Orbiting Planet Poll!

Why is everyone always talking about making things easier for new players? I completely disagree with this sentiment. Mainly because no one is a new player forever.

I don't see games like call of duty that are massively popular making it easier for new players. In fact the opposite. You start with the basic weapons and no perks in a world of tooled up, 16 year old, no life, internet super soldiers who are waiting to kick your *** and tea bag you over and over again.

What it does do is limit what you have access to and slowly introduce you to new aspects of the game after forcing you to first learn the basics. Sort of like a campaign would do in games like sup com. Obviously that will be missing from this game and some kind of system to support learning players is required. But I strongly disagree that it means we have to make the game 'easier' or less complicated (read dumbed down).

Rant over.

... call of duty?
CALL OF DUTY?

I don't disagree with you though, just... you probably could have used a better analogy.

Well you could always let people sort the maps by the amount of orbital bodies it has.

The simplest of tutorial maps could be one planet orbiting around the sun. Everyone fights on one map and all they really see of the orbital mechanics are the day night cycles.

Then when they feel comfortable they could join a game where the map has a main planet, a moon or two and maybe a bit of an asteroid belt.

From there they could try a map with multiple planets. Maybe a 2v2v2 map with 3 planets and each team getting their own world.

And finally when they feel up to it they could look for a server hosting a massive solar system full of things zipping around in irregular elliptical orbits.

Not to try and make this more complicated beyond what's been established, but what happens if you reduce 2 planets in a 5 planet system to a pile of rocks? Does the orbit of the others change even a little?

On another note what about comets?

In reality? Assuming that the orbits of the planets dont get really close (like earth and moon close) nothing much happens at all. Most planets are just tiny specs when compared to the star they orbit.

as an aerospace engineer (student) I of course would like full physic orbit mechanics, but I know, that this would blow the minds of most players, so I dont expect it to come^^

I'd rather not have a Universe Sandbox: Forged Alliance type dealio, being as that could be too complex from a quick-play perspective, and once you find out you're spiraling into the sun there's not much you can do.
I feel that would be pretty terrible, gameplay-wise.

You know that bit in the final battle of Star Wars, where the indicator showing the rebel base occluded by the gas giant changes throughout the battle, finally changing to "death star can fire now" just as the photon torpedos go down the tube?

Can't have that situation without orbits.

Moving death stars can help you in that situation.

Meh, perhaps you are right. However I think it demonstrated the point well because it's a hugely popular franchise, which illustrates perfectly my point that games that punish newbs can still be massively popular.

It's more about the learning curve and how the player is educated throughout the process. In a lot of games the learning curve is not too steep because the various aspects of the game are slowly handed to the player for them to master on a drip feed. This is true of any game with a campaign, even Call of Duty. If it's done well, you don't even realise it is happening. The real issue here is that there will be no campaign. So how are we going to learn to play this game? I must confess I quite like zachb's idea.

I think perhaps in this case we might be better off with a very basic tutorial like in SupCom2. This introduces players to the basic concepts of unit management, setting up a base, managing resources, build queues, grouping units and combat etcetera.

Then we need to look to skirmish to provide a procedurally generated set of scenarios for players to play through with pre-set limitations. Like a PA academy, perhaps with scalable difficulty, to prepare them for online play. Players could even earn a 'medal' to prove to other online players in the lobby that they are up to at least a certain standard - just thinking aloud here.

Such an academy could be along the lines of what zachb has mentioned. Start off small against a skirmish AI and progress to successively large maps with more skirmish AI until the full game is available to the player. From a development point of view this is easy and not very time consuming to create as the procedural generator will do most of the work, all the developer needs to do is define the parameters.

