Project::OSiRiON

The engine needs a way to be able to use a LOD system for performance reasons. I propose a method for this: all brush entities(except worldspawn and misc_model) will have a 'lod' key. The existence of this key in the entity(as in, if it's actually set) tells the engine to enable LOD on the entity. The value for the LOD key would be an integer of 0 through 3. A value of 3 tells the engine to only render the brushes at 75% and above of the detail LOD distance. A value of 2 renders at 50-75%. A value of 1 renders at 25-50%. 0 renders at 0-25% distance. If the key is not set, the brushes will render at all distances(unless set to detail).

This allows two things: Patch meshes get LOD, and LOD gradually degrades with distance.

An alternative would be in patch loading. At model load, bake 4 levels of LOD for the patch meshes into the model, and apply the same rules as above. This may not be desirable because some patch meshes may be required to stay at full LOD for specific reasons.

The only downside to this is that it requires more memory to store the LOD models, but it would cut down on polygon count at render time significantly.

Use: The unfinished jumpgates between Finnmark and Kronenbaden.

Clean up and homogenize material, light, flare, engine and particle color types and flags.

Those fx can be triggered by engine states (trigger_impulse, trigger_engine, trigger_destroyed, ..)
The color can be set as color_entity, color_entity_second, color_entity_third, color_engine, ...

TODO
- review/refactor: lights, flares, materials, and particles should have the some options for
triggers and colortypes.
The parameter names in .map file classes and .material files should be the same

The following issues appear if you're docked at another player's ship

TODO

- If the host docks a planet or a large base and you launch, you'll spawn inside the planet.
- Space dust isn't rendered if the host moves
- Correct undefinied behaviour if the host gets destroyed, docks should be destroyed as well

- Note: In theory, recursivedocking should work (player A docked at B docked at C),
issues should be resolved accordingly

Master server and multiplayer server list.

Implement a system where players can send arbitrary signals to each other
(arbitrary, from the point of view of the network protocol). This would be used
to send trade and docking requests, and to replace the silly 'hail' command
with a 'request for private chat'.

In the future this could also be used for other signals, like players declaring
their hostile intent.

It might also be possible to use the signals mechanism
to exchange targetting info.

Pirate base models, to serve as NPC headquarters.
Several generic models are required.

Allow a player to control (some) weapons on another player's ship,
making him a gunman

The details of this idea still need to be worked out.