Wicpar

Servers HAVE to calculate physics, and physics are cheap if well done (using octtrees etc...). The problem is to share the data between players as it is quite cpu-time intensive. By deferring the physics on clients you would need to verify and crosscompare the results of ALL clients in an area and determine if someone is cheating, and then update in case there are precision errors etc... which is more expensive than actually calculating the physics on the server. It's just a matter of adding vectors and doing simple integration. Collision tho, is the real problem, and that can only be done server side if those can damage cubes, since the quantity of data to collect and analyze would be ludicrous. Not talking about hackers or community modding to counteract this measure and exploit that democratic system. Hope it helps you understand why it can only be done on servers if you wanna be able to let people with a small upload speed play correctly.

i would quite disagree, G forces have a big impact on space travel. without G-Forces we could use a big cannon to shoot people to mars and done, but that is ludicrous. without G-forces the difficulty curve for agility builds is quite linear towards thrusters tech level and fuel efficiency, but with G force you would have to add exponential inertial dampener transforming that curve in a more logarithmic one, as you need more mass to go faster thus going slower a bit than you would without.

There is a misunderstanding here, on that kind of mmo you cannot let people calculate their physics, only their graphics. Latency is irrelevant since you send input to the server and get the changes of everybody back. The only latency you get is when you shoot and move, and that can be mitigated with a small load timer on the gun and movement prediction and interpolation.

i don't doubt that, but this might facilitate their planning and code design work.

i would even extend that i would even extend that, saying you have to manage inertia as gravity, so we can create artificial ring gravity (with rotation), just align the player with the force vector when in collision with a structure or vessel.

Voxelfarm, the voxel engine novaquark uses, supports uv mapped voxels, thus it is logical to allow painting textures. BUT I would be willing to go further: allow people to make their own shaders, this would allow for interesting features like metamorphic hulls, that change depending on the environment for optimal camouflage. a test would be made tho, on upload, to see the performance impact of the shader. it would not be allowed to take more than n millis to render for performance reasons (so you don't start doing raymarching) how to implement it in the shader pipeline: quite straight forward: if the pipeline is standard rendering: vertex shader- > geometry shader -> custom draw shader if the pipeline is deferresd (if not you have to implement it for performance) vertex shader -> geometry shader -> shader that combines custom shaders: vertex color determines the shader to use, and use GL_NEAREST to determine the shader to use. opengl supports async shader compilation, thus removing the need to drop performance too much. then it outputs the color, depth and uv. depth cannot be changed by the custom shaders. this is ideal because you would then be able to put logo animations on the hulls an do all kinds of cool things. It could increase the creativity of the factions. and such shaders could become commodities. the shaders would need access to some vars like shadertoy does to be able to place virtual decals, patterns etc... unless you want to sell skins for pecunia, i don't see why this would be objected too as it is purely client based thus have no server cost except in the upload phase. Even a mod could add that easily.

I used to play starmade, a minecraft-like space based sanbox game, and they have quite a neat system: you can have a faction module on a ship, if it is active, only faction member can interact with the ships, with the exception of weapon that can damage other factions ships. Thing is if you destroy the faction module, you can capture the construct/ship. something similar here would be neat.

even in large battle it would be possible to maintain if the calculations are parallelized. I already did something similar in my physics sandbox, i multiplied performance by 100, literally (there were caveats, but they were due to hardware limitations (physics precision)). A good opencl handler could handle about 10000 - 100000 physical moving shots on an average gpu (770m) easily. (has to have physics ordered in an octtree) well, if it was only relying on me you coud plug a gpu on a potato and dual universe would work efficiently lol.

All your pets will be assimilated, resistance is futile.

actually, no. Those are more similar as you cannot pilot a ton of drones (unless they provide an amazing api that allows you to make your own client to controll them) to a npc shootthemall. A good flack and you killed them all. The more variety there is the more interresting the game. Imagine a one man faction composed of well programmed drones, it could be quite deadly on one target, but if the faction fights on multiple fronts, the ai wont manage on their own and die. The fun about these kind of threats is that they will imbalance the game such to create interresting political movements, and a one man faction can hardly manage diplomacy alone and would thus only be based on fire power.

