Bele wrote:Do you have any idea how often this has popped up on the EVE Online suggestion board?
Never played EVE. That kind of gameplay and especially the player interaction thingy never felt like something I want.
croxis wrote:Short version: Instead of putting developer design and code time into making mining fun, lets just focus on player prospecting and make mining automagic.
I don't think that
suggestions should ever focus on making the game bland and automagic. =P
Been thinking more about the mining. The only hurdle is probably the UI. I don't want one. =)
The major problem of X3 is that every little thing you do requires multiple key presses to achieve. Every. Single. Time.
Initially I was writing scripts / mods like that, too. With more and more experience, I designed them to
require less and less UI, letting the player have the feature without the hassle.
The mining feature I suggested could be completely organic, requiring zero "special" actions at all. It would all depend on how you equip your ship and how skillful you wield your lasers.
Asteroid rotation
While rotating asteroids look cooler, this would be highly annoying if you had to
accurately carve out a mineral deposit.
I suggest to reduce the rotation of an asteroid every time some bit of it is chipped away.
This isn't even unrealistic but an abstraction since you would have to shoot it in a very specific way to get that effect. There is a point where gameplay outweighs cool physics. =P
Ship equipment: Mineral Scanner
This is a passive always-on system. Working in general like a seismic survey that is used in real geology.
When you shoot at an asteroid for long enough to chip away a little bit, the scanner gives you some information about what's under the surface.
Several "pings" will be generated for mineral "veins".
The ping starts as a full-sized circle. (important) The size of the circle shows the size of the deposit.
The colour of the circle shows the type of deposit. Yellow for heavy metals, red for volatile elements... whatever makes sense.
Then the circles start to contract all the way to a dot / tiny circle.
The
speed at which they do so displays the depth. How far do I have to dig to get there?
Once enough slag is stripped away so that such a "detected" vein is visible from the surface, the vein is visible as a rock in the colour that the ping was in.
This is the minimum information that the player needs to be
able to use some skill.
A mineral vein - regardless of actual size - always counts as "collectable sized rock". After all the trouble, having to shoot it just because it violates some size restriction would just be lame.
Ship equipment: Mining Laser
Heavy equipment.
This laser is used for large scale mining operations.
You
do shoot everything. Or maybe you just let a turret do it. A big mining ship probably wouldn't be very agile.
Whenever a mineral vein is hit, only a portion of the mineral content is destroyed. The rest floats away as a collectable mineral thingy.
While "surgical" mining requires no heavy equipment, it is more work and requires skill.
It would be something that a starting player
can do to make a few credits...
Mining lasers and strip mining is what NPC miners would use. This way they don't need to be excessively smart or skillful.
They can be mining
lots of asteroids in the same time you dissect one so on average, using heavy equipment would yield more minerals faster.
Salvage
Shooting a
ship with a mining laser would do low damage... but would chip off collectable chunks of "alloys" - with a small chance of higher value minerals.
That way you (and NPC!) could also salvage derelict hulls and other space junk. This is usually a design problem in games where the player is the only being in the game who can interact with such wrecks. Makes no sense.
When there
is a way to deal with space junk, it can be included naturally without being a player-only special reward. Wrecks can be found drifting in space, can occasionally occur in combat. Pirates can
play wreck to lure enterprising miners because it looks natural.
Salvaging becomes part of life in the universe.
Mineral Collector
Heavy equipment.
This item is used for large scale mining operations.
It's sort of an automated tractor beam.
Whenever collectable minerals are floating around the ship and there is space in the cargo hold, the minerals slowly float towards the ship and are collected when they get there. (visualisation of the process is important)
This eliminates the need to navigate a hulking mining ship to "pick up" tiny pieces of rock without blowing up all the others.