[Shrike]

I'm sure some of you are gonna recognize this.    But it's been over half a year since it was last brought up, I'd like to see what the new people can add, starting fresh.

This is not intended to be a thread on what you would want in FS3.  That has been done to death.  Instead, consider what is possible with a fresh game.

Some topics for consideration:

Primary weapons on capital ships; Cannons, Beams, Torpedoes, others, or multiple types?

Style of weapons on fighters; Large number of small missiles (FS) or few powerful missiles (SL, WC)

Weapons outfits; Fully modular (FS), partially modular (see mechwarrior 4) or fixed (SL/WC)

Level of armament; Heavy armament of light weapons or light armament of heavy weapons?

Physics involved; Newtonian or non?

Shielding; All ships (SL, WC), some ships (FS) or none/special only (B5)

Should fighters have turrets?

How big should capships be?

Some things I'd like to see implemented:
A MW4 style modularity, allowing heavier weapons to be mounted on larger ships.
All subsystems be destroyable objects.
Have multiple parts to capital ships and perhaps fighters so concentrated strikes are more effective.

Post your thoughts.

[mikhael]

 

Originally posted by Shrike:

Primary weapons on capital ships; Cannons, Beams, Torpedoes, others, or multiple types?
How big should capships be?

Capships should be huge, impervious to fighter based weaponry (except perhaps anticap torps) and should be bristling with beams (for other caps), and turreted cannons and missiles(for fighters and installations). I don't like the fact that a fighter can take down capships in Freespace or Iwar2. It detracts from their (supposedly) awesome might.

Also, a proper naval progression from corvettes up through juggernauts should be in place. None of this corvettes bigger than cruisers nonsense.

 

Style of weapons on fighters; Large number of small missiles (FS) or few powerful missiles (SL, WC)

Weapons outfits; Fully modular (FS), partially modular (see mechwarrior 4) or fixed (SL/WC)

Level of armament; Heavy armament of light weapons or light armament of heavy weapons?

Fighters should carry projectile weapons (kinetic, limited ammo, unaffected by shields, low damage due to muzzle velocity), energy weapons (unlimited, affected by shields, recharge delay, higher power), missiles and rockets. I thought that Freespace had the best rocket/missile system of any space game. Its a worthy example to follow.

For weapons loadouts, I recommend the use of an Iwar2 like hardpoint system, with a few more limitations. Heavy and light munitions mounts, heavy/medium/light cannon mounts, special weapons mounts and special purpose mounts (extra magazines, extended sensor packages, etc).

Level of armament should be determined by a mix of mission structure (materiel availability, clearance, etc) and weapon mounts on the various ships. An interceptor might would carry a couple of light munitions hardpoints and two or four cannon hardpoints, whilst a interdiction fighter would carry several large munitions hardpoints, and four cannon hardpoints.

 

Physics involved; Newtonian or non?

Newtonian. All the way. Make those capships lumber and make the fighters and corvettes use inertia to their advantage.

 

Shielding; All ships (SL, WC), some ships (FS) or none/special only (B5)

All capships should be shielded. Starlancer had a good model in this case, just make those shield generators are well defended. Fighters and bombers should be able to equip a variety of shields on the special purpose mounts. Shields should not be too strong, however. I'd like to prevent the 'flying tank' syndrome of Freespace, wherein a fighter can run torpedo intercept by blocking the torp with his own ship and live.

 

Should fighters have turrets?

Turrets should only be found on larger ships like bombers and corvettes (see WC).

 

Some things I'd like to see implemented:
A MW4 style modularity, allowing heavier weapons to be mounted on larger ships.
All subsystems be destroyable objects.
Have multiple parts to capital ships and perhaps fighters so concentrated strikes are more effective.

I would like to see modularly destroyable capships that leave large, dangerous hulks drifting upon destruction. All external/near-hull systems on a ship should be destroyable.

Last, and most important is interface stuff:

• the camera field-of-view, depth-of-focus and perspective correction need to be adjusted so that capships and installaitons look big.
• modular HUD
• contact list with hostile/friendly/critical/noncom filters
• the Orb. Its the best spatial reference model I've ever seen in a game, bar none.
• pilot head. I should be able to pan around the cockpit to look out windows and visually track combatants
• user defined linked weapon groups

I think that covers it all.   I've probably missed a few thing.

