Making Capital Ships fun to fly

Talk among developers, and propose and discuss general development planning/tackling/etc... feature in this forum.
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Erk
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Making Capital Ships fun to fly

Post by Erk »

Honestly, I love the idea of owning a capital ship, or an entire fleet. At present, they are sluggish and slow, and not all that fun except for their turrets. I have a few ideas that use minor alterations of existing systems.

Stop me if anything in here is in 0.5, I haven't played it yet :)

Inspiration
For all its flaws, Star Wars Galaxies had a half decent handle on what makes capital ships fun. I'm brainstorming ways with my friend of how to adapt that complicated engine into something fun for vegastrike, with emphasis on both single and multiplayer.

Roles
These are already present in VS. In essence, there are three roles that are fun to play on a capital ship, and VS has two of them: pilot and gunner. The only role I would add, had I the time and skill to program it, would be "engineer". Though I don't think we need to worry about adding the latter to VS anytime soon, I will state my ideas for it anyway, because I think they are really fun.
Pilot
The pilot, as one might expect, flies the ship. There can be only one. Also controls forward facing, non-pivoting guns, because frankly just flying the ship on a capital is pretty gosh darned dull. This role should be automatable: like a gun turret, the pilot seat can be set to AI and hte AI will fly the ship while players have fun elsewhere. I don't mean autopilot in the sense of flying to planets, but in the sense of controlling the ship in combat just like NPC ships behave.
Gunner
This role would be essentially identical to how it is at present. You control a gun and you shoot it. Wee! However, it would be nice if the armament of turrets could be more complex, ideally allowing a single turret to be linked to multiple weapons like the pilot of a single-player ship has. I know, that is hard to set up, and it is fine as it is. Just food for thought.
Engineer
This is my idea: a player could run around the ship repairing damaged systems by solving puzzles. The puzzles get harder as systems get more damaged, and can even change as you are working on them. They'd probably be fairly simple and graphically based on wires and circuits to give the feel of repairing a system.
Additionally, systems could be temporarily "buffed" by solving similar puzzles at undamaged stations. Though I think this is an awesome idea, at present it requires adding a new role to the game, so let's forget about it.

Selecting a role
This is the meat of this post. Right now, cycling through turrets is a single player, unfun endeavour as I understand it. I think this task should be tied into the "station" part of a capital ship.

As we know, when you dock with a cap you see a concourse with a bar, upgrade center, cargo center, et cetera. This is great! As pilot of a capital ship, I would like to be able to go to my OWN concourse [and perhaps even fly different ships out of my cap ship, leaving it temporarily in AI hands, but that is another idea altogether]. Further, I would like to be able to go from there to the bridge of the ship, where I could click on the pilot seat to enter Pilot mode. I'd like to be able to click on different turret stations in a similar way, ideally through a schematic diagram of my ship (but I can see the difficulty there), to enter each turret. Finally, I'd like my player character friends to be able to do the same, in the finished product.

Basic mechanic:
-when player launches ship from station, he/she is automatically in the pilot seat.
-pressing a "stand up" key puts the player on the bridge
-player can move from the bridge to the concourse, or can click on a schema of the ship to select other stations to man - turrets, or maybe main systems to engineer.

Ideal
In an ideal VS, each ship would have an internal map that the player could walk around. Damaged systems would shoot sparks and engineers could stop and fix them. Turret gunners could either manually walk to their turret or other gun systems, or could just select them from the bridge. Players could leave and sit on the concourse and access a chat menu and eat virtual food. It would really feel like a capital ship, with a single and multiplayer aspect.

This gives the feeling of actually being able to walk around a capital ship, without adding too much programming. It would make a capital ship feel big in more ways than just being hard to fly. Can I get a "here, here"?
rivalin
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Post by rivalin »

sounds great, and I doubt there's anyone who'd disagree that this should be an eventual aim, but until more basic things are accomplished then it probably won't happen.
()Alf
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Post by ()Alf »

just look how you do it in games like battlefield....

A "use"key to use seats, stations, or whatever you aimed on while pressed.
Enjoy the Tri p :shock:
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Post by loki1950 »

An awful lot of your suggestions can not be done with the current engine most will only be possible with the migration of the rendering backend to ORGE3d lots of other things also become doable 8)

Enjoy the Choice :)
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Erk
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Post by Erk »

Please note, I am not talking about a 3D engine inside the ship. I'm talking about it just as it is right now, with a 2D prerendered bridge with a pilot's seat and schematic of the other areas of the ship that can be manned by humans. essentially, clicking the pilot's seat would be the same as selecting "launch" from a station. Clicking a turret would be similar, but rather than launching you into the pilot's chair, you'd be launched in one of the ship's turrets.

Of course, this still might need to wait for the engine migration, as it requires a near-seamless load between 2D and 3D areas. I don't know enough about the engine to understand why we don't just overlay the 2D areas above and keep the 3D engine running quietly in the background.
redisforever
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Re: Making Capital Ships fun to fly

Post by redisforever »

If you've ever played the Last Express, you click on whatever you want to use or look at or sit on a chair. But it would be very nice if this turned slightly into an RPG, like where you have a life on a capital ship and a job to do on one, and a fully 3D environment would help. You could go to sleep maybe, and if you sleep, the flight goes faster. About the eat virtual food idea, if you don't eat, it may become harder to fly the ship, and if you don't sleep, the controls become more sluggish and unresponsive. That would involve having something like stats though.
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Re: Making Capital Ships fun to fly

Post by Shark »

With multiple players I think it would be feasible. Just assign a different player to one of these posts. I suppose in single player you could hire crewmen to take over some of these posts like you currently can hire wingmen.

I don't think there would be new problems with regard to pure combat balancing that aren't already present in the game. Economic balancing might be a problem if capital ships are too cheap and easy to come by.

As for RPG chacteristics, I think Mount & Blade struck a fairly nice balance between character and player skills. (The RPG campaign was junk though.) Even if these characteristics were limited strictly to NPCs instead of both NPCs and player characters it would make a nice minor addition and add a little (currently lacking) personality to the game.

OK, so who's going to code these features into the game so that we can all play like this? Anyone?

:lol:

Mike
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Re: Making Capital Ships fun to fly

Post by biohazard »

It's a nice idea, and adding a few rpg features would make a more involving experience for the player.

But i don't mean to create something like "The Sims: Universe" :lol:
I like the idea of an AI controlled crew (because in the online game, it could be possible but, due to long flight-time, you would have a new crew every hour) and this is paired someway to the "walkable ship" feature.

But i think that adding this kind of features means rewrite most of the gameplay, most of the code and all 3d models (to implement "the inside" space).

Of course this is not a negative side, lot of related gameplay problems of 0.50 like "i have to find something to do while flying" would be solved.
But probably, this entire operation would translate into thinking right now a 2.0 version of VS.

Am i wrong?
Chalk up another for the Maniac!

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Sorry for my bad english.
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