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Suggestion Please do not use a EVE lock on weapon system


banks456

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I've been reading a lot of the information on this game and everything seems fine but I would like to suggest finding a better weapons mechanics  than EVE online.  Although EVE has it's fans, the whole lock on weapons takes away from the battle in my opinion.  I guess it's fun for some but for a game like DUAL Universe it takes away from the freedom idea.   So many other  Sci FI voxel base games allow you to manually fire your own weapons and even games like Emyprion allows you to take control of your turret and manually fire your turret if you choose to. One of the most entertaining parts of building a ship is having full control over your ship and its weapons.  I think using a EVE online  weapons lock on system will be a step back for such forward thinking game such as Dual Universe ..   Smaller ships dog fights will not be as entertaining and since you're planning on doing multi crew capital ships.  If I'm a gunner in a turret then me just locking on and letting my weapons auto aim and shoot will be kind of boring for me. 

 

 Again I'm not saying that there aren't tons of players that love to point at something and let the game aim and shoot for them  but a weapons system like that doesn't bring  the Star Citizen or Elite Dangerous fans.  They need full control over their weapons. 

 

I don't know if this suggestion will be taking seriously because EVE is a popular game but I think for this style of game a EVE combat style of game play will take a lot away from a game like this. 

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i agree with you, and i think you will find that a lot of us here agree with you. im hoping to see it be an optional thing for turrets but for dogfights be treated like a fps. especially since we can make guns and such given that our nano arm thing can be used like a ranged weapon as well i feel like its possible to have both or choose which to use in ships. hopefully they will see the error in the alpha and beta

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The reason why eve (and other mmos) have the lock system is partly from ping times back in the days of dial up modems. It uses much less bandwidth, less server cpu cycles, and better client-side prediction. Ping times become less relevant to player's tactical skill. It also helps solve some some of the issues with seamless gameworlds (what happens to a bullet that crosses from one zone to another, etc). It comes to personal preferences but I prefer more players fitting in one of these dynamic zones over twitch based gameplay. That and I'm bad at twitch games :P

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i agree with you, and i think you will find that a lot of us here agree with you. im hoping to see it be an optional thing for turrets but for dogfights be treated like a fps. especially since we can make guns and such given that our nano arm thing can be used like a ranged weapon as well i feel like its possible to have both or choose which to use in ships. hopefully they will see the error in the alpha and beta

I'm glad I'm not alone on this. This game looks great but giving players the option to manually fire their own guns if they choose to will make this game the best MMO voxel base game out there in my opinion. It will be no denying it.  The only knock on Eve has been flights controls (which now you can fly a EVE ship manually) and the weapons systems. 

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The reason why eve (and other mmos) have the lock system is partly from ping times back in the days of dial up modems. It uses much less bandwidth, less server cpu cycles, and better client-side prediction. Ping times become less relevant to player's tactical skill. It also helps solve some some of the issues with seamless gameworlds (what happens to a bullet that crosses from one zone to another, etc). It comes to personal preferences but I prefer more players fitting in one of these dynamic zones over twitch based gameplay. That and I'm bad at twitch games :P

 I'm guessing you're not a first person shooter fan. lol  I just imagined building a fighter or building a capital ship  and getting excited for my first battle but realizing  I'm just going to point and click then watch. lol :wacko:   DU devs  are way smarter than me, so I bet they can figure out if they really want to.  I  know if they leave the weapons systems like it is the game will still be huge because EVE online is still popular after all these years. 

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Hi Klatu & Saffi !
 
Really important and delicate topics here  :)
Here are a few answers:
 
- About "Friendly Fire" and "Manual Targeting":
We would like to implement that. We really would like. But there a very high chance we won't, at least for now (maybe with computer technology evolving, it will change in the future). The fact that massively multiplayer single-shard sandbox games like EvE Online are able to reach several thousands of players at the same place and the same moment is possible due to some compromises (and while we are aiming to higher flexibility in this regard, we're still subject to compromises too): combat system using Targeting/Locking/Firing mechanics in this kind of game is not completely unrelated to the ability to create massive battles, as it's an efficient way to lighten a lot of real time combat calculations.
 