Slightly off topic I know and I apologise. To get back on track perhaps I might suggest that we consider two things:
1.) If we are talking about a life like model including speed of travel then the rate things are going to happen at, night/day cycles omitted, are going to be so slow that it's negligible. We won't see much of a change in the galactic map over a 24 hour period apart from some day/night cycles. That's if our procedurally generated system has nothing fancy like a binary star system.
2.) If we go for a more fruity model that speeds things up to make gameplay more shall we say 'interesting', then I am sure that it will be little more than planets following a very basic orbital pattern. Most of the time we are looking at terrestrial planets in the centre and the more massive gas giants at the edges orbiting around a single star. It's going to be simple stuff. I just don't see the point in making it any more complicated than that. There is no need from a gameplay point of view and beyond that there is no benefit from having it in the game. All we are really interested in is relative planetary proximity on an axis of time. The rest is superfluous.

I also would love a full orbital physics engine. I want to see cool stuff. I want pro and retro grade orbits. I want eccentric orbits. I want binary (trinary, more?) planets , and stars. I want black holes. I want pulsars. I want quasars. I want COOL STUFF!

And hell, who doesn't?

But why does that have to be hard for the average player to deal with? All of that is under the hood. The machine does all the heavy lifting and provides you potentially interesting visuals and game play elements to play with.

And the math really isn't that hard, at least not for anyone who can build a program like this from the ground up. You can even download freebie apps on your android that can do pretty much all of this. It's probably even possible to find some public domain open source code for a fair amount of this already out there that already has the math there for you ready to use.

For me the answer on this one is simple. More is better.

What about multiple physics models? With ability to change game mode before start new game.
First release with static planets, first update introduces simple physics and second update with full physics.

I would be happy with both eccentric orbits being possible as well as orbits which are not locked to the equator.

:O I love the idea of moon death lasers!!!! Can I attatch a deadly laser to the moon that drills away at the planet?? Is this a confirmed thing? Also, I voted for full physics in game... but what I envision that as meaning is the tide goes in and out during the day/night cycles as the planets go around the sun and have their moons orbiting them on an axis which faces the same general area of the planet every day.

Then I read this... and totally agreed. But I also realize this kinda stuff wasn't discussed on kickstarter or as a stretch goal, will we see this kind of stuff?

True but the star systems themselves will be most likely far from reality. I mean even the distance from Earth to the Moon would be for a very, very long game if you would want to establish a base like the one from the Kickstarter video.

My guess is that the whole starsystems and the galaxy itself will be scaled down to some reasonable distances (after all we will hardly have an Earth sized planet, that's just TOO big).

OR the transport ships will need some great engines (which they will need for the galaxy war regardless).

Rotating should be done, obviously. But I do not expect any "weather changes" from them. No need for it. Nor I do expect any "real" scale of movement. I suppose that planet should orbit the sun at least once during the ordinary battle. You may create planets that rotate faster or slower (irrelevant to their weight or whatever - just generator parameter), so they will meet sometimes, giving interesting opportunity for planet invasion.

If we get Orbits circular or elliptic and rotating planets maybe even with displaced rotaion axis.
Do we then get season, earthtype planets spring summer fall winter.
If extrem elipses maybe like boiling lava time and total ice age time?

edit: should have read last post also

So a simple physics model for orbits is Kepler mechanics. Out of that you have 6 numbers to control, 2 control the size and shape (circle, ellipse or parabola), 3 control where in 3D space is the orbit (tilted, inclined and "rotated" around your star/planet/etc.) and 1 to control where on that orbit you are at the current time.

By limiting the values of some of these parameters you get super simple orbits (just equator, just circle and so on to hearts content). Without limiting you get funny shapes, retrograde orbits, inclined orbits, etc. No change in physics, and this model is used in real life for many things. Full (Newtonian) physics can be done, but has issues, one stemming from no longer being predictable, but you start getting the really strange cool things.

Planetary orbits take place over days and years. PA battles happen in mere hours.

Unless the orbit is really opening up new game opporunities, there's no need to have it.

There are several ways to make orbits faster, the first is that you scale down (in the right proportions) the distances, sizes and masses of the planets and stars, the amount of time things take also scales.

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler%27s ... #Third_law