What to do while in space

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travists
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What to do while in space

Post by travists »

This topic came up during discussions onauto-docking there is some need to fill in the space between bases with some kind of action.

I suggested mini-games to illustrate a point, and it was treated with horror, so if that is what you want you had better have a firm argument for your side. More implement-able of my thoughts are power management, actionable in-flight news, and SOS messages.
Safe and un-safe areas are also heavaly discussed.
Deus Siddis wrote:
travists wrote: I simply do not see how navigation can be made more engaging. . .

. . .what are you thinking Deus Siddis?
Basically I am thinking the game currently isn't doing anything with navigation and that is why it is as dull as it is. We have three big categories of navigation game play mechanics which remain undeveloped:

Hazards. Asteroid belts, debri fields, mine fields, ambushes, raiders, uprisings (or riots), nebulae, black hole and magnetar systems.

Exploration. Unexplored systems, partially explored systems, derelicts, salvageable scrap, mining and colonization opportunities, alien artifacts, undiscovered alien species, theoretical (or unimagined) anomalies.

Internal. Things happening inside your own ship or fleet, mid-flight. Vessel systems maintenance or systems inspection, crew interaction, crew psych assessment and crew task assignment, mystery and code deciphering, course and strategy planning and logging, fighting hostile or handling neutral stowaways, boarders, rescued victims and other 'guests' inside your vessel.

Tangentially, if you had more things to do and deal with when you arrived at a destination, getting back into deep space navigation might seem more like a relatively relaxing break from the action. Imagine if you just barely made it out of the docks with ship and cargo intact, after the station was taken by an ISO lead riot (who equally fortunately, only gained access to the station weapon controls after you had made SPEC). I don't know about you, but I might feel great if nothing more happened during the deep space navigation to a nearby safe haven.
There are doubtless areas of overlap here, but the intent is to establish what can and should be done in-flight as opposed to any one feature.
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Re: What to do while in space

Post by Psyco Diver 69 »

Solitaire??? lol I like that idea though, but space travel is fairly short already, maybe if it did take longer or if you jumped into the worm hole it took a little while to get to each system I could understand that. Otherwise I don't think theres not much of a need, but it would be very cool, and somewhat more realistic if it happened cause I was just thinking about how short the trips are
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Re: What to do while in space

Post by travists »

I guess that depends on what you fly, and what your idea of long is. In a plowshare fully loaded, it can take a few minutes from base to jump point. Across multiple systems that can add up. I was just throwing things out there as part of the arbitrary "keep the player engaged" thinking. Really flight related tasks would be better, and less likely to occur on short trips. Sounds like some kind of mini-game might add some humor, but not really needed.
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Re: What to do while in space

Post by klauss »

What about, in those cases, full-fledged, official (not just devel aid) time acceleration?

I remember a lot of flight simulators, where the idea of realism is really important (npi), so they wouldn't compromise travel time but would allow the user to engage autopilot and time acceleration (not necessarily in that order or in tandem).

Ie: I could accelerate time with autopilot, accelerate without autopilot, turn autopilot without acceleration, or just play.

On long missions (a standard CAP would take 3 hours, 2 patrolling, 30' en route, 30' back), time accel was really not an option, but a necessity.

Accel would be automatically disabled when the player encounters something that requires his/her attention.

Time acceleration in VS is rather badly implemented, sacrificing a lot of simulation precision (to the point where odd things would happen like people ending up inside planets) - but if it were to be properly implemented, we could crank up realism without kicking boredom to the stratosphere.
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Re: What to do while in space

Post by greenfreedom10 »

klauss wrote:What about, in those cases, full-fledged, official (not just devel aid) time acceleration?
My opinion: time acceleration hurts realism. Real people play VegaStrike, and real people usually don't experience life with any sort of time acceleration. So if eg. the game gets an improved economy, and a player time-accelerates a long way, then an economy that has been tuned to be dynamic and appear to change in a realistic way suddenly speeds past what the player expects, because the player has just missed out on months/years. Instead of eg. returning to a particular system because it is well policed, the player discovers that the system has changed factions and is now a very dangerous place. The universe could end up being so dynamic that the player never knows what to expect. Yes, the economy could perhaps be set to run at half-speed or something, but then eg. the player thinks "I just accelerated through 30 years and nothing changed". Also eg. "I realized that I have been living in-game for over 200 years" and other weirdness.
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Re: What to do while in space

Post by klauss »

Well, the trick is not to accelerate past the character's lifetime ;)
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Re: What to do while in space

Post by shenle »

We are though going at speeds of 97c, so why not compress time past a pilot's natural lifetime? You go so much faster over the speed limit, you get what you deserve. :)

Seriously, we should find a compromise so that you never get more than a couple minutes idle time while playing the game normally, except if you choose to on purpose (like stopping in dead space and not doing anything). If that needs to involve some form of time compression, so be it.

