Upgradable HUD

I remember playing the first version of Elite when it came out for the BBC micro. I bought a twin external 5.25" floppy drive so that I could play and save the game from and to disc. I bought an analogue joystick to improve my dog fighting skills too.

The main HUD included:

The view screen with multiple camera views.

A local 3d live map of any bodies around my vessel.(This broke ground in the gaming world.)

A missile bay indicator.

Energy(power) level

Four Shield banks

A temperature system.

Available jump fuel.

But importantly it was possible to buy ship additions that would affect the vessels performance and this would be refected on the main HUD.

So when I bought a missile it would show on the HUD.

I could buy targetting enhancements.

I could buy scanning equipment.

I could could buy docking computers.

I could improve the energy system.

All of these elements would show up somewhere on the HUD

The original game is now many decades old and so am I.

Space Engineers 1 is over a decade old and Space Engineers 2 alpha is still in it's infancy.

What I am asking for is a stronger relationship between the flight HUD and the block systems on the grid vessel.

If I add a radar block to a ship I would expect to see something on the HUD to reflect that. Ship systems could have blocks that determine the available information to the flight HUD and when they are destroyed, get removed from the flight HUD.

The toolbar adds some features to the HUD but is limited in feedback, more is needed.

The HUD generally obscures visual features unnecessarily, the borders over borders take up too much room. Hiding or adding HUD features is unrefined, and do not get me started on the inventory system that jumps around as it pleases.

All that said, I am asking for more information to be available during flight on the main HUD when relevant, and for blocks to be available to run the systems or enhancements that will be displayed on that HUD.

41 years ago a game managed that feat quite well for it's day. It ran that game with 32Kb of RAM on a single 2Mhz CPU.