Really? You find a timer less eye-roll-inducing than yet another minigame?
The roll of the eyes was for the gear changing the length of the timer. Timers are pretty standard fare, but don’t constitute entertainment in and of themselves. The rampant reliance on gear to decide so much nauseates me, resulting in what Kichae once called something like The Battle of the Hangar, because you win or lose by configuring your gear back at base, not by what you do in the field.
In this situation, in order to create real entertainment, there would be an engineering aspect to the game. This particular skill test would be one of many engineering tasks throughout the game, keeping busy those players who are interested in engineering (or tinkering with stuff, whatever). The more general pattern is that players improve systems that are, by default, automated. In this case, the crew can wait for the warp drive to restart, or somebody who is good at engineering can tackle it. That person would also address combat repairs, which could get really interesting if they have lots of leeway in innovating jury rigged solutions.
Just as I would want the game’s combat system to allow for some creativity by combat commanders, I would want the engineering system to allow for some creativity by its players. A minigame doesn’t really do justice to what I’m after.
This is primarily for an MMO, of course, but it can be applied to a degree in smaller-scale games.
Not directly related to the main topic, still
Having “minigames” for the sake of dodging a simple timer is not something that ends well IMO. It just becomes a repetitive thing where it’s essentially still a timer, except now you have to do the countdown manually. (Not to mention the annoying feeling of “I could be doing this faster” if you are not willing to play the minigame) I’d rather have a battle of the hangars situation instead of some flat minigame. If something similar is to be implemented, it should take time to learn how to use it (maybe even hide the rules, so people have to experiment and figure out how they can get better results).
I don’t want to be the one to stifle a good discussion. Feel free to follow the ideas through, as long as they are centred around flight mechanics!
Tracking, for one. I was thinking along lines very similar to what JB’s since mentioned.
Other ideas I have floating around in my head are more related to the idea of the warp frequency being a slider; there are other warp sliders one could imagine: Warp field radius, warp field strength, things like that. Given a finite amount of energy to the warp engines, different combinations of field radius, field strength, and field gobbilygook could result in higher warp speeds, or making your warp field more difficult to merge with, etc.
2 Likes
I would be very leery of putting in controls that alter the basic operation of warp drives. Movement speeds, disruption ranges, etc Those things constitute the game’s movement system. I was going to offer that improving performance could be implemented at a heavy cost of side-effects, but I don’t even like doing that much.
In my opinion, from a design standpoint, it’s much safer to explore ways that the warp drive can affect other aspects of gameplay. For example:
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Let players play with the warp frequency to alter how sensors work when applied to them. The player might choose to trigger a fog-bank type effect on a particular sensor band or bands, at a cost of drive performance. The player can’t see out of the fog bank on those bands, but nobody can see through the center of it either. This is an expansion of the missile scenario. Ships could engaging in blocking (i.e. jamming) activity. Imagine deploying a “mine field” of such fog generators, creating an interplanetary fog bank. I suspect that such things should probably also exist naturally, when certain conditions are right in a procedural star system. Players would then be faced with the question, “Is that a natural fog bank or is someone hiding something?”
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Let players play with the field to increase heat generation for any ship that interacts with their warp field. The closer to the center of the field, the more heating. Because the player’s ship is at the center of the effect, it hits him hardest. If he’s got good heat management gear or simply doesn’t generate much heat anyway, he’ll be fine.
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I can’t remember any other parameters from our old discussions. We talked about lots of systems, and a warp field becomes a great way to alter the environment in which those systems operate. In a space game that’s invaluable as a means of turning all that empty space into a more complex environment. I think there’s a lot of gameplay mileage to your idea of fiddling with the warp field when applied to stuff that isn’t about movement.
1 Like
In terms of actual gameplay, I am wary of this idea. It strikes me that the average player would see this simply as irritating, arbitrary restrictions on where he/she can fly successfully with their current equipment. But then, I’m not convinced by the whole heat management idea as a whole anyway.
Back to flight mechanics, I do agree the warp system with interdiction is one of the best ways we (as a community, and you personally JB) managed to come up with. How would it work with fleets though? Centred around the largest ship? The warp field gets more diluted the more ships that are there, so ending up with a collective barycentre, if you will?
