Gravity, or Electricity and Magnetism.

Whilst gravity is a stable force, it does result in chaotic events. Simulating gravity is a tricky business.

Agreed. Whilst I like the idea of having more simulation, I think it would be better to have a simplified representation of orbits and gravity to prevent that kind of nastiness from occurring.

How simplified? It shouldn't be too much or else it would ignore the potential the force has to really surprise players with, say, the sudden intrusion of several comets, or even another planet suddenly appearing in the same orbit. As examples.

Are you talking about these things being player induced events or random events? because random events are things that have not been generally well received by the community.

If you mean them as random events, planets suddenly appearing in the same orbit as another is not something that tends to happen outside of proto-planet collisions during solar system formation, and comets are also relatively rare events, collisions with one even more rare. Either of those coming in to ruin a players day would be bad for gameplay and to players like me, immersion.

If it is a player induced event, comets would be much like a faster moving asteroid to capture and redirect I guess. On the planet side of things it has been implied a few times that the energy required to move a planet would restrict moving planets around the way that asteroids can be. Something that I again would prefer. Shifting planets orbits is something I would prefer not to be a thing.

Clarify for me if I have misunderstood your meaning.

I meant player induced and I suppose you have a point with the planet moving bit.

Thread is full of fail.

The timescale of things over a solar system or galaxy are measured in the billions of years.

No game is going to played over that length of time.

No game is going to be set at the beginning of that time either.

Games are going to be played over a insignificantly small speck of time in a solar system's life, at a point in time where the entire thing has fallen into equilibrium.

Ah ok thanks for clarifying that : )

I wouldn't mind having comets, that would be a neat visual distinction from asteroids, and possibly play a little different if all the celestial bodies orbit around the sun rather than sit in fixed locations.

As for how simplified, I guess I mean in a point and click UI sense. I'll try describe how I think that could work for a KEW.

Player selects an object (say an asteroid) and they can see its current orbital path. Player selects their rocket gantry and they see potential destinations along with current ETAs pop up in UI, they select the aforementioned asteroid.
Once rockets are built on the asteroid and select the asteroid-come-KEW the player sees possible targets + ETAs pop up in UI. Once the target is selected the engines fire up and it is away.

Alternatively at that last step, (and this is something I would quite like to see) the player has selected their KEW, selected their target, and are presented with potential trajectories for their KEW. This is helpful for 3 reasons.

1. The player could then select to slingshot around planets/moons/the star to achieve higher impact velocity

2. The player selects a trajectory that takes the KEW on a path which minimises potential contact with enemy forces (say flying too close to a planet/asteroid/moon with anti KEW defences, orbital defences or unit cannons which enemies may use to deploy units onto your KEW and ruin your day)

3. There is mention of maybe using the asteroid as a movable forward base, firing the asteroid, laden with unit cannons and/or planetary artillery into orbit around a planet rather than a collision path and then using that asteroid to try establish a beach head on an enemy occupied world, the player could choose between orbit and collision in this case.

4. Combinations of 2 and 3. Maybe this is getting too complex but a player could have an asteroid do flybys of enemy worlds, emptying unit cannons on the way past, on its way to the final destination, a heavily fortified enemy world for a KEW impact.

Perhaps having slingshot velocity affect response time for the enemy and impact velocity affect damage is overly complicated, but I would still like to see trajectory selection for points 2 and 3.

I see what you mean and I don't believe it's making it overly complicated, it's like organizing bombing runs with aircraft, except its more like we Pear Harbor a planet. An asteroid could be used to provide support for a beachhead obviously and also, maybe even as a shield against moon based retaliation.

Because the crackpots of current accepted model science have been making up bullshit for generations to cover what they don't know, things like 'black holes' constantly challenge the fundamental rules of science. Velikovski in the 50's was definitely on to the right track but then the scientific community basically pushed his work into the dirt. The facts and evidence supporting an electric universe is all around us. I recommend you do more reading into the issue, and objectively place it against current accepted theory. Anyways that is pretty far off what I had intended with this thread =|

Example: You pull an asteroid from the outer solar system and mount it with engines, if it survives the transition from the electrical fields while you slingshot it around the sun, just before it impacts the planet it should discharge its energy in an attempt to equalize the charges between the objects before it. Potentially destroying the object before it even hits the ground if the difference is too high. On this scale the resulting planatary sized lightning bolts do cause the majority of the impact craters due to the arcing from the surface to object. Anyone remember the copper projectile that was launched into temple 1? And how it discharged before impact blinding the camera on the satellite with more energy than was ever expected.

Could also add a structure to discharge objects to current solar positional levels and allow for impacts. This is the future right?

scientific value of this knowledge aside, do you propose this a a gemeplay mechanic, knowing that the majority of the people playing the game will not likely understand the concepts involved on the same basic level as they understand and know a simpler concept like that of gravity?

what i really want to know is how you see this improving the gameplay of planetary annihilation?

I have seen some of his work and wow. I am just not even going to go there, I doubt that you are going to shift your position and it is off topic.

Alcheon has it right in looking at this from a game-play perspective. It strikes me as needlessly complex.

Uncertainties like this do not work well in the RTS genre and random events governing success is something that are outside of players control is something which the community generally seems to oppose. A player should lose something to the AI or another player. Not some environmental effect like an electrical field around a star, or as other threads have argued, weather events on planets.

raw kinetics work just fine. If something hits something else REALLY bloody fast it does damage. We see it every day on smaller scales, it is pretty simple stuff and I dont think we need the asteroid to behave like a van de graaff generator or a tesla coil.

