Well space is its own environment and then all of the planets have unique atmospheric compositions which affect the flight model.
I imagine battles will most likely be at specific points of interest (fixed on/around planets), but I can also see large slow ships getting intercepted in interplanetary space (for example) becoming battlegrounds often too. Perhaps if there were ways players could effect/create environments in space (e.g. lay mines, create huge clouds of radioactive/electromagnetic interference, place small drones with huge shields around them), that would help add a lot to that kind of battle?
Yes, this is exactly what weâre trying to do! Unfortunately a lot of that depends on how much money we raise. For players to be able to build their own infrastructure and âpoints of interestâ we have to hit quite a few stretch goals.
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Nice! The more that players are able to do the space equivalent of building walls, digging trenches, placing turrets and drawing a defensive line/front line, the more invested players will be in specific locations, even out in the black, which is the kind of thing I would love (and is sorely missing from most games) though it is understandably hard to allow for on a large scale. I suppose ships themselves could be used in this way, as defensive positions/forward operating bases.
I hope the moving POI battles idea made it into a stretch goal.
Before the end of⌠The Final Countdown!
Yeah we ended up deciding not to release the full design doc for a number of reasons but the campaign page will have a lot of new info about the game. The website will eventually have a lot more.
[quote=âPendrokar, post:127, topic:65â]
Have you thought of ways to avoid all 100-200 players from just massing on a single point on the system creating server issues?[/quote]
The other day I created a player connection simulator ( which spawns a ship, moves it around randomly, fires on/off randomly, activates a bunch of ship systems randomly etc⌠) and stress tested the server with 150 âfakeâ players in a single area.
The server didnât crash and bandwidth usage was in line with expectations ( also, this was done on real Internet conditions, from EU to US with 150 ms latency ). Framerate wasnât great ( 30 fps or so ) but considering my machine is 2 years old and the code is very unoptimized, I think that was pretty successful.
I think ( but this is just a gut feeling based on prior tests / experience ) we could support thousands of players if they spread out a bit across the solar system at various points of interests ( aka battlescapes ).
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What theâŚ
I thought I didnât ask that. I have no idea what Flavien did to make that quote as mine, also going to the source of that quote or expanding the quote shows my last post. Discourse bug?
Anyway. I guess that means I-Novae will be doing their own solution, not a third party library like the one used for the âMan vs Machineâ 1000(999) player game. The obscure Erlang programming language scared you away?
That sounds like a fun gameplay tuning problem. Avoiding chokepoints, but also focusing players so that they still mix it up. If the game has exactly one super factory that can crank out great stuff for a team, then both sides will go all out to control it, putting all thousand players in one battlescape. If the game has 100 super factories, then each side will pretty much ignore each other as they easily find several factories that they can exploit. Somewhere in the middle lies a range of numbers appropriate to a certain player population that causes them to fight at varying levels of intensity.
Have you guys consider the problems of structuring games with 20 players versus games with 1000 players?
Anther thought on tuning is that if control point types are unknown in number, and even their relationship is not known, then players will have to be pretty diligent about understanding the entire planetary systemâs contents to know how to best exploit it. As that understanding changes over time, players will have to make judgment calls on how to redeploy their assets.
For example, suppose you have factories and power plants. Factories produce stuff at various rates and power plants produce power at various rates. Well, factories can be efficient to various degrees as well. Power plants can be effective at power distribution to various degrees. So my team may find a 100GW power plant, but if itâs isolated and has low transmission efficiency then itâs not particularly useful to the factories that weâve found far away. So we donât worry about that power plant. But later on we find a new factory near that great power plant and the balance of power shifts in the system.
Does the team abandon what theyâve gotten started in the old factory and switch to the new one (which takes effort to bring online) or do they stick with the old stuff because the game is almost over anyway? Or because we really need the one big item that we told the factory to produce? What happens if the other team secures that power plant and factory?
Iâm a big fan of having a wide range of environment in the game and having those environments influence gameplay. As usual I get pretty far along with my thoughts, but even simple changes can make a significant difference to gameplay. Hereâs one such post I made about warp fields influencing gameplay.
I do remember a particular thread in the old forums with hundreds of messages where we discussed the problem of thousands of players going to a single place at once. Unfortunately I no longer have the time to discuss these things like I used to, so I will run away from that topic now before the desire overcomes my common sense.
But I am curious about the conditions of that test in the simulator.
Was the physics simulation working?
Were you using any sort of âtrickâ(like where the position/state updates from farther ships would be received less often than closer ships and so on) to save bandwidth?
Did you take into consideration the fact that from those 150 players, a good % would probably be using big ships with a bunch of guns firing simultaneously?
A thousand of players in one area is even more of a gameplay problem than a technical one. On the technical side, besides programming it to work which is doable, itâs just a matter of whether you want the server to cost a quarter per 100 player hours, or 2 cents. (roughly)
Servers these days have plenty of power, but the bandwidth cost grows exponentially.
