Why the ship creation approach could be better. Some Thought

[Cordess]

Today i was thinking about the ship creation approach and why it could be better. Some Thoughts:

I asked myself from a logical standpoint why some ships in
Vegastrike are so huge.

When you look at the ship size comparison chart the Vitik (over 7000 m in length) or Yavok are very big ships:
http://cod.altervista.org/vegastrike/sc ... php?page=1

The models look very nice but there is no logical design behind it in the terms of "what's inside the ship".
Also from another thread (can't find it) you give each capital ship
just a number which should represent the hull strengh and thickness.
Say the Vitik has hull strength 2340272.
So now what is this?
All this has several disadvantages especially from a game play point of view.

Here is why:

Representing the hull strengh by just an odd number means that
you don't have a damage model.
To destroy the ship you just need to put the number down from 2340272
to 0 just by firing at the ship.
So there is no place for tactical game play.
You can't say, oh look at there, here is a weak spot of this large capital ship. At this spot the hull is only 4 cm thick and behind it there is one of the
fusion reactors.
Let's fire on that spot, detroying the hull there and the reactor behind it.
And voila, the ships energy output gets reduced by 1/5 because one of the five fussion reactors is destroyed.
In the end this means the player or AI of that ship has less energy for shields or weapons, now he needs to allocate energy from the left shield to the right shield to strengthen it. You see there is much more ways for tactical game play when doing it the other way.

You can't do that kind of tactical game play at the moment
because the odd hull number which represents everything (the whole ship) doesn't allow that.
Sure you could says, when the odd hull number gets down to 100000 the first fusion reactor is destroyed. But this approach is a very vague assumption without logic and it still doesn't allow tactical game play like concentrating fire on this weak spot to get the fusion reactor down a lot more faster although the rest of the ship is in good shape.

So representing the hull strengh by just an odd number is a bad approach.
Here is my suggestion to do it better:

Divide the ship in zones. The outer hull of every zone is defined by a
a hull thickness number, say 10 cm of material xy (steal, titan etc.).

Then there comes the next step.
Every zone has bulkheads. When zone A has a hole in the outer hull the bulkhead stops fire, explosions etc. to reach the other zones or it stops
loosing air from the rest of the ship.

Then we get from that to the next point: ship size and inside logic.

Every zone has something in it, which is an important part of the ship.
For example zone F could have the third fusion reactor out of 5.
Zone H has a fuel tank for the fighters.
Zone J represents the fighter hangar B etc.
Zone K has the computer room and crew quarters.

And now i think you understand why a ship creation approach
should be developed from the inside to the outside.
Not the outer way. like it is in the moment.


There are also other advantages why this approach is better.
For example you can first classify types of fusion reactors.
Every type has a different size, power output and mass.

The size tells you in a logical way how big your ship must get
to have enought place for 5 fusion reactors of type RX-167 with a combined power output of 860983 MW.
It also tells you in a logical way what mass your ship will have in the end.
You know the hull thickness and shape, so you know the mass of the whole hull. Now you add the mass of the fussion reactors of type RX-167 + the engines of type ZuI-34 etc.

This also allows a lot more game play.
By classifying types of fusion reactors you can say,
alien race A are not so good in creating efficent fusion reactors,
that's why there fusion reactors are bigger and that's the reason why there ships are larger and a lot more heavier because they need more space for there weak but big fusion reactors.

Or you could integrate it in the trade and game play logic.
This could sound like this:
The capital ship Excelsior of the human species was heavily damaged in the last battle. At the moment it is at the ship repair yard Mars-Omega 2.
The second fusion reactor of type TS-234 was completly destroyed. They need a new one.
Now you as a player and trader can fly to Centauri fusion reactor factory station and buy one. Because this is the only factory in the human area that
build this large fusion reactor of type TS-234.
Etc. i think you get it.

You could do the same with shield generators, computers, sublight engines, fuel tanks, warp or spec drive reactor etc.


So first classify this things. Every alien race should have its own things.
Give them a size, a mass, power or engine output and then use those
units of this construction kit to create a big ship with a inner logic that makes sense.

It will also be very helpfull when the day comes when it is possible in vegastrike to walk in first person view around in the ships and space stations. Because this needs a logical inside.


From a technical standpoint this shouldn't be a problem.
Of course you don't add every inside reactor, shild generator, fuel tank etc. to the outside polygon model.
This isn't good for polygon number. That's obvious.
So you add those things only in the concept drawings and in the definitions
files which is necessary to compute shield energy, damage and such.
This way it is still possible to keep the polygon number low by only
modeling the outside of the ship.
You also shoudn't model the hull thickness of course.
Of course modeling the inside in an extra file could be very practical later when it is possible to walk around in the inside of ships but now it isn't necassary but you still need concept drawings of the inside.


