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Raming ship


Aesir

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As we know there will be collision damages, I would love to see a Ram element, could be a weapon or some kind of special plate you put in front of your ship to protect it from the impact. What do you think ?

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2 minutes ago, CaptainTwerkmotor said:

WMD weapon

what's this ?

 

4 minutes ago, CaptainTwerkmotor said:

Thubg is, NQ doesn't want the extra load on the servers. Understandable.

Yeah right.

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WMD = Weapon of Mass Destruction.

Think Nuclear Bombs of Intecontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). You could make a construct, fly it via remote and have a warhead composed of mines and fuel tanks that COULD possibly deal damage when destroyed (if fuel is inside), by virtue of triggering an explosion the old fashioned way, via chain reaction.

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I thought there specifically wasn't going to be collision damage? JC said that if there was, then people would be inclined to make projectile constructs, which would put too much stress on the servers. 

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I guess NQ mentioned about collision damage for ship vs environment but not in pvp. If game succeeds - imagine some fights where at least 50-100 people involved and at least part of them try to ram opponent. The load will be pretty high, especially if damage for constructs will be calculated for each separate voxel/module.  

The main issue that collision damage is not actually instant thing, if two ships on high speed collide - to make it look at least fine you need to calculate damage for each voxel with small intervals. That may cover transition states of both vehicles before damage started to be taken/dealt to state when it stopped. In other case it may look like ships hit each other and on next frame both of them lose half of the ship, that is like comics reading not real time fight. 

Even though it would be really cool to have ramming mechanics, it would be abused to destroy your capital ships or bases. Just by creating cheap rockets with an engine and ramming surface. 

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JC has stated several times that there will not be construct to construct collision damage for a variety of reasons. That is ofc subject to change, but right now collision damage is for construct to environment only. 

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51 minutes ago, 0something0 said:

On the other hand, this would give more power to the smaller players or groups so large, established groups won't be in control over everything. There could also be automated CIWS turrets to counter rammers.

Most likely this will work just in opposite way. The more people you have - the more cheap suicide damage you can do. 

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One of the reasons NQ stated that there would be no CVC collision damage was that it would make it too easy for a "cheap" construct to destroy an expensive one.  A player could spend 10 minutes building a ramming ship and ruin a construct that a player spent hours or days on all in a moment.  Ramming with a ship does not require any skills (where as other aspects of PVP such as operating guns would).

 

The other aspect is that servers and connections aren't perfect. If there is CVC collision damage, than anyone operating a dynamic construct in or around friendly ships would accidentally ram if there was a connection or server hickup, ruining their own work and the work of others entirely due to technical issues. This happens *all the time* in games like space engineers, it it is simply too frustrating for someone to go in for a safe docking, hit a small ammount of lag, and crash their freighter into the station, absolutely wrecking both constructs in the process. It exposes all players to an unnecessary amount of risk just so a few people can get jollies out of using trash ships to greif players.

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Hey guys, actually ramming mechanic could be a weapon type rather than a physics compute. You may have a ram weapon, you lock your target, if you are going in the right direction (to be defined) then you can activate the module and the damage could be a certain amount of damage either a fix amount or a computed one, let says something like :
"your ship mass * your velocity / target ship mass"

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Just now, Vorengard said:

That's fair, but you'd still have to balance it so those Ramming elements are expensive, to prevent the same abuse of suicide mechanics by numerous and/or wealthy organizations. 

Could be just a matter of price/size/mass of the weapon, if you wanna do massive damage you need a very expensive ship.
In another hand, I don't think that ramming should be allowed on static construct.

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Just now, Aesir said:

Could be just a matter of price/size/mass of the weapon, if you wanna do massive damage you need a very expensive ship.
In another hand, I don't think that ramming should be allowed on static construct.

At that point, wouldn't we just call it a "melee weapon" for a ship, rather than a ramming weapon? Because if the damage is based on mass/speed/point of impact, then it will end up using a totally different set of calculations from any other ship-mounted weapon. As soon as ramming "requires" a ramming "weapon" to be effective, you might as well just have a class of melee weapons for ships (like beam cutters, pile drivers, drills, etc).

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1 minute ago, wizardoftrash said:

At that point, wouldn't we just call it a "melee weapon" for a ship, rather than a ramming weapon? Because if the damage is based on mass/speed/point of impact, then it will end up using a totally different set of calculations from any other ship-mounted weapon. As soon as ramming "requires" a ramming "weapon" to be effective, you might as well just have a class of melee weapons for ships (like beam cutters, pile drivers, drills, etc).

yes sure, but we can still have the collision physics added to this I guess. You don't have the assiocated "collision damage" but you still have the physics for collision.

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1 minute ago, Aesir said:

yes sure, but we can still have the collision physics added to this I guess. You don't have the assiocated "collision damage" but you still have the physics for collision.

