Cloaking device

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Kangaroo
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Cloaking device

Post by Kangaroo »

Hey folks, don't know about you but i don't like the effect that a cloaking device causes. I think that a ship turning transparent is a WAY too weak effect for such a powerful invention. :? I think that it could create some kind of an optical fisheye covering the ship. :P By the way if the cloaking device is powerful enough to bend rays of light, then why can't it bend weapon projectiles? So now it would be the research of the millenium, rendering yourself invincible at the cost of no firepower! :mrgreen: surely it needs rebalancing, but let me know if it is a good idea.
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Post by klauss »

Bending light is in no way comparable to bending massive slugs or particles.

Plus... the weakness of the effect is surely caused by graphical engine limitations (soon to be overcome). So... go on and start thinking of cool effects... who knows... if it's a good idea, it might become a reality after the graphical engine's overhaul is done.
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Post by Ryder P. Moses »

Why waste system resources on it? Honestly, if anything the damn thing oughta be phased out altogether, the only reason it has to exist right now is that the current combat system is broken and thus it's impossible to actually fight anything with even marginally better weapons than you without one. What the game needs right now is for someone to make flying skill actually the slightest bit relevant to gameplay, not fancy effects for every little detail.
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Post by Kangaroo »

i'm not sure but i think that in a book was writen that only black holes can bend light so much that it is visible. Probably like with sun - it can bend the course of earth (much more mass the a weapon) but can't bend light.
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Post by Ryder P. Moses »

Yes it can. And does. If you've got a good telescope (one with a somewhat higher light reception range than the human eye, say), you can see things that are actually on the other side of the Sun. Even Mars bends light slightly.

Gravitics isn't the only way to bend light, either. You can do it with a lens, or even a simple household object with small holes in.

That's not particularly relevant, though, because those are real-physics lightbending options, and the cloaking device is pure handwavium. It works more like adaptive camouflage than anything else.
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Post by Kangaroo »

May be so but i don't want to lose my eyes trying. :shock:
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Post by Kangaroo »

How do you think - how much energy does a cloaking device use? :?:
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

It exists not, therefore, its energy consumption is undefined ;-)

Why can't people think about gameplay consequences of things, before asking for them? If you can become invisible, it makes you invincible. Every time a game company introduces a new "handwavium" technology, they paint themselves into a corner. Privateer introduced a steltek gun, and then they had to have it stolen at the start of the sequel, just to be able to have a game back. Wing Commander introduced "Flashpak", and later were forced to pull a retcon whereby all confed fleets had to be upgraded with flashproof armor.

And what would cloaking do for gameplay?

Not to speak of the technical and scientific difficulties it presents.

All that, when there are familiar technologies, simple to implement, that add a lot of new angles to gameplay, such as stealth technology, and stealth mode radar. When you set your radar to stealth mode, you don't send out a signal to bounce off other ships, but merely listen to what noise they emmit. Other ships don't see you anywhere as easily on their radars, but the flip side is that you can only guess their distance. This would be great for gameplay, because then you have two choices, both of which have pros and cons. Finally, flying around in stealth mode you don't see other ships in stealth mode at all, on radar, so two enemies might come upon each other without knowing it until they are so close they can look at each other in the eye.
This kind of stuff would be good for gameplay, NOT "cloak".
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Post by Ryder P. Moses »

Um... chuck? It already exists ingame. And what it's done is further reinforce the gadget-based combat model, wherein technique and tactics mean nothing and whether your guns can do one point more damage per second than the other guy's completely determines how battle is played out. Adds another level, though, because any ship with a cloaking device is effectively invincible, capable of taking on capital warships with only a small amount of difficulty.
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Post by loki1950 »

haven't seen it for sale in CVS version yet :D even if it means i can't take out cap ships with impunity 8)

Enjoy the Choice :)
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Post by GoldenGnu »

chuck_starchaser wrote:stealth mode radar. When you set your radar to stealth mode, you don't send out a signal to bounce off other ships, but merely listen to what noise they emmit. Other ships don't see you anywhere as easily on their radars, but the flip side is that you can only guess their distance.
This could be cool, you could play like a space sub marine (active/passive sonar). then you should be able to send out a single radar signal, to get the ship current distance, but still you wouldn't know what way they are moving.
But then you could mach the distance, with the direction the passive radar had received radar signal and get an idea. You could select between doing this manual or atomistically. nice... but still, I like the idea :D
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Post by Kangaroo »

Do you know why my radar shows a ship like this sometimes -
"West springs sqadron - kahan
klkk

out of range"

Don't you think that the ship shouldn't be shoved at all?
Or maybe this is some kind of a stealth radar?
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Post by klauss »

Actually, the cloaking device will be just an advanced stealth mechanism, in the style chuck pointed out: engage the cloaking device, and the most an enemy's active radar can do is point the general direction. But you'll also be running passive systems, so so would you (only be able to tell the general direction).

JackS said so... I agree... chuck agrees... Ryder seems to agree... see a pattern?

