New here, Tossing out this idea. (IWAR)
Posted: Sat Aug 13, 2011 7:30 am
Hello everyone. New member here. Been going over all the posts and reading the wiki docs and checking out VS and it has really sparked my interest.
I want to take some of you back to around 1992. (I know a long way away) there was a fantastic game I purchased called Independence War. It was a space simulator game that had a fantastic storyline as well as very well thought out GUI game play interaction. I will give the basic layout of the ship. It was called the Dreadnaught CNV-301. You had 4 stations.
- Captains Chair : - Console showed forward view. Buttons to read mission briefing docs, set jump locations using the GSV (Global space view map) showing all of known space. You could set jump points to other areas of the galaxy but you had to enter through a lagrange point, and you had to approach the jump point at the correct speed to jump. It also contained readouts to show near by ships. Ships out of range of the scanners would display as unknown, (Yellow) Friendlys (Blue) or Hostile (Red) The information on the lower sections of the display under the forward view is where all near by ship listing would take place. It of course would also show their range, and if they were on standard thruster, or FTL (Faster then light drive)
- Engineering station : - This was my fav part of the ship. It displayed the ship and all of its internal functions. EI: Power grids, thrusters, main ring, injectors, hull, ect. Basically everything that made the ship run, was here. When the ship would take damage sections would highlight in yellow or red depending on how badly damaged they were. Above the monitoring screen were repair teams. 1 - 6 and they would start working on random things on the ship when it would take damage. But you could assign items to teams by dragging and dropping into the repair team window. So, for instance. Lets say you are in deep battle, and your FTL ring and thrusters have taken bad damage. You could quickly put all 6 teams on FTL to get it repairs as fast as possible to make a quick escape (If possible at times)
Another aspect to this console was the fact you could actually adjust powergrids to put power where you needed them. If your shields were taking a hell of a hit, you would transfer power to the upper shield and lower shield. Of course this would lower your gunners ability to fire, as well as your pilots ability to manover quickly but sometimes It could not be avoided.
Gunner station: - This display showed the ship in 3rd person wireframe. And it would track the ships near you, or you could select what ship you wanted to fire on. Once you got a ship in target you could then sub select areas of the ship. Sub target its thrusters if you wanted to disable him in space, or hit his weapons so he could not fire on a important transport of supplies, ect. Damage on the ship would be displayed on a sub screen next to the wireframe. It would show what is exactly damaged on the ship (Thrusters, hull, weapons, ect) and the overall % damage of the ship it self. You could damage the ship to 90% and leave it, it would take the ship some time to repair all the needed systems or you could just choose to destroy it all together. It was your choice. (Or the captains. I will explain this later)
Pilot seat: - This had forward view as if you were looking out the window of the ship. On the console were various controls. (Formulate with target, match velocity, dock, approach, ect) It had radar display of course as well as the same information readouts showing distance of ships, damage of ships, ect When in this seat, you did one thing, fly and fly good! If you are chasing or evading or just getting through a asteroid field and doing it without taking any damage.
So there you have it 4 stations. Now on to what I did with this same concept and then a question.
I wrote a game that was on this same concept way back in the day in VB6. But what I did was i split the software into 4 parts. So you had a captains version, eng version, gunner, and pilot. It took 4 people and made them all members of one ship. Each person had to be very good at their job in the game to survive situations. If the engineer isnt doing his job right, it makes life for the pilot and gunner very rough. The game I made was very basic, nothing like the IWAR game but taking the concept one step further to have everyone working as a team. I long abandon the game I made but as of late with some new projects I have been working on professional I got to thinking about this idea again.
I do some work with discovery channel from time to time, and can do hardware electronic design as well as a host of other things, and recently have been given the 3d mesh of the Dreadnaught will full perms and would like to take a shot at getting the good old dreadnaught into VS. I will talk more about some of my ideas and where I would like to take them (If possible) but first id like to get some feedback from some out there about what I have described thus far. Thanks for taking the time to read this, look forward to hearing back.
