Idle ship animations

Maybe little space robots pop out and give the ship(s) a new coat of paint.

Haha... now that would be cool!

anything really, a neat idea for space stations would be people in space suits going around washing windows or something lol.

maby as the crew of the ship is reparing it out of battle you can see sparks and stuf going off as they fix it up a bit like homeworld or as u said little repaire bots or painting bots coming out and doing stuf or fighter patroles going on or when u animate the autop cannons maby have them turning and stuf or maby have the lights on the ship going on and of as people go in and out of the diffrent rooms or maby have fighters doing practise dog fights like flying after each other that would be cool like training

Haha, genius. Next thing you know we'll have waste transports docking for 'toxic waste removal'...

It's a little hard finding an idle animation for a ship in space. It's motionless... The only thing you can do is adding spinning sections to the ships to animate artifical gravity, or other moving bit. Apart from that you can only have people/bots zoom around to maintain the sexy factor of the ship by giving paint or windows some attention.

As for fighter patrols, maneuvers or practice fights, I'd like to see something like this. Instead of fighters from Hangars and Carriers just sitting there in space when launched, have them randomly fly through the area they are in. This might be especially handy for when we get the Sensors and sight range to play with. Either have a button to switch on Fighter Patrols or make em do it on their own.

We all love to have some autonomous movement in our empire so when we sit back and check out what we've built, conquered and seduced, then we're impressed and have something to follow or look at.

Yea the auto cannons need to follow the traget and move that way they woldent look stupid when they are pointing 1 way and the just of flames coming out of the barrel gose another way also the the def platforms they may be traking a target and fire but the barrles arnt pointing at the target cos the gun cant turn that fast but the bullets come out sidways and hit the target any way which is stupid.

best suggestion EVER!

maby u could have them auto patroling the places where bad guys come in

having them do something purposeful, i.e. patrol would be nice, but to have them bob up and down is a waste of processing power. nobody would bother even to look at the ships in that level of detail (while they're doing nothing) anyway. besides, when is the last time you saw a tank driving back and forth 2ft while its not in combat? never. because it doesnt happen

Hey i made this thread to brainstorm, if EVERYONE here but me thinks ships bobbing up and down is a bad idea, fine what IS a good idea to you guys, im open to suggestions and hopefully the dev's will listen.

Also: Space suit people = the Window Washer boys of the future ! Anyway yeah, most of this stuff could be done with sprites or pixels, you know 2-d images to prevent lag. Oh and when something happens the space suit people move a bit closer to the ship and disapear all within less than 5 seconds, just so that you ships still respond quickly.

Well in regards to the hull repair research, once it is researched, maybe see little bots fly out of an idle ship and shoot them repair sparks at the ship, as it gets fixed.

Hmm, looking at Sin's code, could it be possible to have space suit people/spaceships orbit around Orbital's like a planet ? That would be sweet !

yes, because we all need people to wipe our windows clean of microscopic dust