Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebalance

Development directions, tasks, and features being actively implemented or pursued by the development team.
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IansterGuy
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by IansterGuy »

klauss wrote:
Deus Siddis wrote: After further testing it appears you are most correct... And this feature must be deprecated. The is no hope of finely balancing the game until it is.
We've talked about this and I agree. Difficulty should modify weapons and shields, giving the players some handicap, not speed.
Yea I remember this being mentioned but it was one of many things discussed. Kinda like Klauss said certain things should stay consistent across difficulty levels. Ideally the only thing that would change with the difficulty would be things that don't effect the physic at all, and in the extreme case that would not even include shields and weapons and armor. In this case variables would include economy adjustments like higher costs, less payout, and scarcity. A change of quantity like less credits, less starting weaponry, and more enemies. A change of quality like smarter enemies and dumber allies.

Smarter AI could alone could be the sole variables for an even more uniform universe experience but would require some better AI controls, which can't be relied on now.

Though weapons and shield changes the physics and function of the ships components it would be easy. It would be much better than putting the game in fast forward, or giving additional thrust which always seemed too obvious and inconsistent.
Deus Siddis wrote: It is still an evil but it is a far lesser evil if you make no change to player weapons/defense by default. You should have to set the difficulty to easy if you want a special handicap of any kind.
I don't think setting the game difficulty this way is evil, it gives the player more leverage to make the game fun for himself. I think there could be separate options for player handicap, game speed, economy, and AI intelligence.. The more handicap on the player the more difficult the game gets as I understand. It is measured in percent of full strength. So to make the game easier, the handicap on the player would be something like -10% [Negative ten percent]
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote: That's certainly doable and sensible, but we'd have to severely tweak the dynamic universe system to guarantee safety in those systems. As things are right now, no system is really safe - way too many factions and way too many ways to upset one of them.
The problem is the one introduced by 0.5.0-- traffic. When you move through friendly space the traffic is just an annoying distraction that makes it hard to target the ship or destination you want. But when the dominant factions hate you, that traffic becomes a surrounding hostile army and there is no chance you will get out of there alive. And the advantage you would need to give a player, to survive an attack by dozens of warships and then kill his way out of the system, would break the game balance everywhere else. No mission would be in anyway difficult except a bounty on an Aera capital ship.

So the player's only hope is to not piss anyone off, ever. And the only way to fix that is to make traveling through systems with a hostile presence survivable. And the only way to do that, without adding and carefully balancing some serious new features like speed of light based sensor and communication delays, is to just reduce traffic spawning.

But at least if the player doesn't piss anyone off for no reason, starting him off in say Purist space will be plenty easy. There's mainly supposed to be luddites there, who are the weakest of the "bad guy" types, and you are in fairly well policed core systems. And then give the easy player enough credits to buy a pacifier.
PS: I checked the config. Are you sure about harder and impossible? Accel there looks heavily modded. I think we should slow down the game a bit for easiest perhaps, but keep accel and speed unmodded for the harder levels, and instead play with damage values for those.
Okay so this is my justification and proposal.

Medium, the default setting, should be completely unmodified in every way. This is absolutely critical to balancing efforts. This is the core game balance that gets the spotlight of attention, both from developers and players. And it should be renamed to default.

The other values change speed settings, so let's make them only change speed settings. And let's rename it from "difficulty" to "flight physics" and then rename the individual presets from things like 'easy' or 'harder' to somethings that reflect what they actually do, for examples- "Classic", "Ultra Realism", "Hard Sci Fi" and "Arcade".

Then create a totally different setting for damage modification. But this time again, have a default preset named clearly "default" that modifies nothing. And again, make the other names reflect what exactly is being modified so the player knows if he is cheating, by how much and in what way.

And come to think of it, maybe have another preset field called traffic density, that modifies how many AI ships are spawned at once in systems.