Here's the thing though. What a ramming "weapon" boils down to is a melee weapon, but with damage based on mass and speed, and with a local point of impact. It would be simpler to instead implement a melee weapon if the goal is to have a close range way to deal a lot of damage, and a melee weapon would be easier to tie into character skills since it could be calculated in the same way as other weapons.

 

My concern is that a ramming implement would be challenging to balance against other weapons, it wouldn't tie into character skill trees well, and it would be hard to use. The payoff would be that a person could intentionally build a ramming ship, but that wouldn't satesfy the "ram stuff with garbage to grief" players, and it might not even satesfy the players that would use the implement.

 

It would be a risky thing to burn dev time and energy developing, when instead they could make melee weapons that behave exactly like other weapons, which would take less time and energy and be effectively similar to ramming implements. They would be effective at the same range

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1 minute ago, wizardoftrash said:

local point of impact.

you do not have a local point of impact when considering the weapon, either you hit or not.
you may have a local point of impact when doing the physics of bouncing, but this is not related to the weapon itself, its about collision in general.
 

 

5 minutes ago, wizardoftrash said:

My concern is that a ramming implement would be challenging to balance against other weapons, it wouldn't tie into character skill trees well, and it would be hard to use. The payoff would be that a person could intentionally build a ramming ship, but that wouldn't satesfy the "ram stuff with garbage to grief" players, and it might not even satesfy the players that would use the implement.

 

It would be a risky thing to burn dev time and energy developing, when instead they could make melee weapons that behave exactly like other weapons, which would take less time and energy and be effectively similar to ramming implements. They would be effective at the same range

Hum, i don't see the point, maybe i was not clear, but this is basically a "normal" melee weapon with instant damage which have also the effect of dashing forward on a little range.
I don't think their is anything different from a normal melee weapon despite the dash part.

 

In another hand, melee weapons are always a nightmare to balance properly, so I don't expect them too soon.

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Just now, Aesir said:

you do not have a local point of impact when considering the weapon, either you hit or not.
you may have a local point of impact when doing the physics of bouncing, but this is not related to the weapon itself, its about collision in general.
 

 

Hum, i don't see the point, maybe i was not clear, but this is basically a "normal" melee weapon with instant damage which have also the effect of dashing forward on a little range.
I don't think their is anything different from a normal melee weapon despite the dash part.

 

In another hand, melee weapons are always a nightmare to balance properly, so I don't expect them too soon.

but ramming implements would also be a nightmare to balance, moreso if ship mass and speed are determining factors in damage.

 

And yes, you do have a local point of impact, because this isn't going to be a game where each ship just has a health bar. Damage will occur in spheres, voxels get deformed and individual ship elements in a given sphere receive damage. Sure, DU doesn't have projectile tracking, but it *will* have randomized point of impact for successful hits with ranged weapons.

 

That means that a ramming implement could be more precise than a lazer simply because you are physically steering your ship instead of relying on character and element metrics to hit. In addition, there would be some complexity to making the implement behave correctly, rather than just checking for a collision it has to check *where* it collided which might be technically challenging.

 

If you simply have a "melee weapon" element instead of a ramming implement element, then again, it can use the same character and element metrics to determine hit, damage, and where the damage sphere goes. It would be comparatively easy to balance against other weapons mainly because it would have a fixed damage value (instead of having speed and mass both be additional values), it could miss due to character metrics instead of solely relying on pilot error to miss, and for balance purposes it would just be a very very short ranged gun.

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I do agree :P

 

We can get rid of the dynamic damage and just do it as other weapons does.

 

But wouldn't be so cool to ram into a ship and split it in two pieces :P

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3 minutes ago, Aesir said:

I do agree :P

 

We can get rid of the dynamic damage and just do it as other weapons does.

 

But wouldn't be so cool to ram into a ship and split it in two pieces :P

Play Space Engineers, its built for that. DU isn't ;)

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1 minute ago, wizardoftrash said:

Play Space Engineers, its built for that. DU isn't ;)

Hooo but hasn't DU the right to be cool as well ? It still adds another gameplay mechanic, whatever if the other games has it or not, I think it should be cool in DU ;)

 

Anyway, i'm pretty sure a simple (technically speaking) ram weapon would be nice, not sure how to make it works, their is plenty of options, it could also be activated only when you reach a certain speed and therefore get rid of the dash mechanic, etc ...
 

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  • 3 weeks later...

I keep seeing a lot of "can't be done, server load too much" kind of replies in a lot of threads. But in this thread, I will post a little FAQ for you guys.

First off, game server, I would say 80% of today's games still run on single core servers. Meaning if you have an 8 core processor, you can run 8 servers on one machine (given you have the memory, hard-drive space, and network bandwidth to handle it). 15% of games run on dual core machines. And 4% run on four cores. A whopping 1% uses 6 or more cores. Its not much.

