Collision Damage: Do we REALLY need it?

[Kuritho]

Ok, deep breathes. This might trigger you.

Don't be a trigger-ee.

 

...

 

The Scope of this Topic:

Think about it, do we REALLY need Collision Damage? It'll add engineering challenges, sure, but WITH it:

If the game is running slow and you're near a carrier, docking. Your ship goes ploop by accident and now you have a remarkable dent in both ships.

Without it, however:

The server will run slightly/much more faster, and instead of going ploop your ship is just carried with it.

 

 

The Compromise:

We could simply have severe collisions give the smaller, faster ship a "status effect" so we get both:

"Engineering Challenges because seriously, we don't want negative status affects (slower thrusters, weaker hull in fights, ect) for a bit

"Less stress on the server, game will be more casual, game glitching out will not destroy an entire faction, ect."

 

The Ending:

Stop the Choccy milk meme.

It was shit to begin with.

[Anaximander]

Uhm.. you seem to confuse localised grids and planetary grids. The Devs do not want collisions, because of the issue with planets constantly rotating.

I made my suggestion on the matter a long time ago. Instead of physics based collisions, add reactor instabilities and overloads, You bump one too many times (or at very high speeds), you explode (as you should), due to your capacitor on your ship overloading, thus exploding. Which meakes larger battleships more stable, by virtue of having multiple capacitors / power cores, that require more crew, with each capacitor even dedicated in one aspect of the ship. 

This guarantees that a star-fighter colliding with a battleship at max speed will pop, but it also guarantees that the star-fighter has a huge margin of "bumps" when it lands on a carrier, or a planet, as it goes much much slower (and planets do not move).

Also,as you may think this, you do understand carriers do not actually have to move much in a battle, right? They are dreadnaught sized ships that carry fighters instead of more guns. So yeah, a star-fighter landing on a very very slow moving carrier, is not gonna overrule the bumps mechanic as of speed.

Beyond that, auto-pilots will land your fighter, you won't have to do it manually, at least, not in a FLIPPING military grade star-fighter. 

The reasons such a mechanism is needed, is so do not crash land anywhere all the time. I mean, why do I even need a smmoth approach on a planet, when I can simply grind my ship to a halt without having to worry if I explode?

Heck, the Overload mechanism could be even a formula of change in velocity (DV), and how much of a ratio of it a reactor can withstand before it starts Overloading from the strain of the decceleration.

See, the real problem with the collisions, lies in the fact that people think collisions should be about voxels connecting to voxels, and said contacts altering those voxels. That's the part that takes up server RAM, as the server has to calculate collisions for EACH individual voxel.

MY suggestion, only takes into acout mass, decceleration and power core / capacitor "strength".

Which evidentally, is not ultra realisitc, but guess what happens if two metric megatonne battleships collide in space. You guessed it, they evaporate. There's no wreck left behind for the server to have to calculate damage done to voxels.

Cheers!

[Novark]

That's why we need something called "shield" arround the vessel to protect it from hull damage due to collision

 

To answer you question, do we need collision damage ?

- yes

[Kurock]

It has already been stated that ramming won't be a thing. What exactly will happen when two constructs collide is not entirely known.  If they are just going to bounce off each other's bounding boxes, or whether there will be any kind of physics involved at all is still in question.

 

Besides Twerks suggestion of overloading cores, some other suggestions were to have a spherical explosion at point of contact of bounding boxes based on relative velocities.  But these could be abused to create ramming ships. A counter argument is to simply make the components of a ship more expensive and/or have the smaller/cheaper cores explode in a smaller radius.

 

I am fine with not having any sort of damage on contact, but as Twerk said, it does lead to people being able to "land" at any speed, which breaks immersion a tad.

 

What I do want to see are breach-boarding ships: ships that are designed to penetrate the hull of a larger ship (after shields have been taken down). The cheapest way to build a breach pod/spike is through ramming, like a hypodermic needle.  However DU will not have ramming, so another element will need to be made that can saw through a hull.  Its an idea.

 

This thread needs more potatoes.

[Volkier]

If anything, I'd go with Twerkmotor's suggestion, of collision damaging capacitors - or even modules on the ship. A small ship kamikazeing into a planet sized starship should go pop with the starship's crew going "Why did the proximity light flash for a second? We didn't feel anything.. Oh well, must have been a space rock or something". (ie. it taking little to no damage). 

 

WHY do we need 'some' sort of 'collision' damage, is because we 'need' people to actually put some effort into landing, and building their ships / constructs around the ability to maneuver / land better or worse under various different circumstances. Like having half the thrust engines blown off. I know I'm likely speculating here, but ramming full speed into a planet to "land", or alternatively having a "one button auto-land" - aka NMS style - is going to ruin this game for a large number of people imho. 

[Anaximander]

It has already been stated that ramming won't be a thing. What exactly will happen when two constructs collide is not entirely known.  If they are just going to bounce off each other's bounding boxes, or whether there will be any kind of physics involved at all is still in question.

 

Besides Twerks suggestion of overloading cores, some other suggestions were to have a spherical explosion at point of contact of bounding boxes based on relative velocities.  But these could be abused to create ramming ships. A counter argument is to simply make the components of a ship more expensive and/or have the smaller/cheaper cores explode in a smaller radius.

 

I am fine with not having any sort of damage on contact, but as Twerk said, it does lead to people being able to "land" at any speed, which breaks immersion a tad.

 

What I do want to see are breach-boarding ships: ships that are designed to penetrate the hull of a larger ship (after shields have been taken down). The cheapest way to build a breach pod/spike is through ramming, like a hypodermic needle.  However DU will not have ramming, so another element will need to be made that can saw through a hull.  Its an idea.

 

This thread needs more potatoes.

You got to admit though, landing with your star-fighter flipping over would be hilarious, similar to the Accountant's scene from Drive Angry with the truck, for more referrence, watch this .

 

Although, breach-boarding ships are not actually needed. I mean, we got missiles that punch holes on ships and people who can space walk to board them

 

Also my suggestions is making sure that "Breaching" ships do not happen, as they would have to rely on voxel to voxel calculations and destruction in order for them to "Drill" through as hip (and given the speed of the enemy vessel, it would be quite a toll on the server).

 

What I suggest, as I mentioned, is a simple middle ground.

 

Also, before some people think that a battleship will ram their small frigate... you guys do realise battleships go really slow, right? A frigate would run circles around a battleship

 

Now, if people are afraid of people ramming their ships when they are not online, well, that's why you park your ship on a space staion, so you won't be rolled over when offline - although, if you were to be rammed when the ship is offline, would simply make the ship just spin around, as its powercore is not online to be overloaded to begin with.

 

To be honest, the possibility of collision damage, in whatever form it may be, will only drive the need for better auto-pilots, or avoidance subroutines for flifght assistance, so people can avoid colliding with the enemy - as well as the same subroutine being used to allign ships in neat formations and squadrons (it's the same principle of distance and manuvers).

 

Why bother alligning your ships in formations that make certain they can maneuver freely and not collide, when there's no collision to begin wit, right?

 

Thats why we need those collisions. Otherwise things like being chased by pirates through an asteroid field become risk free of being shot and good pilots are not rewarded to the slightest.

 

[Anaximander]

If anything, I'd go with Twerkmotor's suggestion, of collision damaging capacitors - or even modules on the ship. A small ship kamikazeing into a planet sized starship should go pop with the starship's crew going "Why did the proximity light flash for a second? We didn't feel anything.. Oh well, must have been a space rock or something". (ie. it taking little to no damage). 

 

WHY do we need 'some' sort of 'collision' damage, is because we 'need' people to actually put some effort into landing, and building their ships / constructs around the ability to maneuver / land better or worse under various different circumstances. Like having half the thrust engines blown off. I know I'm likely speculating here, but ramming full speed into a planet to "land", or alternatively having a "one button auto-land" - aka NMS style - is going to ruin this game for a large number of people imho. 

Well, the idea is for the transversal speed of the ship to take into account the transversal of the collding object when dictating how much a capacitor is overloaded.

 

If the collision is head on, yeah, that's a 100% damage to the capacitor in Overload (which has to be determined by mass of the colliding objects, their combined velocites, etc. ) , while an offeset collision, wil lbe taken as a hit, sure, but it won't be something "Critical".