I would only add switching off active systems as a poor man's cloaking device: active radar can spot you very well... but only if enough "exposure" is given (to let tracking systems detect you). Enemy passive systems can't detect you, so no early warning unless their active system tracks you down (which would need serious balancing).
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Post by Ryder P. Moses »

Cool, so there's actually gonna be a heat/emissions management module eventually?
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Post by klauss »

Yep.
Ok... I'll explain a little:

I already have a lot of code, code I had written for a game of mine I never finished (it's quite hard for a team of one...). It has to be adapted (aka rewritten), but the concept is there and when I get somewhat decoupled from Ogre, I'll try to work some on that.

It's an overhaul of the entire damage model, actually, a la BattleTech(tm) - with critical systems, internal explosions, heat management and - new to BT - stealth management.

AI had response times, mostly based on pilot skills. Sensor systems were modular, and so only exposed a realistic interface: the code itself hid what the sensor wouldn't pick up from the AI layer, so the AI would have to manage. It performed well... but writing AI modules was a pain (and one of the big leftovers).

The idea here would be similar, but with a bit less abstraction so that this time AI coding is not painful: AI has each contact tagged with "trackability" and "obviousness" (names subject to change) attributes that make it ignore it for longer (low obviousness) or shorter (high obviousness)... loose contact/aim poorly (low trackability) or better (high trackability), etc.
Cloaking devices, or low emission levels (passive cloaking), would in fact decrease both obviousness and trackability, to points well below normal - so low, that AI modules will have a hard time telling them apart from background noise.

Ah... background noise will show up in the contact list if you tweak your sensibility too high, but I'm not sure how to efficiently do this yet without falling in the same cumbersome implementation I had in my project. Probably through scripted "noise sources"... that's the best option I have for the time being.

Sensor packs were extremely complex. I'll have to tone them down a bit. They had full "Ping" histogram, sensitivity histogram, and tracking/sensing noise thresholds (also histograms). Objects would reflect programable parts of the ping, so each kind of cloaking/stealth armor would be easy to code - the default and versatile "sensable dummy" was an object component that handled it by applying an absorption histogram to the incoming ping histogram. Oh... the incoming ping histogram got modified by the "environmental transfer function" - modelling the result of passing by the atmosphere. So... to sense a unit, the system would send a ping out, and wait for it to come back, modified by a) the medium between sensor and target, b) the target itself, c) the medium again, and d) the sensor's sensitivity characteristic.
It all sounds way too complex, but was actually quite simple, once you abstract out the complex action of "applying a histogram to another" - histograms were one cumbersome data structure... but easily conceptualized by just saying that you could "sample them" at certain "frequencies"... then everything became clearer. Thing is... once you forget about histograms, it all became really straight forward.
So... I would have to simplify histograms, and keep the general concept. All this has a goodly long time before it shows up in CVS, though, because it's a) low in the todo list, and b) quite complex... and c) would require extensive modification of AI which, IMO, will be well received (improving AI), but all developers will look at with critic eyes (which isn't bad - just a slowerdowner). And, most importantly, d) I won't even try it until I have it all figured out.

But sounds good... I imagine.
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Post by Kangaroo »

Is there any chance that ships may detect each other by heat detectors like in heatseek missiles? Maybe there could be many sensor systems in the new verison making it like a copetition between computers and technelogies too :) ?
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Post by klauss »

That was the whole idea.
Sensors won't be perfect, and will mess up from time to time.
Like not detecting someone.
Like true heatseekers... they won't lock onto the sun (that's been solved years ago, in RL), but they might lock onto you (Privateer intro :twisted: ).

Thing is... sensors won't be merely characterized by range, ITTS and IFF, but rather a whole set of characteristics. I'm not sure how much complexity will be left in the end, but I think I had:

Sensor principle: Just an opaque identifier of sensing principle. Radar/Sonar/Whatever.
Focusing range: max/min focusing angle. Determines maximum range.
Sensibility: the histograms I talked about.
Software: Maximum tracking units, tracking accuracy, tracking threshold histograms (can't lock on a poor signal).
Imaging devices: seems trivial... but it's not. Determines which kind of screen the game will show. You won't imagine the difference it makes having PPI over an osciloscope. You can't imagine the difference it makes having both - or even analytic oscilloscopes (like those used in modern sonars).
HUD linkup: (new) defines how the radar will link up with the HUD. Will it be able to show contacts overlaid onscreen? Will it provide audible warnings about new, possibly hostile contacts? that kind of neat stuff. I'm thinking that the HUD reflecting the kind of hardware you're mounting on your ship will enhance gameplay in a rather irrelevant and trival way... but in a very emotional way (basically... it will look good/feel nice, but it doesn't actually do much - just create emotional attachments to certain brands/kinds of equipment).
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Post by hurleybird »

Sounds awesome klauss!

...is it just me or did this thread used to be in feature requests?
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Post by klauss »

hurleybird wrote:...is it just me or did this thread used to be in feature requests?
I really don't remember.
I certainly didn't move it :P - if anyone did.
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