Coded frequencies? Each player could ‘tune’ their warp drive to the same frequency so it wouldn’t interfere with other ships in their fleet. Or just a basic ‘join fleet’ UI feature that does this automatically.
Would make for interesting drama if anyone could drop their whole fleet out of warp at any time. Betrayals and all that.
I’m not convinced about manually changeable frequencies (or whatever). It seems unnecessarily complicated and ripe for exploitation. Could someone being chased constantly change frequency and make themselves nearly impossible to pursue because the following ship can’t synchronise? Sounds like a minigame that isn’t really needed.
I do, however, like the automatic warp interference concept that JB came up with on the testbed program. But I’m still curious as to how this works with many ships. I never got to test that. And how well would it work in 3D space?
I think frequencies works OK for tracking, since your ship’s sensor suite has the ability to track multiple bands of frequency (your goal would be to get your ship to emit in one of the bands where your enemy’s sensors are relatively weak (but not necessarily 0), reducing the detected signal strength). This is OK for the homing missile scenario if your ship also emits over a narrow band of frequencies (so that the tracker doesn’t need to be looking for an exact match), and it takes time for your ship’s frequency to change). Time + bandwidth = something possibly worth exploring.
Multiple ships flying together would fly in the direction of the fleet average, with the average weighted by warp field strength. Obviously, larger ships would have stronger warp fields, so they will dominate this. In a fleet with a couple of large ships, if one large ship broke formation and pulled away, this would actually affect the flight paths of the rest of the fleet. I think this would be a neat little immersion element, so long as the game auto-corrected everyone else’s flight path for them (when flying billions of km, small deviations can throw you way off course, of course; there’s no reason to burden people with this, but imagine flying along when when one of the large ships in your fleet breaks away to the right. You see the visual indicators of travel also skew to the right momentarily, and then sway back again automatically. It gives the ships, especially the larger ones, the illusion of weight).
Just so folks know, the idea of warp disruption is not mine. I contributed to the discussions in the old forums and ironed out enough details to build my interpretation in the prototype, but other people thought up the basics.
It would work just fine with many ships. If they are within each other’s full warp disruption, you’re left with an ICP arena that moves around the star system. If there are any celestial bodies in range of full warp disruption (e.g. a moon, asteroid or ring), then it’s literally an ICP arena because the celestial body pins down the arena. If a ship isn’t within full disruption, then it’s either approaching or departing an arena. I guess you’d have to experience it to realize how it works.
Others were also concerned about 3D intercepts. I think it would be a challenge, and I think that’s exactly what’s needed in a full-scale space game. It establishes that space is mind-numbingly large. I can imagine that some interception aids would be either helpful or downright essential, but just keeping the target at the same point on your screen would suffice as a basic technique.
Providing a fully-automated interception system would be appropriate for a game that tried to provide as broad an appeal as possible. That is, with as few demands on player skill as possible; a World of Warcraft type game. An I-Novae engine is overkill for such a game. Just go with No Man’s Sky, where planets seem to be separated by a few thousand miles.
A hybrid would assume that players would have access to an automated intercept system for intercepting celestial bodies, but that ship-to-ship intercepts would be manual. This would allow a kind of EVE Online experience to novices (where everything happens near celestial bodies), but provide varying degrees of challenge to the rest of the players.
[quote=“Kichae, post:35, topic:513, full:true”]
Multiple ships flying together would fly in the direction of the fleet average, with the average weighted by warp field strength.[/quote]
Right. In the prototype, ship mass determined warp field size. The mass of celestial bodies did as well, but it was on a different scale as planets lack a warp drive.