 

But yeah, can you imagine how many bricks are going to be shat, when

 

Navigator : "erm.. we just avoided an asteroid by 100 meters, Operations, do you even check the scanner?"

 

Operatations : " *snores* "

 

Collision = A reason to have Emergent Court-Marshals.

 

 

The thing is, it can't be used to calculate damage to different modules, cause that would be either based on  RNG (randomly occuring), or having to calculate damage on collision to modules individually (which is the same as voxel collisions, that being costly).

[Archonious]

I hope:

-Ship to Ship - no

-Building to ship - no

-Ground to Ship - yes

 

Ramming is useful thing, but very expensive for performance (also very abusable, build stick of armour and destroy turrets without major risk to your ship). But if ships can freely fall down on the ground and do not receive any damage, this would be wrong. I belive it is possible to make economical version of simple collision GvS.

 

Thanks,

Archonious

[Fitorion]

As I understand it... when you land a ship/exit it/stop controlling it/deactivate its core (all ways of phrasing the same idea) it becomes a static object like a building or space station. 

 

If parked in a safe area either player made or at the ark ship then any thing colliding with it would simply bounce off just as shown in Dev videos with ships bouncing off the ground.  If not in a safe area ships would still bounce but then you'd be subject to a player getting out of their ship and using their hand weapons on your ship (at launch) and their ship weapons on you when ever they add ship combat weapons.

 

If 2 ships which were under control/ in flight mode or whatever you want to call it... then when they bump into each other the impact could effect both vehicles flight paths.

 

This is as it is currently and is my understanding of the interviews and descriptions of game systems I've seen thus far. Subject to change... game in development... yadda yadda disclaimer. 

 

 

I don't think breaching pods would be too hard... All you really need is a way to attach your craft to the craft you want to breach... Then just open your door and use hand weapons... or a ship to ship weapon when they add those...  

Couple of potential scenarios:

1. You've done enough damage to deactivate the core... the target ship is now dead in space... no different from a static space station or asteroid which don't move... just pop on over ... zero difficulty.  

2. Your main ship or fleet of ships use some sort of tractor beam to immobilize the target ship.  Requires coordination and team work... moderately difficult

3. Your breaching pod just has to be fast enough to catch and latch on to a ship.  Not sure how difficult this would be... could be pretty easy and could be very very hard.

 

 

I don't think we really need collision damage... Landing speed really doesn't concern me.  I don't think piloting a ship should be too much of a skill... A little more control than No Mans Sky but not Elite Dangerous levels... And you could limit speeds around massive objects like planets, asteroids, or really big stations... call it interference with the engine drive system or something.  Plenty of lore friendly ways to explain such a thing.  Now don't get me wrong... I do love Higher simulation games.  The first time I docked two craft together in Kerbal Space Program was a 3 hour nerve wracking and extremely satisfying ordeal.  I am better at it now but I'll never be 100% confident I won't knock off solar panels... So I save before hand... retract panels and come in very cautiously... slowly... and methodically.  Which isn't the type of Game play I and most people would want from DU. 

 

How would I like DU landing to work?  VTOL.  Vertical Take Off and Landing.  I'd like to come into a planet... building... carrier type ship... whatever and hover above what ever surface my down facing radar detects... I'd like to select a hover altitude from my ship computer...  or shift to raise and ctrl to lower.   use wasd and maybe q and e to shift around and rotate my craft just the way I want then lower myself until contact.  Simple.  No velocities to cancel.  And heck if I don't care about the precise orientation and position the good old No Man's Sky style press button to land or take off works plenty well for landing on and exploring planets.

[Anaximander]

As I understand it... when you land a ship/exit it/stop controlling it/deactivate its core (all ways of phrasing the same idea) it becomes a static object like a building or space station. 

 

If parked in a safe area either player made or at the ark ship then any thing colliding with it would simply bounce off just as shown in Dev videos with ships bouncing off the ground.  If not in a safe area ships would still bounce but then you'd be subject to a player getting out of their ship and using their hand weapons on your ship (at launch) and their ship weapons on you when ever they add ship combat weapons.

 

If 2 ships which were under control/ in flight mode or whatever you want to call it... then when they bump into each other the impact could effect both vehicles flight paths.

 

This is as it is currently and is my understanding of the interviews and descriptions of game systems I've seen thus far. Subject to change... game in development... yadda yadda disclaimer. 

 

 

I don't think breaching pods would be too hard... All you really need is a way to attach your craft to the craft you want to breach... Then just open your door and use hand weapons... or a ship to ship weapon when they add those...  

Couple of potential scenarios:

1. You've done enough damage to deactivate the core... the target ship is now dead in space... no different from a static space station or asteroid which don't move... just pop on over ... zero difficulty.  

2. Your main ship or fleet of ships use some sort of tractor beam to immobilize the target ship.  Requires coordination and team work... moderately difficult

3. Your breaching pod just has to be fast enough to catch and latch on to a ship.  Not sure how difficult this would be... could be pretty easy and could be very very hard.

 

 

I don't think we really need collision damage... Landing speed really doesn't concern me.  I don't think piloting a ship should be too much of a skill... A little more control than No Mans Sky but not Elite Dangerous levels... And you could limit speeds around massive objects like planets, asteroids, or really big stations... call it interference with the engine drive system or something.  Plenty of lore friendly ways to explain such a thing.  Now don't get me wrong... I do love Higher simulation games.  The first time I docked two craft together in Kerbal Space Program was a 3 hour nerve wracking and extremely satisfying ordeal.  I am better at it now but I'll never be 100% confident I won't knock off solar panels... So I save before hand... retract panels and come in very cautiously... slowly... and methodically.  Which isn't the type of Game play I and most people would want from DU. 

 

How would I like DU landing to work?  VTOL.  Vertical Take Off and Landing.  I'd like to come into a planet... building... carrier type ship... whatever and hover above what ever surface my down facing radar detects... I'd like to select a hover altitude from my ship computer...  or shift to raise and ctrl to lower.   use wasd and maybe q and e to shift around and rotate my craft just the way I want then lower myself until contact.  Simple.  No velocities to cancel.  And heck if I don't care about the precise orientation and position the good old No Man's Sky style press button to land or take off works plenty well for landing on and exploring planets.

 

1) There are two kinds of Core Units in the game, Static and Dynamic Cores. Dymanic Cores can be moved, Static Cores cannot. Dynamic Cores are the blue ones.

 

2) When a ship is inert, it means there's no person with tags that can power the ship on, it doesn't mean the ship can't be moved. Immobilisation, compelete and total, is in the realm of Static Cores. Your idea? Works both ways. I can place a giant cup-ship aroudn your ship in the safezone and laugh as you whine for days on the forums about it. What? What??? Will the Devs be babysitters for this kind of thing? No. So yeah, Dynamic Core Units can be moved off of a planet, either the user moving them via naivgation, or somone budging them over. Also, since you missed said memo, the devs want to have mass and inertia (massive ships need more engines). I guess in your version of the game, my tini-tiny star-fighter is Mjolnir. Not even a battleship can nudge it aside.

 

3) Breach Pods that cannot breach, are not breaching pods. Doing damage, to open up a hole on a ship's armor and hull, to get a pod through, doesn't make this Pod a Breaching Pod, it makes it a Boarding Pod. Nuff said

 

4) We need collision damage, because otherwise Autopilots are obsolete and anyone can replicate them by taping down the W key on their keyboard and going afk. What? You won't need to adjust your course. Asteroid field? Who cares, you can bounce off of asteroids with Mjolnir, the magical star-fighter.

 

5) Piloting needs to be complex, it should take skill. If you didn't get the memo, the game utilises geometry in order to emulate calculations on glancing blows, which have to do with the orientation and the transversal speed of the ship, with the turrets locking onto another ship and getting data referrences as of the enemy ship's orientantion and transversal speed. And before any code peasant here says "But that cannot happen, it's impossible", EVE does this trick since 2003. They even got calculations for bullet based weaponry on when to take into account a "smashing hit", by virtue of slingshot trajectory emulations ( how is that achieved? Learn matha nd find out ). This ? This requires a pilot to know a thing or two about geometry in order to be effective. You want a simple piloting skill? You want to not have to know what kind of speed your weapon's projetiles have and have in order to get a maximum hit chance on the enemy given their distance? You don't want to have to build elaborate autopilots that adjust a star-fighter's speed and orientation to its target's in order for the emulation to find the two star-fighters at rest (look up what's "rest" in physics)? Then DU's flight mechanics won't be fun to you, it's THAT simple.

