Dockscreens showing the interior image of a station has been a long-standing suggestion for the game. However, this hasn't been approached much because of the immense time investment involved, among other reasons. I think we can composite scenes to recycle a few good interiors all across the board.
We would probably start with three generic images to start out with - One for friendly stations, one for enemy stations, and one for asteroid stations. These scenes would then have images composited over top of them to make them more unique. Aside from texture reskins, we would have images for items, ships, and people. And, probably the most versatile option, is to have a 3Dv projector in the scene to generate advertisements, maps, or other things relevant to the station.
More elements to add character like dangling wires, exposed conduits, missing plating, and ships in dry dock would be helpful in setting an atmosphere.
Setting it up like this allows for some unique opportunities:
- * When the image is loaded, we check if the station has barrels or other items with graphics in their hold. If true, we add those to the image (and remove them when looted) [this would be super cool i think]
* We check if a special character (eg. Admiral Decker) is on the ship/station and add them to the scene if appropriate.
* We keep a mask of all windows in the scene and add in the correct space background, corresponding to the star system
* We keep a small library of "hero shots" of ships, and add them in to the scene in dry dock if a matching ship is docked