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My long ill-thought out diatribe thingy

May 14, 2003 Celebrim link
In truth I don't have a lot of criticisms to make (this is going to sound like a funny statement by the time you are finished reading). From what I can tell from the current state of development, the capital ships are going to be cool. I'm most impressed by the fact that the turrets have facings! Wow! I know most people are going to see that as being rather less impressive than the fact that its 740m long or the wicked animation, but to me thats the most important piece of code work since we got the ability to configure our ships in the stations. Granted, its probably a bit of a hack (or maybe even a huge hack) at this point rather than the sort of pervasive code I'd like to see, but the idea is tremendously important.

Of course, facings creates a problem in that suddenly your artist have to start thinking beyond just producing ships that look cool, but which have a form which lends itself to being a military vessel. This doesn't mean that the ships have be optimally made, because real world military vessels have other constraints beyond mounting the guns in useful places and often look pretty haphazard themselves, but at some point someone has to think where do the weapons on this ship go. The number and quality of the turret guns on the sample capital ship is I think about right for its size, but the placement may need some work and deficiencies in the model as a warship may force you to add a few 'armpit' guns for protecting rarely used but highly vulnerable arcs. The current ship model has a couple of blind spots in its field of fire. At present this problem is compounded by the fact that the vessel isn't moving, but the problem will remain and needs to be addressed. One way to look at it is because the very projections that create the blind spots overlook the ship, turrets should be placed the ends of the projections and given maximal fields of fire. The only problem with that is that the turrets will probably end up shooting their own ship from time to time and I'm not sure if you can simply ignore that or not. I'd have to see it happening and decide how silly it looked. The other option is to add a couple of 'armpit' turrets in the creases which have limited fields of fire but which protect the blind spots next to the ship.

I never really gave much thought to destroying individual turrets. Its a cool idea, but it tends to make the ship weaker than it might otherwise be. Do the turrets respawn every few minutes? If they don't you risk creating big blind spots in the field of fire which will make it easy to destroy the ship. Of course the problem is exacerbated by the current stationary nature of the target, but it won't go away.

My biggest disappointment was not that the ship didn't move, because I didn't expect you to be able to get it moving yet. My biggest disappointment was that it didn't have a primary weapons battery. My suggestion is that a ship with a given number of defensive turrets should have about one half that number of primary weapons - the current ship would get 10-12. Just because the weapon is in a semi-finished state and is visually impressive I suggest for now you stick with a modified version of the beam cannon with say 3km range, 4000 damage, cycle rate 1/2 seconds. This would allow the ship to defend itself from bombers and would set the stage for capital ship duels.

I'm both impressed with and less than impressed by the destruction animation. The first time I saw it I was strafing down the nose of the ship at a distance of about 600m. Yes, I know this is about the stupidest attack run you can make on a capital ship (They're moving around to attack position...), but I was mostly sight-seeing not fighting. Suddenly the thing blew up in my face and I've got this 200m long chunk of metal rotating, coming apart into smaller chunks, and flying towards me at more than 150m/s. That was heart in my throat moment I assure you, as I strafed around the thing and then followed it along just to watch it disintegrate. I was impressed. However, repeated viewings of the animation found a number of flaws, all of which the animator is probably painfully aware of. I was most concerned by the lack of an overlay texture on the ship from directly above it. From a god's eye view you can see the intact ship spalling off animations and then suddenly disappearing. I assume the problem exists from below the ship too but a) I don't use the 5 gate as often and b) its darker and harder to see detail down there. So a couple of suggestions regarding the animation (keeping in mind that I'm not an artist):

1) The larger animated chunks should be tracked as solid objects if they aren't already. Getting smacked by one should be equivalent to striking an asteroid at high turbo speed... repeatedly. Of course this raises long term problems, I know, such as what to do with the animation and the object embedded in it if it hits another high mass solid object like a 'roid, station, or other capital ship. I suggest having a solid object to track so that you can turn off the animation (probably concealing the event in a cloud of small explosion animations you have in stock) when it hits something big enough would be good.

2) There needs to be more buildup to the big event. A series of small explosion animations like are used for fighter destruction, prox mine detonation, and charged cannon impact rippling across the surface for a half second or so before the main separation textures occur would be very cool.

3) You need to cover the disappearance of the ship from all angles with explosion animations so that the ship never just goes 'poof', but always disappears in a cloud of hot plasma and metal fragments.