So with all this you have an easily customizable and transparent approach to game difficulty. It is a lot like some other flight sims like old Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator, where instead of one "difficulty" setting you have a whole menu of clearly explained options that go between a full on realistic simulation and a very forgiving simplified arcade game. It even summed up your level of realism as a percentage at the bottom of the screen. That rewarded you to, as your skill increased with time, trying turning realistic stall physics back on or turn off unlimited bombs and rockets. You had full control over not just how much difficulty, but what kinds of difficulty you wanted, and then it gave you an ultimate goal to aspire to, becoming a fighter ace at 100% realism.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Deus Siddis wrote: Medium, the default setting, should be completely unmodified in every way. This is absolutely critical to balancing efforts. This is the core game balance that gets the spotlight of attention, both from developers and players. And it should be renamed to default.

The other values change speed settings, so let's make them only change speed settings. And let's rename it from "difficulty" to "flight physics" and then rename the individual presets from things like 'easy' or 'harder' to somethings that reflect what they actually do, for examples- "Classic", "Ultra Realism", "Hard Sci Fi" and "Arcade".

Then create a totally different setting for damage modification. But this time again, have a default preset named clearly "default" that modifies nothing. And again, make the other names reflect what exactly is being modified so the player knows if he is cheating, by how much and in what way.

And come to think of it, maybe have another preset field called traffic density, that modifies how many AI ships are spawned at once in systems.

So with all this you have an easily customizable and transparent approach to game difficulty. It is a lot like some other flight sims like old Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator, where instead of one "difficulty" setting you have a whole menu of clearly explained options that go between a full on realistic simulation and a very forgiving simplified arcade game. It even summed up your level of realism as a percentage at the bottom of the screen. That rewarded you to, as your skill increased with time, trying turning realistic stall physics back on or turn off unlimited bombs and rockets. You had full control over not just how much difficulty, but what kinds of difficulty you wanted, and then it gave you an ultimate goal to aspire to, becoming a fighter ace at 100% realism.
I can buy that
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

Alright then, here's the new vegastrike.config attached to this post. The "Difficulty" field has been replaced by "Physics" which has three options- Default, Classic and Realistic. Classic is meant to approximate Privateer and Realistic caps accelerations around 3gs and doubles the speed governor. And of course Default makes no modifications.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by IansterGuy »

I tested your config file in the various modes several times simply with oswald and his buddies as I always do. It seems promising. Classic was not as extreem and cartoony as what I expected privateer to be like. Realistic does not seem too much different than normal but this is good because the high end ships is where changes should be most noticable, and the lamba will be downgraded to realistic acceleration for a cargo ship as I understand.

You have not even got shown us your new ship tweaks yet, thought I did also test this file in combination with your old units.csv tweaks.

The more I think about this the more optimistic I get that this will get done right and both satisfy past and current intentions for the game play. This is especialy since your comming up with some great ideas like repaceing dificulty levels with "Physics" styles.

I do have a few things to say about some ideas though. I think many fundemental problems can be solved by choosing more open sandbox gameplay and featues. The game universe is already open ended, and I think open game play in general is perfect for the nature of open source, because of the ease of testing then. Locking and funneling everything down for an ellietist game feel is what proprietary developers are already good at.
Deus Siddis wrote:So the player's only hope is to not piss anyone off, ever. And the only way to fix that is to make traveling through systems with a hostile presence survivable. And the only way to do that, without adding and carefully balancing some serious new features like speed of light based sensor and communication delays, is to just reduce traffic spawning.
This is a good rational for reducing traffic, though what I would like to see is a setting for adjusting it. Sounds like eventualy there will be enough options to make it worth thinking of an in game menu.
Deus Siddis wrote:But at least if the player doesn't piss anyone off for no reason, starting him off in say Purist space will be plenty easy. There's mainly supposed to be luddites there, who are the weakest of the "bad guy" types, and you are in fairly well policed core systems. And then give the easy player enough credits to buy a pacifier.
I think this is could be a good idea because there seems not much special about the current starting location, but it may have less to do with difficulty and more to do with preference. Indeed well policed systems sometimes feel safer even if there are more pirates because the police are instantly there to save you. Though this could dramaticaly change if SPEC and communiction could be jammed to hinder escape and delay recue.

klauss wrote:
Deus Siddis wrote:Medium, the default setting, should be completely unmodified in every way. This is absolutely critical to balancing efforts. This is the core game balance that gets the spotlight of attention, both from developers and players...

