Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Davros on April 01, 2012, 05:38:46 am
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hope this hasn't already been posted
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/features/9253-A-Space-Fighter-Versus-the-World
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Too bad his game isn't very good apparently. :(
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WHERE. IS. NAUMACHIA (http://naumachia.aureasection.com/)?
I realize there's quite a few space sims out there, and a few of the newer ones have even been listed in the featured article, but between the above and Infinity... I think such have the power to bring back the genre.
I personally believe that future space sims will become successful not just due to simple mechanics, but rather, ease of use with realistic physics, or at least what I'd call "relative realism." To me, most of the fun in flying comes from... flying! And flying in space does not mean it needs to be hard, but it also doesn't mean it needs to be WC or Star Wars or FS all over again. It's always going to be fun, but I think it feels a bit too "arcadey." Instead, I think gamers or new simmers will be impressed by the speed and power of realistic flight, while not being overburdened with a keyboard full of controls. In that regard, FS is most ironic in that, in its vanilla form, it is possibly the most arcade-ish feeling sim I've played, while it needs full simulator-style command over the keyboard to operate.
Thus, going in the opposite direction is possibly the best route to take. Many people want to fly about in space, but it needs to feel like you're in space for one, and it needs to be fun for second. Someday, maybe. :)
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e: nm
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Just to let you know Thaeris, that web-page is setting off my Avria Webguard as containing "HTML/Infected.WebPage.Gen2 "
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Odd. I didn't pick up anything, but it ought to simply be their main page for the game. Unfortunately, they're also quite dead in their forum as well. Aside from that... aside... if you've seen the Naumachia page before, you're probably not seeing anything new now.
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Uh.. by nature flying in space isn't simple if your going for realism.. (object in motion stays in motion, extreme speeds, etc.)
Also, I would argue that it needs to be fun before it needs to feel like space if it was going to sell well and "bring back the genre".
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Yeah, I know I for one don't have much interest in full-Newtonian space sims, just because it feels like you're compromising for reality over plain old fun.
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I've had a lot of fun with pseudo-Newtonian approaches like SAFSO and BtRL, but it's ironic that as the relative velocities of the ships increases, the game becomes slower and more deliberate, concerned more with (kinetic) energy management and getting at the right angle for your autoaim to kick in. I can feel the gameplay style moving towards Falcon 4.0, where dogfights are defined not by quick, violent, dynamic engagements but either lengthy stalemates or abrupt missile-based resolutions.
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I guess what I'm basing that assessment on is this demo for a Russian sim called Home Planet I played once. It was definitely full-Newtonian, and it felt like the combat just devolved into a series of very high-speed jousting matches. It's a long way from being able to park yourself on someone's tail and unload on them.
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You should try I-War, it is a pretty great game.
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I'd love to have a proper Arcadey spacesim with good art direction (Naumachia's Homeworld looking art being what's in mind).
A very simple flight model and reduced controls (to the point where it could be more like a console game), but complex gameplay in terms of loadouts and tactics.
For example: having shield generators on a capship that you can fly under and take out the emitters. So fighters take out the shields and then capships can bombard them with beams.
There would be a lot of rock/paper/scissors balance on weapon types too. A few specific types with various tactical roles. (so beams, torpedoes, missiles, KEWs, etc. all used for specific tasks)
Setting wise I'd also make things like the FTL behave more like Wing Commander (jump point/node based FTL) with a non-FTL but intertialness "cruise" setting for autopilot. That way for campaigns actual flanking maneuvers and such can happen in system unlike FreeSpace or Galactica where ships can jump in just about anywhere.
Diaspora has an even more semi-newtonian model than BtRL did and of course plenty of franchise limitations. So although we're trying to make it fun and unique it's not really the direction I'd take a new spacesim from scratch.
I think Sol: Exodus has the nice, simple flight model. But I don't really like the art direction and the overall ships/weapons balance seems too simplistic. I'd actually make the controls even simpler than Sol but add several distinct fighter types and loadouts and really add complexity not to the flight system but the overall *GAMEPLAY* and really use combined arms tactics.
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Why exactly did gamers abandon space combat sims? According to Stockman, the audience shifted to burgeoning genres such as first person shooters like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D and real-time strategy games because of a simple peripheral problem. "The main control mechanism for space combat games - and flight sims, in general - has always been joysticks. These completely faded away once FPS and RTS genres became popular. Gamers spent their peripheral money on better mice and keyboards," he says.
Why is it that they always give this as the "ONE AND ONLY REASON WHY THE SPACE SIMS GENRE DIED" in interviews?
It's never the fault of the ****ty advertisment or anything. Nope. It's always the joysticks.
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Why exactly did gamers abandon space combat sims? According to Stockman, the audience shifted to burgeoning genres such as first person shooters like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D and real-time strategy games because of a simple peripheral problem. "The main control mechanism for space combat games - and flight sims, in general - has always been joysticks. These completely faded away once FPS and RTS genres became popular. Gamers spent their peripheral money on better mice and keyboards," he says.
Why is it that they always give this as the "ONE AND ONLY REASON WHY THE SPACE SIMS GENRE DIED" in interviews?
It's never the fault of the ****ty advertisment or anything. Nope. It's always the joysticks.
Are joysticks really an absolute need in space sim games? I ask because I've never used a joystick in my life, and yet I'm under the impression that, while I'm not QuantumDelta and I'm the first to admit it, I'm at least able to pull out a reasonable performance using a keyboard.
Of course, Freespace is the only Space Sim I've played, so I really have to ask if keyboard suitability is a FS-only thing, or if it's a common attribute of the genre.
