Battlescape Solar System & You: A Tale of Orbital Mechanics

Battlescape
21

I think the real problem lies in the fact that the networking techniques were designed for stationary environments with slow-moving characters. In a Battlescape game with moving space stations, you’d effectively get fast moving environments with fast-moving characters. If you made planets and stations into “characters” that were updated like ships, then you’d just have a lot of fast moving characters all dancing around each other.

The basic problem was brought up in the networking discussion a few updates back. In essence, you see other ships a short time in the past. Perhaps 1/10th of a second. If two ships are just racing around at high speeds shooting at each other, the server can probably mask the problem. Things are pretty hectic and you won’t notice the deviations. The server sorts out the delay and does the hit detection, etc.

But when you’ve got two ships that think they’re flying a few dozen m/s relative to a space station, it gets a bit tougher to mask. The ships are actually moving at 5km/s, meaning that 1/10th of a second delay puts their positions 500m in the past. But the players are thinking in terms of a few dozen m/s, so that large position error becomes a serious problem.

A more straightforward demonstration of how the networking technique gets wonky is just two ships trying to fly in formation at a speed of 5km/s. If each sees the other 1/10th of a second in the past, then each will see the other 500m behind. It’s clearly going to be a strange experience to know that you’re side by side but each seeing the other 500m behind. I doubt many players are going to handle that well.

The whole “arena” or “bubble” thing that I keep bringing up is a technique to address all this. It causes a space station to become an arena. The networking code continues to use the standard FPS techniques, but it does so with velocities that are back down in the few dozen m/s range. So things make sense again, and orbiting planets and stations become practical. At least in terms of the networking.

In this aspect of design, planetary surfaces are easier than orbiting space stations because the speeds are so much lower. The Earth’s equator moves at 460m/s. If two ships were fighting at the Earth’s equator, they would see the other ship’s position 46 meters behind (assuming that 1/10th of a second of delay). That’s perhaps one ship length. It’s still going to mess with formation pilots, but combat seems practical.

Orbiting planets are out of the question. The Earth orbits the sun at 30km/s. That would add 3km delay to ship positions. That is, if two ships were hovering over the same point on the Earth’s surface, each would see the other 3km away.

5 Likes
22

Welp, If we’re not getting orbits, then we’re going to need some system to stop ships needing to use thrust to prevent them drifting down towards planets thanks to gravity when they’re around planets and asteroids.

It looks very strange to need to have engines firing at all times just to sit next to a floating rock, and it’s especially aggravating to deal with flight around stations without flight assist in the current build.

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23

Maybe I did a poor job of explaining but that’s the case I was trying to solve mitigate. You don’t need to use absolute velocity and position if you represent objects as a function of their orbital elements. Their positions will still be exactly the same but firing your thrusters for 10s may change your absolute velocity by 2000 m/s but may only change your semi major axis by few hundred meters which means your 1/10 error is only 10 or 20 meters instead of 200 meters.

As has been said it’s entirely out of the scope especially for the requirements for battlescape, but I think it’s a clever way of working around those limitations by representing objects, even the ships themselves, as their orbital elements.

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I thought a solution was reached. I’ll have to take another look.

25

It can always be reworked over time if game reach success and enough funds, maybe it is too early to ask for that.
I hope many things will be polished over time and this one among them but for now;
Go ALPHA!

26

Offtopic …

I really don’t understand all the people saying: “It may come after release …”

I don’t think so. Either Infinity Battlescape is a success or it is not the way it is released.

Either way there is virtually no money in changing the game to make it better.

Infinity:Battlescape 2 or another game makes much more sense. Financially. I can’t see how “making the game better” pays for itself.

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27

While I agree with you to an extent, there is precedent in games like Arma.

If the game is a success and acquires a healthy player-base then updating and adding to the game can maintain interest and keep the player-base active over a longer period of time, during which sales can continue to roll in.

On the other hand, many games that are considered a success on launch have very few players a year later, and why would anyone buy a game, however cool it looks, if they know the servers are empty?

However, note the first phrase “If the game is a success and acquires a healthy player-base” - this requires the game to be a commercial success on launch. There is no point releasing something without clouds underwhelming, because then there’ll be no money to fund ongoing development.

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28

Yes. There are different models.

Some games have a longer lifespan. Other a shorter. I-Novae has to adapt to whatever their game(s) turn out to be. I don’t oppose DLCs, bugfixes etc. But major research and development is expensive and an investment they need to consider. Some things are just much too risky to do for an DLC.
There are pro and cons to prolonging a games life. Usually only games with very big markets can manage to make people pay full price every year or two. Also fracturing a possibly healty playerbase could be problematic.

