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Re: Faction Shipyards (including your faction)

#16
Procedural just means that there is a "procedure" generating the content (in contrast to handcrafted content).
That does not imply that it must have a random component. It can, but it does not have to.
The UI symbols in the old demo for example where drawn using a procedure. But their parameters and thus their looks where fixed.
The advantage is then, that those elements can be edited much quicker than in classical bitmap based design.

About presenting the game world: The more something is artifical / "man made" (vs natural objects) in a game, the harder it is to make it believable by using random parameters.
The game must find a balance between too much static predetermination on the one side, and random mush on the other. Practical structures are build with an intent in mind. Just making a lot of pretty shapes out of random procedures will get boring quickly.
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Re: Faction Shipyards (including your faction)

#17
Cornflakes_91 wrote:
Sun Dec 10, 2017 11:22 am
S46 wrote:
Sun Dec 10, 2017 11:08 am
Josh DID say that everything in the game would be procedural...
yeaaah no :P
procedural everything isnt nearly as cool as you seem to think :P

i like to be able to read the interface language and know which symbol means what on the interface without having to relearn everything when i start a new game :P
i'd also like to have functional, integrated mechanics for the game and not have that change everytime either :P
Maybe you should read below that line quoted on my post XD
Devoted to providing LT with daily doses of eureka moments.
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Re: Faction Shipyards (including your faction)

#18
As I come from Freelancer as my main space game, I think the word "faction" has a different meaning for me than it does for you, and perhaps it differs for others here as well. "Faction", in my experience, delineates a corporation, law enforcement force, activist movement, terrorist cell, criminal element, mercenary organization, political collective, colonization effort, or similarly ideologically, economically, or historically united group of people, whereas I think most folks here might take it to mean government or nation. I suppose this might be an odd way of looking at it, since it means the Liberty Navy and Liberty Police were separate factions in Freelancer, although they had the same allies and enemies so they typically stayed together on the reputation sheet.

What I intend to broach with this is that I don't feel like ships must necessarily be faction-specific. I think they should be manufacturer-specific. One particular manufacturer may sell to many other clients, but all of the ships made by that manufacturer will probably have common themes in their components, since the same processes and materials would likely be used to build them.

The Border Worlds shipline in Freelancer, including the Dagger, Stiletto, Sabre, and Dromedary, exhibits common features among the different ships. The manufacturer though is a collective of shipbuilders from several different groups in-lore, and they sell their ships on the open market (though you typically only see pirates and other ne'er-do-wells flying them).

Likewise, the US Navy doesn't build their own ships. nor the Air Force their planes; these are built by contractor companies, who also often have permission to sell their products to other countries. As such, I think it would make more sense that there be corporations in-game which specialize in shipbuilding, and that the origin of a given ship be evident in its amenities and aesthetics as much as reading the make and model would tell you. A particular defense corps of sovereign entity A might have a tendency to buy ships from shipbuilding corporation X, but that doesn't mean that everyone from A will fly a ship from X. Some will fly ships from Y, or Z, and X might sell to B.

Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous have shipbuilding corporations as well, and I like the sense of flavor and variety it grants to the game world. The navies and orbital patrols will likely use ships as uniforms, but I suspect that, even within a single system, civilian industries will fly ships from any manufacturer with a distributor present.
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Re: Faction Shipyards (including your faction)

#19
The ship choosing style can apply to pirates and terrorists and any kind of group, as long as they use their own ships and don't steal the ships and designs of others... :twisted:

Though the idea of manufacturing companies sounds good, so basically the choosing process will apply more to them rather than the actual faction.
Devoted to providing LT with daily doses of eureka moments.
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Re: Faction Shipyards (including your faction)

#22
Damocles wrote:
Tue Dec 19, 2017 1:33 pm
Pirates having their own ship design would mean: pirates are pirates by default (scripted) and did not choose to be pirating by them self.
So pirates should not have their own ship design, but just regular ships from the area.
but they could develop their own ships and style them according to their own factional inclinations (aka pirating)
so pirate faction ships still can look pirate-y
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Re: Faction Shipyards (including your faction)

#24
Cornflakes_91 wrote:
Tue Dec 19, 2017 1:40 pm
Damocles wrote:
Tue Dec 19, 2017 1:33 pm
Pirates having their own ship design would mean: pirates are pirates by default (scripted) and did not choose to be pirating by them self.
So pirates should not have their own ship design, but just regular ships from the area.
but they could develop their own ships and style them according to their own factional inclinations (aka pirating)
so pirate faction ships still can look pirate-y
"How do you know I'm a pirate?"
"You're flying a pirate ship."

I think criminal elements are usually going to try to keep things discreet. Also, if they maintain ships that are bought off the shelf, that means they don't have to produce their own parts, and can procure them through trade or theft. It's not like a mugger walks around in a T-shirt that says "CRIMINAL SCUM" on it.

I gripe about this because I played on a modded Freelancer roleplaying server for a while and the mod had compulsory IDs -- out-of-roleplay/metagame items which were intended to indicate to server admins how you would be playing your character and what things you were and weren't allowed to do in accordance with the server rules. Your IFF was supposed to be the in-character indicator of your faction, and you were allowed to fly without one at all. Corporation or military IDs force-displayed your IFF, but generic IDs (Miner, Freelancer, Pirate, Vigilante, and the like) didn't have a default IFF.

The problem is that as a game construct, the IDs were just a reskin of tractor beam equipment items, so they still appeared whenever someone scanned your ship. Most players had a pretty tenuous grasp on what roleplay is and figured "if my scanner can see it, I know it". So even when you were flying a generic open-market heavy fighter with no IFF or faction-specific weapons, people would just scan you, call you out for being a pirate, and chase you out of the system. [The same game limitation really bit me in the ass with all of the passenger commodities. I totally buy that a ship scanner could judge whether you have human beings on board, but as to whether they're slaves, tourists, diplomats, or refugees, it should be clueless!]

No way, man! A pirate's gonna have a fake ID to get him on nice civilized stations so he can have a proper drink and a shower every now and again! Perhaps a well-established and infamous pirate horde would operate more openly to get their victims to brown their pants on sight, but it's probably better to intimidate them with weapons over jolly rogers.

That's not to say criminal elements wouldn't have their hands in the shipbuilding trade, but it would be wise for them to sell the ships to non-pirates just so the fuzz can't profile them so easily.
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Re: Faction Shipyards (including your faction)

#26
S46 wrote:
Tue Dec 19, 2017 10:31 pm
Unless, of course, his pirate group already stole a station where you can get a hot drink and a shower...
If he's got a pirate group. Pirates can come in packs, they can come solo, they can come in ramshackle fighters, stolen cruisers, heavy transports, what have you. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if some groups of pirates used a larger transport or a salvaged warship as a mobile base of operations.
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