None of this is intended to be a criticism of anything, merely suggestions and curiosities dressed in back-story


I've been skimming through a couple videos for the past while, and noticed some interesting things. I know this game isn't meant to be *physical* in the sense of matching the laws of physics that we have in our universe, but having some of them "match" might make it look even cooler than it is already, so why not?

Stars:

The radiation spectrum of stars is dependant on their temperature. This would show up on the ship scanners. See Blackbody Radiation graph.

Another cool thing about stars: their peak wavelength (what is what we see as their colour) is a reflection of their temperature. These two things (I think) would be very easy to match up in the procedural generation, along with a waveform in the spectrum that looks like that.


Ice and other transparent things:

Ice has a known index of refraction. Would it be cool to code the exact one in? I honestly don't know our resident genius Josh codes that stuff in, but I think it could be doable (????)

Note: I'd rather see cool graphics than have realism to that extent.


Friction/Ship movement:

I've noticed that when Josh releases the throttle, the ship immediately dramatically decelerates. Space is essentially frictionless (except when you're flying through dust in asteroid belts), so why decelerate so quickly? One thing that could be done would to be to introduce some sort of speed limit by using relativistic mechanics (the equations, really) to provide a "soft limit", requiring more and more energy to asymptotically approach the speed limit. This makes it slower to accelerate and decelerate, while keeping the mean speed of the ships essentially the same, while making movement a lot more smooth. This is essentially favouring slow, asymptotic decay over linear decay.

All of these things wouldn't change FPS that much, given that Josh has already implemented some sort of deceleration subroutine and speed limit in ship movement.

One thing to note: Josh still can have empty space in this game have some small coefficient of friction, to prevent "cheap travel", even though I think he's quite generous with travel already

I personally think the star thing would just be more eye candy (and easy to implement), but the ship movement one would affect gameplay the most and I think is most important because of "smoothness".
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There may be more that I have missed, but that is all!

I await criticisms, complaints and suggestions!

Cheers!

About the friction in, the player will be able to easily change the "amount of friction" number to nearly zero which would provide the player with a "realistic" space sim experience. Josh is basing LT off of a game called Freelancer. The physics and general game play features are going to be similar to one another.

While I often parrot the phrase that "plausibility is more important in a game than realism," I have to admit I'd like to see star color keyed to temperature, and for the scanner to display frequency peaks accordingly.

With some variation for prettier colors. Because game.

"relativistic speed limit"

booooooriiiiing

what would that do for gameplay if every ship had the same top speed +- a few percent?

it would move all ships closer to being same-ish, regardless of size and role, watering down the game balance and gameplay

There's a slider for everything...surely

Now I want a game that consists of nothing but sliders and checkboxes and dials.

Actually, that's not a bad description of SimEarth....

NONONO I'm talking about how deceleration is mathematically defined inside the code.

I mean like having some sort of slow asymptotic decay to zero versus linear decay that does reach zero quickly.

Example of Asymptotic:

V = initial velocity * exp(-constant*time)

rather than linear where it does reach zero in finite time

Cornflakes_91 wrote:"relativistic speed limit"

booooooriiiiing

what would that do for gameplay if every ship had the same top speed +- a few percent?

it would move all ships closer to being same-ish, regardless of size and role, watering down the game balance and gameplay

I agree that it could be boring, unless the velocity was "impossibly high" to achieve without either a very powerful engine or very low mass... (remember high school physics?)

The limit could be so far away that it would take like months or years of "optimal research/gameplay" to achieve it.

I'm really just starting to start a conversation on this. Plausibility is always beautiful, but I want a fun game too.

Procedural games like Cube World got boring too quickly, due to too growth being way too easy to achieve, and the limits being set "too low".

nikki_ wrote: I agree that it could be boring, unless the velocity was "impossibly high" to achieve without either a very powerful engine or very low mass... (remember high school physics?)

then why bother with it if its so far beyond any plausible velocity you could archieve?

why not just a drag based model which divesifies ship(classes) and leave it there?


a small ship would likely have less of a chance to archieve the velocity cap if you start tossing around real physics.
the smaller the ship, the higher the overhead and the less dV it has to accelerate to arbitary speeds.
in RL bigger ships are faster, not the other way around.

(i dont need high school physics, have university physics )

Cornflakes_91 wrote:

nikki_ wrote: I agree that it could be boring, unless the velocity was "impossibly high" to achieve without either a very powerful engine or very low mass... (remember high school physics?)

then why bother with it if its so far beyond any plausible velocity you could archieve?

why not just a drag based model which divesifies ship(classes) and leave it there?


a small ship would likely have less of a chance to archieve the velocity cap if you start tossing around real physics.
the smaller the ship, the higher the overhead and the less dV it has to accelerate to arbitary speeds.
in RL bigger ships are faster, not the other way around.

