Hey guys, good suggestions and commentary all around - exactly the kind of discussion we should be having. Let me highlight some points which I need to make clear.
If you haven't yet, PLEASE do the following:
1. Download and play the
Echo Squad SE demo (2008). This will give you an idea of the twitch based fighter space combat.
2. Download and play either
All Aspect Warfare (2009) or Angle Of Attack (2009) game demos. This will give you an idea of the aerial combat, first person engine etc. These are ALL new technologies which will be used in GCO and will remain largely unchanged.
3. Download and play the freeware
Universal Combat (2004) game. Though this is a much older game, without having to buy the newer
Universal Combat Collector's Edition v2.0 (2009), this is the closest that you will get to having an idea of how the cap ship combat, space<->planetary transition, fps etc will work since everything is rolled into these UC games.
As I mentioned in the
GCO game's FAQ as well as on the
forum thread, the idea here is not to change anything that works; but rather to lower the barrier of entry somewhat, while keeping intact the elements that more advanced players love about the games
Welcome back to HLP Mr Smart.
As I said before, I think BC3000AD would work quite well as an MMO, it allows the universe to flourish without having to be pushed along, which leaves a lot more room for the real fun stuff server-side.
Indeed. Which is primarily why there are absolutely no quests, missions or anything of the sort. The IP's underlying storyline which seeds alliances, territories and such - are all there is. So this will keep the game's open ended nature intact.
I was an Eve player, but I quit, because the game was dividing too heavily into 'haves' and 'have-nots', there were too many in-crowds, and no chance to simply wander around and experience the game universe in general, the hard part of any MMO, I suppose, is catering to the vast spread of playing types there are out there, some people prefer non PvP games, where they can sight-see, others prefer one on one combat, personally, I'm not a big fan of unsolicited PvP, something Eve was absolutely rife with, I think, to be honest, CCP got too obsessed with it being a community and not obsessed enough with it being a game. That's my experiences/thoughts on Space-based MMO's anyway.
Exactly. And this is the reason why we're scouting the space sim communities and getting feedback. I certainly don't want the game to favor expert players or to have an unbalanced game world. My goal is for those starting the game today, to not be at a significant disadvantage against players who came in months before. That of course is going to be tricky, but if the game is not complex and rewards all gamers equally, I don't see that as being a problem. Sure, some issues will arise, but thats what game balancing is all about and is exactly the reason why I'm going to start the public testing from the late Alpha stage and right through to the final release.
As to the PvP vs PvE issue - I am well aware of this and will rely on the testers to shape that path. Due to how the
game world is designed, I don't see PvP as being a big problem. For example, a Terran/Military player starting off at GALCOM HQ station (in orbit around Earth) can still trade and explore the Terran quadrant without fear of being attacked. Of course if you get too close to a hostile station (e.g. in Sygan), you will be. One thing I have in place is a "weapons off" directive whereby via electronic locks, your weapons simply won't work. Period. The problem with that is say this is activated in Earth region, this means that no combat can go on in that region - hence the station there will never be attacked.
So it is going to be a balancing act - especiallyh for a game that have PvP components. As there are no quests or stories, being that the game is neither instanced nor sharded, PvE is going to be just players going up against NPC station or base assets. e.g. if you engaged the Sygan station - even with no human players in the region - the station will launch defense assets, fire its turrets, missile batteries etc. This means that it works exactly as it does now. If you just want to trade, then you stick to the friendly trade lanes. But tbh, without PvP in this game, its not going to be much fun for long. I guess the thrill is going to be seeing how deep into enemy territory you can go with illegal arms and such withough getting blown to bits. Since the game world is already seeded, there is a lot of exploration to be done. And the richer you become, the more likely you are to find a barren rock and build something on it without anyone knowing about it.
My goal for GCO is the same as my previous BC/UC games in that I want gamers to make their own adventure. Anyone who finds this to be an issue, will have to go play something else.
