I'm afraid my poor speccy was recycled many years ago, however I do use Pocket Clive on my XDA whenever I feel the need for some good old fashioned gaming
Did the same thing. Never thought then we might miss them one day, even if using the emulators is (as someone once commented upon my use of Klive) turning a Rolls into a Mini. I would defend the fact that the Mini does have its charms!!! Are you going to publish your Asp, BTW?
Keith, I'm carrying most of your ideas along with me for several years now (allthough not elite related), and I think it's something that a lot of people here would love to see. Since I allready spent years thinking about it all, however, I might as well point out some of the problems you will be facing.....:
There's a lot of good content in what you have written. The AI would be the biggest problem. Simple homing AI is simple enough, as are simple decision procedures. For example; brave enemy = does not try to escape untill ship integrity is less than 15%, +/- 5; or cowardly = escape when ship integrity is at or below 80%, sort of thing. Managed something quite workable years ago in VB when I made a simple naval battle computer program as an excercise. The challenge with Orbiter is, as you well say, getting a good pursuit model that respects astrophysics!
I suppose you could always randomly "spawn" vessels inside a certain radius of another, as if they just nipped out of hyperspace? By all appearances of the program's behaviour on the original Elite or (especially) Frontier, it did it this way, with the other vessel approximately matching your vectors.
You know, I came to a similar conclusion about the cellbody market issue, ie, not really required. The stations or the planet bases could be programmed with a market system in their respective modules, and probably even better than the original Elite where the fluctuation appeared to be arbitrary. Functions available through the getvesselinterface could be used to coordinate related stations.
But above all, my thanks for revealing a few more add ons. I am notoriously bad at searching on OH. I recently coded a test vessel with a swish refuelling function only to have pointed out that an MFD had already been made (by tl8) that did the same thing! Nevertheless, I can still use it, as it is not an MFD but works through the HUD (or on a panel) and is wired into the module of the vessel, instead.
Hopefully you will get around to finishing your improvements of the multi solar system. And if I get around to cocncluding some preliminary working version of my Python with at least a couple of the functions incrusted, I will post the beta version here for scrutiny...
Thanks all!!