 

6) VTOL? VTOL works in very light-weight vehicles. I know this may sound crazy, but jet-planes do not weigh as much as a shutttle, and since DU is definitely not Star Citizen's WW2 planes in space, and actual space-flight engines are needed to take off a world, it's safe to assume you need to have powerful thrusters to take off a planet. Which also means, no magical space-brakes This game is a sandbox. You can't have mining / sanning / building be a difficult thing to do master, and have flight controls be easy. It doesn't work that way.

 

You may say "but this is a game, it's not meant to be difficult". Guess what, JC Baillie has said many times over, this game is going to be complex AND difficult.

 

To reiterate, I do not want voxel collision damage, I want an overloading core mechanism that makes said power cores / capacitors overload when a ship collides with an object, which incidentally, doesn't overload the server with calculations on each individual voxel as of traditional collision models It's a compromise that spills into many different game aspects. If you seen Rogue One, the third act of the movie, about 20 minutes from the end, is why we need collisino damage.

 

[Volkier]

Well, the idea is for the transversal speed of the ship to take into account the transversal of the collding object when dictating how much a capacitor is overloaded.

 

If the collision is head on, yeah, that's a 100% damage to the capacitor in Overload (which has to be determined by mass of the colliding objects, their combined velocites, etc. ) , while an offeset collision, wil lbe taken as a hit, sure, but it won't be something "Critical".

 

But yeah, can you imagine how many bricks are going to be shat, when

 

Navigator : "erm.. we just avoided an asteroid by 100 meters, Operations, do you even check the scanner?"

 

Operatations : " *snores* "

 

Collision = A reason to have Emergent Court-Marshals.

 

 

The thing is, it can't be used to calculate damage to different modules, cause that would be either based on  RNG (randomly occuring), or having to calculate damage on collision to modules individually (which is the same as voxel collisions, that being costly).

 

I thought you were more on the simple F=Ma formula - ie. taking the overall mass of the other object into consideration, whereby F is directly converted to damage taken by the capacitor (and maybe later on to directional forces if the game goes in that direction / engine allows for complex collisions). Only thing, is I would like to see certain modules built around decreasing - or outright absorbing a certain portion of damage for a certain amount of mass - at the expense of something like Maneuverability - so as to give people the option to outfit ships designed to fly through asteroid fields (eg. mining barges?). Of course the trick here would be to not have a mechanic that allows for battering ram types of ships (ie. a mining barge that can fly directly THROUGH a larger carrier, destroying the said carrier and not taking any damage itself), but at the same time, I feel there does need to be some kind of 'buffer'. And what better way to impliment it, than to give players options with regards to how they build specific ships. 

 

EDIT: Also come on - 100metres is PLENTY of room for error! What can POSSIBLY go wrong there? What happened to 'living dangerously' and whatnot?

[Anaximander]

I thought you were more on the simple F=Ma formula - ie. taking the overall mass of the other object into consideration, whereby F is directly converted to damage taken by the capacitor (and maybe later on to directional forces if the game goes in that direction / engine allows for complex collisions). 

That - the F=ma - can be easily exploited and can lead to torpoedo ships. We do not want torpedo ships. They already though got the orientation mechanism in-game for the ship's auto-scripter function when buillding it, so they also can keep track of orientation. They do have explained they ships wil lhave mass, and them ore stuff they got on board, the more massive the ships get.

 

F = ma would work if the model was voxel-damage based. What I suggest, works with decceleration in mind first. If two shps collide, but are moving in 10 m/s, then they just "lock horns" so to speak. They do not move. Now, the more massive ship, gets more power into its thrust, thus its inertia factor is higher, so the eother ship, to compensate, has to pump in more power into its core, thus, at a point, its core becomes to overload The "smaller ship", can choose to shut down the power core in its entirety and be shoved to the side, or risk popping in the struggle.

 

If anything, this whole "collision" model of mine is based on the principle on impulse, similar to what parkur practicioners utilise to not break a leg when they land after a vault. You extend the time of decceleration in order to reduce the forces applied to you.

 

If a ship has a certain mass and thus inertia modifier and its reactor is a Tier 3 model (top of the line), it has an Impulse Threshold of X. If that threshold is exceeded (ratios may vary as of the manufacturer player's skill training on Schematic research done on the Element itself), the capacitor / power core, suffers an "overloading" percentage of damage (which can be repaired / reduced via varius gameplay means, like cutting fuel to the capacitor while the overloaded amount is depleted, or amping the output to deplete it quickly to bring the capacitor under nominal standars).

 

If two ships were to "graze" one another, they would still suffer minute overloads, but on the bright side, they didn't pop. But if a star-fighter, which goes at a high velocity, was to collide with a ship that won't really badge by the collision as ts impulse tolerance is higher and its intertia is tronger, that star-fighter would pop on the spot, as the star-fighter can't tolerate such brutal deccelerations. Same goes for two star-fighters colliding They still can't afford the deccelration in their power cores, so they pop instead. 

 

Also, having mutiple power cores for a battleship would make sense, as it means the overloading percentage can be spread equally amongst them, thus increasing the Impulse Threshold by qutie a margin (at a very high manufacturing cost).

 

And yes, they do go for transversal speeds and orientations (like EVE's model), that's what they said in the updates from Kickstarter. 

 

The Unigine2 engine's calculations can compensate for relativity (which are used to simulate GPS satellite orbits). I think they got the technology for such a design.

 

 

See, what many people do not understand in the fear of the unknown, is that having collisino damage only opens up a vast array of options. Is your faction risking building those super-dreadnaughts at the monetary cost of 5 normal lbattleships? You as the engineer o na ship, do you make the decision on jettisoning a fuel cell in order for the capacitor to cool down from its overload, on going against your better judgemetn and listening to the captain of the ship telling you to "give them more power". You build a star-fighter with such an advanced flight assistance, that you ship is hailed as the second coming of the sliced bread, with your ship having the least numbers of collisions in battles.

 

I guess most people are short-sighted and they can't see a sandbox game as the interconnected entity it is. This is what mos t of the replies on many threads so far give me the impression of.

[Fitorion]

1) There are two kinds of Core Units in the game, Static and Dynamic Cores. Dymanic Cores can be moved, Static Cores cannot. Dynamic Cores are the blue ones.

 

2) When a ship is inert, it means there's no person with tags that can power the ship on, it doesn't mean the ship can't be moved. Immobilisation, compelete and total, is in the realm of Static Cores. Your idea? Works both ways. I can place a giant cup-ship aroudn your ship in the safezone and laugh as you whine for days on the forums about it. What? What??? Will the Devs be babysitters for this kind of thing? No. So yeah, Dynamic Core Units can be moved off of a planet, either the user moving them via naivgation, or somone budging them over. Also, since you missed said memo, the devs want to have mass and inertia (massive ships need more engines). I guess in your version of the game, my tini-tiny star-fighter is Mjolnir. Not even a battleship can nudge it aside.

 

3) Breach Pods that cannot breach, are not breaching pods. Doing damage, to open up a hole on a ship's armor and hull, to get a pod through, doesn't make this Pod a Breaching Pod, it makes it a Boarding Pod. Nuff said

 

4) We need collision damage, because otherwise Autopilots are obsolete and anyone can replicate them by taping down the W key on their keyboard and going afk. What? You won't need to adjust your course. Asteroid field? Who cares, you can bounce off of asteroids with Mjolnir, the magical star-fighter.

 

5) Piloting needs to be complex, it should take skill. If you didn't get the memo, the game utilises geometry in order to emulate calculations on glancing blows, which have to do with the orientation and the transversal speed of the ship, with the turrets locking onto another ship and getting data referrences as of the enemy ship's orientantion and transversal speed. And before any code peasant here says "But that cannot happen, it's impossible", EVE does this trick since 2003. They even got calculations for bullet based weaponry on when to take into account a "smashing hit", by virtue of slingshot trajectory emulations ( how is that achieved? Learn matha nd find out ). This ? This requires a pilot to know a thing or two about geometry in order to be effective. You want a simple piloting skill? You want to not have to know what kind of speed your weapon's projetiles have and have in order to get a maximum hit chance on the enemy given their distance? You don't want to have to build elaborate autopilots that adjust a star-fighter's speed and orientation to its target's in order for the emulation to find the two star-fighters at rest (look up what's "rest" in physics)? Then DU's flight mechanics won't be fun to you, it's THAT simple.