How about a deus ex machina supervisor that analyzes what the player is doing and makes decisions such as "the player is now starting a trip that at the max speed will take 17 minutes of real-time. Let me compress the time 4x so that the trip takes only 4.25 minutes real time - this way the player won't get bored along the way"

I don't like this idea too much, but I have no better one.
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Re: What to do while in space

Post by Deus Siddis »

I don't see the advantage in adding time compression on top of two forms of FTL (all in one mod). You could just boost the SPEC speed limit from 97c up to 1000c and get the same effect.

Either way, we still haven't done anything to make navigation time more interactive (which it has not been in the least since 0.5). Plus, as we add features to this part of the game to make it more interactive, people's desires to cut it short or skip through it should be greatly reduced.
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Re: What to do while in space

Post by klauss »

Deus Siddis wrote:I don't see the advantage in adding time compression on top of two forms of FTL (all in one mod). You could just boost the SPEC speed limit from 97c up to 1000c and get the same effect.
No, it's not the same effect.

If you fly faster, you... fly faster. You get where you want to be in a zap.

If you compress time, by the time you get someplace... time... has elapsed.

Subtle difference?

Say you have to go to Cephid to Sol and back. That takes a lot of travelling from jump point to jump point, and if travel from one point to the next took a few days of game time, by the time you're back a full month might have passed and things could have changed.

If you make spec faster, you get back in a few minutes of game time, not enough for anything to change in the universe.
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Re: What to do while in space

Post by Deus Siddis »

klauss wrote: Say you have to go to Cephid to Sol and back. That takes a lot of travelling from jump point to jump point, and if travel from one point to the next took a few days of game time, by the time you're back a full month might have passed and things could have changed.

If you make spec faster, you get back in a few minutes of game time, not enough for anything to change in the universe.
Ah I see now. Before I thought you meant using time compression to skip through long SPEC travel, but you mean to make travel more interesting by having it introduce a greater degree of universe change. The more interstellar travel you do, the faster the universe will change. That's an interesting idea, though it wouldn't address navigation interactiveness directly and would require some change of canon.
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Re: What to do while in space

Post by travists »

How does spec work? Should there not be some relativistic effects to consider, thus altering time flow? I think there is room for both in flight opps and time compression. Like an on/off switch in setup and things to do while flying. I do see where time compression is going, and to see it's ultimate expression look no farther than the old "Wing Commander" series: hit "a" for autopilot and the game does a check for hostel encounters along the path and drops you just outside of the next nav point or at the location of the hostel encounter. Great for a combat driven game to keep the pace up, but not so much in a more free form setting. From what seems to be the working theory of dynamic economy, stepping up the timer to trip recalculating the price lists should work if time compression is used.

As far as faster spec, perhaps a systems upgrade could speed your ftl capabilities up. I understand the technical prohibitions against adding more upgrade type systems, but personally feel that a base ship that only has standard, sub-light thrusters and generally being little more than a surface to orbit shuttle that can be upgraded to an interstellar cargo or combat vessel would be the epitome of this kind of game. You get enough scratch together to buy a used shuttle and a basic spec drive then work on up! It also would be nice to have maneuverability, acceleration, etc damaged and able to be repaired by repair systems.

Anyway, unless travel time is calculated added to the game clock and happens instantly, there will still be some downtime. Do you just sit back or fiddle with fine-tuning ship systems? In the economy thread a suggestion was made to be able to mine on your own.
shenle wrote:Speaking of mining... How about mining stuff yourself? Pick up a MB4 mining machine, find yourself a pristine asteroid and drill away... And of course in a finite+persistent universe, resources get depleted as you use them so the same asteroid remains used up once you've exhausted its resources, making you explore more...

(and now everyone knows that my _real_ goal in life is to become a rock hermit ;))
I thought that if you can by an automated factory , why can't you deploy it?