As cool as this all is, the separation texture causes another worry for me in that it represents a whole heck of a lot of work both already and more to the point in the future. Not only does it raise issues of consistency to have such large animations spalling out visually large solid objects from the capital ship, but it raises serious issues of how many ship models you are prepared to do that kind of work for. A short list of capital ships might be: corvette, frigate, cruiser, battle cruiser. A medium sized list might be: corvette, frigate, destroyer, light cruiser, cruiser, heavy cruiser, battle cruiser, dreadnought, heavy battle cruiser. A long list might be: corvette, small patrol frigate, patrol frigate, monitor, frigate, destroyer, flotilla leader, light cruiser, protected cruiser, cruiser, armored cruiser, heavy cruiser, battle cruiser, dreadnought, heavy battle cruiser, super dreadnought. And that presumes that you don't want to develop a few racial specific hulls. Something like the medium-sized list is sort of my minimum, "Hooyah, that's so much cooler than any other space shoot 'em up game on the market." Obviously the longer and more fully fleshed out your fleet is, the more burdensome having to do those extensive ship specific animations become. Unless they are a lot easier to do than I think, maybe you should just plan on developing ship specific animations for a few of the bigger more impressive ships as a kind of reward for killing them, (Yee haw, you're all clear kid...!!!) and develop more general techniques (grape like clusters of explosions) for concealing the removal of your smaller or less important ship models.

Lastly, some thoughts on where to go from here. Obviously, getting the ship moving and in an environment simple enough for the current AI to understand (not that improving the AI's path finding is a bad idea) is a big step forward. You know more about that than me, but I thought I might say something about capital ship combat decision making processes.

To a large extent, the AI that makes the 250 and 350 bots so dodgy would seem to be applicable to the AI of capital ships provided the AI can take into account the slowness of its vessels reaction time. As the ship becomes more sluggish, decisive decision making - right or wrong - becomes more important than responding to each new event as it happens. In other words, the AI must respond to an event and then treat this response as something like its long term plan, where long term means probably anywhere from a few tenths of a second to a couple of seconds depending on the severeness of the triggering condition. Right now the job of the AI captain is pretty simple, so now is a perfect time to start developing such a system.

Basically, I'd have the choose from a list of non-mutually exclusive 'orders'. The order could not be repeated or altered until completed so that you don't have the ship waggling around indecisively and actually getting nowhere. Human pilots do this already, because they don't have the AI instaneous reflexes.

For the most part, the movement of fighter level vessels and the firing of their weapons is not something the AI captain of a capital ship should bother about. For one thing, the situation will change completely before he can manage to respond to it. The one thing currently occurring that should initiate a combat maneuver is the launch of an Avalon. Whatever maneuverability the capital ships acquire should roughly correspond to the wieldiness of the Avalon. That is, even the most unmaneuverable capital ship should be able to turn 90 degrees about in under ~6 seconds (play testing will reveal the best numbers), and vacate its own space in under 10-12 seconds in the worst case. That suggests a top speed for your big ships of about 60-75 m/s, and an acceleration rate (in any direction) of no less than 4-5 m/s^2 (noting of course that your acceleration is not linear under your game model). The launch of an Avalon should cause something like the following set of triggers:

1) If the Avalon is on my broadside, turn toward the Avalon or away from it depending on which is the shorter angle.
2) If the Avalon is off my prow or stern, strafe away from the Avalon in the direction such that the Avalon moves as far as possible from my centerline.
3) If the Avalon is ahead of me, reduce forward speed if possible until it no longer has an intersection (simultaneous with #1 or #2).
4) If the Avalon is behind me, increase forward speed if possible until it no longer has an intersection (simultaneous with #1 or #2).
5) If the Avalon won't come within 245m of me on my present course, then ignore it for now.
7) (The tricky step, because it probably involves traversing a tree of suggested course changes and testing for each change how many of the Avalons will miss). If there is more than one Avalon and more than one is within 6s, act so that the greatest number possible have a path more than 10m from my position.

While fighting the capital ship is fun, I think it greatly shows the need for something like the armor I've been mentioning in order to keep just a few fighters from taking out a capital ship without that much difficulty. Several players have commented that without the ship's fighter wings, a single centurion could tediously wear away the current frigate without that much trouble. I suggest that the ship receive the first 'armor' implementation with an initial value of around 600. That's probably not enough armor for a ship of this size (a tachyon still gets through if only barely), but seeing as the ship currently has infinite energy its good enough for now.

Lastly, a1k0n mentioned elsewhere improvements in fighter wing behavior (spawning with the frigate, disembarking, etc.) which I approve of, but tactically I want to also suggest a larger patrol radius for the wings. The wings should be patroling an area between 600m and 1800m from the capital ship, rather than the close area they currently patrol, and should not get more than 2400m or so from the capital ship. Their detection radius should be about 1200m. While patroling and before locking to a target, they should be manuevering to contantly put themselves between the capital ship and detected enemy fighters. A fighter with a 'circle at 1200m behavior' detects an enemy fighter 1200m away, and so plots an intercept which puts it on a direct line between the enemy fighter and the capital ship. If its now close enough to engage the target, lock onto it until it gets more than 2400m from the capital ship and then go back to putting myself between it and the capital ship.
May 15, 2003 slappyknappy link
As always Celebrim has put a lot of thought into things. Unfortunately, I've yet to actually see the thing explode, but I like the concept of having to dodge debris afterwards. A few comments:

1) The debris should hurt those alien bots, too. And they should not respawn after the frigate is destroyed.

