ship technology

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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#46 Post by Daveybaby »

marhawkman wrote:BUT..... That's only an issue if the player is directly controlling the fleet. If not then we can just let the AI do whatever the player told it to do.
So youre adding in a layer of complexity, then adding in another layer of AI in order to reduce the complexity back to a level where the player can manage the game.

Why not save a lot of effort and leave out the extra complexity in the first place? Not to mention saving the player frustration when the AI does things they dont want it to do.
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skdiw
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#47 Post by skdiw »

Q: I've decided that all footballs will be painted green from now on.
A: But that will it very hard for players to find the ball against the grass.
Q: Players? Ive decided to do without them, since they conflict with my plans for green footballs.
lol.

isn't that what you do in COW? :p





okay, back to the topic. most games rely on top speed, and i think that's what we should do. acceleration should be quick, especially deceleration. angular acceleration is also of importance if we chose to have directional firing.

i think ships should be fairly quick to accelerate, the top speed determined by ship mass/engine power, and can stop on a dime (or close to it).
:mrgreen:

Zpock
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#48 Post by Zpock »

Wrong.

f = ma

You dont throw fuel out the back - you fire reaction mass. Fuel (i.e. energy) is used to accelerate this reaction mass. The more acceleration you apply to the mass the greater the acceleration of your ship. So by spending more energy you can get a larger reaction from a small mass to accelerate it to very high speeds. So energy is the key here, not reaction mass - and if you have a highly efficient energy source (such as, i dunno, matter/antimatter annihilation) then energy is practically free in terms of fuel mass.

Besides all of the above - so what?. The model you have invented for yourself out of thin air may very well involve fuel/reaction mass supplies that are insufficient to last more than 1 space combat, but this is just something that exists in your head. If the rest of us decide that maybe we can have supplies which last much longer than that, to the extent that fuel becomes a non-issue for combat, then it doesnt mean that we dont understand the physics, it just means that your particular preference isnt the only possible way that things are ordered.

All you keep saying is: "Youre wrong you dont understand physics, because i've decided that i'm going to paint my ships green".
Ok sorry I meant with fuel what you call reaction mass. Just as my preference isn't the only one, neither are yours. The point of my system was to make the newtonian system playable not physically correct acording to your preferences of how anti matter power sources work, but you seem to have missed that.

guiguibaah
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#49 Post by guiguibaah »

f = ma
You dont throw fuel out the back - you fire reaction mass. Fuel (i.e. energy) is used to accelerate this reaction mass. The more acceleration you apply to the mass the greater the acceleration of your ship. So by spending more energy you can get a larger reaction from a small mass to accelerate it to very high speeds. So energy is the key here, not reaction mass - and if you have a highly efficient energy source (such as, i dunno, matter/antimatter annihilation) then energy is practically free in terms of fuel mass.

Yes, that is true - although each reaction mass is different compare to the technology. NASA's conventional boosters uses fuel as it's reaction mass. The problem is, what happens when you run out of reaction mass?

Even if you took a tiny mass and accelerated it to near light speed, well, you've no longer created just a thruster, you've also created a mass driver / gauss cannon that may fire behind the ship (where friendly units are found).



Personally, I've always found it strange how in space strategy games (such as moo2) I had to turn my spaceship to fire at an enemy, make it do a 180 degree turn at the cost of movement points, move away, make another 180 degree turn and fire again. I think something more accurate would have been something like the Druuge Mauler - a ship you can fire at long ranges, have it moving AWAY from the enemy, and still fire at long range.

The problem with a complete physics model, is that it gives long-range and fast moving ships near invincibility. You can have 10000 medium range ships chasing one long range ship - all the long range ship has to do is match the speed of the medium ranges, while remaining in long-range firing distance, and the battle is won.


I do like the idea, though, of that if a ship is disabled, it keeps moving in the same direction. It could give retreating ships a bonus - while disabled ships heading in-system could crash into the sun, or other planets.


Then, perhaps in the future, you can get "inertial-less" ships, like the Arilooleelay skiff through technology.


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Daveybaby
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#50 Post by Daveybaby »

skdiw wrote:isn't that what you do in COW? :p
I've decided to do without players, since they conflict with my complete lack of executable code. :oops:
Zpock wrote:Ok sorry I meant with fuel what you call reaction mass. Just as my preference isn't the only one, neither are yours. The point of my system was to make the newtonian system playable not physically correct acording to your preferences of how anti matter power sources work, but you seem to have missed that.
Fair enough - i was just addressing the 'you dont understand newtonian physics side of your posts'.