- About "Bigger means more complex":
Well bigger ships will certainly be harder to destroy/invade if they're built in a smart way by players. However we do have some ideas to balance their toughness: They will be slower, less agile than smaller ships, due to their mass. Big Weapon Turrets will also at disadvantage against very fast ships. But nothing will prevent builders to create specialized ships: like a huge battlecruiser full of small weapon turrets to hunt down hostile small and fast ships. But there will be a choice to make: Energy consumption. Every module in a ship will require energy. So it won't be possible to have everything in infinite number, even on a big ship.
 
- About "Arms Diversity and Rock/Paper/Scissors":
This is already planned: We are thinking about weapon families, with each type of weapon very efficient in some cases and not very efficient in others. Right now we plan to have at least 4 different types of damage, but it might still change in the future.
 
Best Regards,
Nyzaltar.
 
It's unreasonable to implement FPS style mechanics into a game where potentially hundreds or thousands of ships may be in a battle.
 
You've played an fps with a person with more than 100 ping, and they're definitely harder to hit, and also shoot you from around the corner of walls yeah? And those games usually dont feature more than 32, 64, 120 people.
 
Even planetside 2 which would be the only comparable game with MMO FPS style has population limits on servers. When you go over the limit the server can't keep up anymore data gets lost, and potentially if you overload it the program will lock up and need a restart. And that leads to rollbacks and lost player data.

 

Heres a time dialted fight in eve where it takes far longer to warp than it should.

Eve Video <

 

A game that actually struck a good balance between skill, skills, and locking on was world of warcraft. Not a game I praise often, but they captured a good balance of enjoyable gameplay and as such it is my recommendation that these developers take striking a balance of factors to create an enjoyable flow of combat rather than capturing call of duty, or eve's click, click, and click, push 1 button, sit and wait.

 

To me personally it is not a game breaker what mechanic is used in targeting. However it will be a game breaker if the game is so frustrating to play that you can't aim or hit anything, or that it takes no skill to operate weapons and you just sit there watching a lock-on bar and then the guns automatically firing every few seconds. Although if we push them for FPS mode, maybe enough players will rage quit and free up computational time on the servers.

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I've been reading a lot of the information on this game and everything seems fine but I would like to suggest finding a better weapons mechanics  than EVE online.  Although EVE has it's fans, the whole lock on weapons takes away from the battle in my opinion.  I guess it's fun for some but for a game like DUAL Universe it takes away from the freedom idea.   So many other  Sci FI voxel base games allow you to manually fire your own weapons and even games like Emyprion allows you to take control of your turret and manually fire your turret if you choose to. One of the most entertaining parts of building a ship is having full control over your ship and its weapons.  I think using a EVE online  weapons lock on system will be a step back for such forward thinking game such as Dual Universe ..   Smaller ships dog fights will not be as entertaining and since you're planning on doing multi crew capital ships.  If I'm a gunner in a turret then me just locking on and letting my weapons auto aim and shoot will be kind of boring for me. 

 

 Again I'm not saying that there aren't tons of players that love to point at something and let the game aim and shoot for them  but a weapons system like that doesn't bring  the Star Citizen or Elite Dangerous fans.  They need full control over their weapons. 

 

I don't know if this suggestion will be taking seriously because EVE is a popular game but I think for this style of game a EVE combat style of game play will take a lot away from a game like this. 

 

I have played many hours on Elite Dangerous and you just could not do that with hundreds or even thousands of players effectively.  Star Citizen is pushing the envelope but so far that is all they are doing. Even with myself and 4 other friends we push the engine past what it is easily capable of and its not even voxel based. Star Citizen is a poor example in and case when it comes to these games as so little actual stress testing has been done (What they want and what they can do are two sides that have yet to clash).  When handling that many players you can't have it both ways with current technology.  Now during the interview with XPGamers the developer stated that less would be rendered and updated depending on distance and how crowded the space becomes at any one moment. Also more information would be split to different servers when it reaches a certain bandwidth "cap" (all explained at about minute 4:40 in the video).  So far this seems a fair balance but I wonder how that will work out for player made weapons (Think player made Kinetic Kill missiles in Space Engineers, cause you know someone will do it!)  How will it handle updates between two players at far distances trying to get a hit in.  Food for thought.

