X-Rebirth No piloting Capital ships!!??

[gbjbaanb]

rubbish, whining now is entirely down to pure speculation. They may release a system where you "pilot" a capship like a captain - tell the pilot where to go, the weapons office where to target, the engineering to fix the dilitium warp core shield generators quicker.

It might be much more immersive and fun than the current system, we just don't know. And that's why whining is non-constructive .. yet.

[Mightysword]

Besides, if past experience on what the ES designers factored into capital ship maneuvering is any indication, not flying your capital ship manually seems like a recipe for disaster.
It's not so much how it was implemented - I'm talking about the considerations that went into the design.

it's more like there wasn't any factored IMO. This is what I meant earlier that "there was never capital ship combat in X". Capital ship was nothing more than oversize fighter with the same combat routine without unique principal.

IMO capital ships needs:

- A different defense mechanism: this means ulitty, not just a bigger hull and a bigger shield.
- A different offense mechanism: this means a different weapon "class", not just the same class of fighter. And don't tell me there was differences between a HEPT and a PPC, there wasn't except their size. A HEPT is just a bigger PAC, in turn a PPC is just a bigger HEPT. I want to see the kind of difference between a Machine Gun on a toperdo boat to a 105mm cannon on a battleship.
- A different manuver mechanism: right now fighter yawn, turn, strafe and capital ship also yawn, turn, strafe. no difference.

[Catra]

rubbish, whining now is entirely down to pure speculation. They may release a system where you "pilot" a capship like a captain - tell the pilot where to go, the weapons office where to target, the engineering to fix the dilitium warp core shield generators quicker.

It might be much more immersive and fun than the current system, we just don't know. And that's why whining is non-constructive .. yet.

That's what we are getting.....we tell other crew members what to do, in exchange we can't tell the navigator to move outta the seat and take direct control ourselves.

That's more unrealistic than our current implementation.

There is no speculation.

- A different manuver mechanism: right now fighter yawn, turn, strafe and capital ship also yawn, turn, strafe. no difference.

Ummm...yea......I cant take you seriously after reading this and breaking out into a literal ROFL.

there wasn't

Never knew PPC shot at 231 r/m and did extremely poor damage.

A different defense mechanism: this means ulitty, not just a bigger hull and a bigger shield.

Utility and defense are very different things.

[Mightysword]

- A different manuver mechanism: right now fighter yawn, turn, strafe and capital ship also yawn, turn, strafe. no difference.

Ummm...yea......I cant take you seriously after reading this and breaking out into a literal ROFL.

there wasn't

Ok, after you get up the floor mind give me the reason why you laugh so hard? There are no different between fighter combat and capital ship in X (at least X2, X3R and X3TC). When I play a fighter, I turn and strafe. When I fly a M2, I turn and strafe. There is no different control and manuveur, if anything capital ship is just dodfighting in slow motion, yes, I feel like I'm "dodgefighting" in my M2, which doesn't feel right (to me at least). I don't know how you feel flying capital ship in X, but I feel no different then flying a fighter in slow motion. In a technical term: I don't see any different between a M3 and M2 in their combat orientation.

Never knew PPC shot at 231 r/m and did extremely poor damage.

Did you miss the part where I said they're just bigger? It should be obvious (at least I hope so) that I'm talking about their mechanic. Sure PPC is slower but hit harder the a PAC, but then they're shooting at a slower and thicker target. This means PPC is not a "different class" of weapon then a PAC in a right sense, it's just a heavier version. Classes prefer to something like pistol/rifle/cannon or direct-fire/altilery, their different is not just their output but the mechanic behind the shot and their effect. If fighter use something like a machine gun, I want capital ship to have something like a cannon, not just a really big machine gun.

A different defense mechanism: this means ulitty, not just a bigger hull and a bigger shield.

Utility and defense are very different things.

I said defense mechanism, and ulitilies can be a part of any "mechanism". Offend or defense. Again I don't want the only difference between classes are simply their inflated or deflated number, I want mechanice/principal that's "unique" to each class. The different between motorboat and battleship is not just one have thin and one have thick armor or one slow and one fast. Chaff, point defense, ECM, anti-beam defcharge, reflective coating ...etc... things can be a lot more colorful.