[quote=“Kichae, post:35, topic:513, full:true”]
In a fleet with a couple of large ships, if one large ship broke formation and pulled away, this would actually affect the flight paths of the rest of the fleet.[/quote]
Right. In the prototype, it could be quite pronounced. Capitals were such lumbering beasts that separations could take a couple minutes if I recall correctly. (A separation is going from full warp disruption to no disruption)
[quote=“Kichae, post:35, topic:513, full:true”]
I think this would be a neat little immersion element, so long as the game auto-corrected everyone else’s flight path for them (when flying billions of km, small deviations can throw you way off course, of course; there’s no reason to burden people with this, but imagine flying along when when one of the large ships in your fleet breaks away to the right. You see the visual indicators of travel also skew to the right momentarily, and then sway back again automatically.[/quote]
Ships will need to pay attention to a departure like that for another reason. Fleets are like globs of soft taffy with ships stuck in it; if you pull a big ship out and there are small ships nearby, they’ll be pulled out with it. So unless you want to depart with a large ship, get away from it when it is leaving. Contrariwise, if you want to go with it, fly over to it.
The prototype lacked the automatic course correction feature. If a ship comprising a significant portion of a fleet’s mass started to move, the rest of the fleet felt significant effect. At the local level it just looked like the ship left. But at the star system level, the fleet was dragged off course for a while. For example, if it was traveling on course 135, then while the ship was in the early stages of its departure it would swing to 150, then slowly return to 135 as the departing ship got farther away.
That illusion could be reinforced by having a variety of effects, both visual and audial, that result from interacting with large warp fields. Perhaps groaning and creaking from a ship’s structure. Perhaps some light static on sensors during transitions in and out of large fields, etc. The goal is to say that this is a big freaking ship and the forces involved are huge.
2 Likes
The other appealing factor about this is - as Kichae mentioned - giving capital ships some real presence on the battlefield. We all know a sense of scale can be almost impossible to achieve with a space game because of very few reference points. However, if a capital ship’s presence is felt as much as seen, it kind of eliminates that problem.
That does also seem to lead onto thinking about comparative warp field and thruster strengths (going back round to the beginning of this discussion maybe? 
). It stands to reason that, as a general rule of thumb, bigger ships would have more powerful warp drives. Therefore, they would create a wider area of disruption and possibly have different flight characteristics.
In the scenario where one large ship pulls away from a fleet and takes fighters with it, those fighters need to be capable of flying back to the fleet. So their ability to thrust away from the departing battleship must be able to counteract this effect. Of course, it would be dependent on how long they waited.
So how might we see an interaction between warp fields (which I understand could be mainly used for interplanetary travel) and conventional thrusters (local manoeuvring)?
Could they be treated as one hybrid system working together (probably more likely for a simpler game), or separate systems that need to be managed independently?
In my opinion both drives should be separated and not affect each other. Warp Fields only affects the warp drive.
So when flying around the system you would have two relative speeds. The warp drive speed and the thruster speed. This would allow for all kinds of movements inside a moving warp field without restricting interplanetary travel.
The thruster speed could be displayed relative to the centre of the solar systems, if they are really fancy the barycentre.
Problem with that is that it complicates movement. I’d like to hear how the “combined propulsion” team thinks they can achieve free movement inside a moving warp sphere even when just alone … or does there always need to be a bigger ship that always points towards the destination of the warp bubble, Isn’t that restricting the biggest part of the fleet in manoeuvring inside a battle?
The faster they react, the less time they need to travel between the two capital ships.
Thinking about that now though. It highly depends how exactly combining or mutually affecting the warp spheres will be practically coded and how exactly they behave.
Will they combine? In that case smaller ships need to actively rearange as the other capital ship fly outwards the combined bubble until the bubble starts to split. This includes all ships except for the other capital. The movement of the departing capital ship will move the center of the warp sphere and thus all the other ships relative to it. Ships that are evenly arranged between the two capitals will be evenly “stretched out” and have to actively fly back to their resposive command ships.
Edit: I had onether paragraph starting like: “Or will they mutually affect each other?” and then realized that it would look exactly the same as the previous paragraph.
This could be confusing and exploitable in a battle. Allowing big ships to it could allow for crazy maneuvers, like tanking ships “stealing” whole parts of enemy fleets and pulling them into a trap.
One solution would be to have a big “No effect zone” close to each warp bubble. But how would the border feel like and what would happen if in case of departing capital ships the combined center of both will be totally empty of ships … oh … I think now I start to grasp the concept. Though more questions arise. When do they start to combine? Will it be aprubt or more like a gradual movement? If they start to combine won’t fleet ships suddenly be able to move much faster relative to each other because they now fly parallel but not any more in the centre of the warp bubble?
