[Scourge of Ages]

For black/redouts, if I understand correctly, it is a function of vertical g-forces, ie. up and down. Without gravity or air acting on control surfaces to change direction, the only vertical g-forces would be from what the maneuvering thrusters provide. The main engines in a Viper purely provide horizontal g-force.

So when you use directional thrust to go straight "up", that's all the force available that could give you a blackout, and straight down is all that could give you a redout. Rolling could be more effective at causing a redout, depending on how close to the center of mass the pilot's head is.

[HeadScar]

I was reading your posts very interessted in both, the camera movement inside the cockpit and those red- and blackouts or blurred vision. IMO and I can't reproduce the situation I was in playing Diaspora just some days ago. After a couple keyboard/gamepad configs and after failing to locate the button for something I saw on some YouTube clip about Diaspora I got some intense space feeling sitting inside the cockpit of my MKVIII. The camera was drifting away while I tried to move around - I was the camera.  I pressed some button to activate it I guess. It was fun, felt like real, but the drifting was way to strong so I've been an easy target to my MP opponents. And about blur IMO try to rotate circular and see the stars melt or get high by watching them do so. The game features it at least with the view from inside to outside of the cockpits window, as far as I can recall.

Okay, if this thread is about Ideas & Suggestions I would like to post some of mine now. Keep in mind, this might sound much but Diaspora itself is even without my suggestions a masterpiece. Anyway, glad theres a place to post it. The following might be something to think about IMO:

- Onboard instruments or HUD:
  -- Add Life Support System as Subsystem.
  -- Output 'remaing amount of air to consume from a) ship and b) spacesuit or c) Cylon Raider Entity.
  -- Output Cockpit pressure on/off.
  -- Output Air lock status on/off.
  -- Output 'remaining amount of water for a) ship, b) pilot or c) Cylon Raider Entity.
  -- Output status of 'Filtersystems' to visualize how toxic space can be.
  -- Output of Redundant System Architecture, Atomic Mini-Core or Fuel, Board Computer and Navigational Status + Visualization of ship status inside some Display.
  -- Output for Electronic Warfare Systems onboard.
  -- Output FTL Calculation Screen.
  -- 'Scientific or strategic cockpit modules' for radiation measure or other purposes. Could be extra modules messing up the beautiful cockpit we all love!
  -- Uhm, don't beat me up on this: Clickable MFD's (Multi Function Displays) and buttons onboard
    -- How about some Checklist before launch, got your food ration in cargo? ...your missiles mounted right? ...all systems thumbs up? Test it, feel it!


- Outter view related:
  -- Landing Gears/Sockets for Vipers
  -- Please let me eject Viper and watch the show sitting in space.
  -- Damage Textures showing increasing level of Hull Damage. Could that be possible with FS2 Engine?
  -- Rusty and old looking versions of Vipers and Raiders. BTW: Add unique Ships like Cylon Scar.
  -- Decorative Ship Paint Jobs (Skins) or different ship colours to choose from (why must I mention such things, frak, sorry lol)


- Textures (most time related to those Colonial Fleet Ships we need to save and stuff):
  -- Electric malfunctions/lightning and flashes around the hull (as seen in WC Saga).
  -- Window lights on/off very slow to visualize the ships living features, lights flickering in case of damage.
  -- Engine flickering in case of damage or due to energy lack.
  -- Movements of passengers/Silhouette shadows inside windows.
  -- Inside window textures, some simple interior/furniture.


- Something to think about as Multiplayer experiences:
  -- Tylium and Ore grabbing and trading with players.
  -- Trading of food supplies with Cargo Containers and smaller Cargo Units. 
  -- NPC passengers/travelers as a kind of fake Cargo Unit.
  -- Output about Crew status. How many are they.
  -- Consumation of Cargo Units onboard.
... this part could be highly enhanced by me if such things as Trading could be possible. I have a large and fitting list of goods to trade with.



Thanks for reading! Hope you like it!

[Swifty]

Yeah, we're probably not doing any of those.

[HeadScar]

Sorry if I failed to name things right: Those suggestions are not only to be things for practical use ingame. Many things on the list could work as visualizers only, showing fake data or beeing somewhat not so detailed as you might expect. 

[General Battuta]

The lightning around damaged ships is a standard FSO feature, but Diaspora disabled it because we never see anything like it in the show (I assume).

[Angelus]

Yeah, lightningarcs were never seen in the show.

@Headscar:
Quite a bit of these can be done via FRED or RTT, while others are either not feasable or just simply not possible in FSO without code changes.

