ODINxKANE

Space PETA would be all over you

I think that there is a game currently on the market that does it pretty well. Empyrion is set up that food is a large part of your needs, and makes it a core mechanic in the game, but it isnt over bearing in my opinion. You make a couple of planters on your ship with a grow light above them and plant some crops and your all set. If you want to dive into it more you can combine different crops with other resources and make things like canned soups and other things that will give a larger portion of your food bar back. they sort of made it so you can make it as easy or as complicated as you want.

i second that as well, i find myself being optimisticly cautious about new games such as this, but believe that these devs have a great idea and a defined direction that they want to go. regardless of what happens, it will be an adventure.

i agree whole heartedly, i cant see a game like this without a decent FTL

i think if you thought carefully about ship design and coloring options, you could do a good system cloak and still make the ship hard to see just from an arcitechtural standpoint. But i agree it should be impossible to do both completely at once.

a little math for ya if we were to travel to alpha Centauri at 150,000 mph it would take approx. 17,900 years to reach. the fastest we have ever made something man made go was a little over 30,000 miles per hour, unless you take into account a man hole cover that was ejected from a hole that held a nuclear bomb detonation.

mildly disconcerting considering the fact that our closest star is alpha centauri and its 4.22 light years away. I suppose my biggest issue with the idea is that in game we supposedly have backpacks that allow for molecular re-arangment, we can carry thousands of tons of stuff in belt pouches, but cant get anywhere off planet quickly. I would assume that the ark ship was at sublight, but that in 10k years research may have happened allowing for FTL just not able to incoporate itinto the ARK ship. I dont know, the DEVs will have to dictate this more in depth, but like i said i believe that if you make it a rediculous amount of time to travel from one system to the other you will have a lot of players loose interest quickly. On the same token though i dont want to instantly travel to a new system either, so a happy medium needs to be found.

I second that

agreed that would be pretty epic

lol right now for me its just interesting to see how other people think the game should progress or what others think it should include. I am not a big covert ops player typically, i prefer maximum guns and explosions, but i normally value intel on what im about to fight that normally comes from someone in a covert ops role. Vantablack is an intruiging idea for a coating on a ship, downside is if your in a system or nebula where space isnt black...

i do agree with it takins some time, hours though not days, for a different system, but anything beyond that i think people will loose interest very quickly. At that point it would feel like a cheap phone game if i was an explorer, id log in set a destination that takes 3 days (72 hours) to get to and log back off... no fun in doing that. But if it takes 3 hours to get there, i can tool around on my ship, research things, redecorate my living quarters, or just take my wife out to lunch in the real world and come back and within a reasonable amount of time start exploring something new.

i actually like that, assuming that there isnt a limit to the number of probes you can have out at once, and hopefully they have an FTL or jump capability as well. Fire out 15 different probes one day and another 15 the next rinse and repeat... then you start recieving in the fruits of your laobors over time ensuring that you have a constantly updating starmap and information flow. After all Information is power and i think we are going to see that in this game very quickly. He who knows more will ba able to profit faster.

lol you should read the laser designator post... I agree that mechs would be cool, and if things like rotors and pistons are introduced they in theory would be absolutely possible. I can imagine that the controll script that youd have to write to controll it might be a bit complicated. But the des also said that AI would at least at some level be in the game as well... maybe it could be scripted to help. Titanfall incoming

lol love the titanfall reference. I agree that this could be a great addition. They devs said we would be able to implement our own scripts and that we would have the opportunity to have a form of AI to team up with. I think if you were able to combine all of this with your laser pointer idea this would be a great way to add a whole new dynamic for the game. I could see things like exploring a planet and finding a rich resource vein, ordering your AI on your ship to exploit the resource that you designate with your laser designator then firing the mining lasers to begin the process.... all sorts of good things

i would also go as far as to say that any map should be player created. What i mean by that is you can creat your own map or buy/ trade for someone elses star charts and then add to them whaterev you have discovered.

like i said their should be a circular flow chart of "stealth" tech and countermeasures. countermeasures should have limits such as effective ranges, variances, and so forth. Basically the farther away you are from a countermeasure or sensor in your stealth ship, the safer you are. Using this im not saying that they wouldnt know that you are in the area, but maybe your far enough away that they dont know who you are or where your at because your past the max effective range. This would still allow you to conduct covert ops and recons, but would also give your target the ability to try and hunt you down at the same time, this would creat a cat and mouse dynamic on a massive 3d scale. This of course would be if your target is set up to scan for everything. If they are not then you could in theory park your ship next to the station and watch for as long as you want. The other thing that hasnt been touched upon is i think that you should not be able to fire weapons or raise a shield if you are visably cloaked. This of course is for obvious reasons it would give a huge advantage to the cloaked player. They should have to uncloak, lock the weapon and fire then they can re cloak. That would give the target at least some chance to defend themselves.