2) "I never really gave much thought to destroying individual turrets. Its a cool idea, but it tends to make the ship weaker than it might otherwise be. Do the turrets respawn every few minutes? If they don't you risk creating big blind spots in the field of fire which will make it easy to destroy the ship." ...I think they should NOT re-spawn. Being able to create blind spots is a legitimate strategy that should be encouraged. Smart attacks should always be encouraged over brute force. Of course, in the frigate's CURRENT state, this would be devastating to it, but once it has some AI and can move, this will simply make everything more interesting. Also, escort ships should factor in when they need to be aggressive and chase people down, and when they need to hang tight by a "weak spot" to protect it.
May 15, 2003 Cmdr. Freeman link
I think the alien AI needs to be toned down...right now they can see you from farther than you can see them (they know where to fly even if you're >3 KM out and therefore can't see them).

I also think that destroying turrets would be a good thing - ideally, the frigate would be the ship you target, but the turrets would just be subsystems (if the devs get subsystems working on the frigate, then they might be able to backport the design to fighters to make a lot of cool new stuff possible). Think of how the newer X-Wing games allowed you to press , to target things on a ISD (e.g. the shield generators or the nose [ for the famous XvT ISD nose bug])
May 15, 2003 Celkan link
nose bug? explain please as I had that game and never encountered it.
May 15, 2003 Cmdr. Freeman link
If you targeted the nose of an ISD and blew it up, you could fly INSIDE the ISD through the hole that the nose made. I did it several times.
May 15, 2003 Celkan link
o.O woah... COOL!
May 15, 2003 Suicidal Lemming link
Some of the big chinks of frigate could just be a ship in physics mode, it hits something it will just bounce off, then adventualy explode and hurt people near it.
May 16, 2003 Celkan link
hmm... that would be a good idea, seeing as the NPCs appear to fly in physics mode. It would make sense for the frig to do so also and thus blowup that way.
May 16, 2003 a1k0n link
Celebrim, by "facings" do you mean that the turrets have a limited firing angle range? That's essential for getting it to work, because shooting backwards would have looked silly and ineffective. This way turrets on different sides of the ship can take on different targets. In addition, and to answer a question, the capital ship does hurt itself if a turret manages to hit the wings. This is a side-effect of the fact that team 0 (robots) gets hurt by friendly fire.

Another point raised was whether the capital ship explosion pieces are solid objects. They are. You'll bounce off of them and take damage if one hits you, and so will the bots. I concur that the wingmen shouldn't respawn while the frigate is dead. (An amendment to this: the large chunks silently "explode" into smaller ones eventually. These smaller chunks are, um, etheral objects which you can fly through.)

Also, I had intended for the capital ship to command the fighters on an above-tactical level, but I didn't get around to it. The fighters that are there are the same as they are in 17 and 18, obviously, but only because I was having problems with the ones that were supposed to be there. An interesting possible strategy arising from this is for a bot to "take a bullet" for the frigate in the situation where multiple avalons are incoming.
May 16, 2003 Suicidal Lemming link
a1k0n, can you make the bots scream kamikaze if they do do that?
May 16, 2003 Celebrim link
"Another point raised was whether the capital ship explosion pieces are solid objects. They are."

Excellent.

I don't know what the underlying code is for determining the turret firing arcs but I can only hope that it is based on what the turret can 'see' from its position - or at the least that you are planning to take the code there. My biggest gripe against this game is that nothing actually blocks los. Objects hidden behind other things appear to be rendered (as best as I can tell), and objects hidden by other things are always visible (through radar and 'u'). So the fact that you were beginning to deal with things that ideally need to have thier behavior modified by los issues is somewhat encouraging to me.

I'm looking for to seeing the next steps. Tactical coordination of the efforts of the fighter wings would be really cool if you could pull it off.

May 17, 2003 Cmdr. Freeman link
Add a shockwave.

If you /explode in someone's face now, your fighter lets off a mini-shockwave and does damage to them, so the frigate should logically have the same thing, but about 200 times as large. If you think about it, there's got to be one h*ll of a reactor onboard the frigate and when the ship goes, it ought to go *boom* big time, vaporizing everything within about 1-1.5 KM of the frigate's center.

Just scale the Avalon's wave up.

Besides, it would look cool if a chunk of the frigate went flying off into space propelled by a big-@$$ shockwave. =P


One more note: When will the frigate itself be targetable?
May 17, 2003 Suicidal Lemming link
How to target a frigate, point at it, hit g or z, look at the huge red box, rinse and repeat until you see the huge red box.
May 17, 2003 roguelazer link
Point at the little cube in the center of the frigate when within 3km and pressing g for best results. It is the only part both without a turret and closest to the center. my 2.001c