I was pondering ways to make Battlescape feel different from the plethora of other space sims out there and I hit upon a small idea that I’d like to share.
I’m going to assume the following about Battlescape since we haven’t gotten the final word yet.
Most servers will be individually hosted
Those servers will likely be able to register with a central inovae server that will tell all potential players that they exist (e.g. traditional Counter Strike servers and the like)
In order to make it a little more engaging then the standard “select a server and go shoot people,” I think it needs a common thread.
I’d like to suggest:
Simulate the entire galaxy and let those servers registering with
the central server select a star system within the simulated galaxy
that they would like to host, allowing each server to be a unique system.
The server host would be able to select starting points, resources
and victory conditions within their own system.
Players can then join a particular “Battlescape” by traversing the
galaxy to the star system that the server has registered as.
Once at the star system, they would need to go the starting point
before they can join/queue for the battle (Prevent people from
popping up just anywhere)
Players that leave the system’s sphere of influence will
automatically be dropped from the server (with advance warning)
Time dilation controls and autopilot can be added to facilitate
faster travel for people who just want to get in and fight.
Outside of being logged onto a server, the galaxy could serve as a
sandbox that people can fly around in as they like.
You could then go on to include other interesting game mechanics, such as allowing competitions for the continued hosting of any particular system (i.e. clans could duke it out for hosting rights). Cooperating servers, by choice of the server hosts, such that what happens on one can affect the other (i.e. strategic resource transfers). Non-combat specific servers…hang out, chill, play bumper craft, recruit/threaten newbs, showcase mods.
Anyway, just a thought. One that I think will add a bit of flavor and should be feasible to implement in any case.
So basically, you want to remove the seamless galaxy of TQFE and make it an instantiated MMO? You do know that the idea behind Battlescape is that they don’t have the resources for a MMO yet?
You totally didn’t read that right. There is no mention of MMO in any of my suggestions.
Since the galaxy is seeded anyway, generating it is not a problem. Hosting thousands of players at once is, along with the appropriate amount of content needed to keep it interesting for them.
I’m suggesting that instead of just a single one size fits all solar system no matter what server you are on, a server would have the choice of merely picking one of the stars in the galaxy as a sub-seed, making it a unique server…nothing more than that.
Also, as the galaxy is generated, it does not necessarily need to be hosted to be a sandbox on any given person’s computer. Going to and from a star system is just a more involved and unique way of selecting a server from the list, while also paying lip service to people who just want to explore.
So basically the server browser is the galaxy map.
You can roam single player around every system.
To join a server you dock with a station/fly to a starting point.
You connect to the server.
Action!
If you want to fast travel use the “QUANTUM WHATEVER” which is basically a server browser/list.
Definitely cool. But it needs severlal features that aren’t really planed for Battlescape.
Features this suggestion need and are already (most probably) planed:
Server Browser
Drop in/out servers
Free roam
Features this suggestion needs and that aren’t really planned or unsure:
Multiple different star systems (not confirmed)
It needs a polished Galaxy generator, I guess it hasn’t been worked on for years now and would need to be updated like everything else. That’s the biggest problem I see.
Jump mechanics
Seamless integration, When you start the game you are already in a ship flying around, needs to be intuitive what to find where (more difficult then just two buttons labeled “Free Roam” and “Multiplayer”)
A more natural UI to not break the immersion (That should be in anyway … but who knows how nice looking the UI will be)
The multiple different star systems would effectively be a function of the Galaxy generator, and yes I completely agree with your second point. I entirely realize that the galaxy generator has probably not been touched since the engine revamp. Its likely still there in some form, so i don’t think they’d be starting from scratch on it.
Scope as originally stated by you guys? Yes.
Scope of feasibility/difficulty as suggested and past capabilities demonstrated? Not really.
Scope of additional resources/time? That one’s on you guys. It was only a suggestion to add some flavor and uniqueness to the game.
Oh and the entire thing is one single suggestion, not multiple. I just bulleted the individual points of the suggestion to break it up.
There won’t be “multiple different” star systems. The Battlescape game world is a single star system, hence I:B will not have a galaxy generator. It is possible some of the planets in the system will utilize variable seeds though.
It’s undetermined at this time if a galaxy generator is a stretch goal for the crowd funding campaign, I can say it is not something we’re focusing on at the moment.
