


Feel free to comment on the idea and suggest your own modifications to it.
As someone who loves Mech Warrior I have to disagree. It takes a certain amount of skill to aim at and destroy a cockpit. Even more so if the cockpit as a reasonable amount of armor. But this also assumes that ship designs have exposed cockpits, which may or may not be the case in LT. Blowing up weapon mounts is fun and encourages the player to have an understanding of the ship which is being fought.Talvieno wrote: ↑Sat Aug 12, 2017 7:52 amAs to cockpits being targetable, I'm not actually sure that's going to happen. It would make it considerably easier to kill enemies - and you! You have to remember that if you can do something, the enemy can do it, too. Getting your cockpit lasered before you're even within gun range would cause a lot of people (myself included, admittedly) to ragequit.![]()
I did mention shields as a balancing point there. Also, it'll be super hard to aim at a cockpit when the enemy is MOVING, so it's not that easy. Shields could basically make sure that the small weapons, like lasers, don't get through to the actual ship first, so rather than hundreds of tiny little pieces having to be broken off from laser shots, with the shields on only things like railguns and cannons and missiles will have sufficient power to penetrate shields and take chunks out of the ship. Anyway, I remember an image gallery sometime ago (May I think) where Josh did a "stress test" with asteroids. So, if you think of broken off pieces as mini asteroids...Talvieno wrote: ↑Sat Aug 12, 2017 7:52 amAs to cockpits being targetable, I'm not actually sure that's going to happen. It would make it considerably easier to kill enemies - and you! You have to remember that if you can do something, the enemy can do it, too. Getting your cockpit lasered before you're even within gun range would cause a lot of people (myself included, admittedly) to ragequit.
So you say a ship without shields becomes completely pointless and that everyone must use projectile weaponry to be competitive.S46 wrote: ↑Sun Aug 13, 2017 2:29 amI did mention shields as a balancing point there. Also, it'll be super hard to aim at a cockpit when the enemy is MOVING, so it's not that easy. Shields could basically make sure that the small weapons, like lasers, don't get through to the actual ship first, so rather than hundreds of tiny little pieces having to be broken off from laser shots, with the shields on only things like railguns and cannons and missiles will have sufficient power to penetrate shields and take chunks out of the ship.
Except those asteroids were static (aka physics free) and not generated in packs of a hundred every second in combat with mesh recalculations for all hit ships with every hit.S46 wrote: Anyway, I remember an image gallery sometime ago (May I think) where Josh did a "stress test" with asteroids. So, if you think of broken off pieces as mini asteroids...
Which doesnt matter at all because you have to do that anyway to the shields, with or without cutting systemsS46 wrote: Also, the larger the ship, the harder it will be to actually get through its shields.
(Emphasis added)S46 wrote: And if, for example, you manage to cleave a ship in half with a laser, then you don't have to worry about millions of individual pieces lowering frame rate everywhere if it was a clean cut![]()
S46 wrote:
Oh and btw, Avorion (which is another space game) already has the ability for you to break off parts of ships where you hit them (such as engines) so it is possible...
Are you suggesting that EVERY system will still be loading broken off parts and such even though the player is millions of light years away?Cornflakes_91 wrote: ↑Sun Aug 13, 2017 3:29 am(Like other, similar clashes for example because you arent the only one doing anything in that universe)
No, not all systems. But the ones close enough for the player to notice if theres discrepancies in simulation.S46 wrote: ↑Sun Aug 13, 2017 5:04 amAre you suggesting that EVERY system will still be loading broken off parts and such even though the player is millions of light years away?Cornflakes_91 wrote: ↑Sun Aug 13, 2017 3:29 am(Like other, similar clashes for example because you arent the only one doing anything in that universe)
Not when you have turrets and large masses of AI-controlled ships.BFett wrote: ↑Sat Aug 12, 2017 10:54 pmAs someone who loves Mech Warrior I have to disagree. It takes a certain amount of skill to aim at and destroy a cockpit. Even more so if the cockpit as a reasonable amount of armor. But this also assumes that ship designs have exposed cockpits, which may or may not be the case in LT. Blowing up weapon mounts is fun and encourages the player to have an understanding of the ship which is being fought.Talvieno wrote: ↑Sat Aug 12, 2017 7:52 amAs to cockpits being targetable, I'm not actually sure that's going to happen. It would make it considerably easier to kill enemies - and you! You have to remember that if you can do something, the enemy can do it, too. Getting your cockpit lasered before you're even within gun range would cause a lot of people (myself included, admittedly) to ragequit.![]()
Okay, a couple points to make here. First off, Josh has always talked about shieldbuster weapons and weapons that could get past shields before they even went down (albeit either harder to aim or with weaker damage). Freelancer, which LT is based on, had some weapons that were particularly good at cutting through specific "types" of shielding, for instance.S46 wrote: ↑Sun Aug 13, 2017 2:29 amI did mention shields as a balancing point there. Also, it'll be super hard to aim at a cockpit when the enemy is MOVING, so it's not that easy. Shields could basically make sure that the small weapons, like lasers, don't get through to the actual ship first, so rather than hundreds of tiny little pieces having to be broken off from laser shots, with the shields on only things like railguns and cannons and missiles will have sufficient power to penetrate shields and take chunks out of the ship. Anyway, I remember an image gallery sometime ago (May I think) where Josh did a "stress test" with asteroids. So, if you think of broken off pieces as mini asteroids...
Avorion is voxel-based. That means it's essentially already carved up in tiles, and it's quite easy for a computer to cut off pieces and chop it all up that way. It's already in pieces, so there's no real computational work that needs to be done. LT, on the other hand, is not. It uses a mesh-based system, as I mentioned previously. The two are very different. Voxels are notoriously slow to begin with, but have the advantage of being able to carve them up easily. LT would probably not run at all if all its ships were made of voxels. I'm sure you never saw 500-ship battles in Avorion, for instance. (I haven't played, but given that it's voxels, I'm fairly certain you never really saw battles (at a decent framerate) with any more than 25 or so moderate-sized vessels at once.)
How difficult is it to check that all the pieces are connected? Other games have done that to some degree anyways.Cornflakes_91 wrote: ↑Sun Aug 13, 2017 12:01 pmYou'd also would have to do checks if the ship is still one continous piece. Which is also not cheap computationally.
And you dont want floating "connected" ships with holes through them
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