I have seen the pictures with the the extreme amounts of projectiles being fired, however the idea of four to five gatling guns being fired at its full rate (+-4000 rpm) there would be a HUGE amount of points to track with metal projectiles potentially traveling forever (obviously there should be a cutoff point and a diminished effect due to low accuracy over distance) my idea is to have a line segment of x meters and have the shots themselves be animations (or just pictures since the picture is moving not the bullets in the pictures) and let the continuous chain of lines (end to end) traveling through space and determine damage as a beam weapon. That way you could divide the amount of points to calculate by 10 to 40 corresponding to the length of each line. This would work and look the way it should when you move the gun around while you're shooting.
I don't know how feasible this is but i'm just thinking here.
congrats with the kickstarter Josh.
PS: I like to use () because I often think things that are hard to squeeze into sentences.
Post
Sun Dec 23, 2012 10:52 am
#2
Re: "stream" weapons
Cutoff points can already be seen in the demo video 5. On the beam thing wouldn't that negatively affect the capability of the minigun in question to act as a point defense weapon?
If a ship intersects with a "pulse" of the minigun after part of it has passed does it take full or no damage?
If a ship intersects with a "pulse" of the minigun after part of it has passed does it take full or no damage?
Post
Sun Dec 23, 2012 11:06 am
#3
Re: "stream" weapons
the momentum of the bullet thrugh vacum should be constant and in a perfect simulation the damage should be determined by relative velocities, it is definitly easiest to have a determined damage and no "relative" damage and no dropoff in damage over distance.
did it help?
did it help?
Post
Sun Dec 23, 2012 11:26 am
#4
Re: "stream" weapons
Not exactly what I meant. If i understand you correctly you want to lessen the load on the processing by lessening the amount of projectiles calculated by clumping multiple balls into a single shot or a pulse of minigun fire. This could lessen the effectiveness of rapid fire weapons where just 2 or 3 shots would normally shred a drone versus requiring a single pulse of 10 that you bunch into a single entity. And yes i agree the damage should probably be constant for the sake of my poor CPU.
Post
Mon Dec 24, 2012 3:00 am
#5
As for the computer performance issue of removing cut off distances could be laggy. The only thing i can think of to solve this how can a infinite universe exist within a computer which cant handle infinite? As Limit Thory is infinate If Josh can put his solution to this problem I'm not sure if it will work or even be compatible only real world tests can be sure. Good luck
Re: "stream" weapons
I'm excited about the possibilities of this statement as there could be a butterfly effect somewhere else in the galaxy caused by a stray mega weapon from a faction war which could destroy an entire space station.the momentum of the bullet thrugh vacum should be constant and in a perfect simulation the damage should be determined by relative velocities, it is definitly easiest to have a determined damage and no "relative" damage and no dropoff in damage over distance.
As for the computer performance issue of removing cut off distances could be laggy. The only thing i can think of to solve this how can a infinite universe exist within a computer which cant handle infinite? As Limit Thory is infinate If Josh can put his solution to this problem I'm not sure if it will work or even be compatible only real world tests can be sure. Good luck
Post
Mon Dec 24, 2012 7:31 am
#6
As for cut off distances for weapon fire: the existing videos already show clearly that such cut off distances exist. It's a simple necessity, because the system can't be filled with a potentially unlimited number of entities.
Also, I understand that—similar to Elite—there will only be one system at a time, the one in which the player is currently moving. There is no borderless transition between systems. Therefore, even a stray shot with unlimited range could never exit the system where it was fired and hit something in another system. Not gonna happen.
Re: "stream" weapons
This one is already clear: only the player's immediate surroundings (= more or less the system they're currently in) will be really modeled accurately. What happens in neighbouring systems will only be modeled in a very general and approximate way, and what happens in the rest of the universe won't be modeled at all.Actzoltan wrote:As for the computer performance issue of removing cut off distances could be laggy. The only thing i can think of to solve this how can a infinite universe exist within a computer which cant handle infinite?
As for cut off distances for weapon fire: the existing videos already show clearly that such cut off distances exist. It's a simple necessity, because the system can't be filled with a potentially unlimited number of entities.