Call me old fashioned, but i like the idea of firing of long range probes. When it comes down to stars etc. we have the technology in the real world to guage distance and what not so i dont think that ths would really have to be a problem. Now to see whats in the system once you discover how far away it is, thats where long range probes and the sort comes in. or If your close enough, then potentially long range scans from your ship. As far as actual navigation, as long as they build in something for some sort of avoidance (dont care to go FTL strait into a planet) then im happy. Once you have researched a star or cluster through getting a distance and bearing, then it should just go into your ships computers to update your star chart. All of this is just my opinion of course, but the only reason i could see an advanced navigation computer would be to do things such as waypoint navigation with docking etc. In that case i agree with Gingerdeadman6 that player created scripts would be best for stuff like that. In an open game like this i think players should be partially responsible for the creation of things.

Exactly, ike i said if systems were light months away and no FTL i think interest in exploring would dwindle very quickly. God forbid you wanted to go galaxy to galaxy... Elite dangerous pretty well nailed this one as far as sublight vs warp, inside the system you were able to move around at the speed of light so getting from one side to the other might take 10 minutes depending on if you got to close to something like a planet or star and its mass slowed you down. Which is another point i hope they add into the game, mass and gravity slowing you down at sublight.

the material that your referencing consists of concentric rings that add up to many times the size of the object that it is trying to hide. As of right now the only thing that it can hide is very small objects from the non visile spectrum such as x rays and UV, its a cool concept that if condensed and refined might actually be viable one day. That being said the downfall with that theory is of you have to surround a ship with metalic rings to make it bend light to cloak, a cage of steel tends o block vision and electronic signals as well creating whats know as a feraday cage... disclaimer: dont mind my typos it just builds character, and im on a touchscreen phone with fat fingers.

i dont know about you but moving at sublight over a distance of light months, will still take months. I cant see that being a viable game option. I would still imagine that there would have to be some sort of FTL that would happen to turn those lightmonths into lightminutes or lightseconds.

that is along the lines of what in the military we called active camoflage, using projectors and cameras to try and make something appear to dissapear. It has its advantages and dissadvantages. Examples are, if the object is moving there is normally a bit of lag in the images displayed or if a camera or sensor fails, image becomes distorted or fails in an area. However at slow speeds or while stopped this could be an extremely effective camoflage device. I suppose that is my point with all this, there needs to be advantages and dissadvantages to any options so that there is a way to counteract them, and as you progress through the universe you could find different materials and fuels or elements to make it better, but still never perfect.

I agree FTL drives of some sort would seem to be a requirement for system to system. For explorers that go bneyond space around the starting area it seems like it would be mandatory, because if its new space, how would there be star gates?

I absolutely agree with both of those conditions. In addition, seeing as ships will be built by players, i think that to build a weapon or turret, a player needs to place restrictions on it such as traversing a turret to make sure that it doesnt hose your own ship and of course an error doing this would result in VERY friendly fire lol. I also think that fixed weapons on small intercepter/ fighter craft should be able to aim with an arc say +or - 3 degrees from the centerline of the weapon. This would allow non turreted weapon systems to be able to target craft basically in a finite cone but still manageble for a slight aim assist. This would still allow for friendly fire because your still squeezing a trigger and if you squeez it at the wrong time bad things happen.

I would even take it a step farther, with countering stealth have something like optical motion sensors to pick up ships that arent visually cloaked, but with a fall off in effectivness with increased range. for ships that are visually cloaked, as you said build scanners, probes and radars that will pick up the energy or other things like x-rays, heat signitures etc... Just like in history with armor and weapons, they always balance eachother out, whatever has the edge today, someone will figure out a counter to it tomorrow.

lol you did rewrite my idea, but in a much simpler way that is exactly what i was trying to say