...full control over not just how much difficulty, but what kinds of difficulty you wanted, and then it gave you an ultimate goal to aspire to, becoming a fighter ace at 100% realism.
I can buy that
I agree, I think that the hole idea is excelent, the extra game options would give the game more sandbox play appeal which I like.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Cool - as soon as I can confirm Ianster's positive reviews, I'll commit :)
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

The point of this config patch is mostly just to lay groundwork for the linear movement patch that I will release a little later, as well as to replace the difficulty setting with one that affects only physics. When everything else is done with the physics rebalance, we can pick someone who has recently played one of the privateer remakes to balance the Classic mode setting to play very much like that game. And maybe realistic mode can use chuck_starchaser's recommended settings.

But it needs to be committed before that so the linear accelerations balance patch and any future changes to physics will be unmodified by default. It is like a level foundation physics balancing can build on top of.


Klauss, do you know what this config variable does exactly--

Code: Select all

<var name="difficulty_based_enemy_damage" value="true"/>
I missed this before but it sounds very meddlesome; I think it should be switched off by default. Could you switch that to false in the patch before committing it?
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Deus Siddis wrote:The point of this config patch is mostly just to lay groundwork for the linear movement patch that I will release a little later, as well as to replace the difficulty setting with one that affects only physics. When everything else is done with the physics rebalance, we can pick someone who has recently played one of the privateer remakes to balance the Classic mode setting to play very much like that game. And maybe realistic mode can use chuck_starchaser's recommended settings.
I've played all forms of Privateer... so...
Deus Siddis wrote:Klauss, do you know what this config variable does exactly--

Code: Select all

<var name="difficulty_based_enemy_damage" value="true"/>
I missed this before but it sounds very meddlesome; I think it should be switched off by default. Could you switch that to false in the patch before committing it?
Not exactly, I'll have to check. But I think it should be replaced by explicit damage modification factors. This boolean seems too obscure and automagic to be of any use. In any case, I bet it includes some form of asymmetric damage multiplier derived from the difficulty setting (player-vs-npc, npc-vs-player)
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Ok, what it does exactly: damage dealt to the player is multiplied by the difficulty value if enabled. There's a difficulty_based_shield_recharge, but it seems broken.

PS: Anyway, I think this is the correct way to change difficulty barring starting system stuff (which is impracticable ATM due to the issues we spoke of). Ie, the right way to handle difficulty when it's not possible to put the player in a safer system, is to make the universe safer by making his ship tougher and his blows stronger, maybe, if possible, other AI dumber, whereas the overall gameplay remains the same.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote: I've played all forms of Privateer... so...
Cool, if you have the time for this then that base will be covered. But don't make any tweaks until the base physics balance is done or else they'll get broken by it.
Not exactly, I'll have to check. But I think it should be replaced by explicit damage modification factors. This boolean seems too obscure and automagic to be of any use. In any case, I bet it includes some form of asymmetric damage multiplier derived from the difficulty setting (player-vs-npc, npc-vs-player)
Well then it should definitely be off by default. The game should only give you an out-of-universe advantage like that if you explicitly tell it to. Plus it will seriously mess with later balancing of weapons and defenses. I attached a new vegastrike.config patch with this setting turned off by default, please commit this one instead. And when you change it to a modifier, please make it 0 by default.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote: Ok, what it does exactly: damage dealt to the player is multiplied by the difficulty value if enabled. There's a difficulty_based_shield_recharge, but it seems broken.
So then what is actual name of the difficulty value variable? I didn't see anything in the config that pairs the string "difficulty" with an actual number.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Seems to be part of the mission script, and eventually the savegame. New_Game has no difficulty value, so it takes the default of 1.