I see, but if you make big ships you may add some AA capability like 4-5 tiny turrets and also larger ones. It should be possible to make the bestest ship, but you have to do a tradeoff like high tech level, less big guns, less big shields, harder power routing ai etc... But the point is if you put in a lot of effort you should have a lot of power, so the solution to that is to implicate multiple elements in the mix that complexify having the bestest ship. I for instance wanna make a borg cube, borg cubes are the bestest ship util they meet bigger, but borg ships are very compact and complex, have to turn on themselves to fire efficiently on every side, have a lot of power to have extremely big gyros, etc... The point is simpler = varied fleed, complicated = bestest ship.

I would even go to making multi plane mirror mode, where you can do xyz planes simultaneouly and even do sub planes etc, you would have a color scheme to distinguish them.

That is a good idea, making relative subgrids that determine interaction, not too expensive computationally (you just move the entire grid) and allows proper orbital mechanics. These kinds of things can be parallelized quite a bit since it is made step by ste: move -> detect -> interact. This clear dissociation would allow a cuda program to do the update on thousands of grids simultaneously (cuda and not opengl as cuda is better at handling different sized gpu threads) Anyways server side computation is inevitable if you want a hacker free environement, unless you opt for peer computing but that is way slower (sadly as it is extremely cheaper to use clients computers to verify calculations).

Thing is even a tank will eventually hiy a fly, and disallowing it is a gamebreaker, since it changes statistics infinitely as it decreases the chances of success of a battleship from .1% to 0% wich is 1 in 1000 shots , maybe 30 min playtime, to infinite playtime thus allowing a tiny ship to take down a battleship eventually.

I agree with captaintwerkmotor, things that are difficult and long to make should be strong. For the online thing that is impossible. Since they advertized you could go on alone your base must be able to run and defend itself without the player online but with restrictions: Screeps is a mmorts that uses scripts to work. Their system is that your level determines the max cpu usage of your scripts and your allocated storage memory. Something similar could be done here and this would prevent people from immediately creating drone armies and overloading the servers. For instance a script may be only allowed to run for n milliseconds thus promoting script efficiency and optimization.

That is necessary anyways to prevent hacks...

Yes that clears it up quite a bit, but aiming where it hits facilitates too much the matter in my opinion and will disable you to hit fast ships, since the computer will 100% compensate in the wrong place. I stand by my pov that you aim the vector the shot is shot, but you have a reticule that estimates the impact point too like in freelancer or any other space fps like that. Your brain can actually evaluate distznces if you rapidly move left/right, so you can yse that to accurately evaluate the trajectory. A feature that would be necessary tho would be left/right leaning in the cockpits to allow stereoscopic vision on standard screens

Hello Dualiers, The plan right now is (according to what i have seen and heard) to have a stats based locking targeting system. it is extremely cheap. too cheap. the problem with it is that the battle becomes more of a dice roll, as can be seen in eve online. You target point blank on a battleship (miss) wtf... these kinds of things are frustrating. there are tons of ways to contour the problem with kinetic weapons and their delay, the easiest way to reduce performance drain is to handle them like a shell + their movement, it calculates then an intersection on that 4D-ish object (it is in practice flattened into 3D) every frame, not more expensive than having a player. then you can put a limit in the form of reloading time, real battleship shells take 10-20 seconds to reload in best of cases. besides that, lasers are practically free, but do less damage, and have tendency to overheat so you have to stop them quite often if not reducing their lifespan considerably, and use a lot of energy. you get the idea of the gameplay implications. this system would allow to handle all weaponry shots in one container, thus reducing development costs and code base pollution risks. this is mostly important if we want to make weapons interact between planets and space, as punching a hole in a vessel in space would be ludicrous from the planets surface. and what about 1000mm planet-space cannons, do these not ark? in addition to that this system would allow for massive increase in need of good targeting scripts or canoneers (there would be visual aid for players (can be cheaply calculated with raymarching, but it is relative t the memory architecture you chose for the physics mesh, if there is a phase where it is static in the loop, it may be worth it to do it asynchronously in a separate thread if it is the case) eve online opted for that system because it uses 1 second ticks, i don't think you work like that, and if it is the case there is no advantage to it except a relatively small amount of computations, as you would have to determine the voxel to break anyway... and what about people who want a fast fighter with Gatlings? locking would be so unsatisfying, especially if you target a starbase... but anyway, this is my opinion and my vision of locking may be wrong. hope you find this idea interresting . just remember, my point is control vs simplicity (pro control).

