FreeOrion

I'd say we just draw a range-circle around planets and if the other planet is close enough you can reach it and if it isn't you can't go there. Range would be modified by technology. That's probably the way MoO2 did it, but how else would you limit range? I certainly don't want to refuel my ships manually...

Just have fuel based on distance travelled OR on turns spent moving.

It doesn't matter if they reach the enemy homeworld in turn 25. A few problems:
1. Your technology would suck and probably not be enough to even scratch their homeworld
2. Their technology will have increased easily by then
3. You have to find their homeworld first.

Anyway, I think this question is much better discussed in either a brainstorming thread, or a DESIGN: thread if the game design team wants more thought into it. This thread is about starlanes mechanics.

It might be a clever idea to go with whats called a "scale free network" arcitecture option at game set up.

The game generates a bell curve of the number of connections each system has, thus most systems will have an average number of connections, a few will have less, a few more. The connections are then established randomly. This tends to create a very chaotic game with every part of the map equaly "far" from every other, some systems will be far more imporant then others, some systems would be backwaters.

This would be a nice option for FFA type games.

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Fear is the Mind Killer - Frank Herbert -Dune

The problem is, that you would have doezens of crossings between starlanes, and i dont think the UI is designed for this. having chaotical starlanes throughout the universe would look very... ihm.. chaotic.

This was one of the strengths of the MOO3 3d map, if things were crossing onscreen too much, you could rotate the galaxy a little and probably clear up the maze of starlanes. We're going to use a 2D map....I personally prefer having everything in the same place, but clutter could potentially become a problem.

The way the UI will be designed, I think starlanes will be a very light, probably semi-transparent color. Since there will be a pathfinding function involved, you will be able to instantly see the path your ships will take to get to any known system....the starlanes on the route will light up or will show a dotted line or something.

If clutter ends up being a problem, then we'll obviously have to rectify the situation, but I don't see that as a big deal.

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FreeOrion Programmer

Have we desided what a starlane is?

I have heard some people refere to it as a

A well mapped area of space, possibly with beacons and such that alow a ship to safly move at higher speeds without fear of crashing into unknow rouge comets/asteroids. The physical space is esentaly no different.

A worm hole like phenominon but with a long connecting passage thus making the trip non instantanious, in this case an internal distance 1/4 that of the normal space.

Some modification of normal space that for lack of a better work "greasses" space making it easier/faster to travel through. In this case the change to space is physical.

Another thing, are starlanes naturaly occurring or are they built by some ancient long dead romanesk civalization?

I prefer the "greesed space" and built by anchients option smy self but I guess in the end it dosn't matter. The player can be told what ever senario we wish. As far as I can tell their is no desire to have "on ramps" or "off ramps" on the star lane. Or in other words you cant get off or enter the lane except at the end points. Senario 1 is the only one that dose not jive with that asumption but I am shure theirs some way of explaining around that.

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Fear is the Mind Killer - Frank Herbert -Dune

Allowing ships to enter at a non-end-point would make programming the thing exponentially more difficult. As it stands, making them only accessible from end point systems we can model the system of starlanes as a weighted graph. Modelling them as actual lanes would require us to compute intersections at an arbitrary point and also would drive up the time it took to compute a shortest path....which will need to be a very fast function if we are to dynamically show the shortest path in accordance with the user moving the mouse.

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FreeOrion Programmer

Why? The stars are at known XYZ points and the ships move from some known XYZ point to another known XYZ point. Changing direction between stars is a simple trig function.

The player should be able to halt a fleet at any point and use that point as a rendevious for additional fleets, search for interesting specials, conduct research, etc. < Why is it necessary for all action to take place in a star system? >

My view of star lanes are that they are a very clumsy way of moving between stars. And a very clutzy way of depicting a universe/galaxy. For example you have two stars that are very close together without a star lane yet there is a star lane to a star four to five time as far... GEEZ! (I'm not talking about worm holes... which are a totally different subject.)



Thumper

Because it's easier that way. It gives you a place to meet other players' forces and gives them a place to meet you. If you ever played the mediocre game of imperium galactica 2 you'd know how annoying it is to have free movement and deep space intercepts. Once an enemy fleet slips past you, you have absolutely no chance of catching them before they conquer half of your empire.

It's okay if you think starlanes suck but they are in nonetheless. It even seem that you will be able to turn them of at gamestart so I'd suggest you stop complaining...

Figuring out how to move ships in a system like this is not too hard, but a quickest path algorithm in a situation like that is, I believe, an NP complete problem. I think MOO3's way of doing it worked well, but I dont think that 'offroad' should be penalized as much, and there has to be a way to force offroad travel, even if it isn't the shortest route. (I hated not being able to reach a system bc a guardian was in the way)

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Empire Team Lead

Of course, the fact that it was realtime and you could conquer planets instantly didn't help much. All they had to do was skip merrily between worlds. If planetary conquest took longer (say a few turns) this wouldn't be as much of a problem, because they'd run out of troops too quick, and they'd have to stay in one place and keep space superiority if they wanted to hold the world.

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Empire Team Lead

In Moo2, the closest thing to a str lane was a worm hole, they came first.

In Moo3 they had starlanes, but to me it was more like heaps of worm holes, they just renamed them, made more of them and made them very slow to travel through and open space even slower to travel through.

And that is exactly as it should be. That is the reason you build Home Fleets. To protect your empire's core worlds. If you take all of your ships off on some expidition and get blind sided... you just learned the facts of life.



How do you get that I was complaining? I was stating my point of view on a subject that you disagree with. And then you start with the name calling...

This is susposed to be a free forum for thought. So far I've had two threads locked to prevent further discussion and one post deleted by "accident" and a race tosses because of NIH.

I am begining to find this forum anything but free. It is being run in a very dictortorial manner by two or three of you. I am very disapointed by what I see happening here. By abusing your heavy hand of forum masters you are limiting input unless it agrees with your conception of what you want the game to be.

Thumper

In fairness, I think drek and NF are just tired of having to say "this was already voted on, we're not opening it back up" It would help if we had all of the passed features in a centralized location, but losing the old forum really screwed us up in that area

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Empire Team Lead