There is a wide verity of non-station activities that could be done, not all of which involve combat. Though, system authorities dealing with rampant pirate activity may post a system wide bounty on all pirates. Kinda like in Privateer II where a pirate kill is worth 50 cr with or without a specific bounty. Heck, there is a “skip track” and volume controls for the music, but why not be able to change the channel on your radio?
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Re: What to do while in space

Post by Psyco Diver 69 »

Why can't spec speed be upgradable? Just thinking from some of the post I read in this thread, the only max speed, doesn't matter if you have spec I to spec X is .97c, why not make this speed upgradable, that way if you need to get across system and you have say spec I or II maybe only .25c and spec X be .97c? Maybe from there if your ship has a low speed you could buy minigames at bases like space invaders lmao
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Re: What to do while in space

Post by travists »

Psyco Diver 69 wrote:Why can't spec speed be upgradable? Just thinking from some of the post I read in this thread, the only max speed, doesn't matter if you have spec I to spec X is .97c, why not make this speed upgradable, that way if you need to get across system and you have say spec I or II maybe only .25c and spec X be .97c? Maybe from there if your ship has a low speed you could buy minigames at bases like space invaders lmao
How about a cheesy 2d space and trading simulator? :lol: I'm playing a space sim in my space sim (in my space sim in my.....) Spec I is still sub light while SPEC X is like 1000C, and the research stations have some experimental models that go even faster, but might blow up on you? Power management would come well into play, by overdriving some systems you get more preformance. But be careful, over drive it too much and you burn it out. Really put the screws to a system and you could blow your reactor and have too call for a tow! An SOS possibility.
"Help! Systems damaged, please defend until power restored."
Think of this coming in as you're flying along.
Do you:
  • Keep on flying
  • Help them out
  • Join the throng of pirates attracted by the distress call and harvest the debris
A news item comes across the inter-sys net while your are hulling a load of water to one place, saying that another bases water storage ruptured and needs to be replenished driving up prices? Time compression has it's place, but that time can be filled with other interesting things too.
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Re: What to do while in space

Post by shenle »

travists wrote: How about a cheesy 2d space and trading simulator? :lol: I'm playing a space sim in my space sim (in my space sim in my.....)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Trader_%28Palm_OS%29

I actually bought this one about 10 years ago (it was shareware before it became open source a couple of years later)
Hey, that wikipedia page mentions us! :)
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Re: What to do while in space

Post by greenfreedom10 »

Deus Siddis wrote:I don't see the advantage in adding time compression on top of two forms of FTL (all in one mod). You could just boost the SPEC ... and get the same effect.
klauss wrote:No, it's not the same effect.

If you fly faster, you... fly faster. You get where you want to be in a zap.

If you compress time, by the time you get someplace... time... has elapsed.
Deus Siddis wrote: ... you mean to make travel more interesting by having it introduce a greater degree of universe change.
This is all dependent on an improved dynamic economy, then?

All this "dynamic" coolness is great, unless the player is unable to figure out what is happening and at least partially, why. The reason we want to improve the economy currently is because players can not rationalize what it is doing. Time compression could easily make it more difficult to build an economy that the player can rationalize.

And by embracing the idea of time compression, the VegaStrike development community would be de-prioritizing interactivity improvements (that is, now we don't bother with developing things to do in space because we are skipping it all).
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Re: What to do while in space

Post by shenle »

greenfreedom10 wrote: This is all dependent on an improved dynamic economy, then?

All this "dynamic" coolness is great, unless the player is unable to figure out what is happening and at least partially, why. The reason we want to improve the economy currently is because players can not rationalize what it is doing. Time compression could easily make it more difficult to build an economy that the player can rationalize.
Unless there were, for instance, a way to explain it to the player. Newspaper, newsfeed, economic advisor, call it what you want.

"Several caravans raided by rogue ships between Xiowaqua and Fentuze! Grain prices skyrocket!"

'New uranium deposits found in the asteroid belt. Energy becomes abundant and research into 4th degree fusion reactors loses funding. Guess the breakthrough we were expecting in research for smaller and more efficient automated factories will have to wait another year or two."
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Re: What to do while in space

Post by greenfreedom10 »

shenle wrote:
greenfreedom10 wrote: This is all dependent on an improved dynamic economy, then?