 

6) VTOL? VTOL works in very light-weight vehicles. I know this may sound crazy, but jet-planes do not weigh as much as a shutttle, and since DU is definitely not Star Citizen's WW2 planes in space, and actual space-flight engines are needed to take off a world, it's safe to assume you need to have powerful thrusters to take off a planet. Which also means, no magical space-brakes This game is a sandbox. You can't have mining / sanning / building be a difficult thing to do master, and have flight controls be easy. It doesn't work that way.

 

You may say "but this is a game, it's not meant to be difficult". Guess what, JC Baillie has said many times over, this game is going to be complex AND difficult.

 

To reiterate, I do not want voxel collision damage, I want an overloading core mechanism that makes said power cores / capacitors overload when a ship collides with an object, which incidentally, doesn't overload the server with calculations on each individual voxel as of traditional collision models It's a compromise that spills into many different game aspects. If you seen Rogue One, the third act of the movie, about 20 minutes from the end, is why we need collisino damage.

 

 

1. Irrelavent

 

2. if you land in someone else's building zone they could build over top of you yes.  I see no reason to prevent that.  In fact It could be quite useful if someone doesn't pay their landing pad rental fee...   No where does anything I've said contradict mass and inertia while ships are being flown.  Small ship flying to a large ship is hardly going to effect the larger ship and the little ship will bounce right off.  Big ship will plow right through little ships being flown around it.

 

3. can you read?  apparently not since you ignore where I mention the pod using weapons to open a hole in a ship.

 

4. Space is mostly Empty.  That's why it's called space...  The planets will not be moving in orbits.  The stars probably won't either.  So yeah you could just go in a straight line in a lot of cases.  However if you did fly into an area highly populated with objects you would bounce around and end up pointing completely the wrong direction to where you intended to go.  Not to mention you'd be extremely vulnerable to attack while you're afk... with your craft in flight mode.

 

5. Cite a source.  because Nothing you've said here has been said to be in the game by any dev I'm aware of.  In Fact it's quite the opposite.  They've said that projectiles will not at all be physically simulated. 

 

6. So what?  You need powerful engines for large ships... No duh.  What is your point exactly?  Complexity does not mean difficult and easy does not mean it isn't complex.  Game systems of good successful games are easy to use but difficult to master.  But simple mobility in a game should not be.  The simple things should be simple... like flying from point A to B and landing or taking off... Where piloting skill should be on display is combat.  Not moving boxes around a cargo bay.  This game is not a Physics Sim.

 

 

As for Rouge One... The Devs specifically cite large scale collisions and the mass destruction they can cause as the reason they don't want collision damage in game.  I completely get why you want it though.  The visuals of massive objects colliding and exploding are awesome.  I find them just as awesome but I recognize how much it would suck to have a city or large space station destroyed with out any of the players in said city or station having any agency to prevent it.  And a massive object being able to be driven into another object such that they explode is that.

[Anaximander]

1. Irrelavent

 

2. if you land in someone else's building zone they could build over top of you yes.  I see no reason to prevent that.  In fact It could be quite useful if someone doesn't pay their landing pad rental fee...   No where does anything I've said contradict mass and inertia while ships are being flown.  Small ship flying to a large ship is hardly going to effect the larger ship and the little ship will bounce right off.  Big ship will plow right through little ships being flown around it.

 

3. can you read?  apparently not since you ignore where I mention the pod using weapons to open a hole in a ship.

 

4. Space is mostly Empty.  That's why it's called space...  The planets will not be moving in orbits.  The stars probably won't either.  So yeah you could just go in a straight line in a lot of cases.  However if you did fly into an area highly populated with objects you would bounce around and end up pointing completely the wrong direction to where you intended to go.  Not to mention you'd be extremely vulnerable to attack while you're afk... with your craft in flight mode.

 

5. Cite a source.  because Nothing you've said here has been said to be in the game by any dev I'm aware of.  In Fact it's quite the opposite.  They've said that projectiles will not at all be physically simulated. 

 

6. So what?  You need powerful engines for large ships... No duh.  What is your point exactly?  Complexity does not mean difficult and easy does not mean it isn't complex.  Game systems of good successful games are easy to use but difficult to master.  But simple mobility in a game should not be.  The simple things should be simple... like flying from point A to B and landing or taking off... Where piloting skill should be on display is combat.  Not moving boxes around a cargo bay.  This game is not a Physics Sim.

 

 

As for Rouge One... The Devs specifically cite large scale collisions and the mass destruction they can cause as the reason they don't want collision damage in game.  I completely get why you want it though.  The visuals of massive objects colliding and exploding are awesome.  I find them just as awesome but I recognize how much it would suck to have a city or large space station destroyed with out any of the players in said city or station having any agency to prevent it.  And a massive object being able to be driven into another object such that they explode is that.

1) Ignorant : That's you. There's a rreason the word Static means Immobile and dynamic meaning "able to apply forces and have forces be applied on". You thin kthere would be two Core Units, that didn't serve different purposes? On the Kickstarter video they explain it on ships "Core Units deploy a voxel grid, that telsl the planet these voxels can move freely off of it". You still confuse "inert object" with "immune to forces object". If it was so easy to anchor an object in the game, the Devs would not need more time to deploy an anchoring mechanic in the game.

 

2) You are Ignorant and Inconstistent : You can't have mass and inertia and then say "but ignore mass and inertia when I am sleeping". Also, if I land a cup-shaped ship over your ship in a safezone, I go offline and I get to keep you prisoner FOREVER. I do not break any game mechanics. I just landed my ship where I wanted to. Oh, you want out? How about you pay 1 billion spacebucks to get out of it? OH you don't got it, tough luck, I got 100 more Cup-shaped ship-prisons to look after  (and you can't do anything about it in your world of powered down ships are Mjolnir" ).

 

3) A Breaching Pod, works by plunging itself on a ship's hull. A Pod with guns, it's just a Boarding Pod with guns . If you think a peashooter will break through a battleship's armor, you are way too dellusional Yeah, do try to pierce a battleship's armor with your  .50 Cal machinegun, I am pretty sure that will work in your world of magic and ships of infinite weight.

 

4) Guess who's gonna wait for you in a straight line. Me. I am here to make people's lives a pain. I am the game's difficulty level. I am the pirate. You want to avoid me? Get in an asteroid field, and zoom around tight corners to avoid being grappled and, well, be turned into a salt mine. In fact, I don't even need to grapple you, I will bounce on you until you stop entirely and just board and torment you with "oh, nice stuff you got there for me". Oh, and pirates work in swarms, so we can tackle you completely. If only collisions prevented massive tacklings and piling tactics. I guess spaceshisp are cars. We can use the same trick as police cruisers to tackle a suspect's vehicle. LEL.

 

5) Check your e-mail, Kickstarter updates They explain about that in the CvC e-mail. You are, as it seems, misinformed on the subject. Also, I rephrase 1), you are Ignorant and not well versed in english. An emulation, is not a simulation I said EMULATION. EMULATION. Get it? Let me say it again , EMULATION.  You get it now? No? Let me say it again. EMULATION, not a SIMULATION. Call of Duty? That's SIMULATION. EVE Online? EMULATION.

 

Get it? No? Emulations use mathematics to determine periodacal occurances of events. Code-Peasants use the "roll a dice" parabole for code, but since I am not a code peasant, I won't pretend as if luck is an actual thing.

 

Learn math, then come back and discuss this subject.  Also, check what you quoted off of me, I do state "emulate" and "emulation" in it. I never said Simulation, which you, the code peasant, actually think of as physical projectile phyiscs, which are emulations.

 

Simulations = much more complex

Emulations = statistics based, thus, coming down to a formula.

 

 

6) Easy to use exhibit A : AWSD movements, combined with QE for yaw and ZXC for dive and pivot. 