Either in case of a combined system or a separations of warp and thruster drive: Both throw up questions.
You say that like this:
and
are problems to be solved, instead of 100% pure awesome sauce. What you’re describing are large scale fleet tactics that utilize the artificial and dynamic geography the warp fields impose on space. This is the kind of thing that makes generals (or admirals, I guess) a thing.
[quote=“Sab1e, post:37, topic:513”]
In the scenario where one large ship pulls away from a fleet and takes fighters with it, those fighters need to be capable of flying back to the fleet. So their ability to thrust away from the departing battleship must be able to counteract this effect. Of course, it would be dependent on how long they waited.[/quote]
In the prototype, arenas were dynamic, but it was impractical for a ship to sneak in and steal ships that don’t want to be stolen from an arena. Instead, it was much more likely that ships that want to stay with a larger ship could do so in a natural way.
Here’s how the prototype worked arenas:
A ship has an area of full disruption (AFD) around it. A fighter’s AFD radius is about 0.6km and a battleship’s is perhaps 3km. If one ship enters the AFD of another ship, then the two ships are considered linked. They experience newtonian relative motion. Note that even though the fighter enters the AFD of the battleship long before the battleship enters the AFD of the fighter, they are both linked.
The linking of AFDs chains, producing an ICP-style arena. Imagine three linked fighters as they approach a battleship (i.e. they are within 0.6km of each other). As soon as the first fighter enters the battleship’s AFD, all three fighters are linked into an arena with the battleship. If a frigate comes in and enters the set of linked AFDs on the opposite side, then the frigate is linked in and the arena is extended to include the frigate and its AFD. In the prototype, arenas were a collection of overlapping circles. In a 3D version, it would be a set of overlapping bubbles. The bubbles are rigid; they never stretch.
Now assume that a battleship is trying to wedge itself into a fight so it can drag ships away. That only works if the battleship can somehow manage to ensure that it is their point of attachment to the rest of the arena. If it is, and the battleship disconnects from the rest of the fight, then the arena spontaneously splits into two (the original and the one with the battleship and whatever ships were linked to it) and the battleship can start to carry away the ships linked to it.
However, if there are other ships’ AFDs linking those ships to the overall arena then the battleship cannot drag any ships away; those other ships’ AFDs keep them attached and the battleship just flies out of the arena. Also, a battleship is not a nimble ship. That means that smaller ships can just fly past it to touch one of the AFDs of the original arena and get linked to it again.
What can a smaller, more nimble ship do? Well, it will be more able to move around, but it will have a smaller AFD radius and a reduced ability to actually move anyone anywhere. A fighter might magically be able to work itself into the AFD structure such that it is the link between a battleship and a larger arena, but the fighter can’t move the battleship anywhere.
The prototype used a single system for both, and I thought it worked very well. The reason that it worked well is that the system remains fundamentally newtonian at all scales. It’s simply that the turning radius of a ship in interstellar space is typically measured in AU instead of km.
There was a restriction in the system where ships cannot move faster than 3km/s relative to an arena’s ‘rest velocity’. That restriction is very intentional and desirable for reasons that I spent a lot of time explaining in the old forums. The short form is that allowing players to spend lots of time accelerating to higher velocities interferes with the players’ ability to interact once they get near each other.
An extreme case is one where you and I have spent two minutes accelerating our ships. Now we’ve accumulated some velocity. That velocity is either low, which means that we won’t be able to maneuver when we reach each other , or it’s high, which means that we’ll just flash past each other. What we’re looking for is situation where ships take a modest amount of time to get from zero to maximum velocity, and where that maximum velocity works for the sizes of the ships.
In the prototype, fighters took 30 seconds to get from zero to max velocity. Battleships took 5 minutes or so (useful only for long interplanetary runs). The maximum velocity of 3km/s meant that ships would pass each other at no more than 6km/s, and that’s a pretty extreme scenario that really doesn’t allow the ships to do anything. At that speed, a fighter would have about one second to snap off shots at the battleship while they were in the same arena. Assuming the fighter didn’t just smack into the battleship.