I don't really like this status quo, I like your line of thought better. Feel free to request any difficulty-related variables you need.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote:Seems to be part of the mission script, and eventually the savegame. New_Game has no difficulty value, so it takes the default of 1.
So if this means there is no modification being done by default then that should be good enough for now at least.
I don't really like this status quo, I like your line of thought better. Feel free to request any difficulty-related variables you need.
Well for starters I would recommend moving any variables like this out of the save games and into config, so that the settings can be changed without having to start a new game and losing all progress in order for the changes to take effect.

And then it could be worth discussing at some point, variables for starting credits and the spawning density of AI ships.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Deus Siddis wrote:
I don't really like this status quo, I like your line of thought better. Feel free to request any difficulty-related variables you need.
Well for starters I would recommend moving any variables like this out of the save games and into config, so that the settings can be changed without having to start a new game and losing all progress in order for the changes to take effect.
Well... regarding that... games since forever have done the opposite. Are we questioning their collective wisdom? I really haven't paid much attention to the issue, but such massive adoption of in-savegame difficulty settings must be due to some rationale worth looking into...
Deus Siddis wrote:And then it could be worth discussing at some point, variables for starting credits and the spawning density of AI ships.
That, difficulty and a slew of other things, maybe, should be part of the main menu, when you click "New game". Right?
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote: Well... regarding that... games since forever have done the opposite. Are we questioning their collective wisdom? I really haven't paid much attention to the issue, but such massive adoption of in-savegame difficulty settings must be due to some rationale worth looking into...
We must distinguish between game start variables and general variables. A damage handicap you should be able to change anytime you wish, it is a general variable because it won't break anything to change it after game start. And the player might only realize a chosen preset is unsavory for himself after he has played for a while.
That, difficulty and a slew of other things, maybe, should be part of the main menu, when you click "New game". Right?
Starting credits you would only be able to change at game start by necessity. But damage handicap, physics and NPC traffic are things you should be able to play around with and adjust anytime, unless it is technically infeasible.


I have discovered what might be another hitch here, I think that while "game_accel" modifies only ship acceleration rates, "game_speed" modifies the entire game speed, not just ship speed governors. Is this true?

What go me thinking is the name of the variable: "gun_speed_adjusted_game_speed" and the following code comment--

Code: Select all

<!-- REAL accel is game_speed * game_accel go figure. No nested comments (apparently) allowed by expat  -->
So it would appear that the physics settings should all set "game_speed" to 1 or else they will affect much more than flight physics. So unless you disagree I will make said change to the patch.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Deus Siddis wrote:
klauss wrote: Well... regarding that... games since forever have done the opposite. Are we questioning their collective wisdom? I really haven't paid much attention to the issue, but such massive adoption of in-savegame difficulty settings must be due to some rationale worth looking into...
We must distinguish between game start variables and general variables. A damage handicap you should be able to change anytime you wish, it is a general variable because it won't break anything to change it after game start. And the player might only realize a chosen preset is unsavory for himself after he has played for a while.
It might break game balance. Imagine a game like Privateer (where the campaign is carefully crafted and balanced), and imagine I reach a mission I find challenging. Instead of actually winning it, I could set the game temporarily to "easy", go about my way trivially fighting enemies, and then go back to "hard".

If we had a highscore or something like that, where those achievements matter, I can see how that would be undesirable. Since we don't... I'm not sure.

There's also the multi-user issue to consider. What if we have many users of the game, sharing instances. Do you want a globally configured difficulty setting there? (in linux you'd say have them use different system accounts, but Windows land tends to do the opposite).
Deus Siddis wrote:Starting credits you would only be able to change at game start by necessity. But damage handicap, physics and NPC traffic are things you should be able to play around with and adjust anytime, unless it is technically infeasible.
See above about handicap. About NPC traffic, I'm not really sure you cam actually change it anytime. Ignoring the multi-user scenario presented above, technically, NPC traffic is stored on the savegame, generated by dynamic_universe.py. I don't think you can easily switch back and forth between settings, since that data will still be there, and it will take considerable time for the universe to converge towards the new setting.
Deus Siddis wrote:I have discovered what might be another hitch here, I think that while "game_accel" modifies only ship acceleration rates, "game_speed" modifies the entire game speed, not just ship speed governors. Is this true?
Yes, game_accel*game_speed applies to thrust stuff (all flight computer limits), and only game_speed applies to set-speed governor settings.