Also, I understand that—similar to Elite—there will only be one system at a time, the one in which the player is currently moving. There is no borderless transition between systems. Therefore, even a stray shot with unlimited range could never exit the system where it was fired and hit something in another system. Not gonna happen.
Post
Mon Dec 24, 2012 9:41 pm
#7
Anyway, it's a fairly interesting idea that you've posed, and is almost exactly equivalent to how beam weapons are done. If I modified the beam weapon shader a bit to use discrete pulses, it would be exactly what you're describing. I may consider it, since it would indeed save a bit of CPU. Then again, I've already optimized realllyyyyy heavily for loads of projectiles going on at once, and they're not the bottleneck at this point - ship-to-ship collision is by far the bottleneck.
Re: "stream" weapons
All correct statementsCommander McLane wrote:This one is already clear: only the player's immediate surroundings (= more or less the system they're currently in) will be really modeled accurately. What happens in neighbouring systems will only be modeled in a very general and approximate way, and what happens in the rest of the universe won't be modeled at all.Actzoltan wrote:As for the computer performance issue of removing cut off distances could be laggy. The only thing i can think of to solve this how can a infinite universe exist within a computer which cant handle infinite?
As for cut off distances for weapon fire: the existing videos already show clearly that such cut off distances exist. It's a simple necessity, because the system can't be filled with a potentially unlimited number of entities.
Also, I understand that—similar to Elite—there will only be one system at a time, the one in which the player is currently moving. There is no borderless transition between systems. Therefore, even a stray shot with unlimited range could never exit the system where it was fired and hit something in another system. Not gonna happen.
Anyway, it's a fairly interesting idea that you've posed, and is almost exactly equivalent to how beam weapons are done. If I modified the beam weapon shader a bit to use discrete pulses, it would be exactly what you're describing. I may consider it, since it would indeed save a bit of CPU. Then again, I've already optimized realllyyyyy heavily for loads of projectiles going on at once, and they're not the bottleneck at this point - ship-to-ship collision is by far the bottleneck.
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” ~ Henry Ford
Post
Tue Dec 25, 2012 5:07 pm
#8
Re: "Stream" Weapons
the reason to do this with some weapons is that if you decrease the speed of each point of the chain you would get really cool visuals with thousands of glowing points along the chain spewing out of a ship, if you have say 20 ships, that is 20 000+ shots ( i m thinking of a 3 to 4 sec cutoff on the chain and 300 ish rounds per sec combined for each ship.).
the load would be quite big if you dont have the chain way of doing gatling guns and similar high projectile count weapons.
the load would be quite big if you dont have the chain way of doing gatling guns and similar high projectile count weapons.
Post
Tue Dec 25, 2012 5:18 pm
#9
Re: "Stream" Weapons
Not really sure what you're trying to say, here...ravener96 wrote:the reason to do this with some weapons is that if you decrease the speed of each point of the chain you would get really cool visuals with thousands of glowing points along the chain spewing out of a ship, if you have say 20 ships, that is 20 000+ shots ( i m thinking of a 3 to 4 sec cutoff on the chain and 300 ish rounds per sec combined for each ship.).
the load would be quite big if you dont have the chain way of doing gatling guns and similar high projectile count weapons.
“The impact of space activities is nothing less than the galvanizing of hope and imagination for human life continuum into a future of infinite possibility.”
Post
Wed Dec 26, 2012 4:27 am
#10
Re: "Stream" Weapons
That 20 000+ projectiles would be straining on the computer and a few ships equipped with gatling guns would be able to do that, thus the chain of projectiles instead of single shots.
Post
Wed Dec 26, 2012 11:37 am
#11
Re: "Stream" Weapons
Keep in mind that Josh said that the main performance issue at the moment is ship collisions and not weapon optimization.
Post
Thu Dec 27, 2012 6:15 pm
#12
Re: "Stream" Weapons
By all means, concentrate on the ship colisions. Acctually, make the ship collisions work nicely before adding these kinds of weapons in the first place. I am just saying that this is one day going to be a limiting ( internal giggle) factor if evry projectile is calculated individually. I hope we all can agree that lines of tracers whizzing thrugh space fits nicely in the batles of Limit Theory (se what i did there? Shift all tha way!).