So the moral of the story is that giving players lots of time to accelerate to high relative velocities inhibits their ability to interact.
The only exception to that is that players can still fire missiles at arbitrary ranges and relative velocities. So if you want players to engage each other in those conditions, missiles are the way to go. In fact, for interplanetary ranges, warp missiles were our solution in the old forums. In those cases, ships have huge relative velocities and are at colossal ranges, even when using the prototype’s warp system.
So how exactly does your (the one in the prototype) differentiate between warp speed and relative speed?
If it is, as you say, a combined system?
If it is a combined system accelerating in one direction with my thrusters in deep space would result not only my “thruster speed” to increase but also my warp speed. I guess that it is solved totally differently and those terms don’t apply anyway.
So by capping the relative speed you also capped the warp speed right? As warp speed is pretty much a multiplier of you “thruster speed” (can remember some from the old forums).
So at full speed, after those 30 seconds whatever, I will be at max speed of 3km/s + 3km/s * warpMulFunction.
You do the same from across the system → aim at each other at max speed → as we get closer our warp fields merge and our warp speeds slowly decrease to zero → we pass each other with a relative velocity 6km/s.
It is a solution. Not a big fan of the speed cap but I can remember your argumentation from the old forums and that’s ok.
The warp combination solution sound in itself like a typical programmer solution. As I understood it, it is the timing and direction of the arriving ships that creates the tree. So those “warp forces” aren’t transferred trough the “warp field/tree” based on the distances between the ships that is present when the force arise but when the ships first joined together? What happens when the fleet rearranges? Does the tree update every now and then?
Or does no problem arise from this architecture and it is only in my head? Probably got the concept wrong.
Of course you are right and as there will also be Battlescapes near planets where that effect isn’t as pronounced.
Not saying that I wouldn’t love it. I just want to preserve maximal variety. And that includes that certain fleet maneuvers work in certain environments and in others they don’t. 
As a physicist, rather than a developer, the idea of strongly defined spheres of influence really irks me. I realize they’re probably necessary for technical reasons, but still. It doesn’t mesh with my vision of interacting warp fields.
The way I visualize these things is very similar to the elastic sheet analogy for gravity demonstration in general relativity. In other words, the magnitude of the impact of the interacting fields follows an inverse-n relationship, and the amount of control the external field has on your ship given by the slope of the “well”. Deep, compact wells would be more difficult to escape, but once you’ve managed to flee the relatively narrow interaction radius, you’re gone. Broad wells with shallow slopes allow for greater freedom of movement within them, but the fields remain interacting over a much larger radius.
This would allow ships that want to maintain their entourage without much fuss to deepen their wells, strengthening their hold on ships that are very nearby, at the cost of their hold on more distant vessels. They would still have to escape whichever well they’re currently situated in (it’s not like this is a free pass to run away from a battle or anything), but they’d be dragging fewer members of the fleet away with them.
Unfortunately, I fear the calculations involved in this may make it unworkable. As I’ve just described it, at least, it’s an N-body force problem with variable exponents. Interesting and elegant (IMHO), but it rapidly explodes as you bring more ships into the picture.
[quote=“Lomsor, post:41, topic:513”]
So how exactly does your (the one in the prototype) differentiate between warp speed and relative speed?
If it is, as you say, a combined system?[/quote]
It’s combined, so there isn’t a difference. You have one engine power setting. At zero power you move at zero speed. At maximum power you move at maximum speed. Those speeds are expressed relative to the current frame of reference and are scaled back by warp disruption.
The simplest treatment of that is a ship sitting in the middle of nowhere, its warp drive completely undisrupted. Its frame of reference is the star system itself, and without any warp disruption, zero power leaves the ship stationary in space while maximum power lets it run around at 0.1AU/s.
In contrast, when you’re at a planet’s surface at zero power, you just sit there, unmoving relative to the planet. At full power, you move at 3km/s relative to the planet. The planet serves as the ship’s frame of reference, and the power setting controls how fast the ship moves in that frame of reference. But the planet itself is moving through space. So the frame of reference is moving.
