D2X-XL's RADAR display could be a useful asset, particulary when hunting a boss robot in maze-like areas, but it was just ugly, and I never really liked it. It should have had a 3D-ish appearance, but it didn't really look like it. It just looked cheap. Bleh. When I was browsing the Freespace 2 Open forums recently, I came across a screenshot showing a RADAR resembling what I had had in mind for D2X-XL, but had never come around to implementing: It had three rotating rings located in the three perpendicular spatial planes, which made it look quite 3D.

Having seen that I was finally able to getting myself to build a RADAR display into D2X-XL that deserves the name. The old RADAR had just been three ellipsis rendered inside of each other to mimic properly rendered 3D circles. D2X-XL now actually does display properly rendered circles in 3D space, and to improve the impression of the radar showing a spherical area of the space around the ship, renders three moving circles located in three perpendicular planes in space. To enhance the RADAR's visibility, it is green (aren't RADAR screens always green? ) and has a dark background.

I think the effect is much better than before and the thing actually looks like a halfway believable 3D RADAR.

Here is a brief explanation:

The greenish plane inside the 3 horizontal circles is the plane the player ship moves in. The pins visible on the RADAR are robots in various distances and positions above or below the player. Robots above the player have a line extending from the pinhead downwards to the RADAR plane; robots below the players have their lines extend upward from the pinhead to the RADAR plane. The shorter the pin and the more intense its pin color, the closer a robot is.

To turn off the RADAR and toggle through its positions and various (four, to be precise) scanning ranges, press ALT+R.