Still. There were four or five statements in the last three weeks that just assumed it will be feasable to invest majorly in reasearch in development. It’s pretty safe to assume that a simple content DLC may pay off. But a whole new, low level system that may not even be a lot better than the existing one?
We’ll see.

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29

I totally agree that it’s not a strategy I-Novae should count on and people shouldn’t assume big features will be added post-release.

Significant features like orbits and clouds will deliver enormously more return on investment if they are in on launch rather than added later.

I-Novae are really not going to be in a position to charge for updates, not least because they couldn’t do anything that would fracture the player-base as you said.

I just meant I don’t think it’s quite as dichotomous as you make out. There can be significant value in I-Novae updating and adding to the game post-release.

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30

Yeah clouds are very important and immersive feature in my opinion!

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31

Clouds were mentioned.

Prepare to be clouded.

gpw-201306-NASA-ISS035-E-34688-Earth-from-space-clouds-shadows-20130505-large.jpg3250×2162 2.54 MB

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32

It is companies with products that dominate their market that can do stuff like that. There really isn’t any competition for ARMA. Nothing else comes close to 100 simultaneous players in a military simulation - which can be modded. It’s not that large a market, but they own it.

Battlescape needs to occupy a product space that it can call its own. Fortunately, neither Chris Roberts nor David Braben understand multiplayer gaming, so they’ve dropped the ball. I don’t get the impression that INS understands it either, but they may just luck out because they have the technology to throw hundreds of players into the same space.

In competitive gaming, you can still do art DLCs. New ship types, weapon types, etc. They work like the old ones, but they look a whole heck of a lot better. The obvious candidate here is a new faction of ships. The vanilla players can still fight in the original faction, but the guys who dropped some cash have access to a larger variety of ships.

In cooperative gaming, you can do pretty much anything you want. That’s because cooperative gaming is about how good you are at contributing to the overall activity. So the available assets are just tools for contributing. If you don’t have all the tools, then your ability to contribute is limited, but if there are enough vanilla assets, then you can still do the essential stuff.

So there’s a DLC right there - AI for cooperative gaming. It wouldn’t produce fracturing of the base so much as provide new games to play in the Battlescape style.

2 Likes
33

I find it obvious that I:B should be made to have a long lifespan, yet currently Battlescape is an MMO with MMO maintenance costs but a singleplayer business model. What other MMO is a one-time purchase with no free to play elements, no microtransations, and no subscriptions? Battlescape’s purpose is to break through to the market and explore the capabilities of the engine while making enough money to fund further projects. Now ‘lifespan’ for singleplayer games is just how long a game is popular for. For an MMO, lower popularity leads to server shutdown. If that happened with Battlescape, a purely multiplayer game, literally nothing would come out of it after.

For most MMOs, significant, sometimes free updates are always being added. Some games have expansions, others just regular updates. This is made possible by the MMO business model, squeezing more than a one time purchase out of loyal players. It’s why War Thunder’s whole lifespan has just been constant updates.

I’m not saying Battlescape should have a subscription model, it’s certainly possible to achieve a constant content stream with other means. Constant new content after release is important for player retention, and high player counts are part of why new players would purchase Battlescape.

It just seems odd that Battlescape should be released and that’s it. It could achieve its purpose much more if it focused on active development.

34

I don’t see how this is the case? It’s a tactical space combat game and we’re trying to get as many players as possible on a single server - like I think any multiplayer game should do (with rare exceptions like Gears of War). Unless sales are humming along we will only host a handful of servers. We are building it to be a long-term game but the central focus of that effort is on modding and the virtual marketplace. Lastly, we don’t plan on stopping development on Battlescape after release unless its sales are very low. That being said, aside from modding, it isn’t clear how we’ll move forward with the game after release as that’ll be dictated by market conditions.

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35

It’s not an MMO. Servers are separate, the universe isn’t persistent and each match is separate…
It’s multiplayer in the same way as Battlefield, CS, Arma, CoD, etc.
We don’t know what the requirements will be for a server but we can be sure the running costs won’t be anywhere near that of an actual MMO which would require a very different server architecture.
AFAIK the plan is to support private servers so individuals will pay for those.

Keith has talked about the payment model, but again, IBS isn’t an MMO with associated costs.

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36

Indeed. IBS is something much worse. :wink:

Approved abbreviations only please!

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37

Battlescape isn’t an Arena or an MMO or an RPG or anything else. It’s Battlescape. Leave INS to figure out what that means. If INS falls into the trap of declaring Battlescape to be a game of a specific genre, innovation stops and they simply follow the recipe of that genre.

6 Likes