little update on myself and rambling.

Development directions, tasks, and features being actively implemented or pursued by the development team.
chuck_starchaser
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Re: little update on myself and rambling.

Post by chuck_starchaser »

safemode wrote:For instance, perry keeps getting taken over by the kilrathi, but the canon says this doesn't happen. Why? If it's happening so easy in the game, what's different from the game's state to the canon's? If the dumb AI can defeat perry so easily, something is off, either in the game, or in the canon. The game can be adjusted if it's found to be in error, but if it's the canon that makes no logistic sense, then we have to fudge the game, and that's where players come up to stupid situations where a ship is not able to be damaged, or actions you normally would be able to do are locked out if you go out of order.
Perry is strategically located in a protected area; --separated from kilrathi space by convoluted jump paths full of asteroid fields through which capital ships have a hard time passing. Plus, the kilrathi have cultivated a relationship with the Church of Man (in Gemini and Avalon) which relationship could prove more valuable to them, in the long run, than having the territories themselves. (The Church of Man have sleepers inside the Confederation, such as Governor Menesch and the mystery guy in the ES that keeps Eden off the official charts for them; and if they are powerful enough to blockade New Detroit, they can do more for the kilrathi than the kilrathi themselves.) Plus, Perry has little strategic value for the kilrathi. The kilrathi, from the beginning of the war, have had a mental model by which, to conquer the confederation, they must take Sol. Anything else they do is as a distraction or a prelude or a stepping stone to taking Sol.
If the game AI would give me an ability to model the situation exactly like that, there'd probably be no problem getting a dynamic universe to behave like the real one. But I think that's too much to ask, and that's why all I ask is for a way to bypass dynamics.
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Re: little update on myself and rambling.

Post by safemode »

All in all, i am saying that the solution besides good scripting, is accurate universe staging. If a base is not supposed to be destroyed, then it should be defended heavily enough such that no force can destroy it, not hard-coded so that weapons have no effect or that it's shields / hull take no damage etc.

If a player decides to take knowledge of what happens later in the game to a base/outpost needed later in the game with a ship capable of destroying it... then this needs to be reconciled without hacks.

With VS, i hope we can deal with this by removing all "integral" units from the campaign. Meaning, there are no points of failure in a campaign, outside of actually failing at your mission. In addition to that, there would be a lot of available campaigns going on at once. Depending on how the universe state is, various campaigns would be active or potentially active at any given time. You never really know everytime you restart how things go, and the way the campaigns can be made, the same ship/base may not be used for the same campaign each time. Plus the units involved can be dynamically chosen at the start of the mission/campaign.

It isn't something you could do in WC/PU recreation games, but hopefully it'll be something we can utilize to make the game handle even the most annoying player actions without resorting to any kind of tricks.
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Re: little update on myself and rambling.

Post by chuck_starchaser »

Understood.

But what I was trying to say is that to the extent that Vegastrike is an engine, and not just a game, it needs to leave options open.
"Tricks" have to be such an option. Clean or filthy.
I'm not interested any more than you are in having things that are illogically indestructible. I don't want that kind of trick.
I want the kind of trick that really fools the player to perceive the state of affairs as intended.

Perry won't be destroyed. Period.
This is not because it is "indestructible", but simply because there's no reason (cost/benefit-wise) for it to be destroyed.
The size of Perry is actually colossal. About 5 km diameter and 10 or 12 km long. And it has room for quite a few ships in it
to scramble to a defense. You'd need a pretty well planned attack with a large fleet to take it out, and you'd have to be ready
to take some heavy losses, and there's no strategic reason to do so. It is out of the way in a nowhere, backwater sector that's
almost a liability for the Confed, with all its internal problems with piracy, gangsterism, smuggling and retros. Besides, Perry
is protected behind a "natural barrier" of asteroid infested systems; which barrier works both ways, such that a large force
to attack kilrah would not depart from Perry, so Perry is neither a value nor a threat to the cats. It is high-hanging fruit full
of worms.

IOW, nobody (not kilrathis, not pirates, nor retros) would attack Perry, because there's no sense starting such an attack if
you cannot hope of succeeding at destroying it, and the cost of attacking Perry successfully far exceeds the benefits.

In fact, in our current version of PU on svn, you hardly ever see any bogeys in the Perry system, and that's as it should be.
The problem was when we had a dynamic universe implemented that kept sending kilrathi forces to attack Perry for no reason
whatsoever. Whoever wrote the code for dynamic universe jumped to the conclusion that military bases should atract enemies
always, unconditionally, no questions asked; and AFAIK there was no way to turn that stupid feature off.

THAT is the problem.
Lack of flexibility (or of documentation).
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