What do you think about all this?
Good or bad?

[loki1950]

@Cordess nice summation it has been metioned before quite long ago actualy and i am sure that it's on one of the dev's to-do list but that list is kinda long for so few brains atm. that and i believe that to engine may not be handle your concept atm with Ogre may be but that's still a way off

Enjoy the Choice

[peloskie]

i picture capships as big giant floating buildings, huge and sluggish, and has very tiny menuverating rating to a point where there will be a big need to have a tottaly different control systems for the capships... such as using point and click methods to plot the navigation.

capital ship agility again, should be between 1(for small capital ships) to .002 degrees(for the largest set of ships) degrees a second there should be no complaints about the capship menuverability because thats the way they are.

yes, I also have to agree that there should be some type of different damage systems for them capital ships.

just the point that flying capital ships shoulden't be easy as 1-2-3 homeworld style.

[Oblivion]

yep... modular ships... *sigh*



@peloskie

i picture capships as big giant floating buildings, huge and sluggish

and vice versa. Small Stations would have thrusters too. At least to maintain orbit. Very large stations (which is currently impossible/difficult to make, but would be easily done when modularity kicks in) would be more static. They'd be vast jungles of scaffolding, junk, panels, living quarters... Space Cities! Not stations - cities.

just the point that flying capital ships shoulden't be easy as 1-2-3 homeworld style.

I disagree. It should be easier. More like rts that fps. What with a crew to change your spoken command to action you'd be much better off than worrying with your copilot on a bunch of blinking lights in an interceptor.

slower, But easier to handle in terms of go there-go here. Capships can;t afford mistakes taht could kill a crew of 300.

[peloskie]

with that type of idea, a lot of players would choose capships over starfighters by a large margin anyday. any newbie would want to dedicate their time getting one of those because... ooh! its so easy to control one!

things needs to be balanced out where one type of ship would not be the most dominate type useage wise over another... doesn't matter how much credits it costs.

if thats the way the developers want to make capital ships for the main game, then at least modding would be the last option depending how much exposure this game gets but I'm not trying to go far over there.

[Jesse_the_Midget]

heres an idea. Why doesn't someone (at least for the moment) make up a tutorial or guide on making "balanced ships" that would show how big things are and how to design to fit them. (I.E. "Shield generator: 500 cubic meters, x>5, y>10, z>10" -just random numbers)

then, all the dev's would have to do is make some way of logging damage per area etc.

[mortaneous]

I imagine it would be easier to code as an extension of the shield damage system... each subsystem and upgrade would be under one or more shield facings, and could be covered by another component, once the appropriate section of shield is down and the armor penetrated, any damage goes to the topmost component in that area. Once a particular component is damaged to 0%, the next in the stack begins taking damage.

I.E.: Front: Shield->armor->ECM->Autotracking mounts->Weapon capacitor->HUD units->Repair droids
Left: Shield->armor->Cloaking device->Jump Capacitor->Jump drive
Right: Shield->armor->Cargo enhacements-> Radar->Jump drive
Rear: Shield->armor->Overdrive->thrust enhancers-> SPEC drive->engines->reactor->Jump drive

[forlarren]

heres an idea. Why doesn't someone (at least for the moment) make up a tutorial or guide on making "balanced ships" that would show how big things are and how to design to fit them. (I.E. "Shield generator: 500 cubic meters, x>5, y>10, z>10" -just random numbers)

then, all the dev's would have to do is make some way of logging damage per area etc.

Well seeing as no one here has much experence with pen and paper RPGs I could do it.

But here is a short list of what I need to get started.

Complete list of ship components: hull, engine/s, FTL drive/s, weapons, armor, etc.
Racial Modifiers: are humans better than Foo at X, but Bar is better ay Y than humans but not as good at X as Foo, etc.
Power levels: how much delta-V can the engines produce? How many shots before the average weapon breaks the average armor/shield?
Price lists: how much per upgrade.
Someone to do the homework above. I can make a balanced system for designing and balancing ships but I do not have the time to dig through all the documentation.

[Jesse_the_Midget]

hmm, I'll work on the list of upgrades and prices, if someone else could work on the rest.

[loki1950]

master_parts_list.cvs has everything that can be bought in game.

Enjoy the Choice