While making a POI today I realized that while LCD screens are awesome, they are also somewhat limited in their appearance. Projectors are cool but it's really hard to line up a projector with current consoles to make it look good. It would be nice to have a few variations of LCD blocks that are basically consoles or PDA pads that have their screen be the LCD screen so you can write messages on them and have them appear more naturally in a POI. Dialogue can work, but that requires a lot more work than just writing text into an LCD and POI creators don't always have access to the dialogue files to do so. Just maybe have 1 or 2 wall consoles, 1 or 2 desk consoles, and a small PDA model or two that can be dropped on the floor. These would be really good for leaving lore bits and POI puzzle hints and such throughout a POI.
I second this and would like to suggest something further. I think the console and various screen blocks should have variants that show various stats in real time. For example, a console block could have a variation that shows the fuel, o2, and pentaxid levels of the vehicle/base on the screen in real time. Various other things could also be shown on screens. For example, the local gravity, the remaining lift thrust, essentially basically anything that is shown in the stats of the p-menu can in principle be shown on a screen and also probably various bits of information from the system and galactic maps and other info. I've started using ASTIC's scripting mod recently and it is awesome and provides much needed functionality. However, I think it would be far better if some of these basic features were simply built into the various console and screen blocks, as it takes a while to learn how to use these scripts, even for fairly basic functions. Some of these functions are so basic that I think they should simply be part of the game by default. In addition to the added functionality, they would contribute much to the aesthetics as well.
True, I had been thinking about making a thread about this, but since you brought up a very related topic, I figured I would just leave my thoughts here.