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--Mik
http://www.404error.com
ruhkferret on ICQ/AIM

"Your guy was a little SQUARE! You had to use your IMAGINATION! There were no multiple levels or screens. There was just one screen forever and you could never win the game. It just kept getting harder and faster until you died. JUST LIKE LIFE." --Ernie Cline

[aldo_14]

I'd agree with Mikhael on the above, except for capital ship hulls, as - if you parallel it with current day naval warfare - a single fighter can very easily take down a warship (i.e. during the Falklands, the Argentine Skyhawk using Exocet missiles took down the HMS Sheffield , I think, and a large cargo ship - and they could have taken down the fleets carriers if they got past the radar net)

As for capships;
- A mix of Fs style beams, but with particle stream-like effects, and pulse lasers - barrage guns firing energy bolts at rapid speed.
- Huge - 5km plus - that was one of the few things that dissapointed me in IWar2, the ship size.  And even bigger installations  , capable of refitting tens of capital ships at a time
-Fully deformable - able to make realistic holes, dents, etc in the hull, and even being able to cut massive sections off... and leave the hull and some debris floating in space.
- Localised damage effects - fire, vented gas, shrapnel, and even seeing the breached levels of the hull
- some larger, 'special case' ships shielded.. a large carrier (eg) class of about 10km, with comparatively weak weapons but deckplate shielding.

- Fighters
- I like the Fs2 fighter style, but maybe slightly less like 'modern' fighters in design
- With some deformable geometry, and certain key parts, like a cockpit, which can be destroyed
- The pilots head visible - like in Starfox / Lylat Wars  
- Weak shielding, possibly only in certain parts
- Possibly a slow autorepair system, which requires energy from other parts... maybe a bit complex though - I prefer point and shoot to engineering management
- bombers should be big, slow, but well armed and strongly shielded.  I think FS possibly makes a bit too little distinction between bombers and fighters, bar the Ursa.
- Optional turrets - which can be 'locked' onto a target or set to free fire
- Modular weapons systems (like in IWar2, methinks)

- Oh, and cloaking devices (at expense of weapons or some other function)...  

Weapons
- I prefer fast, rapid fire but weak weapons... most improtant is that they look good, and have definite advantages and disadvantages.
- Specialised EMP weapons would be good, too.
- Lots of light, fast weapons on big ships- looks better than 1/2 heavy lasers bolts per second.

The rest
- A mix of newtonian physics, but possibly with a little bit of inertia dampening (compared to I War2).
- an IWar2 style 'freeform' system, with travel a part of the game, but based upon being part of a larger force - i.e. stationed on a carrier.  Possibly with promotion allowing more say in mission objectives & planning.
- an option to go it alone as a trader / pirate (possibly after the main storyline), to explore and trade.
- customisable logos, etc on ship - eg your callsign & squadron on your helmet in cutscene (using engine), on the side of the ship.  Being able to set cockpit preference,s like lighting, and easily add skin info to your ship - i.e modding for those who can;t mod   - or even being able to pick furry dice  
- Virtual cockpit, with damage effects (something IWar2 lacked a bit, methinks)
-

[CP5670]

Mikhael pretty much got all of it.   One area of weaponry that has been somewhat explored in the space-sim world seems to be remote mines or explosive drones which could be placed at strategic locations such as jump nodes in FS2. (they could operate similar to the seeker mines in D3 but with more power) It would also be nice if certain ships had a rear-mounted cannon or two, which would be helpful against tailgaters.

[This message has been edited by CP5670 (edited 01-28-2002).]

[Alikchi]

How about we just include ALL the weapons, and make it really..really..l33t, and hell for the poor guys flying the fighters?  

[Alikchi]

 

Originally posted by aldo_14:

- bombers should be big, slow, but well armed and strongly shielded.  I think FS possibly makes a bit too little distinction between bombers and fighters, bar the Ursa.