Gameplay wise, itâs a clusterfuck.
But realistically, when you spread them out across the solar system and it winds up being 100-200 in an area, you may as well say itâs a 100-200 player game even if there is 1000 on the server. Which is fine. But thatâs still enough to feel like you canât contribute much to a battle, depending on how it works.
Anyway, what I saw of the flight model already at this stage of the game made it looks really amazing and fun inside the atmosphere.
There is gobs of potential there with the different atmospheres and weather, and having a megastructure of a factory to fly and avoid things through.
The pre-alpha reminds me of Tachyon: The Fringe without warpgates in a number of ways. It had a lot of asteroids hollowed out by mining to fly through to avoid people or shotgun them when they chase you through.
A lot of what makes these games something to come back to is, like I said, goals you can set for yourself that are amazing and feel like youâve accomplished something. Because, well look at GTA and Battlefield and all the things you can do in there, and record, that go viral. People want to do those things.
Itâs comparable to something like EVE Online in what keeps you coming back is getting more, more, more. The progression feels like an accomplishment even though youâre doing what most people could do with enough time.
As bad as Planetside was, it would have only lasted for a few hours of enjoyment instead of the like 100-200 I got out of it because of things like this:
Right now, it really lacks that. Just some random scripted objective events that are procedurally set are not going to really drive people much. Itâll quickly become the same thing over and over.
An improved damage model would allow a lot of stuff like that, though. So hopefully it gets there. Like being able to skillfully ram people like to clip off their cockpit with your wing. Right now itâs so basic it doesnât leave room for much neat. Youâre just flying in circles depleting HP.
If the site is set up well to continue to raise money after Kickstarter ends, Iâm sure those weather and damage model goals will be reached, though. I hope thatâs all in order to come up right after KS ends.
I just want to clarify that what you have seen is a prototype, and serves only really to show what the engine can do. The final game will have points of interest, will have a way to get players together, will have those ridiculous things you can do in other games(canât tell you what they are, but Iâm sure we will find them). A lot of people are judging battlescape as itâs a game in alpha. Itâs important to remember that it isnât, yet. Itâs still in a prototype phase thatâs proof of concept. They need this kickstarter to start working full time to add these features. This is what everyone wants in the finished game, but right now we only have the engine working.
Basically, get as much pledges as you can and you will see all of that happen when the game is finished ;).
⌠I know that.
But there has never really been a game on large scale where, after the whole âwow this is huge and coolâ wears off does it keep you hooked with actual good gameplay.
Just copying Descent, or Tachyon, or whatever, and making it bigger, is not going to make it good. Iâm putting forth my worry that the gameplay wonât having lasting engagement.
Planetside2 got a ton of people initially trying it out because hundreds vs hundreds battles sounded cool. Then people realized they were just holding down their fire button on choke points and spawn points which they pretty much could have taped their mouse button down to do.
No one has put forth an idea of how make things (objectives, combat, etc) not feel pointless and/or like itâs just a meat grinder.
Itâs great that you are worried about it, I am too(because I want it to succeed), but currently no one knows what the final game may look like. Funding levels may change and stuff just happens. So the point I want to try to make is donât worry about the endgame being awesome, that is ultimately the dev and dev backerâs jobs to make it as awesome and interesting as possible.
Itâs not time to start perfecting gameplay. Itâs time to make sure that we have enough money to have gameplay. As soon as the kickstarter is over we can start putting forth those ideas. Lets focus on the important issue first. Without money, there is no gameplay to put ideas out for.
I know.
I just think itâs a reasonable discussion for ideas before itâs at a point that itâs not very fun and itâs too late to drastically rebalance and redesign gameplay in another way.
Now there is a small part of the game thatâs just focused on combat that needs to be good and sell people on the Infinity âbrandâ so perhaps Infinity:TQFE can be made.
But combat with so many players in one area has never been done that good, so what do?
Well, I promise we have 2 months post-KS before they can even start working on the game where we can come up with all the gameplay design we want. The most important thing now is to convince people to pledge, not necessarily talk about unreasonable gameplay. Iâm not saying donât get excited and hype up the gameplay, because you should!, but try to be realistic about it.
I can also say with reasonable certainty that any gameplay ideas we come up with during the KS will probably be changed or revamped during actual development.
In case of Battlescape that could only hold true if ships spawn inside carriers. Shields have been confirmed for Battlescpae and if they are bubble shields they will protect against capital ship fire. Then remains the question if non-capital ships are able to go under enemy bubble shields, which could lead to a choke point on ship exit points even if they are guarded by destructible turrets.
While Keith Newton worked on Unreal Tournament 3, in Unreal Tournament 2004 there was the Assault gametype in which the attackers spawn point was guarded by indestructible instant-kill turrets.
I know.
I was just speaking in general.
Even when you have shields and all those things, you can join a battle thatâs heavily losing only to see you leave safety to be up against 30 people repeatedly, and so on. Itâs the same concept that happens at these scales.