Hey guys, I have been giving this addon request some thought. Here's what I want to do - I want to call this "Orbiter Online" - the idea is to make the orbiter universe experience persistent and shareable with everyone in the community. The pretext here is that mankind has expanded throughout the solar system, and so, throughout the system there are ground bases and orbital stations that carry food, oxygen, resources/storage (UCGO).
Those bases can be owned by real life orbinauts! I can write a module to synchronize the player's worlds, their vessel bases (preludeIII). And in doing so, everyone who has Orbiter Online active would have a dynamically updating world. Players would be able to purchase/sell bases, and pilots would get paid for making cargo deliveries.
The key difference in this from OMP is that whereas OMP is a true multiplayer, here we are going to try and use Orbiter as the engine, but the actual interactions will take place online, by means of a website.
Base owners would create job requests online for pilots to bring goods to the base. Base owners would benefit when someone lands on their base or buys their fuel/food/resources. We can use something like an MFD to facilitate transactions like this.
The main thing I am conflicted about is UCGO. The question is whether to do resource management myself or to rely on UCGO. I love UCGO, but it has no costs for resources (AFAIK). And because there is no easy way to interact with/control UCGO(it's a blackbox), I don't see how I can use it natively. The conflict is that UCGO is awesome and makes for such a simple cargo management system. But if we want to bring this experience online, everyone has to have the same amount of oxygen/food/etc in their bases. Furthermore, fuel/oxygen/food costs seem like a very significant thing to ignore.
In the new Orbiter Online world, there will be one central "authority" giving the push to humanity (orbinauts). New players will come in the world with a whole bunch of bases and stations already placed in the world by "these people". And they ferociously need new pilots to deliver goods throughout the solar system. Orbinauts could sign up, go through the training program. The programs would consists of flights, with an MFD facilitating the flight client side (making sure there is no foul play) and then updating the results online. Good pilots would be paid a lot, so they could prepare for retirement by buying bases with their piles of cash. Members would be able to see the profiles/status/previous flights of other members, etc. Finally, we could have constantly updating/new events, scenarios that would simply pop up ready to be done by the members. There could be a hardcore mode, where the time acceleration is limited to maybe 1000x, or you are limited to x number of time acceleration hours in a day (real-time).
The possibilities are endless. But the core proposition is basically an online market sort of thing. The system is rich online, and Orbiter with its excellent API serves as the engine. I know there have been add-ons in the past like this, but I don't know any which actually created an online shared market.
Before I start working on this, I would love to hear criticisms, suggestions, ideas, etc.
