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[Servant Corps]

Only on the frigates, apparently. The bigger ships can have several hundreds of "crew". For roleplaying reasons. - As far as I'm concerned however, unless I can see a manifesto with each and every one of these "crewmembers" bio and a picture, they don't exist.

MANIFESTO:

Crewmember #1: Yellowia.


Yellowia is an intergalactical terrorist. He is best known for scamming a poor village out of 5 Isk in a failed pymarid scheme. He has joined up with your crew to avoid perseuction. Yellowia's main goal is to protect the "Yellow Race", whatever that is.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Exactly how much effort would be required to create a game of that sort using conventional means? I mean stuff like DarkBasic or Blitz3D...

Something like Battleships Forever with the RPG system of Space Rangers and crew/customization extras like in Flatspace. I know that making a commercial-grade product is really hard, but something more basic?

[Virex]

Exactly how much effort would be required to create a game of that sort using conventional means? I mean stuff like DarkBasic or Blitz3D...

Something like Battleships Forever with the RPG system of Space Rangers and crew/customization extras like in Flatspace. I know that making a commercial-grade product is really hard, but something more basic?

Let's see:
Physics is simple. As long as you don't intend to go near the speed of light, newtonian mechanics suffice and those are friggin easy to program. Only other thing you'd need is collision checking, which would be somewhat tricky, but not undoable if you know how to do it.

Getting all the ships to actualy work, including realistic subsystem usage would be slightly harder. Basicly what you'd have to do is make each part of a ship a seperate object with it's own characteristics, and then pass things like sensor data, life support, fuell and inertia to the rest of the systems, possibly through a general "ship" object. Then it'd be possible to have multiple people runnign the ship.

Having the ship function as an object to run around it isn't that hard. You'd need to treat the location of the players and NPC's as relative to the ship, so they move naturaly with the ship. Artificial gravity is also possible by relating it to the ship.

Next thing would be weapons, which is just collision checking and passing data to objects to represent the effects. The effects themselve would be easy or dificult, depending on how sophisticated you'd want them to be.

That leaves us with things like planet desing (fractals?), ship and station desing (L-systems?), interaction between ships and stations, background lore and all kinds of smaller things. Animations and sound. All in all, this is going to cost the most time, since you'd either need to hand-craft each ship and station, or find an algorythm that can create them without generating illogical effects or plainly breaking things.

Last thing would be NPC's. Writing a good AI isn't simple by any stretch of the imagination.

[Sergius]

If I can get a capital ship sim, I want it to be possible for a Battlestar Galactica like plot to spontaneously generate, in a totally emergent way. That is, with no scripting whatsoever, just random

Radiant AI for space game ftw (not the crappy version that was shipped with Oblivion, but the actual wizard-burns-own-dog-to-death-cuz-it's-barking version)

[Sowelu]

Jeez, you people aren't demanding at all!

Generating a procedural universe is not that hard.  Go look at Starflight from the 80's.  Not fully procedural, but hey, if you can fit that many planets on two 5 1/2" floppies, you're clearly doing a good job.  But if you only make an awesome procedural universe with no gameplay, you get Noctis, and you need to go farther for your cap ship game.  If you don't put enough time into procedural stuff, you end up with a bland universe, too...but that might be worth it, to put time elsewhere.

Physics is HARD to handle right, and not because the simulation is difficult.  It's hard to make it fun.  Go play "Terminus" if you want a realistic physics space game.  It's pretty comical sometimes, like when you fill up your freighter with gold and head back to base and your ship doesn't move because you are so massive that youre thrust barely accelerates you, and then once you're moving the collision light comes on before you can even see the starbase, and you only avoid a crash by frantically, slowly dodging off to the side.  But you quickly discover that fast maneuverable ships have INSANE advantages, and also that space combat is pretty boring that way.  Early BC3k versions had messed up combat where fighters would go by so fast you couldn't even see them.  But it's realistic!  Heck, even Terminus put horribly arbitrary caps on velocity, because otherwise the game would suck.  Space games love to use "constant thrust = constant velocity" aka Star Wars physics, because it's more fun.  What will you choose?  Hmm.

Having people on the ship is easy simulation-wise.  The people exist on one 'inside the ship' map.  They don't exist on the space-level map, because who's going to look in the windows (or even have windows)?  If someone blows a hole in deck 9 in the space view, that's easy to just do on deck 9 on the ship map.  Don't try to combine them.