I do think you should have a go at simulating the system you describe though - you might be surprised at how quickly things get bogged down.
guiguibaah wrote:NASA's conventional boosters uses fuel as it's reaction mass. The problem is, what happens when you run out of reaction mass?
Well yeah, i was describing something closer to the typical sci-fi vision of reaction mass engines. But I would hope FOs ships will have something higher tech than chemical rockets :wink:

The key thing is that we can have any system of movement we want to achieve the desired gameplay goals, and justify it using technobabble later. Its sci-fi, innit? We can have pretty much whatever we want.
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skdiw
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#51 Post by skdiw »

I think something more accurate would have been something like the Druuge Mauler - a ship you can fire at long ranges, have it moving AWAY from the enemy, and still fire at long range.
i thought of that and i thought it be cool that some weapons are very powerful that it pushes the firing ship back. kinda like the recoil of an artillery.
The problem with a complete physics model, is that it gives long-range and fast moving ships near invincibility. You can have 10000 medium range ships chasing one long range ship - all the long range ship has to do is match the speed of the medium ranges, while remaining in long-range firing distance, and the battle is won.
moo1 got it to work.

i say that in your scenario, the assulting guy doesn't have good mixture of different ships. also, with that number advantage, you can try flanking or surround the guy.
:mrgreen:

marhawkman
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#52 Post by marhawkman »

Daveybaby wrote:
marhawkman wrote:BUT..... That's only an issue if the player is directly controlling the fleet. If not then we can just let the AI do whatever the player told it to do.
So youre adding in a layer of complexity, then adding in another layer of AI in order to reduce the complexity back to a level where the player can manage the game.

Why not save a lot of effort and leave out the extra complexity in the first place? Not to mention saving the player frustration when the AI does things they dont want it to do.
Manage the game? Pfft... Have you ever tried controlling 30+ ships in the SE games? it's a pain in the ass. I quit with tactical combat completely just because I got tired of trying to coordinate so much stuff. there's always gonna be a point where direct control becomes useless. It's just this model has that down around 3. SE 2 and three it's around 20. SE4 it's more like 8. Why not leave it out? It makes things interesting. Why not only have one resource like in SE2? That would totally eliminate all micromanagement of planets. Why not? Because it's dull. SE2 condensed all planetary value down to a single number. And that was dull. Planets were nothing more than territory.
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Zpock
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#53 Post by Zpock »

I don't think there is a huge amount of ai needed here. To move a ship from one location to the other in a not insane way, it just needs to turn around and deecelerate after it gets half way there for example. Ok it might get a bit more complicated then that if the ship is alredy moving somewhere and gets a new order. But I'm pretty sure some clever math would solve this.

Impaler
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#54 Post by Impaler »

DaveBabby: you might want to consider using Python and the PyGame library. I was resently looking into that are thought of starting my own little side project with it ware I might test out ideas and probly trade some code with FO when they start doing python integration. You can get stuff developed and degugged very fast with Python.
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solidcordon
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#55 Post by solidcordon »

blah
Last edited by solidcordon on Fri Dec 15, 2006 2:05 pm, edited 2 times in total.

marhawkman
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#56 Post by marhawkman »

solidcordon wrote:Ship A has an acceleration of 1. ship B has acceleration rate of 2.
Ship A has long range weapons, ship B has short range weapons.

When told to attack each other at optimal range, ship A will end up orbiting ship B, which will just be spinning round in circles trying to get away from ship A.
If ship B is faster how is Ship A able to stay outside it's range?
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ewh02b
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#57 Post by ewh02b »

I'm pretty sure he confused his letters. I'll take a stab at it:

Ship A has an acceleration of 2. ship B has acceleration rate of 1.
Ship A has long range weapons, ship B has short range weapons.

When told to attack each other at optimal range, ship A will end up orbiting ship B, which will just be spinning round in circles trying to get away from ship A, since it obviously can't close.

Say they both have the same acceleration, the battle is decided by starting position. if they start within Ship B's optimal range then both can fire on target. If they're outside ship B's optimal, ship A will pound B to scrap without taking damage.

marhawkman
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#58 Post by marhawkman »

Honestly that situation is one of the reasons why you do tech research. Having better speed and range=technological advantage. Technological advantage=win combat(assuming other factors are even) then again having greater range=less accurate is good. But only marginally less accurate.
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utilae
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#59 Post by utilae »

That strategy would be ideal if the AI could be that smart. Take an RTS game and tell the unit with more speed and range to attack and they don't quite have as much success.

ewh02b
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#60 Post by ewh02b »

utilae wrote:That strategy would be ideal if the AI could be that smart. Take an RTS game and tell the unit with more speed and range to attack and they don't quite have as much success.
That's because they can't move and fire at the same time in an RTS game--they must stop to fire. A key limitation of the combat engine, that meant that melee units had a very hard time attacking a moving target.

Moo, on the other hand, will probably allow ships to move and shoot in the same round.

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