Now apply that pattern to an arena. The arena is the frame of reference. If you’re at zero power, you don’t move relative to the arena. If you accelerate to full power, you move at 3km/s relative to the arena. Well, how does an arena itself move? It moves according to the power settings of the warp drives of the ships that define the arena. So as a bunch of ships are flying around in an arena at between zero and 3km/s, their warp drives are collectively pushing the arena around in space at between zero and 0.1AU/s.
So how does an arena get pushed around in space? Consider a fleet that is moving along in the middle of nowhere. All the big ships are at half power and headed in the same direction. Within the arena, they’re moving at 1.5km/s. The arena itself is being pushed along at 0.05AU/s because all the ships are trying to go in the same direction at half power - and nothing is disrupting their drives. If half the mass of ships in the arena were trying to go one way and half the other, then half the ships would be going 1.5km/s in one direction within the arena and half would be going 1.5km/s in the other direction. The arena itself would be sitting pretty still in space because the weighted average of everyone’s speed is almost zero (the sum of their velocity vectors is almost zero length).
The penultimate example would be an arena near a planet. The warp drives of the ships are partly disrupted by the planet. This means that the ships are still running around at between zero and 3km/s relative to the arena, but the arena is now slowing down as the ships approach the planet. If the planet is disrupting the drives of the ships by 99%, then the arena is moving at between zero and 0.001AU/s (150,000 km/s). The planet’s velocity also becomes a part of the arena’s velocity, but it’s a trivial component. By the time the arena of ships reaches the 10km mark above the planet, everything has reverted to a newtonian environment. (All non-ships have a 10km radius ADF around them)
[quote=“Lomsor, post:41, topic:513”]
So by capping the relative speed you also capped the warp speed right?[/quote]
Yes. A warp drive at full power that is not disrupted moves the ship at 0.1AU/s.
[quote=“Lomsor, post:41, topic:513”]
You do the same from across the system → aim at each other at max speed → as we get closer our warp fields merge and our warp speeds slowly decrease to zero → we pass each other with a relative velocity 6km/s.[/quote]
Essentially, yes.
[quote=“Lomsor, post:41, topic:513”]
Or does no problem arise from this architecture and it is only in my head? Probably got the concept wrong.[/quote]
There’s no problem. An arena is simply the union of overlapping AFDs - so long as the overlap includes the ship itself. In the following picture, each circle is a ship’s AFD. The ships are not depicted, but they’re dead center of each circle. The blue set of circles is one arena, and the green set is another circle. So long as the center of a circle overlaps another circle, they are part of the same arena. Note that none of the green circles overlap the center of a blue circle and vice versa.
Note that the ships in the two arenas are still heavily disrupting each other, so the ships in the blue area and the green area will see little difference from the purely-newtonian environment found within a single arena, but their shots cannot reach each other. They’re out of range of conventional weaponry. If the green and blue arenas drift further apart, their relative velocities will gradually grow, and in time the ships in the blue arena would see a green task force as mere dots, zipping off into the distance.
The extreme example of that is two fleets flying well apart from each other, out of warp disruption range. If they’re not disrupting each other at all, they can fly around each other at 0.2AU/s relative (each operating at a maximum speed of 0.1AU/s). Again, they’d only see each other as dots.
[quote=“Kichae, post:42, topic:513, full:true”]
The way I visualize these things is very similar to the elastic sheet analogy for gravity demonstration in general relativity. In other words, the magnitude of the impact of the interacting fields follows an inverse-n relationship, and the amount of control the external field has on your ship given by the slope of the “well”.[/quote]
That’s broadly the way it works. The disruption effect feathers out from the hard edge of the AFDs to about 1 AU. I don’t recall the actual distances. The larger the ship, the larger the AFD and the larger the disruption range. The larger the disruption range, the easier it is to intercept an object.
The hard-edged AFDs constitute the interaction environment that makes up the newtonian arena. Within it, the player experiences ICP gameplay. Move a little outside of the arena and you can’t interact directly with ships in the arena (e.g. shoot at them), but you can move a bit faster, allowing you the opportunity to zoom around to the other side of the arena more quickly than if you drove through the middle. That’s assuming that the configuration and topology of the arena stays the same. You might find yourself flung far from the arena because what you were trying to skirt around moved away from you, or the arena split into two.
