This thread is to suggest improvements, modifications, and features for the EV3 engine. This does NOT mean posting drivel like, "more missions", "better ships", etc. as their extent is determined by the abilities of the engine. They are a result of the engine, NOT the engine itself. Got it?
and no multiplayer or EV3D stuff. The latter is beating a dead horse, and the former is readily handled by kberg 
That being said, feel free to respond and add your own ideas. I know this has been done before but, if you feel like it, dig through the other posts and maybe we can all just collect everything here in a single thread, okay? Okay then --
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All weapons should have a location on the ship specified in standard X,Y coordinates. If you want to have port and starboard laser canons, you should be able to have port and starboard laser cannons.
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Turrets should have a rate of turn. If you want your standard turrets, just set it to 360/sec or something. That's standard behavior. If you want a massive, main battery set it to something lower, like 10/sec to allow for the realistic pause while the weapon rotates to retarget.
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defense grid flag for all weapons, allowing the autotargeting of ships below n-tons. In other words, weapons which autotarget fighters. if there were no hostile fighters present, the defense grid would follow your main targetting. It would probably be wise to automatically stop firing when the hostile target (fighter, capital ship, etc.) is disabled to allow for boarding. (Kestrel and Lighting money trick). Actually, what would likely be best is to add a flag to the ship resource which would designate the ship as a target for the defense grid. Other, non-flagged ships would only take n% of the defense grids normal damage.
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More default weapon slots to "OEM" ships. We hve four now. This is not good. Let's see at least 16; 32 would be better. If X,Y positioning of weapons is allowed, it would make sense to, say, position a laser cannon on the port and starboard. To get the coordinates right, each cannon would need to be listed separately as a weapon type. If one starts doing this on a large, capital ship (cruiser, carrier, etc.) the available number of slots becomes limited rather quickly.
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It would be neat (neato keen) to allow the use of a captains launch for larger ships. Logic dictates that not all spobs would have the facilities to handle, say, a UE Cruiser. The ship is just too big to dock at smaller stations, land on planets ("you're going to put that where?"), etc. There should be a captain's launch of which the player assumes control and lands as they would otherwise. Add a flag to spobs which sets the largest ship the spob can handle (for planets, moons, etc. it should be length not girth. For stations, girth not length. Why? Pressuming it'd be difficult to land a 1000 meter ship on a planet, but the mass wouldn't really matter. Docking a 1000 meter ship to a space station wouldn't matter, but it's mass could seriously disrupt the station's orbit.)
While the player has control of the launch, the mother ship would automatically protect the launch with covering fire if need be. The launch could be any standard ship type, with the restriction that it must be n-tonnes and n-meters smaller than the mothership.
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New outfit type of "Fighter Bay Expansion" allowing the player to convert n-tons to extra launching and storage facility for fighters.
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Increase the maximum number of ships on screen. I know, I know--this will be murder on 640x480 screens as well as slower machines. But I'd wager that most people who will be playing EV3 are going to have at least 800x600 and mid-range PPCs. Lots of iMac'ers as well, I presume. Throwing more sprites on screen won't hurt these machines.
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and on that note, a preference to downsample the graphics to 256-bit with a 1-bit mask. Runs faster on older machines.
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We have the tribbles flag to increase the supply of a commodity over time. A spoil flag would be good as well. Commodity spoils at a rate of n-tons per day, where n is a plugin developer set number. Commodity is converted into a 'waste' commodity which has value in and of itself at some spobs---think waste reclamation and recycling, biomass, etc.---but can be jettisoned. Add a flag to the govt resource to determine the penalty for jettisoning waste in one of that govt's systerms.
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And on that note, allow player to jettison carge by amount and type. Jettison 5 tons of food, in other words, instead of everything except mission related cargo.
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A persistent universe. If a player jettisons some cargo, that cargo should still be floatin' around if they land and return to the game, jump out of the system and jump back in, etc. Cargo would spread around the system, but could be recoverable if it exposure to space wouldn't spoil it (i.e., food would be useless, but equipment would be okay).
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Add a set of sprites for each ship that could be used as ship wreckage. Tied in with the persistance, this could be used in a very interesting way. Systems which are favorite hunting grounds of pirates would have the burnt-out hulks of past prey floating around. Systems in which a great battle recently took place would have wreckage floating about.
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Add a new type of ship, a salvage hulk, which could collect wrecks and reclaim their contingent parts. weapons, engines, etc. just make each a generic cargo type.
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More cargo types. This is a definite must if the game is to continue in its trading aspect.
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More available ship resources. This is a sore point with many developers, and it needs to be fixed. Badly. 1024 usable resources sounds good, and should keep everyone happy for a few months.
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Inception and decomissioning dates. Ship type foo is first available on n-days since start of game, and is no longer available after n1-days from start of game. This allows the obsleting of ships. After a ship type's decommision date, their appearance would slowly start to disappear from the game.
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Two kinds of ship resources, base and subtype If a developer only specified the base model, the game would run as it does now. but the developer could also add a subtype of the same ship. Specify a base fighter configuration spec, and then add subtypes with special configurations that would appear randomly in place of the base configuration. Yes, this can be done with multiple ship resources and person resources, but doing it this way would be far simpler and more powerful. Coupled with the prior suggestion, this would allow the creation of a series of ships under the same nameplate. Turncaot Mk I., Mk II, Mk III, Mk IV, etc.
Okay... I think that's it for now. 
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