All this "dynamic" coolness is great, unless the player is unable to figure out what is happening and at least partially, why. The reason we want to improve the economy currently is because players can not rationalize what it is doing. Time compression could easily make it more difficult to build an economy that the player can rationalize.
Unless there were, for instance, a way to explain it to the player. Newspaper, newsfeed, economic advisor, call it what you want.
So news reports (which are written from the single-day perspective) are going to explain changes in the economy that happened over weeks/months of skipped time?
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Re: What to do while in space

Post by klauss »

Psyco Diver 69 wrote:Why can't spec speed be upgradable? Just thinking from some of the post I read in this thread, the only max speed, doesn't matter if you have spec I to spec X is .97c, why not make this speed upgradable, that way if you need to get across system and you have say spec I or II maybe only .25c and spec X be .97c? Maybe from there if your ship has a low speed you could buy minigames at bases like space invaders lmao
I think it's a good idea, but we have to have some form of time compression in a usable state before doing this, as I would use it to lower the standard SPEC rating as said before, rather than increase it.

So, to most ships, travelling would take considerable time - you could upgrade your SPEC and travel actually faster (good for some kinds of military vessels, reconissance, for instance), or you could time-compress and be at the mercy of faster ships.

But without time compression, we can't afford forcing players to sit in front of an idle game for long spans of time.
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Re: What to do while in space

Post by Psyco Diver 69 »

What about keeping to local news also, something within 2 or 3 systems of what ever system your in, that way if a battle happens or blockaide, or shortage, you could quickly go to that system to fight or turn a profit
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Re: What to do while in space

Post by shenle »

greenfreedom10 wrote:
shenle wrote:
greenfreedom10 wrote: This is all dependent on an improved dynamic economy, then?

All this "dynamic" coolness is great, unless the player is unable to figure out what is happening and at least partially, why. The reason we want to improve the economy currently is because players can not rationalize what it is doing. Time compression could easily make it more difficult to build an economy that the player can rationalize.
Unless there were, for instance, a way to explain it to the player. Newspaper, newsfeed, economic advisor, call it what you want.
So news reports (which are written from the single-day perspective) are going to explain changes in the economy that happened over weeks/months of skipped time?
Why not? The event that started WWI took a whole morning to happen, but its effects are still around almost 100 years later.
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Re: What to do while in space

Post by travists »

In the economy, prices should be calculated every "day". So, every time a day passes crunch the numbers and generate news items as appropriate. If you see oddities in prices or hostile areas are now friendly or vise versa, look back through the news items. Local news stays local, sector wide in the sector, etc. Something that would be quite useful is adding a game clock to the savegame file. This also allows for time limited missions! I think a slider or something in the setup to handle the level of time compression is the way to go. I guess one thing to be determined is how much idle time is acceptable?
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Re: What to do while in space

Post by greenfreedom10 »

shenle wrote:
greenfreedom10 wrote:So news reports (which are written from the single-day perspective) are going to explain changes in the economy that happened over weeks/months of skipped time?
Why not? The event that started WWI took a whole morning to happen, but its effects are still around almost 100 years later.
I'm talking about explaining events and economy changes to the player. One news item from one particular day during WW1 does not come close to explaining WW1 or its effects on economies and nations.
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Re: What to do while in space

Post by klauss »

greenfreedom10 wrote:I'm talking about explaining events and economy changes to the player. One news item from one particular day during WW1 does not come close to explaining WW1 or its effects on economies and nations.
It's a good point, but I think you're overstating it.

Nevertheless, it's a mistake to avoid - time compression should not get in the way of the appreciation of dynamism. Which is not to say we should avoid time compression altogether, only be careful.
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Re: What to do while in space

Post by greenfreedom10 »

klauss wrote: Nevertheless, it's a mistake to avoid - time compression should not get in the way of the appreciation of dynamism. Which is not to say we should avoid time compression altogether, only be careful.
Oh, and we also already have a configurable game speed that would have its own effect on a dynamic economy/universe.
(In the mix: game speed + time compression + SPEC)

Anyway that's probably enough from me, you know that my vote goes to Deus Siddis' hazards/exploration/internal improvements instead! :)
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Re: What to do while in space

Post by travists »

I too vote for Deus Siddis. Nothing mandatory, and perhaps have time compression as an option, but something more to play with would be best.
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