game_speed (alone) also seems to apply to asteroid field speeds, which would supposedly make them harder to navigate.
Deus Siddis wrote:What go me thinking is the name of the variable: "gun_speed_adjusted_game_speed" and the following code comment--

Code: Select all

<!-- REAL accel is game_speed * game_accel go figure. No nested comments (apparently) allowed by expat  -->
So it would appear that the physics settings should all set "game_speed" to 1 or else they will affect much more than flight physics. So unless you disagree I will make said change to the patch.
Indeed. Current variables are completely unpredictable. That's why I offered to implement specific, limited and well-understood tweaks in addition to current speed settings. Rationale being that Privateer mods probably rely too heavily on those for us to be able to modify them, so we need additional fine-tunning knobs, and we can set the speed ones to neutral values.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

My feeling has always been that if the player really wants to cheat or hack his way through the game then that's his choice. He might even enjoy the game better if he has some way to get around a roadblock mission that seems just too hard and keep playing to experience the rest of the story. I know I do. Hadn't thought of that multi-user aspect at all though. This is a good topic for future discussion.
klauss wrote: Indeed. Current variables are completely unpredictable. That's why I offered to implement specific, limited and well-understood tweaks in addition to current speed settings. Rationale being that Privateer mods probably rely too heavily on those for us to be able to modify them, so we need additional fine-tunning knobs, and we can set the speed ones to neutral values.
Well physics customization might benefit from new specific variables that modify linear speed governors, angular acceleration and angular speed governors.

For now though I am satisfied with a default config that just doesn't modify anything, so that balancing Units.csv is WYSIWYG. And on that note I have attached what will hopefully be my last adjustment of vegastrike.config for today at least. So please commit this version when you can get to it.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by IansterGuy »

Deus Siddis wrote:The point of this config patch is mostly just to lay groundwork for the linear movement patch that I will release a little later, as well as to replace the difficulty setting with one that affects only physics...

But it needs to be committed before that so the linear accelerations balance patch and any future changes to physics will be unmodified by default. It is like a level foundation physics balancing can build on top of.
Sounds like a good way to change things while maintaining the old and gaining the ability to easily compare current balances
klauss wrote: Well... regarding that... games since forever have done the opposite. Are we questioning their collective wisdom? I really haven't paid much attention to the issue, but such massive adoption of in-savegame difficulty settings must be due to some rationale worth looking into...
It is to give the game an exclusive feel that I don't think is completely compatible with the open source philosophy. Most popular games now days actually let you change the difficulty at the start of a mission, and most simulators and Open worlds allow it at any moment because games are longer and people have less patience. The only kinds modern games that I can think of that still lock the difficulty right from the start are short classic styles games where the goal is to pass as many levels as possible until defeated. I remember this had started to change when console games started looking real and I was much relieved
Deus Siddis wrote:
klauss wrote: We must distinguish between game start variables and general variables. A damage handicap you should be able to change anytime you wish, it is a general variable because it won't break anything to change it after game start. And the player might only realize a chosen preset is unsavory for himself after he has played for a while.
It might break game balance. Imagine a game like Privateer (where the campaign is carefully crafted and balanced), and imagine I reach a mission I find challenging. Instead of actually winning it, I could set the game temporarily to "easy", go about my way trivially fighting enemies, and then go back to "hard".
There are some really good compromises for this too, like Grand Theft Auto would give you three lives to try to finish a long mission from checkpoints until it would say something like "Game over" then kick you back to your last save point before the mission started. Then you could change the difficulty again.
klauss wrote:If we had a high score or something like that, where those achievements matter, I can see how that would be undesirable. Since we don't... I'm not sure.

