Exterior View

• The visibility of the main viewscreen may be limited in some way at the beginning prior to upgrades. This could be low resolution, greyscale noise, or a low framerate.
• The map screen of the viewscreen will represent the world as a colour-coded heightmap with small symbols representing points of interest. The player may be able to add their our waypoints as large symbols on this map.

Scanning

• Sufficiently researched resources (living or material) can be scanned for and will be highlighted in the exterior viewscreen. A longer distance ping is possible but will have a drawback that is either:
  • A long cooldown
  • Takes time to find the nearest object
  • Using a significant amount of energy / fuel
  • Drawing unwanted attention from nearby threats
• Scanning signals emitted by story/special objects in the exterior may work similarly to the Signalscope in Outer Wilds, though adjustments need to be made if there are a lot of different types of signal.

Movement

• Must be able to move and rotate in 3 dimensions without confusing the player in limited visibility scenarios.
  • Allow the user to sit in a cockpit where the buttons/joystick visually responds to pressing control keys (WASD).
  • Rotations of the ship may be constrained to the vertical axis to maintain bearings. The player may be able to rotate the ship’s external camera up and down by some limited angle instead of being able to rotate the ship itself.
  • The game subROV: underwater discoveries provides inspiring examples of the kinds of control systems and general operation of an underwater vehicle.

The World

• The first option for building the world is a height map without crevices. This is barely noticeable in the low-visibility of the deep ocean. The occasional concave geometries (such as caves) should still be possible with methods separate to general terrain tools through the use of holes.
• The second option is a voxel-based level building system that creates smooth terrain through the use of marching cubes will allow for fast level prototyping as well as a built-in system for handling overhangs and caves.
• The world comes in horizontal chunks handled by the terrain system but we must implement the vertical stages. When ascending the ocean shelf we do a half life and make the edges of each level match it's neighbour's within view distance before swapping out the level.