I've been toying with the idea of fighter-bombers recently. A slow, unmaneuverable, weak ship, with only 2 primaries but with 3 missle banks, able to carry anti fighter missles, light bombs..LRMS..a stand-off missle boat   It's my dream fighter I'd love to fly something like that

[The Claw]

 Babylon 5, basically  
I reckon fighters shouldn't prove a problem to large cap ships (anything over destroyer class- eg: Cruisers, Battleships, Carriers etc), and should have a hard time taking out smaller ships. Bombers, however, should have large amounts of firepower but be significantly less maneuverable, and not really suitable for large scale Anti-cap action, rather only for smaller ships, or isolated ships. Anything else goes to the Capships and their beam/pulse weaponry  

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[Stryke 9]

How 'bout wide-dispersal beam weapons? You know, where instead of it being just a straight line, it's a cone of damage that becomes less effective as one gets closer to the edge?

[Sandwich]

 

Originally posted by aldo_14:
- Lots of light, fast weapons on big ships- looks better than 1/2 heavy lasers bolts per second.

You mean like this?      

 

Originally posted by Stryke 9:
How 'bout wide-dispersal beam weapons? You know, where instead of it being just a straight line, it's a cone of damage that becomes less effective as one gets closer to the edge?

Useful for wiping out hordes of bombers and their bombs, eh? I liek!    

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[NegspectahDek]

steal a concept from Heavy Gear 2.  Critical hits.  Armor should be considered seperate from structure, and once you start damaging it, you have an increased chance of completely destroying whatever it is protecting.  Also the concept of weak spots in the design of a ship, ie such and such class ship has an I beam junction that if destroyed and the ship is forced to manuver, she will shear herself apart, or something like what happened in world war two with the carriers in the pacific, you can pound the ship for days and all you will do is add holes to the hull.  but if you hit something like an ammo magazine or a fuel line, boom.

the concept of a set number of hit points is retarded imho

[KillMeNow]

tractopr beams would be cool to be caught in tractor beasm but ones that you can see and have your mauvering reduced hugely and you have to destroy the tractor emmited  which while beign used cant be protected by sheilds - obviously capital ship only thing

[mikhael]

Last night I was sitting and mulling this over. It was the topic that was making me thing. All the things I listed and most everything everyone else listed, are all 'been done' sorts of things. Not 'next gen' at all. In fact, only NegspectahDek mentioned someting not yet done: structural modelling.

Negspectah's WW2 PacFleet carriers are the very model of how capships should be simulated (Aldo mentioned Exocets being used to take out British Ships of the line in the Falklands, but this rings of a fluke, or poor shipbuilding on the part of the British. I'm not knowledgeable enough about the situation to say for sure either way). The seperation of armor from structure/subsystems is a good idea and would go a long way toward making capships feel like the mighty beasts they are supposed to be. It would also enhance the role of boarding actions in anticap operations.

The next thing that needs to be revamped/replaced is the comms system. Voice activation should be considered an absolute baseline for a next-gen space-sim. I realize there are third party products that you can use for this sort of thing, but they all run outside the game, and are thus not tied in anyway to the game's timing loop. This can cause some odd timing issues as clock cycles get divided up. I think a standardised API (lets call it DirectVoice) should be put together and used, such that personalized voice libraries could be used in many seperate games. Voice control adds a great deal to the realism (if not necessarily the control!  ) of a sim. Not only does it remove all those bizarre menu and keyboard interfaces from some things that should be voice activated (like ship to ship comms), but it adds an uncertainty to the situation. If you're in a stressful situation and you clip off an order to a wingman, it might come across garbled, prompting him to bounce back with 'whiskey tango foxtrot, Alpha one? your last was garbled.' Its less precise and less certain, but I think its more realistic.
The next thing is LAN usage. Most games use LANs for deathmatch style action, sometimes cooperative style action. I suggest stealing a page from the Longbow2 book: cooperative multiplay as pilot, gunner, engineer, etc, in the same ship. Rather than make a single player switch, put multiple players into the same ship, performing different jobs.
One might think this would be boring at first, but imagine taking control of the belly turret on a corvette-bomber whilst the pilot vectors in on the softened up hull of a cap. In fact, imagine having one person working the sensors to scan for softened up areas of a cap's hull and managing ships systems while the pilot is juking, dodging, and dogfighting along its surface.
Adding a second person also opens up possibilities for more interaction between the player ship and the AWACS (requesting that they focus sensors in a particular place, or move 6km spinward to see what's behind the sensor shadow of that juggernaut).