    Hard to master : Latent motion, transversal speeds and stellar geometries. 

 

What you want, is not the above. Too bad, this flight model actually needs you to be concentrated and not just "pew-pew" at a target.

 

Also.. you seem to have missed also the news on Protection Bubbles and Shields. They, in fact, can prevent ships from entering. Nobody will drive a Super-Mega-Galactic-Destroyer (or whatever the redonkulous ships the Empire has are cllaed) in a space station. The Protection Bubble will prevent that (or the shield, it's yet unkown what's the difference between those two's properties). If you were to collide with a Protection Bubble, chances are you would pop your ship, no matter how strong it is, unless of course, it's not the case, in which case we get battery-ram ships.

 

Thing is, without complexities like collisions in the game, piloting becomes a taxi driver's job, rather than something extremely challenging and fascinating. It's becomes a chore.

 

In EVE, people who are granted Titans by their corporations, are pilots who know how to play the game well. Nobody will give a nooblord a Titan, those babies cost a lot. Same merit should be taken into account for DU. You want your org to give you a battlseship navigators position? You better prove to be a good pilot, that means not being shot out of the sky on every star-fighter you ever go, then working up the ladder, being given a frigate's driver seat, then a cruiser's, then a battlecruiser etc.

 

You can't have a frame of referrence for a navigator to be judged upon their flight skills, if collision damages do not exist (since we know lateral motion and transversal speeds are indeed a thing).

 

As I said before, some people are too short-sighted to see that one aspect of a sandbox game, affects the whole game You see collision damage and say "i want to nose-dive a planet and land just fine", I see it and say "we need no auto-pilots for flight assiastnace, engineerig becomes dull and a press A B or C quick-time event gameplay, and ship-building doesn't take into account arrow-shapes for ships, in order for any possible collision between the ship and another vessel, leading to a grazing contact, which means lesser overload (in my suggestion of a collision model)".

 

See? In my suggestion, even the shape of the ship plays a role in the game now. In yours, I can build a ship shaped like a cup and just troll people until they hand me the ransom I want. Not to mention, Johhny Malarchy can just build ugly blocky ships and not be at a disadvantage.

[Halo381]

 

 

As I understand it... when you land a ship/exit it/stop controlling it/deactivate its core (all ways of phrasing the same idea) it becomes a static object like a building or space station.

 

Uh, no..... If that were the case then I could just deactivate the core mid-combat and suddenly my velocity is zeroed out, don't even have to brake. Then I reactivate my core once the guy chasing me has flown by. That also means that if no one is in the pilot's seat, the ship can't move, which means if someone has to leave in the middle of a fight, you're a sitting duck. Not to mention it makes autopilots kinda pointless.

 

From what I understand, deactivating the core and landing your ship are not always gonna be the same thing. Which is good. Being able to turn off your ship's systems and run dark in hopes that your enemies' sensors won't pick up your signature would be a viable tactic, not to mention it can be used to save power, if you're low on fuel. In this event, your ship would keep moving in whatever direction you had it moving before you turned off the power core, until it hits something, which is as it should be.

 

To land, would basically be to attach a smaller object to a larger object. To do so the objects velocities would have to be zeroed out relative to each other. or close to zero. Then they combine and move as one object, with the larger object being primary to the smaller object, so that the small ship's engines don't fire when the carrier it's on moves. (Correct me if I'm wrong on this)

 

Why should there be this distinction? 

 

Because, like Twerk said, there are Static Cores, and Dynamic Cores. Just because you power down an object with a dynamic core does not suddenly make it a static object. Whatever inertia it had before it was powered down, it retains. As it should.

[Volkier]

That - the F=ma - can be easily exploited and can lead to torpoedo ships. We do not want torpedo ships. They already though got the orientation mechanism in-game for the ship's auto-scripter function when buillding it, so they also can keep track of orientation. They do have explained they ships wil lhave mass, and them ore stuff they got on board, the more massive the ships get.

 

F = ma would work if the model was voxel-damage based. What I suggest, works with decceleration in mind first. If two shps collide, but are moving in 10 m/s, then they just "lock horns" so to speak. They do not move. Now, the more massive ship, gets more power into its thrust, thus its inertia factor is higher, so the eother ship, to compensate, has to pump in more power into its core, thus, at a point, its core becomes to overload The "smaller ship", can choose to shut down the power core in its entirety and be shoved to the side, or risk popping in the struggle.

 

If anything, this whole "collision" model of mine is based on the principle on impulse, similar to what parkur practicioners utilise to not break a leg when they land after a vault. You extend the time of decceleration in order to reduce the forces applied to you.

 

If a ship has a certain mass and thus inertia modifier and its reactor is a Tier 3 model (top of the line), it has an Impulse Threshold of X. If that threshold is exceeded (ratios may vary as of the manufacturer player's skill training on Schematic research done on the Element itself), the capacitor / power core, suffers an "overloading" percentage of damage (which can be repaired / reduced via varius gameplay means, like cutting fuel to the capacitor while the overloaded amount is depleted, or amping the output to deplete it quickly to bring the capacitor under nominal standars).

 

If two ships were to "graze" one another, they would still suffer minute overloads, but on the bright side, they didn't pop. But if a star-fighter, which goes at a high velocity, was to collide with a ship that won't really badge by the collision as ts impulse tolerance is higher and its intertia is tronger, that star-fighter would pop on the spot, as the star-fighter can't tolerate such brutal deccelerations. Same goes for two star-fighters colliding They still can't afford the deccelration in their power cores, so they pop instead. 

 

Also, having mutiple power cores for a battleship would make sense, as it means the overloading percentage can be spread equally amongst them, thus increasing the Impulse Threshold by qutie a margin (at a very high manufacturing cost).

 

And yes, they do go for transversal speeds and orientations (like EVE's model), that's what they said in the updates from Kickstarter. 

 

The Unigine2 engine's calculations can compensate for relativity (which are used to simulate GPS satellite orbits). I think they got the technology for such a design.

 

 

See, what many people do not understand in the fear of the unknown, is that having collisino damage only opens up a vast array of options. Is your faction risking building those super-dreadnaughts at the monetary cost of 5 normal lbattleships? You as the engineer o na ship, do you make the decision on jettisoning a fuel cell in order for the capacitor to cool down from its overload, on going against your better judgemetn and listening to the captain of the ship telling you to "give them more power". You build a star-fighter with such an advanced flight assistance, that you ship is hailed as the second coming of the sliced bread, with your ship having the least numbers of collisions in battles.

 

I guess most people are short-sighted and they can't see a sandbox game as the interconnected entity it is. This is what mos t of the replies on many threads so far give me the impression of.

 

No I that nobody wants torpedo ships - but wouldn't that be countered by the fact that it would become insanely inefficient, considering you would need to put a whole load of mass, followed by enough propulsion to create the acceleration necessary, and dump a few modules like inertia stabilisers on so your ship doesn't fall apart the moment it hits a rock? I mean it would be 'possible', but extremely impractical - as you end up with a model whereby a ship that has no modules on it other than the engine + core + small mass (ie. cheap) would do nearly no damage to anything that is built as an actual ship - or that you would basically have to invest way more $ into a 'torpedo ship', than the cost of the ship you can successfully destroy by suiciding into?

[Anaximander]

No I that nobody wants torpedo ships - but wouldn't that be countered by the fact that it would become insanely inefficient, considering you would need to put a whole load of mass, followed by enough propulsion to create the acceleration necessary, and dump a few modules like inertia stabilisers on so your ship doesn't fall apart the moment it hits a rock? I mean it would be 'possible', but extremely impractical - as you end up with a model whereby a ship that has no modules on it other than the engine + core + small mass (ie. cheap) would do nearly no damage to anything that is built as an actual ship - or that you would basically have to invest way more $ into a 'torpedo ship', than the cost of the ship you can successfully destroy by suiciding into?

That's the point. 

 

Think of it as reverse EVE missile mechanism logic In EVE, (if people do not know) if you got a Torpedo and fire it at a smaller cracft than a battleship (that can use torpedos) the frigate will take less damage, becase it can outrun the blast of the exploding ttorpedo and it has a smaller surface area (signature radius) that makes it feel less of an impact from the explosion itself (which requires a gimmick called a Target PAinter which essentially increases the enemy's Signature Radius to the torpedo boat so it deals more damage to smaller ships).

