Space Combat (madness)

For what's not in 'Top Priority Game Design'. Post your ideas, visions, suggestions for the game, rules, modifications, etc.

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Daveybaby
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#166 Post by Daveybaby »

noelte wrote:
The only exception to this is in things like chess AIs, which basically play the whole game through millions of times for each possible move.
That's proven impossible. :-P But i got what you meant.
Acknowledged. The point is that chess algorithms essentially simulate likely future outcomes for each possible move, and pick the one with the highest probability of winning the game (actually modern ones have a lot more 'tactical knowledge' than that, but your thats what the 'traditional' approach to chess ai is) whereas that sort of thing is impossible for a game like freeorion - there are just too many interrelated variables to do this.
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haravikk
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#167 Post by haravikk »

Ranos wrote:I'm not sure I like the idea of the bullet time though. This would cause each battle to last longer. Either that or it would mean you would have less time for each battle, depending on how the bullet time would work.
Well I doubt the bullet time would really slow the battles that much, there would be limits to how slow it can go, and it could maybe even speed up quiet parts to compensate slightly. I expect there would still be a time-out at which point the battle ends as a 'draw' or such.

The thing with phased time for me is that it seems like there is a lot of waiting with nothing visually interesting. Once you've given your orders you have to wait for the other player to give theirs, then what? Do you see any of the battle or do you just get results?
Getting results would be quicker, but it would IMO make space combat somewhat more dull. If you actually see the battle then you have the same problem you saw with my idea in that you can't do anything until asked in the next phase.

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utilae
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#168 Post by utilae »

haravikk wrote: The thing with phased time for me is that it seems like there is a lot of waiting with nothing visually interesting.

Once you've given your orders you have to wait for the other player to give theirs, then what? Do you see any of the battle or do you just get results?
You would see the battle (of course invisible ships would be invisible where appropriate). Because the player does not do anything in the real time part, other than watch, it would be the perfect oppurtunity to make the graphics a visual masterpiece during real time. Like maybe all you do during the real time part is adjust the camera. The real time part would be the entertaining part, the part that is like a movie.
haravikk wrote: Getting results would be quicker, but it would IMO make space combat somewhat more dull. If you actually see the battle then you have the same problem you saw with my idea in that you can't do anything until asked in the next phase.
In phase time, the phases where you give orders, would occur at fixed intervals, so you might have 1min orders, then 30sec realtime, then 1min orders, then 30sec realtime. So you would not wait for the 'AI' to ask you to give orders, you would give orders at set phases, at set time intervals.

Ranos
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#169 Post by Ranos »

Like utilae said, you would get to watch the battle once all players were done with their orders. As for there being a problem, the intervals in which battles occur should only be 10-15 seconds. This way, if something starts to go wrong, you get a chance to fix it before it is too late.

The problem I had with yours was that you were giving control of the battle to the AI and you had to wait for it to give control back. With this, you give your orders, they are executed and then you give more orders. If you give a general attack order to your fleet, it will continue to attack until there is nothing left to attack. In this way, if you told your TFs to attack and just generalized it, they would attack the enemy TFs near them, and when those were gone, it would go to the nearest enemy to attack, whether it be another fleet of TFs, a planet or something else. With the 15 second intervals, the TFs couldn't go very far in the wrong direction.

Having to watch the battle without having to control gives the opportunity for you to watch for enemy weaknesses and allows you to prepare a strategy for the next order phase.
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Impaler
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#170 Post by Impaler »

I already pointed out that under Variable-Pause-Phasing Havverick's plan could easily become an option for the player, they simply set Pauseing Costs to Infinity give their first orders and watch one big long execution phase that cant be stoped. By alowing players to adjust all the Phases to their hearts content Variable-Pause-Phasing has the best potential to satisfy a wide variety of taste in battle pacing.
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Ranos
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#171 Post by Ranos »

Haravikk's plan was not to give orders and then let the player watch for the rest of the combat. Well originally it was but it evolved into the AI asking for help when it needed it and then also adding the ability to give orders when you wanted to. Setting pausing costs to infinity in Variable-Pause-Phasing just means you are going back to haravikk's original plan, which most everyone disagreed with.
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haravikk
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#172 Post by haravikk »

Just want to say, Real-time with the AI asking for decisions was actually my original idea, I just suck at explaining things first time :lol:

I see where Phased time is coming from now, though I still prefer a real-time model.
Another problem is that a lot of information will need to be visible to the players in order to make decisions, such as the health of each task-force, pop-up mini-maps showing the surroundings of a given task-force (so you can inspect how well they are actually doing with their mission) and so on.
In large combats this could be a lot of information which a player will be trying to make decisions upon in a fixed time.
Phased time might however better suit a combat model that causes large combats to stretch over more than one turn. This way planning phases could become longer with the scale of the battle.