The biggest thing that a next-gen space sim author needs to work on is the pilot AI. By and large, this is absolutely the weakest part of every space-sim made to date. Everyone complains of the uselessness of wingmen, and the ineptitude of enemy pilots. I'm not sure how to rectify that, short of doing a great deal of research into the whys and wherefores of real human pilots.

If I think of anything else, I'll post that too.

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--Mik
http://www.404error.com
ruhkferret on ICQ/AIM

"Your guy was a little SQUARE! You had to use your IMAGINATION! There were no multiple levels or screens. There was just one screen forever and you could never win the game. It just kept getting harder and faster until you died. JUST LIKE LIFE." --Ernie Cline

[KillMeNow]

remember also though if you make the enemy ai too good downing a ship of equal capibities will be difficult - there for missioins will never put you into mealstrom of fighters cause at best you can handle too - and there is to be said when you finish a mission to have reacked up 30 or so kills its fun =)- the voice activation i think is a great idea - i would love to be able leave the fighter - so that you combine a first person shooter with the space fighter section so you can partake in the boarding operations etc ina  scramble mission you can be in the rec room and here alarms then you have to run for the docking bay climb into your ship then fly out throught tha hanger and for normal mission just here over the intercom an order for you to report ot a brieffing etc and where its possible if your feeling brave to board enemy ships yourself and try and take the comand center to neutralise the ship etc - just things to add realism above all else so its not you only ever in teh cockpit of the plane but its more a life your living - from what i hear unreal 2 is going to be abit like this just without the flying sections since its a first person shooter and stuff but you can interact with teh crew of the vessel ferruing you from planet to planet

[mikhael]

 

Originally posted by KillMeNow:
remember also though if you make the enemy ai too good downing a ship of equal capibities will be difficult - there for missioins will never put you into mealstrom of fighters cause at best you can handle too - and there is to be said when you finish a mission to have reacked up 30 or so kills its fun =)-

when you improve enemy AI, you also improve friendly AI. The maelstrom is more lethal overall. I don't understand feeling good for knocking down 30 poorly simulated pilots. That's shooting fish in a barrel. The best part of a combat for me is knowing, deep in my gut, that I'm not going to make it, and then somehow, pulling it out of my hat and limping home victorious. The accomplishment isn't real if the fear isn't real.

 

...
i would love to be able leave the fighter - so that you combine a first person shooter with the space fighter section so you can partake in the boarding operations etc ina  scramble mission you can be in the rec room and here alarms then you have to run for the docking bay climb into your ship then fly out throught tha hanger and for normal mission just here over the intercom an order for you to report ot a brieffing etc and where its possible if your feeling brave to board enemy ships yourself and try and take the comand center to neutralise the ship etc - just things to add realism above all else so its not you only ever in teh cockpit of the plane but its more a life your living - from what i hear unreal 2 is going to be abit like this just without the flying sections since its a first person shooter and stuff but you can interact with teh crew of the vessel ferruing you from planet to planet

This idea is something that lots of people ask for, but I can never get behind. Beyond the extreme difficulty of building an engine that handles enclosed spaces (corridors) well and handles open spaces (space) well, it just doesnt' seem like a lot of fun to me. That could be my general pejudice against first person style games speaking, though. Besides that, it leaves the 'space sim' aspect behind at that point.

Where something like this could work is in a online multiplayer game. Some players fly fighters, another player handles the APC/Dropship and delivers other players playing marines to the enemy vessel. while the battle rages outside (in a space sim engine), the boarding action takes place inside (in an FPS engine). Throw in some software to handle comms bridging between the two arenas, and you're in business.

