bdav wrote: ↑Fri Dec 22, 2017 3:46 am
The number/position of thrusters affects mobility
This will probably not be a thing. Thrusters do not represent the ship's engine(s). A ship with two thrusters could potentially fly as fast as, or faster than, a ship with four. They may affect thrust if you target and destroy them individually, but that could go either way at this point.
the distribution of weapons affects destructive power and survivability, etc...
Because this affects how much DPS you're able to deal, the number of weapons you see on the ship will be equal to the number you have installed.
It should be simple to keep some stats on each ship model (e.g. number of kills, number of encounters it survived), and have a random chance of reusing existing models weighted by their scores. And voilà, you get an in-game natural selection!
I don't know if this discussion already happened on the forum, but I will definitely play with modding this at release
I'm not sure this has been considered specifically. That's a fun idea!
Ship models will get re-used when players (human or otherwise) use blueprints to build them. If these ships are bad, and the owners of the ships get killed, that will lead to those ships disappearing from the market. The value of blueprints may lead to their being copied and purchased by others, so if the survivability of these ships is tracked and tied to the blueprint's value, that may lead to natural selection by itself. I'm not sure whether it will actually work that way or not, though.
MyNameWuzTaken wrote: ↑Fri Dec 22, 2017 6:41 am
Not sure on the tracking of history for pilots and ships, but I would think most of those stats would be tied to the pilot if they were being logged. If they aren't, it should be very easy to mod in a significant event logger that displays pilot stats, considering what Josh has shown us previously for structure.
I don't think a pilot's individual skill will be tracked - an RPG element like that is very non-Freelancer and would be difficult to implement satisfactorily into the planned systems, for both gameplay and technical reasons.
Also, seen some talk about orienting as if there is an "up". Shouldn't players always orient as if the nearest planet is down? Idk where I read that once in a scifi novel, but you take the largest orbital body nearby and treat it as "down", without respect to the equator or the planets rotation. Anywhere you are around the planet, the closest point on the surface is always down.
When I referenced "up", I only referenced it in terms to landing, really. The most important part is, which way is "forward" and which way is "backwards". It's easy to tell which side is the back - look for the thrusters. But which side is the front? If you're looking at any side except for the rear, it may not be immediately obvious - especially if the ship has stopped near an asteroid to mine.
As to the orientation, the plan is for the universe to have an "up" and a "down" specifically, like in Freelancer. A more realistic sci-fi sim might have what you describe, but Josh has always put "fun" and "gameplay" ahead of realism, and the simple fact is that what you describe would be rather disorienting. Humans don't think well in 3D. We're more comfortable with two dimensions.
It makes for better maps, too.