I'm not much in favour of multiple turn combat though unless two forces really are evenly matched.

Ranos
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#173 Post by Ranos »

A solution to having to figure to keep track of how much damage ships/TFs have taken, at least in Phased-Time, is that when the order giving phase starts, all ships get "painted" according to their damage. Five colors would indicate how damaged the ship was, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange, Red. Blue is of course in the best condition adn Red in the worst.

Also, if a ship was in trouble, there could be a ! above or on the ship indicating it needed desparate help in gtting out of it's current situation. This would add in elements from haravikk's idea of the AI asking for help.
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Danakin
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#174 Post by Danakin »

I have not read all the space combat information so please don't flame me if this has already been mentioned. A while back when I read this thread people did not want to re-write the homeworld engine...

I found at the following link: http://www.relic.com/

I found.
HW1 engine source released!
[September 26 2003]

The Homeworld 1 source code has been released and is available for download from the RDN section of the site.


I am not sure if that makes it open source now but it would be worth asking about especially if it would be easy to implement into the game.
I am a programmer but I have my own business and can't contribute to such a worthy cause as this project.

However, I understand what your all going through and have tried 0.2 and think it rocks, keep going congrats. That congrats is not only to those who have contributed in programming or art but also those who put forward their opinions on this forum.

BogusDude
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Hope it's not too late

#175 Post by BogusDude »

Is it too late to make a suggestion here ?

I think it would be more realistic if space combat included the whole system, but ground combat has to be done on a planet by planet basis.

That way the whole system could (and would) pitch in with ships when any planet in the system is threatened, but they can't help each other when it comes to ground combat (except to send re-inforcements (MOO 1 style), but that would probably come too late.)

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BD

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pd
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#176 Post by pd »

Danakin wrote:The Homeworld 1 source code has been released and is available for download from the RDN section of the site.
i've proposed this too, but sadly this won't work with the licence we are using for freeorion.
BogusDude wrote: Is it too late to make a suggestion here ?
it's not too late, this is only brainstorming and not an official discussion :)

discord
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#177 Post by discord »

actualy i am pretty sure that i was first with 'phased real time'...not that it matters, i spewed out crazy ideas like CCG fleet battles, and other nice brain farts...but the basics behind my phased real time was to pause to give orders, and only have so much pause time.....the fixed intervals thing just does not sit right with me....

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#178 Post by Ranos »

The fixed intervals thing was to prevent people from constantly pausing the game. If people were allowed to pause the game whenever they wanted, problems would occur. There has to be some limitation, other than the length of the pause, on the player. That's where Variable Pause Phasing comes in. Players can pause whenever they want but they only have a limited ammount of time to spend during pauses That runs down every time they pause.

So if the battle sequence is 3 minutes with 1.5 minutes of pausing allowed, you get Phased Time where every 30 seconds the game pauses for 15 seconds and Variable Pause Phasing where you can pause whenever you want, but you only have a maximum of 1.5 minutes which runs out every time you pause.

My arguements for and against these can be seen in earlier posts.
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discord
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#179 Post by discord »

ranos.....could you please explain to me what 'and only have so much pause time' means?
and yes i know, we went through just about all of those pros and cons back in january on the old forum(yes i have read through this thread aswell.), so basicly not much new here to say, you are rephrasing my old suggestion from when this project was alot younger...although mine had alot more in it, like command ships with C&C equipment to alter the amount of pause time available and other stuff....strangely enough very few liked it.

Ranos
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#180 Post by Ranos »

discord wrote:ranos.....could you please explain to me what 'and only have so much pause time' means?
Well I could respond better if I had the whole quote to go from but only having so much pause time probably means only a certain ammount of time.
200 and still a Wyrm!?! I don't want to be a Wyrm anymore. I've been a Wyrm for 100 posts now.

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