I don't know why you pick my post a part like you did, but I hope I entertained you.

[A5PECT]

Ok, after you get up the floor mind give me the reason why you laugh so hard?

Yaw. Yawn.

I agree with your point that there should be more variety in weapon characteristics and handling different ship classes.

A HEPT functions identically to a PPC. You stick it in a turret, it turns towards its target, and it starts shooting at it until it's dead. There is little bit of variety in that you can actually charge individual PPC rounds, but the way Egosoft implemented it in TC is rather clunky. I'd like to see that part of the interface improved, allowing you to target a certain ship (or say, a specific part of a ship), set a desired level of charge, and have the turrets fire at that power without having to jump into the gunner's seat myself (or wrestle with an obtrusive command console in the middle of the battle).

You could click on your target, and a drop down box would appear with a list of attack options: Attack, attack engines, attack weapons, attack shields, etc. Click on one of those, then you can choose to use low charge or high charge, depending on the size of the target ship and if you want to either kill or cripple it.

Flying capital ships in TC, however, is mechanically identical to flying fighters. That's my main point of contention.

[jlehtone]

- A different manuver mechanism

Pedantically, capitals and fighters do have different routines now. In practice both are hampered gerbils.


However, we (the users) do not agree on what to do with big ships. Therefore, Egosoft's announcement hasn't made everyone equally unhappy. They seem to respond to wishes expressed by (some) users, and that has happened before too.

Why do "we" ask for these things?


I don't care about the syntactic sugar as such; I can see Redshirts on plain spreadsheet table if I want to. But a roll and other novel technical possibilities under the hood would be highly appreciated.

[Tolmos]

If nothing else, I pray there are no asteroid fields in this game.

Manual flying was the only way I got my carrier through some of those, cause the autopilot did an excellent job of hitting as many rocks as it could.

[Gothsheep]

- A different manuver mechanism

Pedantically, capitals and fighters do have different routines now. In practice both are hampered gerbils.


However, we (the users) do not agree on what to do with big ships. Therefore, Egosoft's announcement hasn't made everyone equally unhappy. They seem to respond to wishes expressed by (some) users, and that has happened before too.

Why do "we" ask for these things?


I don't care about the syntactic sugar as such; I can see Redshirts on plain spreadsheet table if I want to. But a roll and other novel technical possibilities under the hood would be highly appreciated.

We have no idea what Egosoft is doing. For all we know capital ships could control like ships in Homeworld where you issue your movement orders in advance using a mouse-driven interface.

[Catra]

There are no different between fighter combat and capital ship in X

I know that, but there's a HUGE difference between what you said in the quote and what you're saying now.

Chaff, point defense, ECM, anti-beam defcharge, reflective coating

Are defensive, not utility. A tractor beam would be utility.

It should be obvious (at least I hope so) that I'm talking about their mechanic.

Everything you've said has been far from obvious.

And really, there are cannons with the fire rate of machine guns, called autocannons. The maindrawback being overheating. It would be nice if egosoft had overheating and such and put in "adjustables" so we can avoid things such as overheating and overexpanding our weapon generator.

[bobxii]

It'd be nice if the weapon and shield generators (and probably the engines, too) were linked.

[aka1nas]

We have no idea what Egosoft is doing. For all we know capital ships could control like ships in Homeworld where you issue your movement orders in advance using a mouse-driven interface.

Shrug, I'd actually be pretty happy with that for caps. Basically upgrade the sector map to be easily mouse driven and let you RTS move the sucker. It would be nice to still be able to jump in a turret myself occasionally, though..

[pmenso57]

From a gameplay point of view, I know what would be involved to have good (smooth and dynamic) path-finding in 3D. I'd be extremely surprised if Egosoft came up with an efficient algorithm that could perform better than I could (or almost any other player). What would be even more "boring" than piloting a capital ship is watching it take forever to navigate anywhere that has many other objects around (e.g. asteroids, other capitals) compared to what it would take with manual control. With a good algorithm, however, having a lead ship (i.e. of a formation) can drastically lower the computational workload if done properly.