 

Now, think of it this way. In order to pop a battleship with a collision, you need an equally massive object. Now, you need said object to move FASTER than the battleship (so we do not end in a Locked Horns situation). You see the conundrum already I hope. A battleship hull that moves faster than a battleship is a battlecruiser. Why would you build a battlecruiser that will kill only one battleship? It's not cost efficient... at all. But on the upside, ramming speed is always an option, Commander Worf would be proud. o7

 

And then, there's the other issue. You scan an enemy ship from a distance, it has no guns but too much propulsion? That's a torpedo ship? Splendid, just turn your ship o nthe side and give it a long-range broadside until the torpedo boat hits the road or pops

 

And before anyone brings up some weird as arguement of "what if the other battleship is fast as a battlecruiser".

 

There's no such thing as a fast and agile battleship. Power and Cumberness go hand in hand, like peanut butter and jelly.

[Fitorion]

1) Ignorant : That's you. There's a rreason the word Static means Immobile and dynamic meaning "able to apply forces and have forces be applied on". You thin kthere would be two Core Units, that didn't serve different purposes? On the Kickstarter video they explain it on ships "Core Units deploy a voxel grid, that telsl the planet these voxels can move freely off of it". You still confuse "inert object" with "immune to forces object". If it was so easy to anchor an object in the game, the Devs would not need more time to deploy an anchoring mechanic in the game.

 

2) You are Ignorant and Inconstistent : You can't have mass and inertia and then say "but ignore mass and inertia when I am sleeping". Also, if I land a cup-shaped ship over your ship in a safezone, I go offline and I get to keep you prisoner FOREVER. I do not break any game mechanics. I just landed my ship where I wanted to. Oh, you want out? How about you pay 1 billion spacebucks to get out of it? OH you don't got it, tough luck, I got 100 more Cup-shaped ship-prisons to look after  (and you can't do anything about it in your world of powered down ships are Mjolnir" ).

 

3) A Breaching Pod, works by plunging itself on a ship's hull. A Pod with guns, it's just a Boarding Pod with guns . If you think a peashooter will break through a battleship's armor, you are way too dellusional Yeah, do try to pierce a battleship's armor with your  .50 Cal machinegun, I am pretty sure that will work in your world of magic and ships of infinite weight.

 

4) Guess who's gonna wait for you in a straight line. Me. I am here to make people's lives a pain. I am the game's difficulty level. I am the pirate. You want to avoid me? Get in an asteroid field, and zoom around tight corners to avoid being grappled and, well, be turned into a salt mine. In fact, I don't even need to grapple you, I will bounce on you until you stop entirely and just board and torment you with "oh, nice stuff you got there for me". Oh, and pirates work in swarms, so we can tackle you completely. If only collisions prevented massive tacklings and piling tactics. I guess spaceshisp are cars. We can use the same trick as police cruisers to tackle a suspect's vehicle. LEL.

 

5) Check your e-mail, Kickstarter updates They explain about that in the CvC e-mail. You are, as it seems, misinformed on the subject. Also, I rephrase 1), you are Ignorant and not well versed in english. An emulation, is not a simulation I said EMULATION. EMULATION. Get it? Let me say it again , EMULATION.  You get it now? No? Let me say it again. EMULATION, not a SIMULATION. Call of Duty? That's SIMULATION. EVE Online? EMULATION.

 

Get it? No? Emulations use mathematics to determine periodacal occurances of events. Code-Peasants use the "roll a dice" parabole for code, but since I am not a code peasant, I won't pretend as if luck is an actual thing.

 

Learn math, then come back and discuss this subject.  Also, check what you quoted off of me, I do state "emulate" and "emulation" in it. I never said Simulation, which you, the code peasant, actually think of as physical projectile phyiscs, which are emulations.

 

Simulations = much more complex

Emulations = statistics based, thus, coming down to a formula.

 

 

6) Easy to use exhibit A : AWSD movements, combined with QE for yaw and ZXC for dive and pivot. 

    Hard to master : Latent motion, transversal speeds and stellar geometries. 

 

What you want, is not the above. Too bad, this flight model actually needs you to be concentrated and not just "pew-pew" at a target.

 

Also.. you seem to have missed also the news on Protection Bubbles and Shields. They, in fact, can prevent ships from entering. Nobody will drive a Super-Mega-Galactic-Destroyer (or whatever the redonkulous ships the Empire has are cllaed) in a space station. The Protection Bubble will prevent that (or the shield, it's yet unkown what's the difference between those two's properties). If you were to collide with a Protection Bubble, chances are you would pop your ship, no matter how strong it is, unless of course, it's not the case, in which case we get battery-ram ships.

 

Thing is, without complexities like collisions in the game, piloting becomes a taxi driver's job, rather than something extremely challenging and fascinating. It's becomes a chore.

 

In EVE, people who are granted Titans by their corporations, are pilots who know how to play the game well. Nobody will give a nooblord a Titan, those babies cost a lot. Same merit should be taken into account for DU. You want your org to give you a battlseship navigators position? You better prove to be a good pilot, that means not being shot out of the sky on every star-fighter you ever go, then working up the ladder, being given a frigate's driver seat, then a cruiser's, then a battlecruiser etc.

 

You can't have a frame of referrence for a navigator to be judged upon their flight skills, if collision damages do not exist (since we know lateral motion and transversal speeds are indeed a thing).

 

As I said before, some people are too short-sighted to see that one aspect of a sandbox game, affects the whole game You see collision damage and say "i want to nose-dive a planet and land just fine", I see it and say "we need no auto-pilots for flight assiastnace, engineerig becomes dull and a press A B or C quick-time event gameplay, and ship-building doesn't take into account arrow-shapes for ships, in order for any possible collision between the ship and another vessel, leading to a grazing contact, which means lesser overload (in my suggestion of a collision model)".

 

See? In my suggestion, even the shape of the ship plays a role in the game now. In yours, I can build a ship shaped like a cup and just troll people until they hand me the ransom I want. Not to mention, Johhny Malarchy can just build ugly blocky ships and not be at a disadvantage.

You are delusional.  Making up stuff you want to be in the game which hasn't been announced.  Twisting words to your liking and arguing against things I haven't said.  And you cast insults at anyone who disagrees with you.

 

When you return to being rational I'll discuss game systems with you.  Until then bye.

[Anaximander]

You are delusional.  Making up stuff you want to be in the game which hasn't been announced.  Twisting words to your liking and arguing against things I haven't said.  And you cast insults at anyone who disagrees with you.

 

When you return to being rational I'll discuss game systems with you.  Until then by.

This collision damage model = my suggestion.

 

Since you are lazy and don't like facts or research, he tranversal part is in the Kickstarter Update #21, on Combat, n the CvC setion of the combat.

 

Facts : Transversal speeds are a thing (EVE's model of calculatin hits).

 

 

Since Dual Universe is played in first person view (at least for the moment), you get the impression that you shoot at what you aim. For close range combat, we may introduce a lock mechanism that triggers on whatever is near you and facing you. The only limit is that the server must be able to easily check that the lock is valid. As for the the damage: It will be calculated based on the type of weapon, the distance, the lateral speed, the type of armor, any protection, the skills of the targeted and those of the targeter, etc. Many parameters will factor into the level of damage that is applied to the target (it could even be 0, if you miss).

Moving on to Construct vs Construct combat, that is part of the next stretch goal. You can add “weapon elements” to your construct (that you can craft or buy on the in-game markets with in-game money). Let’s say, for example, a railgun turret. In the first version of the CvC gameplay, the only way to use that turret is to get close to it, and activate it. You will then sit on the seat and be able to rotate it and target other ships. In future expansions, we will try to implement a way for you to control several weapons at the same time in a tactical view, and script how you coordinate them. But for the moment, it is “one man = one weapon element”. The only exception is the cockpit (which is a control unit, so you can host scripts in it), which you will be able to connect to various weapon elements in your ship and control from there, so therefore you can have a “dog fight” experience. In any case, be it via orienting the ship to have the cockpit facing the target, or by rotating the turret, you will be able to lock a particular point on the targeted (if it is far away, a random point will be chosen), and then fire. Again, we can have an insta lock + fire mechanism here to make it more immersive.

