Netdevil was working on a very smart HUD system for Jumpgate Evolution where it factored in a player’s concentration around the centre of the screen (which incidentally also assisted in their efforts to reduce motion sickness).
You have a central circle of essential information which tracks other targets around you. I found this to be very intuitive.
Used in conjunction with a modified Elite radar with clearer X & Y cardinal lines marked out and I think it would be the best for me.
Watching Kates session shows the importance of teaching new players all about Newtons laws and how they apply to space combat. A lot of instinctual thoughts lead to incorrect assumptions about what a pilot needs to do to make the thing they want to happen, happen. I would like a button called “calculate my velocity relative to my target”, and have that target displayed next to the velocity info on the HUD.
Target’s relative velocity is already shown under the target.
A tutorial of good combat techniques would be good though.
Velocity is always relative to something, i just want to be able to say what it is relative to. Having to target an object just to see what speed I am moving relative to it isn’t always useful (unless I can target multiple objects).
… This is what you just asked for…
What am I missing?
The fact that I want to target something else and still see speed relative to my previous target.
I see. Can you give an example and say how you think that would be helpful?
You may assert that. I assert the opposite. I don’t want to be able to spot jousting. I want to be able to maintain an intuitive sense of situational awareness so that I can go far beyond “avoiding jousting”. I want players to immediately understand that they are doing something stupid when they charge straight at a target. The reason that they joust is that they don’t see what’s happening. Jousting wouldn’t be the standard tactic if people had more information. If there are two guys with pistols facing each other across an ice-covered lake, they don’t just run headlong at each other and hope to get a shot at each other as they slide by.
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Of course the interface should enable the pilot to maintain situational awareness.
My point was that in the two examples I cited, they both had sufficient situational awareness to know that jousting was occuring.
I think it’s the job of tutorials, not the interface, to help people understand what tactics are good/bad. It’s the job of the interface to enable them to implement whatever tactic they deem fit.
What information do you think would prevent jousting from being a standard tactic?
If this ice lake situation was in a game, and if they were beyond the perceived effective range of their pistol, then yes I believe they would just run at eachother until they felt they were inside effective range.
If they weren’t in a game I think stupid people would run away from eachother, less stupid people would run at some angle between a tangent and 45 - 70 degrees away depending on range.
For a second I read it as “Netdevil is working on a [hud] for Jumpgate Evolution”
Such joy followed by immediate disappointment.
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When you are travelling interplanetary,escorting a cap ship, and get attacked on the way (or are attacking). I want to be able to coordinate with my team mates with a common point of reference (Like the capital ship)
Being aware of finer-grained movement of all ships in my area. It’s tough to have a knife fight when you can’t see the movement of your possible opponents.
I’m thinking back to the days of XPilot (which was an absolute blast). That was a multiplayer 2D game with ships in newtonian space, like Asteroids. The attack styles were varied for two reasons:
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It was 2D so you had a very good sense of situational awareness.
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There was blocking terrain. Essentially static rocks that you could use for cover.
I’m not sure how much fun XPilot would be without the blocking terrain. Perhaps the capitals can serve as the blocking terrain. Having other obstructions like that would help complicate things. But knowing what’s going on allows players to make a variety of judgement calls. The balance point is not giving away so much information that there is no fog of war.
In the ice case, I’d stand still and shoot because it’s a more stable way to fire, but that’s specific to ice. In space, the ships are always… hmmm…
What if firing a thruster reduced the accuracy of your weapons?
For that you’d want your relative velocity rather than your relative speed. And you’d want that to be visualised some way other than just angles and magnitudes. (“I’m moving away from capital ship at 50m/s perpendicular to it and about 45 degrees off its port bow… oh wait it just rolled…”) That is what your ‘radar’ is for.
Everything you’ve described is about facilitating good situational awareness. I agree that should be a massive priority.
Where I think we disagree is that I think people with good situational awareness will joust anyway.
What if speed relative to the nearest asteroid that looks a bit like a cat reduces your rate of rotation? …on Wednesdays?
I’m serious. You guys want rockets? Well, firing a multi-g thruster is going to have some kick to it. Want a science fiction precedent?
That’s a ship rocketing away and shaking like a maraca. I see no problem with that at all, and I can see it lending some interesting complications to gameplay - which is the real purpose of all this stuff.
It is funny to read, how this threads topic turned into a which-is-the-best-radar-representation topic 
However, I would like to read a statement of the inovae team, if it is likely to feature a radar of any kind at all.
Also, I think it would be interesting (and might be a prerequisite for a radar) to define how locations in space will be defined at all. Don’t forget, that a static location on space is not usable as a location relative to a planet.
My first thoughts on this were:
- if a zero vector is required, it would be the rotation-axis of a galaxy. (the rotation direction defines the direction of this vector)
- other vectors could be polar-coordinates on this plane defined by the zero vector
- locations within a solar system could be relative to Lagrange points. It might be useful to partition space by such points and the locations of planets, to define relative locations that can even be estimated by players without using navigation instruments. (might be something like baricentric coordinates based on POIs)
A 3D radar is certainly a serious subject for a FP space game. Unless you let the player have a free view around the ship, which is not going to happen with a cockpit.
The main problem is certainly the computer’s screen, which negates most of the depth perception and limits possibilities.
I think a little different about this, but however. I don’t want to make anything bad here. I was just wondering how you get from a HUD-design to a radar design. I would rather discuss radars (and navigation in general) in an own thread.
That’s probably my fault. Sorry. 
Even WITH a 3rd person view (which will be used for larger ships) you still need situational awareness, and there’s likely going to be SOME kind of HUD, so most likely if there is a radar, it’ll be available as well.