Ah, but part of the appeal (to me) would be that you COULD, if you so wanted, move from space combat area of engagement to atmospheric flight, or land, or disembark your vehicle, all continuously without activating a planetfall cutscene or anything like that. And also if you were not careful, you could end up burning in the atmosphere if you overstressed your craft... or if you dropped too low in a space craft not qualified for atmospheric entries. It would be largely non-issue if the player started at 36000 km altitude at geosynchronous orbit; for all intents and purposes, orbital mechanics wouldn't really disrupt combat there.
Our games have no cutscenes. Never did. The transition from space<->planet takes place in an external camera view once you set in motion the event that drops the ship into planetfall. Having it any other way (e.g. how Infinity QfE does it) adds nothing to the game and is of no consequence whatsoever. The issue with airfoil stress, atmospheric burnup etc - again - add nothing to the game and just adds another barrier for newcomers who have to learn all that stuff. Thats not my goal. My goal is to make the game easy to get into, play and fun, not work. None of the above bear any relation to that goal.
It would also introduce some pretty interesting dynamics to the space combat, since you could then have spacecraft that are capable of only spaceflight but be more optimized for space combat (lack of wings and other accessories required of airplanes reduces weight), vehicles capable of both atmospheric and space flight, and airplanes that would only operate on the atmosphere.
None of that equals fun.
The way I see it, space combat would be concentrated on a very small areas - mainly, stations on geosynchronous orbits and Lagrangian points in the system. Players interested mainly in space combat would be deployed on these areas, however it would be possible for them to traverse to the planet's surface if they so wanted. Similarly, people interested in atmospheric flight combat would be spawned either on air starts or airfields depending on the mission, but if some hardcore player really wanted, he could pick an space flight qualified airplane, get into orbit and attack the enemy capital ship on low orbit. Or a flight of ground attack craft could undock from that low orbit capital ship, descend to the atmosphere and commence a ground attack. Being deployed on the immediate vicinity of action would make the game accessible to people who aren't intersted in long sessions of simple transition from place A to place B, but continous game world would make that possible too.
Thats now how my games work. The game world is open and with no restrictions. Also, adding artificial barriers does not equal to fun. If you see a planet, you can fly around it, do what you want etc. And if you decide to enter it, you just target it, press a key and planetfall is engaged.
...or you could have orbital drop shock troopers (with another name to avoid trademark conflicts 
) seamlessly deployed from low orbit to surface. Or you could have a transport pilot delivering a Marine squad on a space station, or other endless options.
You can already do that in my BC/UC games. But this won't be in GCO because there are no NPC crew. The only way cap ships are going to be able to deploy troops to a planet from space using the transporters, is if the troops are human players on board the ship.
Myself, I would prefer to fly single pilot craft in either atmospheric or spaceborne ship-to-ship combat, but the option where you would be able to gather my survival kit after crash landing on enemy territory, and try to avoid capture is sort of interesting too.
Thats already part of the current BC/UC gameplay mechanic. Even in All Aspect Warfare, you can shot down out in the middle of nowhere and can teleport to a friendly nearby base using a key sequence. I intend to preserve this gameplay mechanic in GCO but with some penalities.
Regarding form of combat, I'm sort of torn. I personally greatly prefer visual range gun combat (aka dogfighting) to BVR missile fights, but on the other hand it might be implausible to exclude missiles altogether. Perhaps making them a commodity might work best; that way you could both make them plausibly destructive and explain why there aren't too many of them.
...and although visual range swarm missiles are visually stunning, I don't think I would want to deal with a Macross Missile Massacre being unleashed on me... 
This is space in the 30th century. Use of missiles and BVR combat is inevitable. By the same token, the advance jamming tech means that using missiles doesn't always guarantee a success. Especially since the game is twitch based and thus player skill comes into play.
People have to remember there is a very big trade-off involved with First Person perspective from an MMO point of view, because a heck of a lot more data needs to be passed around about projectiles, angles etc, that's why most MMO's work a 'dice-roll' system.