Yeah forgot that there’s not even a system generator at the moment … might put that before a galaxy generator …
To clarify the terminology:
Galaxy Generator: Generates Star systems in a galaxy form
Star System Generator: Generates Planets, Star(s), Moons and other Object in Star System form
Looks like nether of those are existent or in a “Flavien Satisfied” state at the moment and hard work to do right.
Still a seamless combination of Singleplayer and Multiplayer could be interesting. But also is hard to execute because two Buttons just are more intuitive the “Fly to that point”.
“What point?”
“How close?”
“Fly?”
“180 Million Killometers ! ? !”
The OP is a nice suggestion and something like that could certainly be fun as a replacement for a conventional server browser.
There’s a couple more issues that would cause trouble…
The galaxy generator that we saw in Flavien’s dev journal created in the region of 100 billion star systems. Mapping that to a few tens or hundreds of servers would be tricky.
The suggestion seems to imply persistence, as in the player’s ship and presumably its upgrades would be saved between servers. That would require something like an item server to manage the current state of each player. That’s an area of sudden and steep scope creep from a simple server browser.
In summary the best you could expect is a 3D galaxy render with a number of star systems highlighted as points of interest representing games that can be joined. There would be no persistence between the games and a fully generated galaxy og a hundred billion stars would be massive overkill. The same job could be done with a particle cloud of a few thousand particles with highlighted stars placed randomly inside it.
Even then the end result would most likely be much less useful and intuitive than a simple list of servers ordered by ping time.
Are the star systems seed generated as well or just the planets?[quote=“INovaeGene, post:9, topic:260”]
It is possible some of the planets in the system will utilize variable seeds though.
I agree with INovaeGene, it wouldn’t be wise to make each system a generation this early. Although it would be cool and look awesome, it would be a waste of resources that are limited at this time.
Battlescape is a game which is going to prove the capabilities of the I-Novae Engine to new potential players and hopefully even some investors. We all agree that a flashy Galaxy server browser would be badass and will give us all the nerdy space simulators that we’ve always wanted, however with funds currently limited and with no current guarantees of a certain fund it’s best to make the suggestions actually possible.
However, hopefully if the game is funded successfully and well beyond, I’m hoping for at the least, $5,000,000. However this is a dream goal for myself as I know a lot will be done with it.
Realisticly if the Kickstarter becomes popular, which let’s be honest it will be, we’ll hopefully raise at the very least $1,500,000 which will be enough to go far with. I believe the minimum goal will have to be $300,000 for a basic simulator but it won’t be anything like we hope.
All of this is guestimates from what I’ve seen on other similar projects, and from knowledge of game development as with a development team this size the more money we get, hopefully they’d be able to expand and hire (wink wink ;))
Anywho, what I’d like to see in Battlescape is the following:
Planetary systems with different environments. For Example;
- If you're in the presence of a Gas Giant, Gravity greatly affects your ship, in the sense of that you travel at a slightly slower pace. -15% propulsion for example.
Different Stars for systems;
- For Example a Pulsar: Decreases Hull by 30%. I think this would introduce a lot of tactics into future developments of the
game.
Ingame Micro-Transactions rather than a pay-monthly subscription
I know that it isn’t decided yet, but I definitely think that the game being a standalone purchase with no monthly fee’s and ingame transactions would definitely be the best way to go. You could by ship customization, boosts, xp leveling (unsure if this will even be in the game just using it as an example).
Suggestions for this game are unlimited because this game is unique and could introduce so many new things that we’ve not seen before.
Expecting 3/4 of the funding through Kickstarter that Star Citizen brought in “at the very least” is insanely optimistic. Topping $500,000 is going to be a real challenge. There’s no big press conference, there’s no big public figures, and there’s no big juicy funding for the pitch.
It’s almost all going to come down to how shiny the pitch ends up looking, how much the developers push for publicity and the community getting the word out to as many people as they can in a pretty short timeframe to hold onto as much inertia as possible.
We can all see the end product’s going to be awesome, but that won’t matter if no one’s around to look.
I’ve seen this and closely related stuff suggested before. I really have to question why A) “gravity greatly affects your ship” or its speed (as the largest nearby mass, your speed should, by right, be measured relative to the giant planet’s centre), and B) why the gravity of gas giants is special. Let’s look at the surface (cloud top) gravity of the 4 giant planets of our solar system:
The inverse square law is a big deal. Even at Jupiter, you only need to get out beyond the Galilean moons for the force of gravity due to the planet to be equal to the force of gravity due to the Earth at the distance of our Moon, which I think most people would consider to be functionally nil in game.