[quote=“Kichae, post:42, topic:513, full:true”]
This would allow ships that want to maintain their entourage without much fuss to deepen their wells, strengthening their hold on ships that are very nearby, at the cost of their hold on more distant vessels. They would still have to escape whichever well they’re currently situated in (it’s not like this is a free pass to run away from a battle or anything), but they’d be dragging fewer members of the fleet away with them.[/quote]
I like that, and it is certainly something the prototype could have done. I would only allow players to pull in the disruption field from some balanced maximum, not push it out arbitrarily. That’s because of the opportunity that hugely-expanded warp fields present for griefers.
Pulling in my field says “I don’t want to interact with others who don’t want to interact”. If I pull it in as far as possible, my fleet can stay with me because we’re in the same arena. If someone wants to leave the fleet, they’re gone as soon as they can get out of the arena (so long as everyone in the fleet has pulled in his disruption field). If someone wants to join the fleet, they just approach the fleet like normal because their own warp drive will give them the disruption that they need for the intercept. Once in, the fleet commander would remind them to pull in their field so that the fleet doesn’t accidentally get dragged around by anything. Like a nearby friendly task force.
I’d argue that adjusting a field takes time otherwise griefers would be yanking people’s chains all over the place.
That would mean that if I’m in one of those zero-radius fleets and accidentally drive out of the arena, I’ll have to wait as my warp field expands slowly, allowing me to intercept the fleet again.
[quote=“Kichae, post:42, topic:513, full:true”]
Unfortunately, I fear the calculations involved in this may make it unworkable. As I’ve just described it, at least, it’s an N-body force problem with variable exponents. Interesting and elegant (IMHO), but it rapidly explodes as you bring more ships into the picture.[/quote]
The algorithms involved definitely have O(n^2) elements to them, but they tend to have simple optimizations. I have no idea if the prototype code would survive contact with 100 v 100 fleets. Heck, the networking code that I threw together could only handle 32 connections - and there was no optimization of the network traffic. It was hugely wasteful of bandwidth.
I’d hate to lose the features of this movement system because it really does work well. I did some stress testing with NPCs, but never formed them into large fleets. As I recall, just having 50 NPCs flying around independently didn’t place an appreciable load on the CPU. And they had to be checked on every simulation step to see if they were in the same arena.
Having automated intercepts would nauseate me, particularly if encounters stopped dead in space. It makes no sense to me to build a seamless full-scale star system and then implement EVE Online’s gameplay.
Sounds like we’re actually on the same page, which is impressive considering my visceral dislike for the “always on” system of yours when you first introduced it!
That’s exactly how I envisioned it, yes.
Oh, absolutely! Field propagation is a thing in all field theories. Mind you, many of them propagate at the speed of light, but there’s no reason a warp field has to, especially in the vicinity of other warp fields.
Other viable variable in all of this are energy and visibility. If energy balance is a thing in game, the energy utilized by the warp engines could be split between field strength (depth) and field radius. Strong, compact fields would show up on censors as a well defined and easily targeted point, while weak, diffuse fields could show up on scanners as a region up to the edge of the feathered region (so, in your prototype, 1AU). Maybe larger, and with a poorly defined shape, so that the emitter doesn’t have to be at the centre of the detected field. In the one case, you get a strong warp field able to hold on tightly to nearby ships, with the ability to drag them all along without regard for any kind of interference from those ships warp fields (an interesting thing to explore might be that fleets are slower than any of the component ships, due to warp interference; this makes scouting parties a truly viable and valuable thing) – in other words, they can reach their theoretical maximum warp values, instead of suffering a fleet penalty, in exchange for more energy – but anyone looking for you can find you from almost anywhere in the system. In the other case, they still know that you’re in the system, but it’s not entirely clear where in the system you are.
So, if rerouting power takes time (and it’s been previously proposed that it should, and I agree), and changing the geometry of your warp field also takes time, I think there’s a suitable penalty to make things interesting rather than exploitative.
Well, that’s actually kind of shockingly reassuring. Fingers crossed, then!