I assume you are talking about the Deep Impact mission. In which case it didn't discharge, it collided. And the resulting impact made the comet shine 6 times brighter than normal, not blind the camera with more energy than was expected.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/deepimpact/main/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Impact_(spacecraft)

http://youtu.be/wn_HqbMmn-4
Looks like an electrical arc to me. Even according to the pictures on wiki. And it most certainly did have a camera disruption before impact.

Don't be so quick to dismiss the facts. You choose how close to swing your KIW to the sun you take a risk of being damaged for the boost in speed. If people understood how it worked, they would be able to easily judge the thresholds. But in that case it could just be done on the ui which would be very cool. Its very predictable and is not bound by the effect of randomization if done right, which is why I propose that it just be possible within the engine. What the idea does is makes the impact effects more exciting.

2 Reasons.
Its Realistic
And it is beyond awesome.

High end strategy.

Realistic orbital physics might end up being somewhat counterintuitive. For example, when a deorbiting body encounters friction, it loses elevation but gains velocity. This would seem like a bug to many new players.
That and it would be hard to program a GUI that makes orbital physics seem simple enough to be fun. You'd either have to somehow input all the parameters or have most of them of them be the default all the time. If they are default all the time, it probably won't be worth the dev team's time to approximate the three body problem that physicists can't seem to solve.

Sleepwarz- Do you even know about Kepler's laws? They explain almost all planetary motion that astronomers can observe.

Simulating planetary orbits will ALWAYS fall apart after a long enough time. If you let a game run for a long enough time, float imprecision will slowly degrade the stability of your solar system and eventually make it collapse. This results in planets flying everywhere due to gravitational slingshots, simply ending the game.

Simulating planets is easy, making it stable for extended periods of time is near impossible. Making it stable for arbitrary, procedurally generated solar systems is impossible.

The game could have moving planets, but this would have to be in ellipses or circles which are pregenerated, not truly simulated using keplers and newtons laws.

mmm, i've been playing a lot of kerbal space program lately, if you want a decent example of implemented planetary orbital physics you should check it out, certainly helps with the getting a handle on the physics of simple space maneuvers, personally thats the kind of orbital mechanics i imagine when i think of the game, but im also eager to see if the devs push it in a different direction ala, popular scifi style movement

If you're worried about the technical problem of simulating (simplified) orbital mechanics, look at KSP. They don't even try to solve the n-body problem. I explained it somewhere else anyway.
If you're worried about the players not getting orbital mechanics, look again at KSP. With a bit of explanation, people understand this stuff quite well. And that's without even a UI doing the job for you.

Ok I'm sorry everyone, this will be the last comment I make sideways to the discussion.

Those are not facts, that is a youtube video. Show me some hard empirical evidence. Some experiments which other researchers independent of that group can repeat that confirm such assertions. Show me a paper that has been peer reviewed by the scientific community and has not been found wanting. You dont get to sit on the sidelines, self publish something with zero scrutiny and then tout it as a theory that changes our fundamental understanding of the cosmos. That is not science. You also cannot expect that the NASA team didn't know what they were looking at, or the rest of the astronomical community and independent peer reviewers who saw that data as well.

I do read, I do listen, and as is required quite often in my field I reassess my views and theories based on what is observed, tested and measured. However until actual data comes by to prove current theories incorrect and prove this alternative theory as a replacement, that is not going to happen. There has been too much weight behind existing theories in the predictions they have made, stretching all the way back to Kepler for it all to be wrong. That is all I am going to say on the matter, back on topic to the gameplay ideas.

I still do not think that damage close star trajectories is a good mechanic. It is damage that did not come from an enemy AI or player and thus strikes me as unnecessary. It runs the risk of damaging the KEW equipment and losing it altogether and you get no significant positive trade-off. any extra speed gained would be very small, as performing a slingshot around a star would easily gain speed enough to decimate a planet without risk.

I am unsure of what it takes to simulate orbital mechanics in a game so I would lean towards this for PA but I stand to be corrected. I'll have to look at this Kerbal Space Program that alcheon and thorneel keep mentioning : D It sounds worthwhile, and I'd be interested in seeing how well orbital mechanics can be simulated

Any particular aspects of scifi space movement did you had in mind? I'd be interested in where that part of the discussion could go given a lot has already been discussed regarding the implementation of realistic orbital mechanics.

wondering whether orbital maneuvers will be close to reality like Hohmann transfers or whether a more scifi approach of simple pointing directly at the place you want to go and burning the engines to get there was going to be implemented

the Hohmann transfer from 1 orbit to another around a single source of gravity consists of 2 single impulse burns (one at apoapsis and another at periapsis) to slow or increase an objects orbital velocity which over a half an orbital period, increases or decreases an objects orbit, in the case of dropping a Kinetic weapon into the planet it would be a single implulse retrograde burn at a specific orbital inclination and point in the orbit path to decrease the objects orbital velocity until the periapsis (lowest point in the orbit) intersects with the target destination (ignoring the effect of atmospheric friction etc), one single burst from the engines and the weapon freefalls towards the target, no additional engine use is required.




the scifi method has the vessel/asteroid firing its engines directly at the target and continuing to accelerate until through the magic of scifi and imaginative physics it somehow it impacts with the target, has no basis in reality but sounds and looks really cool in a script or on screen.

like this sorta thing


if you guys know all this already, im so sry for my terrible explanation

The PA trailer smash has the potential to be realistic... if that planet wasn't rotating.