Commander McLane wrote:Karrade wrote:Gazz wrote:No, you misunderstood.
Making a ship abandoned or a pilot eject is not the hard part.
It just wasn't really worth it because...
Why would it happen?
How often did you find it advantageous to abandon your own perfectly usable ship?
I would find it very useful if I was about to die.
Hmm. Why would you find it more useful to die outside your ship?
If I was going to die (from a heart attack or whatever), I would have other things on my mind than abandoning my ship. What good would it be (for me or for anybody else) to eject in that situation? I can't see any advantages to it.
So I think Gazz's objection still stands.
On the other hand: if you actually meant to say: 'I would find it very useful if my ship was about to disintegrate.', then you'd have a very valid reason to leave your ship, but you wouldn't have a salvageable ship afterwards.
I was meaning in the middle of a battle, hull down to virtually nothing in game terms. That or simply the pilot is dead of whatever reason, same thing - ship is abandoned. Ships should outlast their pilots, wrecks would outlast battles.
Of course the ship would be salvageable afterwards, what was left of it. I don't know where this idea of things magically disintegrating comes from, especially in a vacuum with nothing to run into for vast distances. Look at the wrecks after battles. Floating space debris would be all over the place in a real space battle, and a common sight on a major trading route. It's not as if its going to impact on ground like a plane.
I doubt you could just strap yourself in and fire it up after a battle, but possibly so it might be that easy depending on what was hit and if you had a space suit on. I'd say the pilot was the most squishy thing in a small fighter craft, that and the ammunition rack.
Either way the wreck is salvagable.
You've got fuel/food/water/air to worry about covering these massive distances, none of those would hurt the ship if you ran out of them. Not until it hit the very rare occurring object or ran into its gravitational field on a slow but steady decline. All of them would hurt the pilot.
Hardenberg wrote:Clarification:
This is not about AI ejecting from a ship and leaving a (lootable) wreck behind. This is about AI abandoning a damaged, but fundamentally still working ship out of its own volition, leaving behind said working ship.
I more or less expect that the ships we blow to smithereens will leave the odd juicy morsel of loot behind.
So first you'd have to design ejecting into a real feature...
And that's the nexus of the crisis* - why would a player eject and leave a
working ship behind? I really have a hard time thinking about a motivation. The only thing I could come up in a pinch is that the automated ejection upon the ships explosion is unreliable, while manually abandoning ship gives a higher (100%?) ejection rate. But even that is at best a motivation for an iron man game mode. Under normal circumstances, you'd probably just reload.
Now, to instill the AI with a useful reason to eject would require the AI actor and the ship to be separate entities - else it makes no sense for the AI to eject at all, since it gains nothing from the behavior. If it can come back with another ship to take revenge (or maybe just go back to whatever it was supposed to be doing), it would have a reason to abandon ship in time and leave the odd not-quite-dead ship behind.
Of course, having to track each AI pilots list of possessions and assuming they all have multiple ships sounds like a lot of extra variables that need to be kept track of, for very little gain in gameplay terms.
Also take note that a lack of abandoned ships wouldn't necessarily eliminate salvaging as a potential occupation - it just means that you cut the valuable stuff out of wrecks (which I'm sure there'll be plenty of), instead of finding fully functional ships with varying amounts of damage.
* = and the origin of storms. If you caught that reference, you may call me Desdinova.
Aside from the fact things don't magically disintergrate
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... e_1942.jpg
Here is a hunk of metal after one heck of a pounding, and in space fire doesn't even burn so it wouldn't even look like this. It'd just have lots of holes in the wreck.
Now back to the idea - Again, why complicate it.
There is no need for anything to be separate. Even for boarding there is no need. There is just the need for a missile type probe that's it.
Aside from faction swapping code. Its really, really simple.
There is no crew. There is no AI. Its a gameplay term for one instance where a player can very simply take a ship. A simple explanation for immersion.
Functionally it can be as simple as swapping the faction out to abandoned (neutral) - then swapping it back to the player when the player hits an abandoned ship with an AI or boarding crew probe.
How complicated it then becomes is down to how much you want to do with it, but that''s all it needs.
*The AI probe is the removed in gameplay terms when the ship is fixed at the nearest base.
*The player toes the ship.
*The ship cannot do anything but autopilot etc
*The 'AI' could be a simple crew module probe-missile instead if people like the sound of that. All it is is a self sustaining capsule with living marines on board.
All those are optional.