If you think a stand alone server has trouble keeping track of the lasers shots from a single Multiplayer game, wait until you try keeping track of the shots from a hundred skirmishes across the universe. I think you'd have to do something like turn local combat into a 'mini-multiplayer' game, and that might cause problems with ships moving locally, arriving on the scene etc, because the current state would have to be transferred to those ships as well from the combatants.
That may be an issue for someone who has no experience with networking or building large game worlds. But its not in our case. Bah! we already did that back in 2003. Our networking architecture is client/server based and one of the reasons that I'm keeping the player limit to 256 per server is so that everything runs as best as it can in real-time. This is not P2P. The server doesn't send data to clients that don't need it. So its not like if you're in Terran quadrant, you're going to be getting server data packets from the Gammulan quadrant.
Elementary stuff really. Been there. Done that.
Yes, and that's not even the smallest of problems in a real-sized, continuous planet/solar system sized environment. To look good, the planet would need some serious model detail, and that alone would be... significantly large amount of data. The Earth looks like crap in Orbiter when you get down from the orbit...
Realities bite. I suppose we need a couple more years until we can simulate an universe in our universe so we can fight wars while living in peace...
Visual quality has nothing to do with networking. The server is console based and doesn't do any graphics processing whatsoever. The visual quality of the planet as seen from space is down to how many polys are used to draw it, the quality and size of the texture used and whether or not mipmapping and/or Perlin noise is used when up close.
Again, elementary stuff that is of no consequence.
Make Resnig an NPC and make it possible to kill him in the most visceral way imaginable. I recommend some sort of cinematic when you throw him out of the airlock while orbiting Jupiter.
Anyway, my advices would be to:
- Make the interface follow the industry's standards. Last time I played BCMG I remember the FPS part having some unusual key configuration.
- Storywise, I'm not sure if it was resolved, but some info on the crashed probe (who launched it? what was it doing?) would be nice.
- Make it possible to invade other ships. In BCMG and UC you could never invade other ships, but you were always the one being boarded. I think this was done because of some technical difficulty but it's kind of jarring.
The BC universe always fitted an MMO better than a single-player game as someone already pointed out.
Ah yes, no BC/UC conversation without reference to Resnig. hehe, since there are no NPC crews in the game, I guess the only way there is ever going to be a Resnig is if a player happens to play as him and is part of your ship.
If BCMG was the last game you played, man, you're like ten years out. A LOT has gone on in terms of interface, key commands etc. Try playing one of the games I mentioned at the start of this post and see for yourself.
There is no storyline in GCO. Though there will be planned "events" which can be scheduled to take place at a certain date/time/place. If a player misses that event, then it never happens again. I intend to use this to flesh out some of the underlying mythos of the game world and its various nations. These events will be planned and announced well in advance of their occurence. And yes, the crashed probe is one of many such stories that I intend to resolve in GCO.
You can't board other ships or stations in the first release of GCO simply because there won't be any first person gameplay mode inside those assets. This will be added maybe a year or so after release as an add-on expansion. With that in place, sure you can board other ships and run around inside them in first person perspective. The FAQ has a link to shots of the Engstrom carrier levels to show as an example.
Yup, they can all be done, of that I'm certain, if there's one thing I don't think about Derek Smart, it's that he would be considering the concept if he didn't feel it was possible, and I wish him luck with it, but I will admit to being interested in how the first-person hurdle would be overcome, as I mentioned earlier, the way that occurs to me is creating a 'mini' multiplayer game that works peer-peer between the ships involved, if you could keep most combat outside the main traffic zones, that would ease a lot of weight on the servers.
Not sure I understand what "first person hurdle" you're talking about. There is no "first person hurdle". We've had first person in my games for the past ten years or so. Made even better in the recently released All Aspect Warfare and thats the same fps engine that is being used in GCO as shown in the movie currently on the teaser site.
All the server does is send data back and forth between clients. It is pure client/server architecture and with 256 players the server won't even break a sweat. It is all down to server CPU, memory and bandwidth. Nothing to do with the game itself.