 

 

After further reading on the devblog Kinetic Kill Missiles are out.....  What about drones then?

Edited by Wardion2000
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Nobody is arguing for a target lock system because it's more fun. It's just a worthwhile sacrifice in exchange to the rich social, economical, geopolitical and emergent gameplay brought upon by a single shard.

 

I used to joke that we all want to explore No Man's sky with Eve's social interactions piloting ships we've built in Space Engineers with the combat and immersion of Star citizen. If Dual is all it's promised to be - I will gladly take 3 out of 4.

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Why not have both. If the player makes the ships, the player can designate if it's an auto locking or manual turret. I can see auto lock turrets quite useful in a large ship that needs to defend from smaller ships. While the more manual turrets or guns can be had in smaller dog fighting type ships.

 

On top of that, even on the big ship you can still have both types.

 

So yeah, that shouldn't be an issue. have both types. Unless these devs are lazy and only does cut and paste programming, I would hope not.

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My only questions are about how the combat system is going to affect ship damage.

 

Will we be able to target specific parts of a ship (guns, airlocks, engines, etc), or will our weapons just hit random places on ships?

 

Will the damage actually be a the voxel level, with pieces of ships being ripped apart? 

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My only questions are about how the combat system is going to affect ship damage.

 

Will we be able to target specific parts of a ship (guns, airlocks, engines, etc), or will our weapons just hit random places on ships?

 

Will the damage actually be a the voxel level, with pieces of ships being ripped apart? 

 

thats exactly the question, with normal, mousetargeting i could decide where to destroy the hull-voxels and send in a bomb-drone or something similar. If its tab targeting i fear we will only be able to target significant systems of the ship or completely random, thus we wont be able invade it from less important parts of the ship.

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1) The game has target lock because the server will have to carry more load compared to a common fps, and the ping will be higher. The tecnology they talked about, that let the servers handle thousands of players, doesn't slow time like EVE, but instead reduce the update rate of each single ship, and that's mean that without a lock system, in a huge fight, you're not going to hit something that easily. 

2)The game is supposed to have a single shard (a single server), so people from all around the world will play together, and pings will be kinda high. 

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I can see the arguements from both sides and both sides have some strong points. As many pointed out though, the factor that carries the most weight is the factor that determines whether the game is playable or not.

 

I would like to think there will still be some skill involved. For example, the turrets area of fire, or cone of fire. Lets say you have guns only at the top of your ship, and the enemy is below...you would not be able to target them. If this is how its carried out in game, then skill will still be a factor coupled with the ships design. It wont be a fire and forget type scenario. We also don't know if guns will have cool downs. Lots can be balanced to make it fun, even if its tab target/target locking gameplay.

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My only questions are about how the combat system is going to affect ship damage.

 

Will we be able to target specific parts of a ship (guns, airlocks, engines, etc), or will our weapons just hit random places on ships?

 

Will the damage actually be a the voxel level, with pieces of ships being ripped apart? 

Now, imagine combats. Besides the specialized weapons allocation to various crew members, the fact that the ship is a real object and not some formal 3D image allows for incredible things: partial structural damage that must be repaired (crew members racing to fix this broken hull – FTL anyone?), but also even more exciting is the possibility to board another ship after having cracked open its hull. In my opinion, from an emergent/strategic point of view this is a very interesting alternative to the classical way of completely destroying any enemy ship during combat: instead, board it and take control! Note that we don’t know yet how much of this will be playable in the alpha or beta stage, but it will definitely be something we will support in the long term.

 

Source: https://devblog.dualthegame.com/2015/01/30/multiplayer-ship-crew/

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Now, imagine combats. Besides the specialized weapons allocation to various crew members, the fact that the ship is a real object and not some formal 3D image allows for incredible things: partial structural damage that must be repaired (crew members racing to fix this broken hull – FTL anyone?), but also even more exciting is the possibility to board another ship after having cracked open its hull. In my opinion, from an emergent/strategic point of view this is a very interesting alternative to the classical way of completely destroying any enemy ship during combat: instead, board it and take control! Note that we don’t know yet how much of this will be playable in the alpha or beta stage, but it will definitely be something we will support in the long term.