(i dont need high school physics, have university physics )

I'm worried about the cap in velocity being achieved "too quickly" by the masses of AI. This idea is essentially to balance the game more, and slow down progress to make the game "more playable" for a longer period of time, and to help make sure that things don't get too OP too quickly. See: Cube World. You could make rapid progress very quickly due to too quick of progress. We don't really want AI getting essentially the capacity of having infinite velocities very quickly (not talking about jump drives here) and becoming way too powerful.

When we progress through research, one of the changes will be, in effect, our max speed. Research Progress could and should be programmed and tuned to have gradual and asymptotic approach to this cosmic speed limit.


Note: Linear drag model (which is what I think you are talking about) Does in fact lead to a speed limit.


Recall that in linear drag, something undergoing constant acceleration will lead to a finite terminal velocity.

you get something like v = constant(1-exp(-constant2*time))



note: I have University physics too (it's my major) but I'm worrying about balancing too.



Cornflakes, what do you think about the whole ice thing and the black body radiation idea?

nikki_ wrote: I'm worried about the cap in velocity being achieved "too quickly" by the masses of AI. This idea is essentially to balance the game more, and slow down progress to make the game "more playable" for a longer period of time, and to help make sure that things don't get too OP too quickly. See: Cube World. You could make rapid progress very quickly due to too quick of progress. We don't really want AI getting essentially the capacity of having infinite velocities very quickly (not talking about jump drives here) and becoming way too powerful.

When we progress through research, one of the changes will be, in effect, our max speed. Research Progress could and should be programmed and tuned to have gradual and asymptotic approach to this cosmic speed limit.

Then make it self limiting through other parts of the game.
Ever more powerful engines need ever more powerful reactors which are heavier and slow the ship down again. (and similar cycles)
Give things that have to stay within some boundary some leeway, but tie them down again with other factors.

So the speed of your ship cones from the tech balance and loadout balance you have in your ship.
Want a fast ship? Get some good engines which get the most thrust out of the energy they get and mount the smallest possible reactor to supply them
But you wont do anything but flying around.
Want a more "useful" ship, mount a bigger reactor to supply the additional systems, but that'll slow you down.

Developed some better engines?
They need more energy to work at full thrust, so you have to specialise and cant supply anything but the engines
(Bit of an overdrawn example, but i guess you get the idea)

Dont balance it with only growth and a cap, have some "target speed" and allow deviations from that ideal depending on tech and loadout.

The global, game engine based speed limit could be far above this "design speed" and not be relevant for the unmodded/uncheating game.

nikki_ wrote: Note: Linear drag model (which is what I think you are talking about) Does in fact lead to a speed limit.


Recall that in linear drag, something undergoing constant acceleration will lead to a finite terminal velocity.

you get something like v = constant(1-exp(-constant2*time))

Which is something different than to balance all things to have terminal velocity at the same value +- a few percent.
if every ship, regardless of size or type would have the same top speed it would just remove some aspect from the game, within others would it strongly devalue small ships which are traditionally speedy in games.

(Also, iirc its quadratic drag josh is using, but that doesnt change the discussion)

nikki_ wrote: Cornflakes, what do you think about the whole ice thing and the black body radiation idea?

I could handle a bit more context here

I think I'm making a fuss about mid-game end-game scenarios, where certain factions could become overwhelmingly OP.

Note: I'm not arguing against jump drives, etc, but a "conventional travel speed limit"

nikki_ wrote:I think I'm making a fuss about mid-game end-game scenarios, where certain factions could become overwhelmingly OP.

Note: I'm not arguing against jump drives, etc, but a "conventional travel speed limit"

yeah, and thats why i say that the "average max velocity" doesnt change much throughout the tech progress, and that a low tech civ has roughly the same top speeds as a high tech civ.

individual ship loadouts and types can have different max velocites, and that can vary with research, but always "wanders back" to a common average value.

Hi nikki, while I think I understand your concern I don't think Limit Theory will have this issue. In Limit Theory the player is thrown into a living universe that has already been populated. A certain level of technology has already been developed for all factions. This tech would include ship speeds based on ship class (or ship mass) along with weapon damage, armor and shields.

I believe that the rate of research should be linear across the entire duration of the game. The rate could be changed when resources are added or subtracted from faction owned research labs. Factions shouldn't be able to be excel in all areas. Research faster ships and lose ground in weapons technology, research weapons and lose ground in armor tech. A balanced faction would be fair at everything but excel at nothing.

Research in Limit Theory should not make LT feel like a typical RTS, instead, it should feel like a buff in the area researched with a negative side effect for not focusing on another area of tech.