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--Mik
http://www.404error.com
ruhkferret on ICQ/AIM

"Your guy was a little SQUARE! You had to use your IMAGINATION! There were no multiple levels or screens. There was just one screen forever and you could never win the game. It just kept getting harder and faster until you died. JUST LIKE LIFE." --Ernie Cline

[Zeronet]

The Horror! British ships are unmatched in the quality of their construction!!!

[Shrike]

 

Originally posted by mikhael:
Negspectah's WW2 PacFleet carriers are the very model of how capships should be simulated (Aldo mentioned Exocets being used to take out British Ships of the line in the Falklands, but this rings of a fluke, or poor shipbuilding on the part of the British. I'm not knowledgeable enough about the situation to say for sure either way). The seperation of armor from structure/subsystems is a good idea and would go a long way toward making capships feel like the mighty beasts they are supposed to be. It would also enhance the role of boarding actions in anticap operations.

Seeing as most modern military vessels (except for very recent ones) are built out of thin aluminium in order to save displacement, it's not surprising the Exocet did what it did.  Those British frigats were probably only a few thousand tons, and totally unarmored.  There's a reason they call them 'tin cans'.    

 

I believe that this is the reason the new Burke class destroyers are of all-steel construction (which means they don't have as much internal volume) and have low-weight Kelvar armor over vital sections.

The next thing that needs to be revamped/replaced is the comms system. Voice activation should be considered an absolute baseline for a next-gen space-sim. I realize there are third party products that you can use for this sort of thing, but they all run outside the game, and are thus not tied in anyway to the game's timing loop. This can cause some odd timing issues as clock cycles get divided up. I think a standardised API (lets call it DirectVoice) should be put together and used, such that personalized voice libraries could be used in many seperate games. Voice control adds a great deal to the realism (if not necessarily the control!    ) of a sim. Not only does it remove all those bizarre menu and keyboard interfaces from some things that should be voice activated (like ship to ship comms), but it adds an uncertainty to the situation. If you're in a stressful situation and you clip off an order to a wingman, it might come across garbled, prompting him to bounce back with 'whiskey tango foxtrot, Alpha one? your last was garbled.' Its less precise and less certain, but I think its more realistic.
The next thing is LAN usage. Most games use LANs for deathmatch style action, sometimes cooperative style action. I suggest stealing a page from the Longbow2 book: cooperative multiplay as pilot, gunner, engineer, etc, in the same ship. Rather than make a single player switch, put multiple players into the same ship, performing different jobs.
One might think this would be boring at first, but imagine taking control of the belly turret on a corvette-bomber whilst the pilot vectors in on the softened up hull of a cap. In fact, imagine having one person working the sensors to scan for softened up areas of a cap's hull and managing ships systems while the pilot is juking, dodging, and dogfighting along its surface.
Adding a second person also opens up possibilities for more interaction between the player ship and the AWACS (requesting that they focus sensors in a particular place, or move 6km spinward to see what's behind the sensor shadow of that juggernaut).

The problem is that not everyone has voice-recognition equipment attached to their PC.  And to tell you the truth, I think I'd feel like a jackass talking to my computer.    

 

The biggest thing that a next-gen space sim author needs to work on is the pilot AI. By and large, this is absolutely the weakest part of every space-sim made to date. Everyone complains of the uselessness of wingmen, and the ineptitude of enemy pilots. I'm not sure how to rectify that, short of doing a great deal of research into the whys and wherefores of real human pilots.

AI is very hard to do, especially one that is challenging but doesn't cheat.

[This message has been edited by Shrike (edited 01-29-2002).]

[Nico]