Mr. Smart, I'd advise you to look into the Infinity: Quest for Earth forums. They have a whole lot of good sugegstions on their board and will probably be your competition in a sense. And competition is healthy 
uhm, I don't think so. I'm not going to go to someone's site and rudely peddle my game.
Apart from that, they are a totally different community. For one thing, Infinity is more of a tech demo and proof-of-concept, than a viable game property. Each time I think about it, I go back to how I started out with a ton of ambitious ideas and such - then ended up with very niche games decades later. I do not believe that it will evolve into a
game that many people will play.
My advice is to adjust the controls to the craft. Fighters are twich-based and should handle and be controled like that. Large capital ships are about planning and strategy. So as you move from smaller to bigger ships, the controls and mechanics move ever more from twich-based to point-and-click strategic.
Have that already.
What else? A certain level of modularity between ships, but not too much. Infity is going for a non-specialization principle and it's a good thing - up to a point. But if the difference between a military battelship hull and a freighter hull is miniscue, then what's the point of having different categories?
Have that already.
A good selection of weapons and defenses. No levels. No grinding. Let simple logic guide the universe. No traders flying state-of-the-art military warships. What kind of a retarded military would sell you one anyway? If you want it, you have to be a trusted and distinguished memer of the military. Otherwise, go buy civilian hulls/ships.
Have that already.
I made quite a lof of suggestions on the Infintiy boards. May be simpler to just try to find them and copy-paste. Or if you go and read the boards there I won't need to bother.
Nah, thats ok. As I said, GCO is built off my game properties and tech that already works.
Yes, but when the environment gets big enough, the amount of data that the client side computers is needed to recreate from given random seeds (essentially compressed format) of the game world, the loading times and hardware requirements shoot up sky high (pun absolutely intended). Procedural terrain data that uses a material system for different surface types would be the only sensible solution, but even then the sheer size of the thing would be... troublesome. The accuracy of the terrain needs to be the same for everyone so that collision detection with terrain works the same for everyone, so that means either everyone is required to use the same level of terrain detail (bad idea if you plan on making the game available for a variety of hardware specs, unless you plan on limiting the level of detail on the level that can be run with minimum hardware requirements) or you need some very intelligently designed LOD system that would decrease the surface model detail on long distance while keeping the detail constant at the immediate vicinity of the player.
Infinity is sort of close to what I have in mind... but I'm not having high hopes of it being finished in any reasonable time frame. 
Hopefully, they prove me wrong.
Not an issue. Even procedural terrain has its limitations. Unlike BC/UC games, GCO is not modeling entire planets because it is pointless and wasted data which nobody is going to see or play on. Sure it will be a large map, but where you emerge from space or start on from the planet side of things, is currently no larger than a 500 sq. km stretch of area. Our recent AAW/AOA games used a 400 sq. km stretch of land on a single planet - and people still complained that it was too big. Since GCO is only going to have 256 players per server, creating massive planets is pointless and adds nothing to the gameplay.
With the 500 sq. km map area, the terrain data is trivial. Heck, the map itself for each planet is only 32MB. And since gas giants don't have any terrain, of the 216 or so planets in the game world, only about 175 have any terrain. The server demand loads the entire galaxy without issue.
They are making steady progress. At least in the models department (which remids me... I have to get off my ass and finish the Deltan station).
I'm not so sure about the coding, but the trade system seems to be coming alone nicely too. That said, I do fear the game is trying to be too many things at once.
Indeed. And thats what I was talking about earlier. To me it appears to be more of a comp.sci experiment more than anything else. They are quite competent of course but the fact is, there is a big difference between a science proof-of-concept experiment and a
game.
My guess is that it won't evolve as a game anytime soon. The terrain engine - if it actually does what I've read on there in any meaningful way and with decent performance - is something that they should consider packaging and licensing out. In fact, at one point I had considered joining forces with them, but decided against it because I wasn't convinced that they actually want to make a game out of it. Going from tech to game is a major leap that most first timers tend to underestimate. I should know - I've been there.