 

Source: https://devblog.dualthegame.com/2015/01/30/multiplayer-ship-crew/

 

 

That doesn't really address the question of how any of that is supposed to work within the limitations of an Eve Online type lock-on system. 

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That doesn't really address the question of how any of that is supposed to work within the limitations of an Eve Online type lock-on system. 

 

 

One off the top of my head option would be the ships systems being RNG. For example. Lets say you have 50 elements on the hull of the ship, they could be attacked when the ship is fired at through RNG. The attack would not be a 1 shot 1 kill scenario, but lets say that element/voxel area took 25% damage, a crew could be dispatched to fix it. If that area is RNG attacked again while fixing it, the crew could take damage. The more damage that was initially done and not repaired, could mean more damage inflicted on the crew.

 

Then there are the calculations of the hit miss ratio. Larger guns should have a higher miss ratio vs smaller vessels but do more damage. Smaller vessels should have a higher hit ratio against larger vessels, but do less damage.

 

There are ways to balance it out, and make it fun while maintaining a doable data flow for the games calculations.

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One off the top of my head option would be the ships systems being RNG. For example. Lets say you have 50 elements on the hull of the ship, they could be attacked when the ship is fired at through RNG. The attack would not be a 1 shot 1 kill scenario, but lets say that element/voxel area took 25% damage, a crew could be dispatched to fix it. If that area is RNG attacked again while fixing it, the crew could take damage. The more damage that was initially done and not repaired, could mean more damage inflicted on the crew.

 

 

I don't think RNG is a perfect solution, for the reasons vylqun noted above:

 

thats exactly the question, with normal, mousetargeting i could decide where to destroy the hull-voxels and send in a bomb-drone or something similar. If its tab targeting i fear we will only be able to target significant systems of the ship or completely random, thus we wont be able invade it from less important parts of the ship.

 

At the very least we should be able to target different components on ships, and the damage can be randomized based on skill within a given radius around a given point.

 

For example, you could target a large gun on a capital ship, and with a more accurate weapon and high gunnery skill you could more or less guarantee your shots land on the gun. With a weapon that has lower accuracy or a low gunnery skill, your shot might land within (just throwing a number out there) say 30m of the intended target, or miss entirely. A shot that lands on the ship (regardless of whether or not you hit your specific target) is still going to do damage, and may even take out the thing you're targeting in the first place. 

 

That way, we could still target specific parts of ships, voxel damage could still occur more or less in areas we're targeting, shot success could still be determined by skill levels, and there is a bit of randomness thrown in.

 

You could add more detail to the targeting system, and list components that your scanners pick up for targetting. Ie, with a powerful enough scanners/sensors (or a high enough skill level) you might see a list that has all of the guns on a capital ship as well as the location of medical units, reactors, life support units, etc. 

 

 

 

It sounds like the limitation in the engine means we can't have realtime fire and forget combat mechanics, and that combat has to be very calculated on the server side, such that the animations we see (as the shooters) will have already been processed on the server before we see them (as we'll be seeing events happen as if they are slowed down or happening in the past). 

 

I think that my suggestion could add plenty of detail to the targeting mechanics, while staying within the stated limitations of the engine and still keeping a focus on the skill levels of the people involved in a fight. 

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Hi everyone,

 

Just to clarify on this topic:

We totally understand that First Person Shooter gameplay would be more immersive.

However, we have to take everything in account. And when we do, then we have to make some compromise.

We want combat, but combat is not the main feature of the game. Only one of the main features, equally important with building, real massively multiplayer system in a single-shard universe, exploration, trading, etc. Once this was sorted out, it was logic that we wouldn't sacrifice things like the massively multiplayer aspect just to have the best First Person Shooter possible. In that case, even if it's not the best combat mechanics (we totally agree on that), target locking combat gameplay is the answer for the best compromise. So it's not a decision led by personal taste, but really the most relevant decision on the technical aspect in our case.

