multiplayer concerns

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Duality
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Post by Duality »

Well actually in a mmo, stealth would be limited to.. when you're cloaked, you cannot shoot and you cannot stay cloaked for ever just because cloaking drains energy. When decloacking, you cannot fire your weapons until 45 seconds after being decloaked passes.. When cloaked, you are invisible from radar and people can barley see you. Not as in 100% invisible but see how people in FPS games like Q3 and UT use their invisible power ups. This is the way the gameplay dynamics should be for vegastrike.
Alaskan
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Post by Alaskan »

Unfortunately, because of possible cheats, we can't have cool distortion effects.

It is really hard to make the cloak more complex than on and off.

When cloak is on the server checks to see if someone has detected you.

The check takes into account if you have active sensors on, your proximity to them, how good your cloak is, wether you are near other things that have to effect of masking your gravity, wether your engines are powered and wether the other person has active or passive sensors.

Once you are detected, the detectee is alerted and an object is spawned on their screen. This object is randomly placed around you with a distance depending on how well cloaked you are and a random factor.

So to simplify...

Each ship has a clock index that is calculated depending on the above (excluding the factor of an attackers active or passive sensors)

Whenever a ship is near you, a check is made of your cloak index against their sensor index (passive or active and their sensors), proximity and wether they are facing you. If their check succedes they know you are around.

Then the same numbers are used to make a % off accuracy. At 100% the ship is perfectly placed.

The same checks are made on the missile you fire if it has detecting capabilities. So you might have a lock on that is 100m away from the target, the missile gets close enough to see where the target really is and hts the target. Some missiles might even report back. Maybe there is a missile that doesn't have a warhead, but has a painter.

Just a whole pile of ideas.
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Halleck
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Post by Halleck »

Alaskan wrote:Unfortunately, because of possible cheats, we can't have cool distortion effects.
What cheats? You mean things like telling the game to use different shaders for a cloaked ship, so they appear visible? I guess.

It's a shame that such features won't be implemented just because some cheaters might spoil everyone's fun.

Oh, I've got an idea! What about some sort of device that disguises your ship as something else- another ship, floating cargo or debris, or even an asteroid. That could be implemented easily, i think- just have the server tell the opponent's client that there's an asteroid there instead of a ship, much like it doesn't tell them about a cloaked ship at all. Of course, if you saw an asteroid clipping along by itself at top speed you'd probably figure it out and attack it.

Also, I read that slashdot thing richard posted as an example of how bad cheating can get. On the contrary, I look at it as an example of how to limit the effectiveness of cheats:
Some guy on slashdot wrote:thanks both to the use of actual projectiles instead of instant (or 'hitscan') weapons, as well as a server-client model that DOES NOT TRUST CLIENT EVENTS (which you might think would make the game much more apparently laggy, but which in reality makes the game much less stuttery and much smoother for those on slower connctions; you just have to predict your shots more. But, since you have to do that anyways by design . . .).

The stability of this system is such that even with one of the most rabid fanbases in gaming, the only cheats available are primarily informational in nature. A cheater can see mines better, can know where the flag is, can see people clearly that would be mostly obscured by fog otherwise.

But this gives him very little actual advantage. The only hitscan weapon in the game is not a one-hit kill even on the lightest armor, and it needs to recharge, and the method used in both Tribes 1 and the Torque engine of the server not trusting the player for jack shit is actually EASIER on the server, since it processes client actions essentially as it receives them. Moreover, thanks to 'skiing' and the jetpacks and the visibility of laser rifle attacks, any advantage is quickly whittled down to a simple nuisance.
martin
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Post by martin »

Hallek wrote: [cloaking] could also be used to sneak past enemy fortifications (useful for blockade running), avoid cargo scans, and launch surprise attacks. None of these tasks can be accomplished by just sitting out in space.
I think a cloaking device like you describe it would spoil the whole game,because everybody would use it, especially the "interesting" targets. Even if you make it very expensive (more expensive than a ship?)..the bad guys would certainly have and use them. Any bounty mission would be pointless.
Duality wrote:... you cannot stay cloaked for ever just because cloaking drains energy.
Sorry, but are you really suggesting that cloaking drains more energy than propulsion ? That sounds totally unrealistic to me. VegaStrike is violating energy conservation anyway (no fuel required), so why should it apply to cloaking?
jackS
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Post by jackS »

martin wrote: Sorry, but are you really suggesting that cloaking drains more energy than propulsion ? That sounds totally unrealistic to me. VegaStrike is violating energy conservation anyway (no fuel required), so why should it apply to cloaking?
just as an aside, as of >= 0.4.2 we've improved fuel modeling somewhat (it was there before, but some things were a bit odd). Any acceleration requires the consumption of fuel. Constant velocity motion does not. At some near point, reactor recharge will require the consumption of fuel (that's been planned for a few months, but I just haven't gotten around to it yet). However, even once these are implemented, it'll probably be another wait before running out of said fuel does truly nasty things to you, because that will require more code hacking :)

So, yes, we're currently violating energy conservation, but we're working our way towards becoming more law abiding citizens ;-)
Alaskan
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Post by Alaskan »

There are alot of things that could be done to balance the use of cloaking, but currently the main concern is how to implement it.

If you tell someone some information, you can't assume the client will hide it.

The easiest way to make cheating useless is to make everything that is sent to the client, visible to the end user. Aimbots aren't a problem because you can't only shoot forward, and the turrets already have an aimbot.
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