Lasers

I suspect you can get the best of both Star Wars and Star Trek lasers if you take Star Wars lasers and make them 20 times as fast.

Like a flickering interrupted (regarding space) continuos beam... maybe? I mean even that would still be odd... To get a laser "projectile" like in star wars you would need to fire the laser for like a 1/300,000,000 of a second, right?

Clearly they're actually misnamed plasma weapons...

Also you can have lasers that don't sweep or act as a discrete projectile, they're just a static beam between the firing unit and the target unit. You can give them constant or distance-adjusted DPS while contact is made.

What he said, the lasers in star wars are actualy plasma (or particle) blasters. Not being as much of an expert as i fancied here i i looked up some stuff. Regardless because we aren't debating star wars here the long and short of it was lasers got outdated and people started using the new more powerfull blasters. These generaly shot a bolt of plasma but depending on the weapon could fire other particles instead for differing effects.

All that aside though I'm one more vote for the inclusion of beam weapons for basicaly all the reasons orangeknight says.

While sweeping is cool, i'm not sure its necessary if it presents additional coding challenges.

Beams and pulses please.

Slow moving star wars style projectiles are functionally equivalent to physical projectiles, while this isn't a bad thing, why not also have something that both looks different (and cooler ) and deals damage in a different way, such as Trek style / Freespace 2 style beams. What I'd really like to see is beam weapons that burn through the outer armor and then punch straight through units (or planets ) but that might be pushing it

What outer armour? like walls and stuff?

In this case the outer armor would be the outside of the unit. So say you have some sort of beam based coastal defense gun. If it shoots at a moving battleship and if it was just a glancing blow (maybe the ship is moving faster than the beam can track) it would just leave a scorched line on the hull of the ship (the path of the beam on the armor plating of the ship) But if you were firing at one spot continuously the beam would burn deeper and deeper into the ship (which in game would result in the ships HP dropping lower and lower) till the beam punched clear through the other side of the ship. Might be overly complicated for a bunch of tiny units but it would look pretty cool to use against large units, incoming meteors, planets or whatever.

FYI, realism with weaponised lasers would mean pulses, NOT continuous beam. Pulse lasers are far more effective as weapons because they concentrate more energy into a shorter period of time, therefore doing more damage.

Given that, I think projectiles makes more sense.... as long as the limit to their speed is really really high. As others have said here, light travelling at the speed of sound is not so cool lol.

That was one of the annoying things about lasers in the TA engine. Once you got past a certain speed (which was not very fast), it would go straight through targets without doing any damage. This is because the location of the projectile was calculated once every game tick, so if it's too fast it travels too far from one game tick to the next. So it gets close to the target, but then the next game tick it's past the target, and no damage is done. As long as THAT is sorted and there isn't a theoretical limit to speed for "lasers" - or the game has a way to deal with light speed projectiles - then we're fine.

I mean, continuous beam weapons can be done, more or less, with projectiles (duration=reload, done). So that's not a huge deal...

The downside of that is that it results in curving beams, which look very silly.

Instant continuous beam lasers are great. I need them for my planetary energy chisel.

Because its awesome

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snSIRJ2brEk&feature=related

fastforward to 5:15 for slow mo photons.

Pew pew star wars lasers get my vote. Remember the sentinel, GAAT gun and the front turret on the Warlord battleship? Nothing satisfies like a big thick green laser.

What about Mechwarrior beam lasers? It is a compromise between Star Wars style lasers and Freespace/ Star Trek style lasers.

+1 to MW beams as well, check out Mechwarrior Living Legends The heavy lasers like the CHLL are closer to a continuous beam laser the the (they have a duration but it's long enough that you can sweep it around the mech to damage multiple points (though that might not be the best thing to do)). The normal lasers (like the CERLBL) are a full beam but have a short duration (maybe .5 seconds) and the pulse lasers (like the CLPL) (I really like prefer the Clan variants ) are closest to the OTA style, except the pulses move very fast so they aren't just visually different but functionally equivalent to regular projectiles. They are really still a full beam (ie the beam extends from the gun all the way to the target) but they have very short duration.

I'd have to vote for the "pewpew" lasers. Although that may be from memories of the SC invisible lasers if the creator was offscreen, but I can't imagine that a full beam laser coming from an invisible target would look any better =S

What actually stops you to just spam short light "projectiles" with low dmg, so they will look like continuous beam. It will also fixup the issue with invisible laser beam.

And, please-please-please, if you'll make that crappy "projectile" laser shots, name them "plasma", not "laser". As even in SW it was (later, after much debates) named as "plasma cannon with laser initiation".

And you know, if you are going to introduce real physics model for intersolar movement in RTS (most of spacesims do not do this), making such non-scientific crap as "slow packed light" is just not right

because when the turrets turn, they look wrong.

So the current types of lasers brought up are:

Projectile Lasers: The type from star wars, generaly they aren't actualy lasers in lore but who gives a damn about such intricacies. These are just projectiles that look like a shiny line and we have been conditioned to call them lasers, the trailer had them. With lengthening the projectile (riptides or UEF tac Defence with a different texture) it could be possible to increase the "beamness"

Pseudo Beam: Lots of smaller projectiles imitating a solid beam, the refire rate is the same as the projectile length. Can look as good as any other beam when firing in a straight line except that when starting or stopping the projectile is visible. At best suffers from curving beam syndrome when the turret turns. at worst you see every projectile individualy when the turret turns. Because of the refire rate the beam cannot pulse.

Pulse Beam: Creates a solid, instant hit beam between the turret and the hit location for a very short duration consisting of one damage tick (cybran rhino, zappers and t2 PD). If a real laser was to be simulated over the distances we see this is how it would be done. Presents coding issues as it requires an entirely new class of weapon to be created which is a lot of work.

Continuous Beam: Very similar to above except they can be sustained for any duration and inflict damage in small amounts over many ticks (seraphim t2 PD, Neptune Class). Coding wise there is probably little difference betwen this and pulse beams as the only thing to think about that comes to mind is tracking while fireing and thats probably not a big thing.

Sweeping Beam: These beams sustain their fire when moving between targets and are otherwise a lot like continuous beams (monkeylord, CZAR). Requires even more coding to get to work properly.


So far most people have wanted basicaly the pulse beams although would probably enjoy continuous beams as well. There have been very few demands for sweeping lasers back though (these consist of people saying they liked the monkey lord).

Technically all the Beams are the same kind of weapon, just with different parameters, I don't think it'd be as much coding as you make it out to be, at least for the different beam weapons, I do agree there would be a fair amount of coding to create the beam weapons, but so long as the different types are considered from the start they shouldn't create overly large amounts of effort.

Mike