There's also the multi-user issue to consider. What if we have many users of the game, sharing instances. Do you want a globally configured difficulty setting there? (in Linux you'd say have them use different system accounts, but Windows land tends to do the opposite).
Really good point about players sharing instances. Eventually I think it would be best do what most games do and have players login to an account before changing settings loading or saving. If users want files separately secured, then that is when they would make a separate account on any operating system. It seems most things should not be moved out of the save file until the .config file turns into user settings files.

Any local high score discrepancies would mostly be caused by cheating on the hardest part of a mission rather than someone trying to raise the difficulty to get more points on a single enemy. So I think the locally generated score would be adjusted by the lowest difficulty used during the mission. Or perhaps the difficulty could not be changed during the mission, which is a more common and transparent practice. An online high score for individual missions would have more credibility anyways if vega strike had a persistant online server.
klauss wrote:
Deus Siddis wrote:Starting credits you would only be able to change at game start by necessity. But damage handicap, physics and NPC traffic are things you should be able to play around with and adjust anytime, unless it is technically infeasible.
See above about handicap. About NPC traffic, I'm not really sure you cam actually change it anytime. Ignoring the multi-user scenario presented above, technically, NPC traffic is stored on the save game, generated by dynamic_universe.py. I don't think you can easily switch back and forth between settings, since that data will still be there, and it will take considerable time for the universe to converge towards the new setting.
If it takes time to adjust I think that is good. I would name the variable "spawn rate" in the case that no current units are removed upon loading. It is a bit factor in game performance too.
Deus Siddis wrote:My feeling has always been that if the player really wants to cheat or hack his way through the game then that's his choice. He might even enjoy the game better if he has some way to get around a roadblock mission that seems just too hard and keep playing to experience the rest of the story. I know I do. Hadn't thought of that multi-user aspect at all though. This is a good topic for future discussion.
Truth time! I actually don't play Vegastirke for fun unless I'm testing because any progress I make Is tied into my original settings. I feel like I'm trying to avoid the disappointment of restarting, so I don't play missions hardly at all either. I tried cheating but the the game destabilizes so mostly I just test individual aspects then imagine playing. LOL that's why I joke that the best video card is your imagination.
Deus Siddis wrote:
klauss wrote: Indeed. Current variables are completely unpredictable. That's why I offered to implement specific, limited and well-understood tweaks in addition to current speed settings. Rationale being that Privateer mods probably rely too heavily on those for us to be able to modify them, so we need additional fine-tunning knobs, and we can set the speed ones to neutral values.
Well physics customization might benefit from new specific variables that modify linear speed governors, angular acceleration and angular speed governors.

For now though I am satisfied with a default config that just doesn't modify anything, so that balancing Units.csv is WYSIWYG.
I was thinking eventually that some variables in addition to being in Units.csv should be able to be disabled or adjusted in .config according to the selected "flight physics" mode probably in the way klauss is offering. In particular those ones you mentioned, linear speed governors, angular acceleration, and angular speed. My reason for this is to create a more complete transformation when selecting between "flight physics"

I think defining all possible flight physics would be helpful so here is what I think to be an exhaustive list all physics styles that I am aware have been proposed. I'll use your names because I think they are great.

"Arcade" is what you are calling default now. Since I think any mode could be default, the existing balance should be called arcade, since it was intended to be fun without much regard to realism. The default should not be named default, but rather just labbeled as default.

"Classic" is exactly what you said it was, similar the older games

"Realistic" I think realistic should be default since it should be easiest to balance using reality as a template

Three physics modes are plenty so these next ones should not be nessesary:

"Hard Sci-Fi" sounds like it could be for those who didn't want any exceptions to the governor cap using fictional inertial mitigation methods.

"Ultra realism" For those who don't even like SPEC, in this case the game would have to include a sophisticated auto slowing time compression function that would be usable anytime.

If the game is to be sped up or slowed down it should be a separate option in the configuration. Or as you may know, as long as it is not introduced as a lone solution to travel distances, I have thought it ideal to have optional in game 'time compression' while also removing the cosmic speed limit. It would be a redundent uncannon alternative to SPEC and just a way to speed up the boring parts of travel that have not been fixed in the SPEC system yet.

