escape pod

Post by **safemode** » Fri Apr 18, 2008 4:26 pm

Now that we dont do time dilation. We need to do something about being left in an escape pod. Perhaps send a ship from a nearby base to come pick you up for a fee.

In any case, i dont think players are going to make use of the escape pod if it is gonna take 30 min to redock to a base when they can just quit and restart from the save game and lose nothing.

which leads me to my other point. Why even have an escape pod when nobody makes use of them? Either you get killed outright, or you quit and restart from the save game. There is no motivation to make use of the escape pod.

Maybe it's time to just do away with the escape pod.

bgaskey · Post by **bgaskey** » Sat Apr 19, 2008 1:53 am

I'm all for it. In a year of playing I have never bothered to use an escape pod. Less of a hassle and saves $$ to reload a save.

There may be more uses for escape pods in the campaign when we get around to it, so doing away with it may be premature. (ejecting and having your ship ram an enemy, especially if there is a friendly capship nearby to dock to, for instance)

But just trading around or whatever, there's no use for it.

Post by **pyramid** » Sat Apr 19, 2008 2:10 am

I would leave it as it is. Actually I was thinking about spawning some escape pods in missions after you destroy the enemies and maybe even get them picked up by comrades. Could be a nice feature.

Post by **loki1950** » Sat Apr 19, 2008 2:15 am

That and no escape pod no rescue missions.

Enjoy the Choice

Post by **safemode** » Sat Apr 19, 2008 2:55 am

there are bugs relating to escape pods however.

1 being you can't get anywhere now that time dilation is gone. So while we keep the feature, we should probably make it not occur in-game for the player. Unless we make ships come pick us up and deposit us at a base.

2 Seems like the mass is off or something for escape pods, they dont collide with things like normal.

3 Hand laser is completely useless. Unless you can imagine multiple escape pods attacking eachother. hah.

One solution without much coding changes is to make the escape pod target the nearest significant target within a certain range when it's ejected. Then you get a single Burst of speed in that direction (massive speed) and that speed is kept constant. The range combined with the speed should allow us to wrangle in the amount of time it takes to get back to civilization.

While that may solve the problem of being stuck out in space, it doesn't solve the problem of there being no logical reason why any player would continue the game after losing their ship (that would have to wait for a campaign objective).

vodalian · Post by **vodalian** » Sat Apr 19, 2008 2:56 am

I like the idea of waiting for a pickup. To simplify it, you could even just make the screen fade out for a second and fade back in at the nearest station, instead of the ai 'actually' coming to pick you up.