That just sounds cheap … I can remember one or two games I played that done this and there always was that unpleasant feeling as if someone just switched off my screen … what do you imagine going on in there? Could be anything.
I wouldn’t restrict it to this. Why not make it exciting? Warp and jump effects hopefully will be somewhat exciting.
There already is technomagic in the game.
For example. Ship have warp and jump drives. A carrier can maybe, believably, carry 20 ships internally. Maybe a server owner wants carriers to stay around longer and sets the carrier supply so hundreds of ships could be launched from one carrier without resupply. How that? They are jumped into the carrier with point to point jump drives/projectors/portals. Those are big and require huge amounts of energy … yada … yada.
( Ripline or what it was called)
But to go a bit in your direction. Going the industrial route … elevator, E:D done it, assembled on pad by robots or humans, to complex/no time to implement … and I’m out of ideas. Everything else is SciFi. Nanobots, Construction"GEL", Multidimensional Storage, 3D Printed (Positive/Negative) …
This is not so far fetched, as we apparently live in a virtual simulation and the speed of light limit is only due to the restraint of processing power.
Quantum entanglement helps towards proving this, so warp jump me through portal baby! uhm, I mean captain, commander?
Ripcord by itself would be a bit strange IMHO, but on the old forums I had the idea (to explain away many difficulties about crews) that a ship is laced with internal transfer cables - Another World-style “teleporters” that transfer things at extreme speed with a flash of energy, but actually make them cross physical conduits (instead of Star Trek magical teleportation).
So yeah, this could be used to drop ships in hangars…
Also I don’t see how quantum entanglement helps with teleportation.
Though it happens that quantum (state) teleportation apparently solves the Ship of Thesesus (is it still the same object/person if all the components have been replaced?) problem, the kill/create new problem and the multiplication problem of Star Trek teleportation: you cannot actually copy a full quantum state, so even if you “forget” to disintegrate the Kirk that is beamed out, either the quantum state is destructively copied (aka teleported) to the new Kirk and you end up with a dead Kirk body on departure, or you don’t and you end up with a dead Kirk on arrival. In both cases, you can have only up to one Kirk alive at any time.
While this may be a problem for a few biometric systems, it may also be a boon for reserves of organ self-transplants, depending on how damaging it is at the cellular level to scramble the quantum state (I wouldn’t be on the transplant trial run, though).
Or the transfer doesn’t work and you end up with two dead Kirk and an episode with time travel to prevent the accident to happen in the first place.
I think they’ll be able to carry more than that… I haven’t tested it, but it’s 3x longer than the Destroyer is, and substantially larger overall. I’ll mock up some configurations at some point, but we’re still working on the capital ship designs (the destroyer being furthest along)
[quote=“ThornEel, post:20, topic:5711”] from Space Jay
This is not so far fetched, as we apparently live in a virtual simulation and the speed of light limit is only due to the restraint of processing power.
[/quote]
That isn’t religion. There is/was someone looking into weather we are a program (somewhat like the movie 13th floor)
Last I recall he was looking for an error in space and didn’t find it.
Yeah I though I would be off. But who knows about internals …
Anyway it was an argument to decouple believability of internal space from “that number of ships appearing out of that other ship”.
Although. Nobody really cared just a few years ago. There are a multitude of games where ships just appear … infinite amounts too.
3D printing!
If you don’t want the ships to just “appear”, yes you could add some sparkle or something. Also, what if your ship was printed?
Wouldn’t have to be slow. Just have 3D printing sparkle-magic move across the hangar and “print” the ship model as it goes. I imagine this would be pretty simple to do, as opposed to modelling and animating an elevator launch system.
It would be acceptable as an appearance for spawning, plus could even be used for spawning balance: Printing could take longer on, say, carriers with limited resources and be quicker on major space stations near your teams supply chain. Might encourage people to think about where they respawn rather than just hitting the “Make Me Live Again Quickly” button and racing back to the fight.
Come to think of it, perhaps the speed carriers print also depends on their distance from the teams resource supplies…
Eve Valkyrie has this concept that your mind is projected into a robot pilot.
If your ship blows up, you just get re-projected, matrix-like, into the next remotely controlled robot-pilot and ship, as ships are printed/manufactured on the fly, so to speak.
This is a big immersion breaker in shooters for me, that you always respawn and live. Especially in an mmo, WoW had a nice solution with the graveyard, and the fact that it is fantasy genre.
The pilot pilots robot avatar really is a clever solution to this, but it kinda makes dying less dramatic, and also the ship is just a throwaway clone without any history.
Some time ago I posted my own ideas for a infinity mmo concept. My solution is that a ship never explodes, but instead when it is close to beeing destroyed it is teleported back into the carrier and repaired and ready to go again. You can read it here if anybody likes:
We’ve had this discussion before. If ships are remotely controlled they wouldn’t have robot pilots or cockpits and INS like the aesthetic of having cockpits.
Ships popping into existence is absolutely fine for Alpha. If there is spare time in Beta, then some sparkles can be added, or individual hangars behind doors.
Concerning respawns and the lore thereof, perhaps a more brutal approach could work. When you die, that character is dead. However, the game “resets” you to role play as a totally different pilot who was waiting for an available ship on the carrier.
Or permadeath. Once you die, you ded. Which could make for an interesting variation on game play.
Jokes aside, I wouldn’t be too concerned about it. It’s an arena shooter and everybody is going to die a lot, so there’s going to be magic/convenient tech involved.
Concerning ships respawning, how about hanger doors?
This could work if hangar doors require significantly less work than elevators, which is not a given, though.
We had this discussion about teleporting back the pilot, under the name of “Ripcord”. I’ve always thought that it was an elegant solution that neatly solved the problem, and only needs some special effect.
That discussion was in the context of the MMO.
Battlescape isn’t an MMO and really doesn’t need any lore behind the respawn mechanic IMO.
No one questions that players respawn and simply pop into existence in most AAA FPS. Players typically don’t hang around the spawn area and therefore don’t witness other players spawning.
Simply having the spawn points out of sight of the repair & rearm landing pads would be sufficient.
INS, please focus on the core gameplay requirements! Don’t try decorating the cake until you’ve baked it.
Last I heard the answer to that was no. IIRC there were three (?) reasons, the first and primary is that there were networking issues. Second, it wouldn’t add a lot to gameplay. Third, to deliver a uniform experience. I’m not sure on the last one, but I’m fairly certain that the first two were the biggest issues.
It would be cool to have a fully functional solar system, but for a game session that only lasts a few weeks, the orbits wouldn’t change that much. As for planet rotation, you would have to play very long sessions in order to see any difference, unless you purposely fought only in sunrises/sunsets.
I just saw that you asked about this last year. For some reason nobody started talking about it back then.
In short this won’t be possible without further work on the netcode. I-Novae hinted that it would be unresponsible of them to invest more into it given that they only reached minimum funding.
Here’s a discussion that looks for compromises. Flavien and Keith hinted that some of those might be implemented in the future:
I can remember one or two games I played that done this and there always was that unpleasant feeling as if someone just switched off my screen … what do you imagine going on in there? Could be anything.
Ripline or what it was called)
