It occurs to me suddenly that EVE Online seems to get the interface and a lot of the feel of my game right, which makes me wonder why I originally patterned my game controls after the X series, something which is almost completely inaccessible by ordinary humans.

I will have to make some modifications to mouse control of the ship, for sure, and might even have to put some normal GUI objects up in the HUD.

Anyway, today I added Message Beacons. These are a special class of actors which contain a special Brain (AI module) that responds to a ship coming nearby, and bombards it with helpful information about how to deal with life. Incidentally, to implement this I ended up implementing an onShipNearby method in the Brain which responds to ships coming close to each other, which will be necessary to implement "actual" ship AI eventually. This iterative method really does work!

Also, ships now have a teensy bit of inertia, which helps make them feel like they're large objects moving through space (albeit very friction-tastic space).

Here's a screenshot of me interacting with a message beacon.