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I think QuantumDelta actually used keyboard only (I certainly do)
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i kinda blame the move from the gameport to usb as what killed the joystick. theearly usb joysticks werent as good as the gameport sticks from just before then. then joysticks got really expensive, probibly from the loss of demand for them. the problem with joysticks now is more about ms trying to replace direct input with there lesser xbox api, so joystick manufacturers dont have a clue about what standard to support. some gamepads support both, but the api is too limited for something like a hotas.
but yea thats probably has nothing to do with the decline of space sims, some really nice sticks are being sold right now (though they are over priced, because its somewhat of a niche market), but this push by microsoft to make everybody have the same game controller is a little bit out of hand. ms better pull its head out of its ass and make a superior joystick api when they start building their next console.
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I played and enjoyed space sims back in the day with mouse and keyboard and am still doing so today. The cheap joystick I used to have 15 years ago hardly ever worked. A joystick is not a requirement to play and enjoy space sims, despite what some people might have you believe.
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It's certainly not a requirement, though for some people (myself included), the sense of immersion it adds means that playing without it just doesn't seem right. One tangible benefit is that you're able to have full analog control on four separate axes, though whether or not that improves your play style is up to the individual.
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granted you can get the same in a mouse. but you dont see fighter pilots using mice to control their planes. joysticks take time to get used to. and i come from that era where everyone knew how to use a joystick well. but its a dieing skill.
while its fully possible to play a space sim without a joystick, i can not excuse any game developer who implements piss poor joystick support (like using the xbox api, forcing you to use a slew of 3rd party utils to make it work the way it should). joystick code is so easy to write, there is no excuse for doing it wrong.
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Personally I find using a stick, after all the time and money I spent getting my old gameport one to work under Win 7, to be uncomfortable and
clunky compared to a trackball mouse. I can out turn a stick user... without the whiplash of having to recenter.
The whole joystick excuse is getting extremely pathetic... while it played a part, it's not they were "the reason" the genre died.
...and y'all need to play Tachyon.
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I played and enjoyed Tachyon quite a bit.
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i still have my copy of tach. last time i played it i still had a ****ty x52 with a deadzone the size of jupiter. maybe should try it on my ch gear.
seriously if youre gonna make a case against joysticks in space sims, im surprised you haven't brought up freelancer. thats one of those games where joysticks would not have worked at all. joysticks are great for flying, not so great for aiming. i used a ch profile that mapped out the mouse position based on the position of the stick, it was crude but functional. however it was impossible to hit anything, the joystick resolution being much lower than the pixel resolution of the screen, caused the crosshairs to jump around quire a bit restricting aiming. of course it was trying some new ideas that give it a lot of brownie points. but freelancer was always a love-hate affair for me. i mean there were things about that game that i really liked, vast universe, open ended gameplay, dynamic politics and economy, i even liked the control scheme somewhat. there were many things i hated too, ****ty story, impossible to skip cut-scenes, no long term maintenance of online servers (the game was later hacked to use 3rd party servers), modding it sucked, and it really ****ed with my preference to use inverted y in mouse games (it just dont work in that game).
i dont really support the idea that the lack of joysticks killed space sims (but i do insist that all space sims offer good joystick support, and i mean joystick support, not xbox gamepad support). id actually blame the bloating of the games industry. back in the day you had small games studios, and miniscule budgets, and studios could freely develop into niche markets. when studios got bigger they needed to turn bigger profits to sustain themselves, and thus only focused their attention to making games in popular genres, or trying to emulate previous successful titles.
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I wonder if there is a way to have a joystick offer two modes that hot-switch (sort of like the toggleable scripted joymouse) on the fly:
1) Regular joystick mode, configurable deadzone.
2) Precision aiming mode, no deadzone, sensitivity down real low... well, not sensitivity, but the reaction amount (which they term sensitivity), so if you hauled the joystick all the way over, it would maybe be the same as going 1/4 the way over in regular mode...
3) Or maybe, the same as 2) above, except 2/3 the way over is equivalent to 1/4 the way over, and full over is emergency snap-out of precision into regular mode. Well, whether you wanted that or not would likely depend on if the toggle was an actual toggle, or if it was hold-down, and also, if it was bound to a button on the joystick or a button on the keyboard...
But you get my drift, right?
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Wouldn't it be easier to handle the joystick with axes configured to work in exponential manner? Have someone tried something like this? Is it even possible? :P
I hope you know what I mean.
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Yes, you mean, in the center, it is very precise, but in the outer ring, it is very responsive. If the right balance could be struck, that should work just as well.
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most profilers that come with high end sticks lets you do that, lets you set the gain curve (at least thats what its called in ch control manager), deadzone, etc. you can also do remapping the axis range by keypress. the ch software comes with its own scripting language for this kinda stuff, you can do some pretty awesome stuff, like mix axes, create fake axes, etc. unfortunately its proprietary and doesn't do **** for non ch gear. actually ppjoy+glovepie gives you everything you need to write scripts that arent tied to any joystick manufacturer. ppjoy's api is somewhat simple to use, so its not hard to write a console util in c to do some advanced mapping behavior as well as up sampling and smoothing.
my biggest gripe with joysticks is actually their resolution. it actually decreased when they moved from gameport to usb. a $0.20 microcontroller is cheaper than a $0.50 microcontroller, and electronics companies like to source the cheapest parts possible, so they sell you a fart and put the cheap one in there, even though the better one is less than a buck more. then they add insult to injury and put the fifty cent microcontroller with the 10 bit adcs in the "advanced model" that costs $50-$100 more for an extra 2 bits of precision. and for a few cents more they could throw in a high resolution adc ic, and you would get a nice 16 bit axis. its quite sad. im probibly gonna move on to something homebrew or based on oshw, as its becoming very practical.