I would love base lights change. Imagine base just effing illuminating with its lights from 10-K (it happened to one of my ships, which I jokingly named once Swagship of Sirius).
So you basically want beacons in space? Hmmm... Why not, instead of having a very difficult new feature, modify an existing feature?
Basically the idea is this: You know how there already are external modules, right? Gun platforms being the main example. So why not create new beacon modules (aka nav buoys), which come in different styles (e.g purple huge lights, small pink lights... a bit like pimpship but on a beacon), and then have them use a similar system to gun platforms, where you can place the beacons around the base to have them be the lights, instead of having to create an entirely new mechanism to add lights? Furthermore, it should be really easy to add in 26 models (in the shape of english letters), and create a new type of beacon (easy INI work, should take around 30m once the models are done) using these models, so that writing can be displayed in space; you can even have lights on these, since they'd be a bit like beacons. And lastly, it should also be possible to create some sort of billboard using a flat rectangle, and have official factions request (can be an admin request or whatever) that their logo be put on a billboard object to be displayed in front of their PoB. To avoid any extra work on the devs/admins, it could be made so that the official factions have to get someone to do the texturing for them, and then present it for approval in the request to the admins. Even if that takes too much time, I volunteer to do the INI work for at least the nav buoys and the letters.
(09-30-2014, 10:35 PM)Void_Nemesis_GOF2 Wrote: Unless I'm mistaken, every NPC you see in a bar, shop or whatever, are either completely unique in the case of the bartenders and other important NPCs, or procedurally generated using a certain set of conditions (e.g location of base, affiliation, NPC traffic going around it) to avoid having, for example, a corsair offering an assassination mission in a GRN base. This would mean that for every PoB, you'd need to enter the new conditions into the game files, so that the game considers it as a populated solar and gives it people. However, you'd need to edit these files for every change to the PoB's affiliation, location, or if it is destroyed, ect. This means extra unnecessary work for the devs and very frequent updates (basically one for every PoB or so, and a new one each time a PoB is created). Unless someone figures out a way to make the game automatically update itself each time a new PoB is created, and take the different conditions into account to populate the base (including creating a few random name and assigning the proper dialogues), then it would be not necessarily impossible, but too impractical.