Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I googled this idea and looked through commonly suggested features and didn't find anything similar, so here it goes....

What if we could enable a graphic option to replace the static ship portrait appearing for a locked ship with a live/dynamic boxed version of the ship appearing from your POV (as if you had zoomed the existing camera option in on each of them simultaneously)? This would then show the locked ship getting pummeled with missiles, shooting its own guns, shield/armor effects, burning/smoke, etc.

This would serve two purposes:

1) Add to the immersion, since right now when you are in a mid-sized battle all you see are little boxes and boring static portraits because you are usually zoomed out to see the battlefield. Having your locked ships appear as "live cam" versions would certainly add to the visual effect of attacking something.

2) It would provide situational awareness for the direction the target is headed at any given moment (since the live cam would be based on a zoomed POV from your ship). For instance, a ship burning away from you will have the back of the ship facing the live portrait, if it is approaching your ship, you see the front. This information would probably compensate for being slightly more distracting.

Sure, it would increase your rendering load a little bit above current levels, but if static portraits remain an option the load seems trivial. Plus, you'd get to see ships from all sorts of angles for a little variety without having to resort to ship spinning! ;)

Any thoughts? Too difficult to implement? Too distracting?

+1