Time compression could be available in all the "light Physics" modes or just some of the more realistic ones. The slowness in the higher realism "Flight physics" modes, from the cannon real time action, would then be eliviated by this simulator element. "Ultra realism" would then be what ChuckStarcaster once suggested, including his damming of SPEC LOL X-D. Everyones happy except for the extra work.

To make time consistent in multiplayer, of course these features would be disabled by either disallowing "Ultra realism" as an online option or the time compresson directly. Players would need to be playing under the same physics of course; likly the default.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

I have encountered a new obstacle to a coherent physics balance, "Milspec Packages".

You can't seem to buy them but they come with ships under the Milspec category. They add a lot of extra mass and thrust. And since they come broken for whatever reason they make the ship appear to be slower, but once you "fix" a milspec package all that extra thrust gives the ship tremendous acceleration. And here is the really strange part, units.csv already has a long list of milspec units but when you go to buy a milspec ship you instead get a stock ship with a milspec package that gives you way more performance than a plain milspec unit.

So this "feature" creates all kinds of inconsistencies. Does it serve any purpose?
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Deus Siddis wrote:So this "feature" creates all kinds of inconsistencies. Does it serve any purpose?
It probably does (nobody would implement something for the sake of implementing it).

But we'll have to look into it. At the very least, thrust could be modded down on the milspec package (or removed from it), to balance things out.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote: It probably does (nobody would implement something for the sake of implementing it). But we'll have to look into it.
Actually when it comes to units, it looks like there's a lot of stuff that was implemented just to be implemented. The impression I am getting after combing through units.csv, is that units are added whenever a cool looking model surfaces on the forum, with no thought going into where that unit will fit into the game balance of or if it will contribute anything unique to the game play. We have quite a lot of units in there that are more or less duplicates of other units; different names and models but nearly identical stats. And then on top of it, there are several nearly identical sub-classes of each unit- normal, .blank, .stock, .milspec and others.
At the very least, thrust could be modded down on the milspec package (or removed from it), to balance things out.
I think I will remove it's thrust rating for now, because I want to get out this first linear accelerations patch.

But I am beginning to see that deprecating the "Milspec" concept is the way to go moving forward. It is an ugly feature that solves no problems, adds no functionality but makes the balance a lot more opaque to both developers and players. We only need two versions of each ship, one fully loaded with upgrades and weapons that the AIs use and the player can buy if he wants a standard military craft, and a blank one that has no upgrades or weapons installed. In fact, we don't really need the blank model since the player can sell off whatever parts he doesn't want and buy different ones.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Yes, and if milspec isn't used by the dynamic universe, then I agree about removing them.
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote:Yes, and if milspec isn't used by the dynamic universe, then I agree about removing them.
Excellent.

I found single references to ".milspec" in faction_ships.py and log_faction_ships.py. Can you imagine any other module of the dynamic universe that would reference something so specific to ships/units as .milspec?
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by klauss »

Yes, mission scripts, launch.py and a few others. Safest thing is to look for "milspec" on every .py file.

Edit: looking, I can only find an extra reference on bartender stuff. The two you mention, after checking, I think can be safely removed (they populate a statistics table, and if milspec ships aren't going to be spawned, the statistics are not needed).
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Re: Acceleration, physics, and other ship enhancements/rebal

Post by Deus Siddis »

Alright good to know then, I'll make deprecating milspec a priority after the angular acceleration patch is in.

Speaking of which I have attached the linear acceleration patch to this post. It contains both the modified units.csv and the modified vegastrike.config that fairly thoroughly enforce the 10G acceleration limit. I will now start work on the angular acceleration patch.

Also I discovered another inconsistency. If you have a ship in your fleet that has say 9gs of acceleration, and you "buy" that ship so that now it is the one you are flying, and then you look at your ship stats you will see it magically has 10gs of acceleration now. What is causing this? Is it another config variable or some built-in handicap that gives the player piloted ship some speed boost? How do you turn it off?
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