[newman]

No offense to anyone, but we've spent years actively working on this, carefully balancing it so the game feels and plays authentic and is fun. This means that you're really not likely to come up with a suggestion that wasn't thought of / discussed before. It also means that 99,99% of suggestions here are either a) already discussed and rejected, b) already planned, or the rare few c) so incompatible with what the game that nobody even thought to suggest them

Also, try to remember that a game needs to remember what it is, and still remain a game (as in, fun to play). We're not building a BSG themed MS flight simulator, and we're not doing a bsg mod for The Sims either Features that serve no useful gameplay purpose are almost always unnecessary feature creep that will just get in the way of gameplay, turning your game into bloatware.

For example, if we added all that info to the HUD (life support system, toxicity of space (?!), amount of water left, etc.. you'd end up with a HUD that is so chalk full of completely useless information that it would become unreadable - especially during combat. Game design is a lot more than just adding in every feature you can think of, and achieving the balance between immersion, playability, and realism takes a lot of work.

Which is partly why Swifty said we probably won't be doing any of those (though 'a vast majority of those' is probably a more accurate way of putting it).

[Ace]

Some of the suggestions made like electric lightning flashes on damaged ships we specifically REMOVED to make Diaspora more like the show.

[karajorma]

When it comes to ejection, I mentioned why you're only ever going to see it in special cases many years ago while still working on BtRL.

It's going to have to be insti-death in most cases. The problem with eject is that people can use it as a way to avoid annoying missions. It's also an absolute pain in the arse for the mission designer as the player can eject at any time and that means that the mission needs to account for that the whole time.

Blue 1 - Take out the cyclon nukes before they hit the Galactica
I've just ejected!

Blue 1 - The Galactica is taking serious hits. Work hard to protect it
I've just ejected!

Blue 1 - Athena says she's dumping Helo wants to meet you on the launch tubes for some hot cylon loving. Land immediately.
I've just ejected!!!!

Basically the FREDder now has to check if the player has ejected before any of those messages and branch the mission off so as to not send them. If you look at the games which did have ejection systems you soon see why FS2 doesn't have them. Wing Commander instantly went to mission end if you ejected. Starlancer killed you. Basically you go to mission end as fast as possible so as to not screw up the rest of the mission.

That doesn't mean that missions involving ejection are out. It does mean that you're likely to be expected to come back with your shield or on it in most cases though.

So given that ejection = insta-death, you might as well stay in your failing fighter and hope for the best.

[HeadScar]

Oh shame on me.

It was the perfection of Diaspora that made tricky things sound worth mentioning. To me, theres no doubt about the perfection of Diaspora and from now on I know theres no need to worry about some lazzy further game development. So I'm the bad guy. But, can I still play this game with you guys or Am I everybodys favorite target now? 

It's not that I need my attention and go Off topic with this. But right now I just feel sorry and banned. Will you all forgive me? I don't hope to receive your feedback ingame and either here but don't just ignore me or me, please.

//edit: I never planned to eject just to avoid hard gameplay. I wished to eject to feel how ejecting a Viper or Raptor could feel like. 

[Cerebus]

...man, you guys might need to take a breath, and think of this as a piece of art and consider how you present that to the world, and yeah that's hard.  you gotta let people get into it man, just ignore it for a while; or a community wont coalesce

[Iss Mneur]

For example, if we added all that info to the HUD (life support system, toxicity of space (?!), amount of water left, etc.. you'd end up with a HUD that is so chalk full of completely useless information that it would become unreadable - especially during combat. Game design is a lot more than just adding in every feature you can think of, and achieving the balance between immersion, playability, and realism takes a lot of work.

Its not just how game design works, its how design works.  However, one nice thing about a modable engine that has source code availabile is that someone can come along and implement their idea and possibly convince everyone else that they were right and that this idea is worthwhile.  This is part of what makes Minecraft so popular, because it is so easy to modify, people can implement whatever they fancy without having to write the game from scratch.

Oh shame on me.

It was the perfection of Diaspora that made tricky things sound worth mentioning. To me, theres no doubt about the perfection of Diaspora and from now on I know theres no need to worry about some lazzy further game development. So I'm the bad guy. But, can I still play this game with you guys or Am I everybodys favorite target now? 

It's not that I need my attention and go Off topic with this. But right now I just feel sorry and banned. Will you all forgive me? I don't hope to receive your feedback ingame and either here but don't just ignore me or me, please.

//edit: I never planned to eject just to avoid hard gameplay. I wished to eject to feel how ejecting a Viper or Raptor could feel like. 

Generally we (as in Hard Light Productions) is a pretty easy going bunch; it takes a lot more than being an excited fan to make enemies around here.

Unfornatly, design (game or otherwise) requires considering all of the possible actions. So whether you intended to abuse the feature is irrelavent; it could be abused which then means the use of the features needs to be balanced.

