric pressure, temperature, orbital eccentricity, albedo, and all that technical fun stuff). It may not be all that useful to "gaming", but it's still semi important for the bidding scientists out there
If not in the navigational screen, then at least in the system info screen (see 12 below).
11) Orbits: Again, see Space Engine. Maybe youtube suffers from compression, but I wasn't able to tell orbital direction in ED. In SE, the orbits are faded out, so location of body will always be where strongest and weakest part of shown orbit overlaps.
12) System info: I didn't see any videos showing this. Is it perhaps omitted in this version completely?
Sorry for the WOT, but I had to say something. Space being black again, and not completely filled with ridiculous "fog/nebulae" - thanks a lot. That's a real uplifter. Getting excited again.