Cheers.
Sen
I want to take some of you back to around 1992. (I know a long way away) there was a fantastic game I purchased called Independence War. It was a space simulator game that had a fantastic storyline as well as very well thought out GUI game play interaction. I will give the basic layout of the ship. It was called the Dreadnaught CNV-301. You had 4 stations.
- Captains Chair : - Console showed forward view. Buttons to read mission briefing docs, set jump locations using the GSV (Global space view map) showing all of known space. You could set jump points to other areas of the galaxy but you had to enter through a lagrange point, and you had to approach the jump point at the correct speed to jump. It also contained readouts to show near by ships. Ships out of range of the scanners would display as unknown, (Yellow) Friendlys (Blue) or Hostile (Red) The information on the lower sections of the display under the forward view is where all near by ship listing would take place. It of course would also show their range, and if they were on standard thruster, or FTL (Faster then light drive)
- Engineering station : - This was my fav part of the ship. It displayed the ship and all of its internal functions. EI: Power grids, thrusters, main ring, injectors, hull, ect. Basically everything that made the ship run, was here. When the ship would take damage sections would highlight in yellow or red depending on how badly damaged they were. Above the monitoring screen were repair teams. 1 - 6 and they would start working on random things on the ship when it would take damage. But you could assign items to teams by dragging and dropping into the repair team window. So, for instance. Lets say you are in deep battle, and your FTL ring and thrusters have taken bad damage. You could quickly put all 6 teams on FTL to get it repairs as fast as possible to make a quick escape (If possible at times)
Another aspect to this console was the fact you could actually adjust powergrids to put power where you needed them. If your shields were taking a hell of a hit, you would transfer power to the upper shield and lower shield. Of course this would lower your gunners ability to fire, as well as your pilots ability to manover quickly but sometimes It could not be avoided.
Gunner station: - This display showed the ship in 3rd person wireframe. And it would track the ships near you, or you could select what ship you wanted to fire on. Once you got a ship in target you could then sub select areas of the ship. Sub target its thrusters if you wanted to disable him in space, or hit his weapons so he could not fire on a important transport of supplies, ect. Damage on the ship would be displayed on a sub screen next to the wireframe. It would show what is exactly damaged on the ship (Thrusters, hull, weapons, ect) and the overall % damage of the ship it self. You could damage the ship to 90% and leave it, it would take the ship some time to repair all the needed systems or you could just choose to destroy it all together. It was your choice. (Or the captains. I will explain this later)
Pilot seat: - This had forward view as if you were looking out the window of the ship. On the console were various controls. (Formulate with target, match velocity, dock, approach, ect) It had radar display of course as well as the same information readouts showing distance of ships, damage of ships, ect When in this seat, you did one thing, fly and fly good! If you are chasing or evading or just getting through a asteroid field and doing it without taking any damage.
So there you have it 4 stations. Now on to what I did with this same concept and then a question.
I wrote a game that was on this same concept way back in the day in VB6. But what I did was i split the software into 4 parts. So you had a captains version, eng version, gunner, and pilot. It took 4 people and made them all members of one ship. Each person had to be very good at their job in the game to survive situations. If the engineer isnt doing his job right, it makes life for the pilot and gunner very rough. The game I made was very basic, nothing like the IWAR game but taking the concept one step further to have everyone working as a team. I long abandon the game I made but as of late with some new projects I have been working on professional I got to thinking about this idea again.
I do some work with discovery channel from time to time, and can do hardware electronic design as well as a host of other things, and recently have been given the 3d mesh of the Dreadnaught will full perms and would like to take a shot at getting the good old dreadnaught into VS. I will talk more about some of my ideas and where I would like to take them (If possible) but first id like to get some feedback from some out there about what I have described thus far. Thanks for taking the time to read this, look forward to hearing back.
Cheers.
Sen