[Dirt McStain]

Can you guys add the CNP virus as a weapon attachable to Raiders?  Why bother dog-fighting and dodging flak when you can just shine a bright red beam at your enemies and watch them bump into each other before you blast them with a nuke?

As asinine as this sounds, there might actually result in a novelty mission where you have to CNP cap-ships and waves of Vipers and Raptors before they can start firing on you.  Give the CNP an arbitrary recharge time (say 10 seconds) and it might actually be kind of challenging and fun, in an unconventional kind of way.

[General Battuta]

Can you guys add the CNP virus as a weapon attachable to Raiders?  Why bother dog-fighting and dodging flak when you can just shine a bright red beam at your enemies and watch them bump into each other before you blast them with a nuke?

As asinine as this sounds, there might actually result in a novelty mission where you have to CNP cap-ships and waves of Vipers and Raptors before they can start firing on you.  Give the CNP an arbitrary recharge time (say 10 seconds) and it might actually be kind of challenging and fun, in an unconventional kind of way.

You can make this yourself! It's fun and easy.

[newman]

HeadScar: making suggestions that don't work isn't quite the same as making yourself public enemy no.1, so relax A good idea for a game feature needs to satisfy several criteria, and needs to be thought through. Before we go and start implementing stuff, we ask ourselves a few things:

- is it compatible with the type of game we're making and the BSG universe as seen in the show?

- will it bring any significant gameplay value to the table?

- how much work will it be to accomplish?

- will it add additional strain on resources?


So if we take your suggestion to add furniture and animated passengers to be seen through the liner window, here's what we get.

- Does it fit with the universe and game type? Yes.

- Does it bring a significant gameplay value? Not really.

- How much work would it be to accomplish? Lots, actually. Animated passengers wouldn't need to loop too obviously and doing this so it actually looks good would take quite a while.

- Does it add additional strain on resources? Oh, yes. Doing this would require using a bunch of small textures in sequence which takes a lot of additional vid memory. This is partly why you don't see this feature in commercial AAA games (as in you don't see it through the windows of air force 1 in HAWX, for example).

So in short, it would be a cool little feature that does not add anything significant but would be a ton of work to do and might make the game run slower on some systems. So, suggestions, sure, but they do require some serious thought and some backround knowledge on how the game works under the hood

[karajorma]

It's not even that we're against people suggesting ideas, it's just that if you suggest stuff without thinking about why it should be added and what it brings to the game, it's going to get shot down.

The main reason I posted about ejecting is because that is a fairly common (and quite reasonable) request but once you think about it in depth it becomes obvious why it's not worth implementing.

[HeadScar]

Thanks for your answers. I agree with what you said.

But, oh no, I have another suggestion:
I heard something very usefull when playing another game (just some airplane game). And since you know which is my favorite game, I would like to ask about the possibility of some sound output for such a case and something which happens all the time to me.

Problem: In Multiplayer it's very tricky to check the yellow flickering on the HUD where the 3D target gets projected depending on your screen resolution. I often wonder, was that me or who got my target down to 38, 21, 9, 0% ...boom! Hm, maybe It was me, maybe you did it!?
Fighting CapShips is easy, just aim and shoot. But playing with a bandit, it's difficult to see the difference between damage smoke output and the little spaceship that blows it out. In addition, the object could move so strange, that even when having it in front of me it could slip between the bullets not getting hit thanks to Diasporas Gameplay.

This is why I would digg like the 'as-heard' Feature: You hear a lovely beep each time you manage to hit the target. A constant beeping would mean your an Ace but watch out, if you like the sound of the beeping don't just shoot me down to -1. Is it possible?

[Ace]

Yellow flickering HUD? I'm sorry but I'm really not sure what you're trying to describe.

There's a damage readout for your selected target right under the reticle...

A 'sound when hit' effect could be scripted, but it'd be something we'd want easily disabled in options.

[Dragon]

Actually, I've got an idea for ejections. When you eject, a Raptor comes to pick you up, unless there's not enough time, then you're left behind (and die). If it's shot down, another one is sent (or it just can't be shot down). You then go back to the Battlestar (maybe even flying that Raptor if you want, you could ask for it by pressing a key), and the mission is evaluated on the basis of objectives you already accomplished and some randomization (representing your wingmen going on without you). If the story allows it (very rarely, mostly during the First Cylon War), you could even jump into a new fighter and launch again, of course with all the associated delays.

[karajorma]

So now we've replaced the reasons that ejections don't work with 2-3 minutes of boring gameplay where you sit and wait for a pick up followed by all the reasons AWOL debriefings don't work.