So, "what does this mean you might ask." Me personally, the devs seem to know what they are doing. Their shard system is vastly different than any current MMORPG and as they said, will ensure 1000's of players in one area no issue because of how the shards will split the load.

But, I also keep hearing "can't be done, too much server load". Well, with such brilliant programming, you can spread the load per core. Lest I remind you there are 32 core 64 thread server cpu's on the market now which very high core speeds compared to many older server chips.... If the developers load their game up with massive cpu's that can handle more, and have the proper code to follow suit on the server end, the possibilities are limitless. 10 years ago, yeah I would agree, it can't be done.

Just for an example, one server can have two cpu's, 64 cores, 128 threads, 2-4TB of memory (yes, TB, compared to desktops with 1-32gb), throw in an optical network solution that connects to a business optical solution, you could have seemingly limitless bandwidth. YES, I understand all of this costs money. But, at our great elders have said, you have to spend money to make money..... Now if they can spread server load, and have separate cores handle separate things, you can potentially handle very large amounts of load absolutely no issue. Now we all know that graphics cards handle physics better than typical cpu's, this is FACT. So, in this regard, get the smaller dual socket boards that have multiple pci-e ports. Have a gpu in every port and write the server code to use the gpu's similar to bit coin mining, ie you aren't render graphics, you are running raw code which is handled completely differently.

FROM ALL THIS, anything is possible, its just down to the developers to do it :) Sure, there is the idea that "right now" it would be an issue, but they can iron all these out as they progress in development. It just takes a keen eye and a brilliant mind to show them the path, and they already have brilliant minds that can code and take advantage of it.... Honestly, I hope they see this post and go "holy crap, its doable". I know it is, and now they can too. Its just up to them to code, which I can admit, is hard, as I can't code at all, tried to learn both c++ and python, always get stuck and dunno how to move forward, coding isn't my forte, but solving puzzles and coming up with great idea's, is my forte, hence why I am a mechanic by trade, I follow technology closely in terms of hardware, and I even studied some law. I have absolute faith that the devs can handle the task of pushing their tech even further to give us a truly amazing world to play in.

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8 minutes ago, namco said:

I keep seeing a lot of "can't be done, server load too much" kind of replies in a lot of threads. But in this thread, I will post a little FAQ for you guys.

First off, game server, I would say 80% of today's games still run on single core servers. Meaning if you have an 8 core processor, you can run 8 servers on one machine (given you have the memory, hard-drive space, and network bandwidth to handle it). 15% of games run on dual core machines. And 4% run on four cores. A whopping 1% uses 6 or more cores. Its not much.

So, "what does this mean you might ask." Me personally, the devs seem to know what they are doing. Their shard system is vastly different than any current MMORPG and as they said, will ensure 1000's of players in one area no issue because of how the shards will split the load.

But, I also keep hearing "can't be done, too much server load". Well, with such brilliant programming, you can spread the load per core. Lest I remind you there are 32 core 64 thread server cpu's on the market now which very high core speeds compared to many older server chips.... If the developers load their game up with massive cpu's that can handle more, and have the proper code to follow suit on the server end, the possibilities are limitless. 10 years ago, yeah I would agree, it can't be done.

Just for an example, one server can have two cpu's, 64 cores, 128 threads, 2-4TB of memory (yes, TB, compared to desktops with 1-32gb), throw in an optical network solution that connects to a business optical solution, you could have seemingly limitless bandwidth. YES, I understand all of this costs money. But, at our great elders have said, you have to spend money to make money..... Now if they can spread server load, and have separate cores handle separate things, you can potentially handle very large amounts of load absolutely no issue. Now we all know that graphics cards handle physics better than typical cpu's, this is FACT. So, in this regard, get the smaller dual socket boards that have multiple pci-e ports. Have a gpu in every port and write the server code to use the gpu's similar to bit coin mining, ie you aren't render graphics, you are running raw code which is handled completely differently.

FROM ALL THIS, anything is possible, its just down to the developers to do it :) Sure, there is the idea that "right now" it would be an issue, but they can iron all these out as they progress in development. It just takes a keen eye and a brilliant mind to show them the path, and they already have brilliant minds that can code and take advantage of it.... Honestly, I hope they see this post and go "holy crap, its doable". I know it is, and now they can too. Its just up to them to code, which I can admit, is hard, as I can't code at all, tried to learn both c++ and python, always get stuck and dunno how to move forward, coding isn't my forte, but solving puzzles and coming up with great idea's, is my forte, hence why I am a mechanic by trade, I follow technology closely in terms of hardware, and I even studied some law. I have absolute faith that the devs can handle the task of pushing their tech even further to give us a truly amazing world to play in.

NQ are the ones who said they will not be allowing ship ramming as a game feature.

 

Whether it's possible or not is irrelevant, they mainly don't want it in the game because of the disruptive "cheese" tactics it will allow.

 

I agree with NQ in this regard...

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