Anyway, this is particularly dear to my heart because I've tried to write this a couple of times.  First, while in high school, I poked at a procedural, fractal universe generator.  You'd get random cultures in random cities on random planets in random star systems, and it was cool because each thing's characteristics understood stuff higher up the chain (ie this culture was built and changed based on the star system it was in).  It failed because my design didn't have any way for things to look up and back down the tree, IE, a culture in star A had no way of knowing that a culture in star B existed.  Also, procedural stuff is easy to generate, but HARDHARDHARD to change:  You almost have to do it database-style, say "This is the base world, and the player has changed THIS stuff."  Otherwise, your procedural universe that would take 10TB of disk space if it was all generated, but is much smaller because you can just generate the part you're in right now?  You have to save it all off because it changed.  Hard.

[Sowelu]

Snipped off into a second post...

Half a year ago I actually started on the 'bridge' part of a game like this, when I was pissed off upon hearing that the Star Trek MMO was 'one player per ship'.  I ended up working on a 3d engine from scratch, which wasn't a great idea, but I ended up with a fairly cool system where the control panels on your bridge would render in 3d, and then get translated into textures and be rendered onto the viewscreens themselves.  That's about as far as I got; the next step was letting the player sit down at a console and manipulate it, sending the commands to and from the server.  But my hard drive died and I lost my work.  It wasn't great work, but still.  Back up your stuff!

My PLAN was going to be "puzzle pirates in space" with some changes.  There would be 3 puzzle roles on ship to start...engineering, science ops, medical, stuff like that.  Each role had multiple things they could be doing as part of their station, with different puzzles.  You can have multiple engineers, with one working on engines, another working on something else, etc.

For an example puzzle, here's something that most engineering tasks used, whether you needed to scan something weird, or re-route power...  It wasn't an ongoing task like the Puzzle Pirates one, but more 'plottish' almost.  When you're on a mission and need to accomplish something, or want a way to break through enemy shields.  The game picks three ship systems (like...engines, computers, power grid), then makes a 6x6 grid of tiles evenly distributed between them.  You can slide columns and rows back and forth, and stuff wraps around to the other side.  For, say, a plottish task like "use engines to escape tractor beam", it generates subtasks like "reroute all power to engines", "calculate frequencies", "overdrive engines" etc.  Each subtask requires you to slide certain pieces into certain patterns.  "Reroute all power to engines" might require a pattern with two 2x2 blocks of "power system" on the middle rows, with a 2x6 vertical block of "engine" between them...etc.  Finish all the subtasks in order, and you're done.  That's a generic puzzle, but there would be about 3-4 different puzzles per station; non-generic tasks have their own puzzles (like, say, rerouting power is something you can do WELL instead of just FAST, and gets its own puzzle).

ANYWAY.  Bridge had one of each type of console.  But the ship was bigger and you could move on foot.  Let's say you need more work in engineering; you can order your science officer (player) off his station, send him running down the hall and into Engineering to grab a console there (in first person).  As your ship takes damage though, you could get pipes falling in the corridors or something, making it harder to navigate, or needing to take the long way, or even use jeffries tubes.

It was designed to be most fun with 3-8 players on a ship I think, representing the officers...

You'd also have a captain (whose main job is to keep track of what's going on and give orders on large ships, instead of puzzling; doesn't have many other responsibilities), a navigator (flies around in combat, frequently same person as the captain), and gunners (might be just one person playing it tactically with computer-aimed lasers, or might be multiple people on turrets, dunno).  If you really took it far, there would be away-teams where the whole team can go down planetside and muck around with stuff there for a little while, violating the Prime Directive, but that would be far in the future.

Anyway.  This is my dream implementation.  I want this game very much.

[Virex]

Physics is HARD to handle right, and not because the simulation is difficult.  It's hard to make it fun.  Go play "Terminus" if you want a realistic physics space game.  It's pretty comical sometimes, like when you fill up your freighter with gold and head back to base and your ship doesn't move because you are so massive that youre thrust barely accelerates you, and then once you're moving the collision light comes on before you can even see the starbase, and you only avoid a crash by frantically, slowly dodging off to the side.  But you quickly discover that fast maneuverable ships have INSANE advantages, and also that space combat is pretty boring that way.  Early BC3k versions had messed up combat where fighters would go by so fast you couldn't even see them.  But it's realistic!  Heck, even Terminus put horribly arbitrary caps on velocity, because otherwise the game would suck.  Space games love to use "constant thrust = constant velocity" aka Star Wars physics, because it's more fun.  What will you choose?  Hmm.