The result of the locking mechanism from a Construct is to find a point of impact for the damage to spread from. So, if you target the front of a ship, this will inflict damage on the front, if you target the back, it will happen on the back and so on. The point of impact is simply where your reticle is pointing. Now, from this point of impact, a “damage sphere” will be calculated, based again on stats related to your weapons, the type of damage, the shields, the skills, etc. Everything within this sphere will be damaged, based on its resistance level: the voxels will be “mined out”, and the elements will be destroyed. So, we are talking about realistic located damages, which is interesting because it can lead to different strategies during fight: should you target the engines first, or the weapons? If an Element of a ship gets destroyed, its function will of course be disabled. So a ship could end up missing an engine, a radar, or anything that was part of its normal functioning. As a consequence, you can disable a ship without necessarily blowing it up entirely.

 

 

Dynamic Cores / Static Cores : 

 

 

I guess the Devs are lying in this image on their facebook page uh? I guess you know better than them, right cheeky fella?

 

 

Since I proven you are just an ignorant person, I expect you to be an honorable ignorant person and apologise to the Devs for being misinformed and spreading misinformation.

 

Wow, and here I was thinking ony one other person on the forums was terrible misinformed and refusing to be informed on the game's - discussed by the devs - mechanisms.

 

P.S. : You got the moves like Rico Suave, avoiding people calling you out by burying your head in the sand. You will be a top-notch politician in the game. xD

 

 

[Volkier]

That's the point. 

 

Think of it as reverse EVE missile mechanism logic In EVE, (if people do not know) if you got a Torpedo and fire it at a smaller cracft than a battleship (that can use torpedos) the frigate will take less damage, becase it can outrun the blast of the exploding ttorpedo and it has a smaller surface area (signature radius) that makes it feel less of an impact from the explosion itself (which requires a gimmick called a Target PAinter which essentially increases the enemy's Signature Radius to the torpedo boat so it deals more damage to smaller ships).

 

Now, think of it this way. In order to pop a battleship with a collision, you need an equally massive object. Now, you need said object to move FASTER than the battleship (so we do not end in a Locked Horns situation). You see the conundrum already I hope. A battleship hull that moves faster than a battleship is a battlecruiser. Why would you build a battlecruiser that will kill only one battleship? It's not cost efficient... at all. But on the upside, ramming speed is always an option, Commander Worf would be proud. o7

 

And then, there's the other issue. You scan an enemy ship from a distance, it has no guns but too much propulsion? That's a torpedo ship? Splendid, just turn your ship o nthe side and give it a long-range broadside until the torpedo boat hits the road or pops

 

And before anyone brings up some weird as arguement of "what if the other battleship is fast as a battlecruiser".

 

There's no such thing as a fast and agile battleship. Power and Cumberness go hand in hand, like peanut butter and jelly.

 

 

I used to make "fast battleships" in EVE online. I'm sure everyone has. I'm also sure that everyone remembers that while you would eventually match the speed of a first tier 'poor man's interceptor', it would take about one or two minutes to accelerate to that speed, just as long to stop, and your maneuverability was about as good as Hindenburg's last decent. And on top of that, you had significantly reduced offence and defense capabilities. Needless to say, while it was fun to mess around with such builds "for the lulz", it was guaranteed suicide to try and fly something like that into actual combat. 

 

Same applied in cases where you managed to shove a battleship sized MWD onto a battlecruiser - except multiply all the extremes by 10. 

 

Not sure where I'm going with this, other than I suppose pointing out that it's not impossible to have a mechanic that can provide a whole load of depth into the game, while avoiding abuse of the said mechanic by means of making it impractical - at least to an extent. 

[Anaximander]

I used to make "fast battleships" in EVE online. I'm sure everyone has. I'm also sure that everyone remembers that while you would eventually match the speed of a first tier 'poor man's interceptor', it would take about one or two minutes to accelerate to that speed, just as long to stop, and your maneuverability was about as good as Hindenburg's last decent. And on top of that, you had significantly reduced offence and defense capabilities. Needless to say, while it was fun to mess around with such builds "for the lulz", it was guaranteed suicide to try and fly something like that into actual combat. 

 

Same applied in cases where you managed to shove a battleship sized MWD onto a battlecruiser - except multiply all the extremes by 10. 

 

Not sure where I'm going with this, other than I suppose pointing out that it's not impossible to have a mechanic that can provide a whole load of depth into the game, while avoiding abuse of the said mechanic by means of making it impractical - at least to an extent. 

Even so, if you were to have a warp drive on a battleship in DU and have powergrid to spare for afterburners (since Micro Wwarp Drives are just powerful afterburners ), the mass of your ship would be holding it from reaching "torpedo" speeds. And this whole "torpedo battleships", the devs could add a stat on a construct ,called "structural integrity", which means that a ship, given its mass and the stnregth of its materials, if it goes beyond a certain speed, it's going to start suffering Overloading on its reactor(s), thus preventing certain ships from reaching high speeds organically. Plus, let's be honest, given the material depletion in DU, I do not see such battleships being built, because they are organisation level of entry ships. Nobody is gonna build Lik' Timmy a For teh Lulz ship  

 

Back to the "fast battleship" thing, given the time needed for a ship to speed up to a critical velocity and the fact said ship would have to maintain a straight line to an object (like a space station), the mass it would accumulate (becoming impossible to stirr), said space station, with some guns on it, could easily blow that torpedo ship off of the sky. Not to mention, that even if the battleship was to "collide", in my suggestion of the whole system, the space station is orders of magnitute more massive than the battleship, thus, it has a higher impulse threshhold, thus it will simply suffer minor reactor oveloadings, with the exception that the exploding battleship, if said reactors were to spawn damage bubbles (the way the devs plan on damage to be applied,, similar to the "mining" bubbles), that space station may possibly suffer some minor damage on its exterior. And even on that department, there are solutions.

 

There are workarounds for the collision mechanism to be in the game, that would make certain ship architectures be prevalent (arrowhead ship models, disc-shaped ships), in order for people to minimise that possibilty of collision in combat and to mitigate said collisions on top of that. Last thing we want is Caldari ships in DU (except for the Corax, Corax is BAE). And this ties to my workaround of the station taking damage by a battleship that collided and exploded and caused damage via virtue of its reactors overloading and exploding. If people want to have ugly ships, with asymmetrical edges,by having ships' shields acting as ovaloid "rubber-bands", that drain a shield while keeping the two ships from colliding and when shields fall, then the overloading mechanism comes into play. This, applied to a space station, would make the exploding battleship that torpedoed itself upon it, cause damage on the shield of the space station, not the space station itself.

 

I guess it's up to the devs if they want such a mechanism at this point, mine being just a very rough draft of an idea, I am not a professional designer, and I don't know how they rigged their game engine to work, I just made a suggestion that would be very far less costly on the server.

 

But sadly I suspect they do not want said mechanics like collision, for various reasons, one of those reasons, is that many people who will play this game, won't have this thing called "Common sense". For referrence, look at one of the dacade's trends, Planking or look at how many people in MMOs stand on a fire roaring beneath their feet during a raid boss, then they blame the healer for not being omnipotent or whining that the tank is an idiot for not being able to take the two rooms that person drawed aggro from onto themselves.

 

It's a hard fact, that omission of game mechanics from a game that lead to it being dumbed down (like the lack of collision) is there to cater to the most common denominator, the nooblord. Even EVE, with all its hardcore glory, would cause people to pop a vein if it added collisions.

 

 

Nooblords were the same people who brought the NGE on Star Wars Galaxies.

 

I personally, will be doing ground combat stuff (with all the possible C4 I can place on people's vehicles), but what I want to do inn my downtime is building and rigging ships to do spiffy tricks. And I don't find incentive in making auto-pilots and cruise controls when there's no collision

 

[Volkier]

Ah, but then we're venturing into the concept of "maximum speed in space", and how it's going to exist in DU. While I hoof no idea how the developers are going to tackle this aspect considering that constructs are made by players, all of varying degrees of size, I would have to say that the best (and most logical aspect of it) would be to have no maximum speed altogether. Instead, the amount of propulsion affecting a certain mass, would affect the acceleration of constructs - including maneuverability. So your 'interceptor type' small ships, that can turn on a dime and accelerate stupidly fast are still going to be viable and fly circles around a large battleship. The battleship would be able to get to technically 'same' speeds - albeit several minutes later, take just as long to decelerate, and have crippling maneuverability in comparison. 