I'm not interested in FPS part in a freespace-like game. Would fit much more for iwar2 imho, but anyway it's not the point.
You want a good AI? play crimson skies! just got it, and, well, bow down. The pilots in there do incredible things, they fly at 2 meters above the ground, fly under hangars and between buildings to dodge your shots! amazing! It my be scripted ( so if the guy comes near the hangar, it follows a path and goes under it), but it does the trick perfectly ( plus FS2 does the same when a fighter/bomber attacks a turret, excepted the FS2 AI can't even follow the path and will collide anyway   ), each kill is a real pleasure, and your wingmen are really good. At first I thought, what the hell, we can't even give them orders! And I never noticed them being hotshots. So I looked at a mission, not dogfighting, just looking at the enemy and my wingmen. it was a real airshow  . I can't even give them orders and yet They are way more effective than FS2 wingmen.
If they can do that for a flight sim, I assume doing that for a space sim would be even easier no?
For the kind of ships and weapons, hell, there's no rule. it all depends on the timeline, the tech available, the species involved etc. If I play a space sim supposed to happen in a close future, I want only ammo based weapons, no beams, no lasers etc. If I play a space sim that happens in 3150, trash the ammunitions! Homing plasma balls and twisting beams all the way if you want  
I completly agree with nexpect... (scroll down to check the name)... Negspectahdek, HP are retarded. I think it should work kindda like warhammer: a weapon has a hull penetration factor, and a hull has a strengh factor. The more powerfull the weapon, the more chances it has to go through the hull (If the shot goes through the hull or not is determined randomly, based on both penetration and hull factor), and then hit a critical element (same way to destroy the subsystem than go through the hull).

Voila voila  

[mikhael]

 

Originally posted by venom2506:
...You want a good AI? play crimson skies! just got it, and, well, bow down. The pilots in there do incredible things, they fly at 2 meters above the ground, fly under hangars and between buildings to dodge your shots! amazing! It my be scripted ( so if the guy comes near the hangar, it follows a path and goes under it), but it does the trick perfectly ( plus FS2 does the same when a fighter/bomber attacks a turret, excepted the FS2 AI can't even follow the path and will collide anyway   ), each kill is a real pleasure, and your wingmen are really good. At first I thought, what the hell, we can't even give them orders! And I never noticed them being hotshots. So I looked at a mission, not dogfighting, just looking at the enemy and my wingmen. it was a real airshow   . I can't even give them orders and yet They are way more effective than FS2 wingmen.
...

Crimson Skies, for all the blatantly poor simulation (try crashing into the ground. I dare you. *BOING!*), has--hands down--the best wingmen in any combat game I've ever played. I hadn't even thought about it before you mentioned it Venom.

BTW, the path following they use for aerobatics is very loose and affected, I believe, by the pilots skill. They don't always succed at those barnstorms.   Sometimes, you'll dip through the hangar on their six, and you'll find a fireball waiting for you.

I wish I could reinstall Crimson Skies.   It always hangs at 99% and then crashes the computer.


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--Mik
http://www.404error.com
ruhkferret on ICQ/AIM

"Your guy was a little SQUARE! You had to use your IMAGINATION! There were no multiple levels or screens. There was just one screen forever and you could never win the game. It just kept getting harder and faster until you died. JUST LIKE LIFE." --Ernie Cline

[Nico]

 

Originally posted by mikhael:
Crimson Skies, for all the blatantly poor simulation (try crashing into the ground. I dare you. *BOING!*), has--hands down--the best wingmen in any combat game I've ever played. I hadn't even thought about it before you mentioned it Venom.

BTW, the path following they use for aerobatics is very loose and affected, I believe, by the pilots skill. They don't always succed at those barnstorms.   Sometimes, you'll dip through the hangar on their six, and you'll find a fireball waiting for you.

I wish I could reinstall Crimson Skies.   It always hangs at 99% and then crashes the computer.

hmm, dunno, I can tell you I don't "boing" that often   (remember that race in hollywood settings? flying through the bridge -not under, throught!-, and then through one of the O of Hollywood, and then in the street of the fake New York, I can tell you, I tried many times before beating it -just did this yesterday night lol). well, sometimes, I'm get caught by one of the gridders on a blimp, and make a pretty u-turn w/o dying (but the wing is almost gone then), and it's damn funny  
agreed, it's fairly poor simulation, but it's not a simulation so there's no pb  
If you didn't get me, I've fallen in love with that game, rah, flying over that train, in a tunnel, that was hot  
I'd love if it was editable (but it's not it seems   )

[Su-tehp]

 

Originally posted by CP5670:
One area of weaponry that has been somewhat explored in the space-sim world seems to be remote mines or explosive drones which could be placed at strategic locations such as jump nodes in FS2.

You've been playing Fighteer's mission "Dragon's Teeth" again, haven't you?