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Multi-ship Devices

#1
had a few thoughts about ship equipment that would need precise organisation to work at all.

sensor augmenting "telescope fields" that need to be projected from a group of ships to enhance another ships scanner performance.

giant bubble shields that need multiple ships distributed around the surface to be generated.

towed cannons.

generation of warp rails.


in short everything that has to be mounted on different ships/stations but has to be handled as one coherent piece of equipment.


so now i have questions:

what equipment could be implemented that works "fragmented"?

also, how could the control interface work for such groups?
how could we give the player the maximum amount of control with minimal micromanagement?

:think:
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Re: Multi-ship Devices

#2
Nice idea. I was wondering about the "multiple ship sensor network" recently, so the timing on this is good.

Conceptually, this might actually fit into Josh's notion of "projects." He's already got a framework for coordinating components with a single unified goal. It might not be too terribly hard to generalize that to a system that can treat Things as components as well as NPCs, and whose function is ongoing rather than ended-when-complete. And if you think about it, setting a goal for a fleet of ships already seems pretty close to defining a project with multiple ships/NPCs.

Seen as a project, some of the ideas you describe could be achieved by assigning each physical component to an NPC and making the project goal for that NPC to do whatever is needed with that physical component -- fly it to a particular location, activate it in a particular way, and so on. The output from that project is then whatever you want the multi-ship, "fragmented" pieces to come together to accomplish. And the interface would be a generalization of the basic project interface.

Does this seem like a reasonable approach? Or is what you're thinking of too different from a project, and therefore requiring its own specialized system?
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Re: Multi-ship Devices

#3
Im not sure how clumsy it would be to use, as some of the fragmented equipment types would have to be used during combat situations.

I dont want to have to fiddle around for two minutes to get a group of tugs to attach their tractor beams on that damaged cruiser to tow it away in time.

Ideally the multi ship equipment would be an independent object i can order directly.

For example with the tow group, or the ship that already gets towed, i click on one button to select it, and make another click to give it a movement order.
Regardless of what or how many objects it actually consists of.

:think:
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Re: Multi-ship Devices

#4
These are all cool idea's just like everything else on the suggestion page but if Josh doesn't get on with making the game then it's all pointless.

Sorry for going off topic peeps but I feel he just needs to get the basic game ready and then look to add to it later or it will be another year gone by with no game and perhaps no/hardly any updates and LT is already approx 18 months behind eta already.

Josh also needs to contact us again soon or he will feel it even harder to come back to the community next time around. I know he has had some bugs recently but for someone who was so communicative before it's so weird that he's now so quiet. I feel there is something more to this...perhaps?

Josh get the basic game finished asap so you can make more money and possibly get these suggestions implemented at a later date or it will go on and on and on with nothing to show for it.
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Re: Multi-ship Devices

#7
I'd totally be down with that.

One memory that comes to mind is Species 8472 from Star Trek Voyager. There's a scene where seven of their ships "sync up" their laser cannons into one ship to make one large super-laser.

You could easily "move as a unit" in this squad under your control... or even under the control of the AI.
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Re: Multi-ship Devices

#8
RTS games have been doing this for years.

In Dawn of War 40k (and it's expansions), only the primary selected unit's abilities are shown. When you choose to activate the ability, all the selected units capable of executing the same command (ie: "teleport") would execute it at the same time. To access the other abilities in the group, you would simply change the sub-selection.

It could get frustrating, when you tried to tell three ships to teleport to a location, to have only one do it because the others were out of range. To counter this, most abilities assisted by moving the selected units into range before activating.
We noticed that this thread got a little side-tracked into a conversation about eating spaghetti with a spoon. We do enjoy our fair share of italian food, but please remember to keep discussion on-topic when posting on the forums.
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Re: Multi-ship Devices

#9
Jazehiah wrote:RTS games have been doing this for years.

In Dawn of War 40k (and it's expansions), only the primary selected unit's abilities are shown. When you choose to activate the ability, all the selected units capable of executing the same command (ie: "teleport") would execute it at the same time. To access the other abilities in the group, you would simply change the sub-selection.

It could get frustrating, when you tried to tell three ships to teleport to a location, to have only one do it because the others were out of range. To counter this, most abilities assisted by moving the selected units into range before activating.

No, not that.

In WH40k for abilities to work multiple units dont need to work together; every special effect unit can be alone when it uses its effect.

What im thinking of are abilities that need multiple units using their equipment at the same time, such as the Siege Laser in Nexus:The Jupiter Incident, or the Species 8472 focused Biopulselaser.

how do we control that? Especially when some of the effects cant be described as a single click actions, or can be trivially attributed to a single type of unit.
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Re: Multi-ship Devices

#10
how do we control that? Especially when some of the effects cant be described as a single click actions, or can be trivially attributed to a single type of unit.

There could be mechanic where you fire a laser stream (instead of pulse) at a comrade and it will buff their firepower, shields or something. They would require certain tech to be able to "store" more energy than the usual. The squad command interface *could* be used to set this sort of thing up, but circumstances would be rare for this sort of thing to occur, unless you're attacking at a distance.

While this seems to be a buff mechanic, it could probably be used as a debuff mechanic as well.
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Re: Multi-ship Devices

#11
nikki_ wrote:
how do we control that? Especially when some of the effects cant be described as a single click actions, or can be trivially attributed to a single type of unit.

There could be mechanic where you fire a laser stream (instead of pulse) at a comrade and it will buff their firepower, shields or something. They would require certain tech to be able to "store" more energy than the usual. The squad command interface *could* be used to set this sort of thing up, but circumstances would be rare for this sort of thing to occur, unless you're attacking at a distance.

While this seems to be a buff mechanic, it could probably be used as a debuff mechanic as well.

nonono!

how it would mechanically work is comparatively trivial.

the hard question is:

how to order your ships to do it?

say i need 3 supporting ships on one supported ship for the device to work as intended.

i have 10 ships, all of them look identical, and only a comparatively time consuming process can tell me which ship has which equipment.

all of them can work as "destination" for a supporting energy beam.

but only 6 of them can generate a support beam.

i need 3 supporting ships on one supported ship for the device to work as intended.
[formation = 3 supports + 1 supported ship]


the fleet is assembled and i want both of the possible formations to engage, how do i tell them to arrange themself as needed?
how to keep them together in formation when i give them a general move command?
what if i want to give the formation an order to attack a target? how does that work?

i want to split the fleet in 2 parts, and i want in each group one complete formation, how do i do that without manual checking`? (you here, you there)

:think:
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Re: Multi-ship Devices

#12
Hmm...most of those actions will be quite self-explaning i think...so in case of a multi-ship-scanner you could go so, say a equipment dock and buy a scanner-array...then It´ll show you, that it needs 3 ships to work properly and asks you, what ships you would like to equip with it...after that they fly to the dock, get the upgrade and are since then generally listed as "Scanning Array 01" or something similar...if you want to use it you could simply tell that formation to scan in a system (depending on the scanner range), or to scan an area in space or something else and it will fly there and to the job...of course the system should handle this formation as 1 "ship" to make building squads easier.

And if one of those 3 ships is destroyed...you could just open the formation panel, introduce (forgot the appropriate word <.<) a new pilot/ship which flies to the dock and automatically equips the scanner...or at least somewhere along the lines...because: If the device only works with 3 ships together...why not simply treat this squad as a single unit?
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