[MOD] Fewer PPC rounds 13/12/2006

[arcana75]

When big battles with lots of big ships happen, could you say that all those PPC rounds contribute to a significant amount of load on the PC?

I checked the T files and those PPC rounds last almost 30 seconds in space. Based on the rate of fire and lifespan, sometimes there's at least 1000 PPC rounds in space at one time.

I'm pretty sure that contributes a heck of a lot to the in-sector performance. I modded the TBullets and TLaser files to reduce the rates of fire, but correspondingly increased the damage, energy use and energy amounts of the PPCs.

Make your own assessments for balance. Here are the originals for PPCs:

[BlackRazor]

[fud]

You could speed them up, and shorten the life span of them. It can take away from their traits tho, doing that.

Sit with a calculator, and figure out damage/sec, and adjust it. If you shorten the lifespan, they'll fade out quicker. But to accomplish the same range, they'll need to have a faster velocity. This is where the balance issue is. If they're faster, they're now more of a danger to smaller ships. While this doesn't bother me personally, some might not like it.

You could reduce the damage caused by each "bullet" by the factor of how much you increased the speed.

In essense:

You increase the speed by 50%, decrease the damage by 50%. You could further balance that out by changing the rate of fire in TLasers.



In my past meddlings, I had laser towers that fired GPPCs, at over 5x the normal rate, with faster bullets, but shorter range. The result was that 4 LTs could wipe out a station with stray bullets in a matter of 4-5 seconds.

It was a little *too* much.


Just fiddle with the files, you can prolly find something to help performance.

[arcana75]

[Mad Hatter]

It completely unbalanced the OOS combat. Because of the hard coded calculations, ships that were not so tough in sector became nearly invincible OOS. I think that Xenon raiding parties were able to trash entire fleets in seconds.

[arcana75]

[Mad Hatter]

I think that they raised the damage and lowered the rate of fire to compensate. This kept damage over time the same, but reduced the number of bullets in the air, which raised fps.

Ask over at the XTM forums and I'm sure someone can tell you what they did.

[frymaster]

i believe a smaller though still noticable performance gain can be had from editing the PPC effects to something less... glowy

[Red Spot]

you can change weapons and get an even better relation between IS and OOS combat ... however dont think its just weapons ....

(I dont really see how people get the balance messed up as OOS-values you can see and basicly base weapons so they are in line IS with how they have OOS-values ... I did it in X2 and in time I'll do it again with X3....)



G

[minikin]

Reducing PPC rate of fire dramatically increases FPS.

In my game I reduced PPCs to firing 30 shots per minute while still maintaining the same amount of damage a torrent of PPC bolts would inflict in that same 60 seconds. With a few tweaks to other things here and there, lag in big battles is virtually non-existent now.

[Syklon]

[arcana75]

Hmmm it's possible that rate of fire and bullet speed are taken into account when fighting OOS, maybe to account for target agility or ship size.

To compensate for less rate of fire, I increased bullet speed as well as the requisite damage/energy.

[arcana75]

Anyway I'm gonna put up the mod for download; caveat emptor I suppose. I've been using it and IS combat seems great.

[al_main]

The theory was:

Wth the half fire rate / double damage (ie same damage over time) it seemed that OOS the calculations could get iffy. Presumably because getting the first shot in was now far more advantageous. The result was that Xenon Q's (M7 class) against a destroyer would usually get the first shot in due to their superior speed and hence the extra damage. So basically they would usually win against a superior opponent.

Basically a fast ship Dragon/Q/etc would appear to get first shot against a slower but superior ship and with more damage on the PPC round would end up winning OOS. OOS the ROF didnt seem to effect it.

[arcana75]