 

Basically, it's once again the concept of "what's most practical for how you fly and how your ship handles". I just feel that this kind of system that doesn't use "hard caps" on variables, would produce an overall more enjoyable end result that will give players a whole lot more options when it comes to the design of the constructs. So I guess what I'm trying to say, when it comes to "torpedo battleships", it "should" be "possible" - through maybe shoving an engine from a deathstar sized vessel onto a battleship construct. But it shouldn't be viable in most situations, as you will run out of fuel in less than a minute of using the said engine, even if the entirety of your ship consists of a fuel tank. 

 

But as you say, it's hard to say anything at the moment, as none of us know how exactly the devs rigged their engine, what will be possible in it, and ultimately, which way the devs want their work of art to go.

[Anaximander]

Ah, but then we're venturing into the concept of "maximum speed in space", and how it's going to exist in DU. While I hoof no idea how the developers are going to tackle this aspect considering that constructs are made by players, all of varying degrees of size, I would have to say that the best (and most logical aspect of it) would be to have no maximum speed altogether. Instead, the amount of propulsion affecting a certain mass, would affect the acceleration of constructs - including maneuverability. So your 'interceptor type' small ships, that can turn on a dime and accelerate stupidly fast are still going to be viable and fly circles around a large battleship. The battleship would be able to get to technically 'same' speeds - albeit several minutes later, take just as long to decelerate, and have crippling maneuverability in comparison. 

 

Basically, it's once again the concept of "what's most practical for how you fly and how your ship handles". I just feel that this kind of system that doesn't use "hard caps" on variables, would produce an overall more enjoyable end result that will give players a whole lot more options when it comes to the design of the constructs. So I guess what I'm trying to say, when it comes to "torpedo battleships", it "should" be "possible" - through maybe shoving an engine from a deathstar sized vessel onto a battleship construct. But it shouldn't be viable in most situations, as you will run out of fuel in less than a minute of using the said engine, even if the entirety of your ship consists of a fuel tank. 

 

But as you say, it's hard to say anything at the moment, as none of us know how exactly the devs rigged their engine, what will be possible in it, and ultimately, which way the devs want their work of art to go.

I do not question if it should be able to have a torpedo battleship. I only argue that with the limtation of resources being depletable and the effort required, no organisation would actually consider building them Maybe a mocking version of a battleship, made out of wood or something, but not actual, titantium +++ worth materials torpedo battleships.

 

Also, my material integrity idea? Makes said ships made out of wood able to break on a dime if they were to accelerate to speeds theat wood would shatter, by virtue of the mentioned overloading reactor, while a ship made of, let's say, Titanium, would have a far higher material integrity to withstand higher accelerations and afford some cosmetic wood panels on their hallways (for w/e reason I guess ).

 

Yes, speed, should be based on inverted values i.e. less mass == more acceleration and velocities limited by propulsion strength, its instances and an inverted value that reduces the thrusters efficincy the further they are from the center of mass, in other words ,requiring people to spread propulsion through the length of a ship (as they SHOULD ). That way, a ship's acceleration, velocity and maneuverability, all become a trade-off, you can max one but averaging the other two, or you can make a ship that is meant for speed, with very punishing maneuverability nearing 0 on the "triangle", requiring auto-pilots to compensate for a long trip. I mean, if your enemy's turrets can't track you as you zoom by them, you could be one heck of a murderous bomber, and even if you get the right triangle of said stats, you still got the materials that add quality to your ship (and a prie tag of course). Interceptors for example, are expensive because they got strong and light-weight materials, that give them speed, maneuvrability / acceleration and can protect hem from damage, while a common G.I. star-fighter is made of paper and hope, i.e. X-Wings being flying coffins. And on top of all these, a ship would then have to have a certan design to make it less "collidable".

 

And all of the above, can even combine in a gameplay feature of people going for a ship's power junctions, in order to cause its reactors to become overloading with power (as they are ordered to send energy to places the reactors can't since the junctions are cut), which would then make battleships explode if they were to be hit on key points (which the battleship's engineers could actually repair), thus actually given smaller org a chance against a battle capital ship attack against them.

 

This idea, again, would only be worth it if there's a reactor overloading mechanism, that ties to collisions, maximum VIABLE acceleration / velocity (exceeding it causes overloads to the reactor as its ship's hull takes "damage" based on the construct's collective material integirty tying to "Hull Integrity" ), which leads to special forces people sabotaging a battleship by infiltrating it before an operation (cloaky armors? Who knows) and setting its reactor to overload, and starfighters going for the "juggular" of a ship, that then requires a ship architecture to be present, with key power junctions points on a ship's hull to be reinforced (so the reactors don't start overloading), which make a ship renowned for its level of craftmanship and reliability, its design and small tweakings that make it a monster of a warship, compared to Lik' Timmy's "Killst0rm1337" ship, that is a garbage of a design.

 

All in all, it's a feature that sips into many other gameplays. And I do hope the devs consider adding a form of reactor overloading mechanism, which would make collisions possible, without overloading the server with voxel-to-voxel calculations, as it only takes mass, reactor instances on a construct (for spreading the overloading amount equally amongst them) that equate to the Impulse Tolerance value that is then compared to the colliding ship's Impulse Tolerance, then dividng said ratio with the angular velocity (transversal speed) of the two constructs for determining a ratio that below it they can "ignore" collisions before their reactors begin overloading from the strain of keeping the acceleration going by pumping energy into the engines ( a small recap I guess) . I.e. a battleship has an Impulse Tolerance ratio of 100, but a star-fighter has 10. The ratio where they can ignore collisions, is 1:10, thus the star-fighter explodes if it was to collide with the battleship.

 

Again, I agree with the "no hard caps" mentality you go for, I only suggest an organic way for caps to exist to begin with in the first place, as they do IRL , i.e. you can have a tank that goes 250 km / h , but do not expect it to survive a battle with a tank that is actually armored.

[revofire]

I for one think we need collision damage. There is a user here that keeps talking like we need to make the game easy. I'm sorry but this isn't Mario Kart and you shouldn't be allowed to ram into a planet at slightly less than light speed and make a perfect landing. This is not optional, this is not a choice, this is a requirement. NQ said that there wouldn't be voxel recognition of ramming but that does not mean that you should take no damage. I think the idea that your ship's components take damage instead of the actual structure makes a lot more sense.

 

I implore NQ to not even consider implementing no collision damage. I shouldn't even have to argue this, it just seems so ridiculous that I didn't even consider that to be on the table. This is not Minecraft in space. It is supposed to have the FREEDOM of MC but it is not supposed to hold your hand and make it an arcade 0-immersion game. It's a civilization, living, breathing game.

 

But I'll leave you with this to think long and hard about. I didn't have to type this all up, Understand that this is all Dual Universe will ever be if you have no collision damage.

 

https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FNPLOG3nS3Q8%2Fmaxresdefault.jpg&f=1

[Lethys]

I for one think we need collision damage. There is a user here that keeps talking like we need to make the game easy. I'm sorry but this isn't Mario Kart and you shouldn't be allowed to ram into a planet at slightly less than light speed and make a perfect landing. This is not optional, this is not a choice, this is a requirement. NQ said that there wouldn't be voxel recognition of ramming but that does not mean that you should take no damage. I think the idea that your ship's components take damage instead of the actual structure makes a lot more sense.

 

I implore NQ to not even consider implementing no collision damage. I shouldn't even have to argue this, it just seems so ridiculous that I didn't even consider that to be on the table. This is not Minecraft in space. It is supposed to have the FREEDOM of MC but it is not supposed to hold your hand and make it an arcade 0-immersion game. It's a civilization, living, breathing game.

 

But I'll leave you with this to think long and hard about. I didn't have to type this all up, Understand that this is all Dual Universe will ever be if you have no collision damage.

 

https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FNPLOG3nS3Q8%2Fmaxresdefault.jpg&f=1

I loved that game.

 

Oh and for now you can demand whatever you want but server stability and better core features of the game > "realism" like collision damage.