 

We totally understand that it won't appeal to every player.

We are aware that our game won't satisfy everybody, and it's the same for any game.

 

Best regards,

Nyzaltar.

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Hi everyone,

 

Just to clarify on this topic:

We totally understand that First Person Shooter gameplay would be more immersive.

However, we have to take everything in account. And when we do, then we have to make some compromise.

We want combat, but combat is not the main feature of the game. Only one of the main features, equally important with building, real massively multiplayer system in a single-shard universe, exploration, trading, etc. Once this was sorted out, it was logic that we wouldn't sacrifice things like the massively multiplayer aspect just to have the best First Person Shooter possible. In that case, even if it's not the best combat mechanics (we totally agree on that), target locking combat gameplay is the answer for the best compromise. So it's not a decision led by personal taste, but really the most relevant decision on the technical aspect in our case.

 

We totally understand that it won't appeal to every player.

We are aware that our game won't satisfy everybody, and it's the same for any game.

 

Best regards,

Nyzaltar.

Thank you Nyzaltar for making this clear!

 

I must say, that this is not what I was hoping for, but the decision is perfectly understandable.

Having tab-targeting confirmed makes me even more curious about some other combat related mechanics, which may not have been decided on yet.

 

The first thing I'm wondering about is how damage is going to be handled.

With tab targeting, I don't see a possibility to have a realistic voxel-damage model, since we won't be able to target specific points on the hull of enemy ships.

So, will ships only be one entity with a specific "health-bar" and some random cosmetic damage marks (like scratches, holes, fire) depending on the remaining health? Or will there be Subsystems and maybe even hull compartments, that can be locked on?

For example, if I fire all available weapons on the port side of an enemy ship, will the damage also mostly be on this side, or randomly generated all over the ship?

 

This also leads to another question: If the enemy ship is, let's say on my starboard side, will I only be able to use my starboard weapons, or do all weapons simply add up?

 

Another question is: are there plans for dogfighting mechanics? There are some suggestions on this forum on how this could be achieved, even with tab targeting - so, is that an option?

 

Since ship design and efficiency was mentioned in the dev-blog to be a core element for ship designers, is that only going to be about, let's say things like acceleration, fuel efficiency and aesthetics, or is design also going to influence combat durability?

If it is, then how could armor placement influence a ships health and durability, or is armor just going to add up (means you could, in theory, just craft a huge "block of armor", put engines and turrets on it, and have an incredibly durable ship)?

 

Boarding an enemy ship has been mentioned as a possibility in the dev-blog, so (if there already are plans for that) is this going to be a scripted event, or may there be some options to decide where to cause a breach and then board the ship with your crew members?

 

Another thing would be repair mechanics - how could that work?

 

I know that the game is still in a very early stage of development - at least when it comes to gameplay mechanics - but I'll try to take my chance to point out some questions and ideas, as long as things aren't set in stone :)

 

Greetings

 

TheRealBeowulf

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How about the TERA online mechanism with arrows? You maintain a lock-on for a while and if you succeed at that, then your missiles hit, then it's all about the enemy to compensate for that. The point is with Lock-On or Tab-targeting mechanics, it comes down to RNG sometimes and stat-grinding. That's my overall concern tbh. Tab-targeting could negate jet-fighters entirelly, since tab-targeting them would mean instant-death froma battleship's cannons.



At least someone from the dev team could explain how ground combat will work. Will it be tab-targeting as well with skills and such? Cause I'm tots down for it if the armor you wear will be your access to skills, giving crafting of items a deeper meaning as well.


EDIT : Upon researching the matter of aiming and why MMOS can't have first-person shooter combat, I am now backing the idea of Tab-Targeting for a game as Dual Universe. 


And let's face it, according to the lore, there is WARPING TECHNOLOGY, I don't think that they mastered spatial withdrawal but they failed to upgrade auto-targeting systems and still operate turrets manually. It fits the universe and lore. Plus, if they add a cone of fire element to it and a sweet sweet charge up mechanic for a slow but deadly shot rather than a pew-pew barrage, it can possibly be all about them jukes when you space-joust one another.

 

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