Why are you trying to use your thrusters to accelerate and slow down anyway? Try using a planet to generate a slingshot effect

Also, a cap ship fight has little to do with dogfighting in space, and any game that tries to simulate that will indeed fail horribly. It's not just the physics, but they usualy completely misinterpret the range of weapons. A simple military grade can easely have a range in the order of the distance between earth and the moon (funny fact: that's actualy how they measured the exact distance between the earth and the moon), probably way, way further, and missiles in spcae also reach much further since they don't have to deal with friction. Hell, a ram scoop engine has a diameter of several kilometers and so do many solar sails. When you're talking about space, distances you're familiar with just don't hold any meaning any more. Take a look at star treck: Many of the distances are measured in thousends of kilometers, but that's nothing. Many fights appear to be on a scale in which the ships can see eachother. But even modern fighter-jets can't see eachother by the time they launch their first missiles...

Sure you wouldn't realy be able to dogfight, but instead you'd be using a more tactical aproach to combat, in wich you're fiddling with shields and weapons, and targeting vital systems and such. Trying to blow missiles out of space is also possible...

[Sowelu]

See, realistically, I'd expect a cap ship fight to be over almost before it started.  For one thing, at extreme ranges, whoever has the longer range weapons kind of wins!  Also, if you have light speed, just accelerate to light speed in your target's direction from the edge of the system, then drop a peanut out the airlock and watch your target explode when it hits.  Still, if you phase the combat down to more like battleship vs battleship stuff...

Well, for one thing, why move at all?  You're not exactly going to dodge when you weigh as much as a cap ship.  I do like actual aiming for specific systems and stuff though, where it's more surgical combat.  That's where the fun is.  It just makes me think, well, why not use lasers instead of missiles and abstract away the physics?  The physics isn't going to have much game effect at all!

I think the game would be quite playable with no physics and just abstracted movement.

(Terminus, btw, did have friction kinda.  When any ship went over I think 6000 km/h, it started taking damage from space dust.  10000 km/h was a hard limit IIRC.)

[Yanlin]

If you have light speed, just accelerate to light speed in your target's direction from the edge of the system, then drop a peanut out the airlock and watch your target explode when it hits.

Wouldn't you also smash into the ship you're targeting?

[Sowelu]

Nah, you slow down or veer off to the side or something.  You can drop that peanut a light minute out or whatever...or just send a drone.  Seriously, if you can hit light speed, a fighter with a piton is all you need.  No need for explosives, just make it as dense as possible, or put whatever countercountermeasures you can think of on there.

[Yanlin]

Still sounds like a risky move.

[sonerohi]

Seriously though, use a missle. If you go at your max speed and then launch the missle, it has relative speed, plus the speed generated from it being launched. It could probably go straight through an entire ship, just leaving a hole through it. You get bonus points for putting a rope on the missle and repeatedly using that one missle to string multiple ships together. Sow a sweater out of all the ships!

[Yanlin]

Seriously though, use a missle. If you go at your max speed and then launch the missle, it has relative speed, plus the speed generated from it being launched. It could probably go straight through an entire ship, just leaving a hole through it. You get bonus points for putting a rope on the missle and repeatedly using that one missle to string multiple ships together. Sow a sweater out of all the ships!

You don't know physics do you?

[Sowelu]

Still sounds like a risky move.

Risky, but it gives you destructive power literally the same as an antimatter explosion!

(Matter-antimatter reactions turn the involved particles into energy.  A lot of energy.  Energy equal to the mass times the speed of light squared.  The kinetic energy of a peanut travelling at the speed of light is ALSO mass times the velocity squared.)

So you can chuck two light speed peanuts at someone and get the same effect as a bomb made out of a peanut and an antipeanut.  I'm not sure how easy it is to find an antipeanut but in a lot of sci-fi, reaching light speed is relatively simple.

(Okay, it could be an antianything and still work, not just a peanut, but you get the point.)

[sonerohi]

Seriously though, use a missle. If you go at your max speed and then launch the missle, it has relative speed, plus the speed generated from it being launched. It could probably go straight through an entire ship, just leaving a hole through it. You get bonus points for putting a rope on the missle and repeatedly using that one missle to string multiple ships together. Sow a sweater out of all the ships!

You don't know physics do you?

No clue whatsoever.