i should have put it the other way, i wanted to do the analogy with that german expression...

why would that be bad? no one hears you in space, and if you are in a station or building or base, just leave or go in an isolated room. if they handle pressurization, they can handle this too in the same hit, 1 hit: two bugs(or features, it's in essence the same).

quite indeed, just throwing ideas around hoping one sticks on the wall.

i have developed a technique that can reduce the cost of aerodynamics by a lot: take the ship, put an orthographic camera in front of the ship, to point in the inverse direction of the move vector, then draw the ships normals like in deferred rendering. using opencl-opengl cross compatibility, calculate the drag of each pixel and apply that force to a virtual ship construct in opencl memory, and then bring it back to cpu and apply it to the ral object. please note you have to have the center of mass of the ship in that specific camera space to be able to calculate the rotations. that said, maybe PhysX has better to offer, but i never looked it up and it wouldn't be cross-platform. this is the most efficient way to do it by far, and is done in one draw call. Opencl supports async rendering so you may take advantage of multi threading while waiting on that step. for server calculations, it is a little inconvenient since you need a gpu, but it is worth it, i have worked with GPGPU quite a bit and would be happy to give you everything you can compute on maybe a tesla rack or else. ideally the server would use cuda, it has opengl interop too, and is way simpler and more powerfull to use, and the dev environment is cpp, and nvcc optimises like crazy. anyway, if interested i will be happy to help you. one other thing: if you do so: do the accurate mathematical formulas(integrations), it's a little more expensive but the difference is massive on multiple iterations... i learned it the hard way is my physics sim sandbox.

i think you should be able to make infinite drones, but it requires two things: turrets that can auto target drones without needing to code ai (coding ai would allow to target player ships too with different kind of weapons), and a control center in comm range to control these drones, as ai centers for "powerful" calculations would be quite big to put on a small drone, and would be very expensive, but could control multiple drones and coordinate them. with these things set, it is easier to defend, as you would have a main target to destroy to kill everything, so just get an orbital canon and code it to target the control ship, or have a 10-20 of these turrets (that could also be used to fend off natural disasters like meteor showers) to defend a gainst a 100 -200 tiny drone army (with similar cost) thus equalizing the balance, of cource this is speculation, a very good ai will triumpth, but a bad one will be decimated. I plan to make the Borg, i have studied genetic algorithms quite well and i think if the api allows interaction with the code base i could easily make an evolving faction. an interresting aspect would be to add weapons adaptation (matching weapon and shield frequency allows for the shields to be rendered useless, so you have to have your shields and weapons synchronized to be able to use simultaneously and a hack could be employed to get it, or deduct it with an energy feedback of weapon-shield collision We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile. (imagine it said with the text to speech module )

i think g forces should be applied to removed helth if it exceeds the maximum, but you may install inertial dampener modules to compensate, thus obligating you to not have a megathruster and a cockpit if you want to live, but have at least some amount of inertial dampening to compensate, it would be a mechanism to avoid having too maneuverable ships at low tech levels. just a plan of technological balance in the field of agility (imagine tiny drones going super fast?! horrible!!) computer cores or ai modules would be affected too, but would have a higher tolerance.

may i remind you the chat filters will be in place, and profanity should be reportable