Actually, with GPGPU hardware you can replace the k with a t in auto-pilok. This stuff can crunch collision detection (and by it's nature, collision prediction) way better than a CPU. Assuming EGOSOFT are doing a full reboot and scrapping all the old code (which seems the case), I would believe they would have also written up an auto-pilot that can take advantage of the newest hardware. And that's what I will assume until and unless they say otherwise.

That's still not enough. The path plotting (etc.) becomes an extremely combinatorial problem really quickly when there are many separate entities. Computing this dynamically (i.e. in real time) to a point comparable to what many human brains could produce is beyond current technology's capabilities. It is analogous to (though not the same as) the three-body problem. So, for any such real time system, you have to "cheat" by calculating approximate solutions (which are rarely optimal and, if so, are so by heuristically-guided chance). The more entities in the system, the more approximate the solutions have to be to maintain performance.

Take the traffic light system as an example. Even if every car was 100% reliable and controlled by a computer with departure times and destinations entered into the system (e.g.) the day before, calculating the optimal times at which all traffic lights change is an enormously complex and computationally expensive process--and that's with everything static. Instead, heuristics and probabistic analysis is applied to scenarios such as these using imprecise generalizations (e.g. vector fields, perhaps, in a case like traffic lights). It's one gigantic finite scheduling algorithm that has to operate in real time, but way worse because there are so many resources (i.e. discrete locations in 3-space at whatever granularity you choose to use).

When a human sees stuff happening (say with flying a ship or driving a car), an enormous amount of predictive analysis comes into play beyond simply taking current vectors and speeds and (attempting) to apply perturbation theory to a somewhat chaotic scenario (in the sense of chaos theory). Programming the heuristics for such predictive analysis to produce good approximate solutions quickly is notoriously difficult to do well.

The auto-pilot AI being what it is at the moment (X3:TC) doesn't surprise me in the least given the nature of the problem. That doesn't mean that it can't be improved, but it is extremely unlikely that Egosoft is going to come up with something that solves this type of problem in a near-optimal fashion in real-time where 40+ years of research has failed.

In lieu of doing that, various game mechanics, both realistic and contrived, can be added to reduce the scope of the problem as is often done by having standard routes or stuff like "trade lanes" that the AI nearly always takes which boils down to replaying previously computed (i.e. non-real-time) scenarios. But you could also have other things like formation flying where the computational load can be reduced somewhat by having high-level passes that consider formations as a unit--thereby reducing the number of "distinct" entities under "distinct" control which simplifies the problem by reducing the size of the input.

Collision detection is considerably less involved than path plotting (i.e. comprehensive collision avoidance + near-optimal system throughput) in a large complex system. It is still combinatorial, but not nearly as expensive in a practical sense. This is especially true when you can eliminate huge numbers of combinations with large filters (such as big spheres).

I actually work (as a programmer) in automation systems of large machinery with lots of moving parts--including those that have lots of physical things moving around in 3-space, so I understand these problems well and have to deal with a significant amount of motion analysis. There a similar constraints on such systems to the systems in X (efficiency, stability, and reliability), except that there are generally fewer components that can interact, I can statically precompute the scenario (elminating the real-time requirement in most cases), and the consequences of failure are drastically higher (i.e. depending on context, it may cost a lot of money to repair or may injure or kill people as opposed to the annoyance of your "virtual" capital ship being destroyed being destroyed in a game).

All that aside, in games, the algorithms can fail where the cost is minimal provided it doesn't fail too often, and that's where heuristically-guided approximation techniques can be deployed. This can be done reasonably well, but it is difficult to maintain a high degree of efficiency, stability, and reliability in all cases.

So, can it be done better than, say, what X3:TC does? Absolutely. Does it need to be done better than, say, what X3:TC does? Absolutely, the current system is woefully inadequate. Is it at all likely that it will be done in a way that is comparable to what I could do flying manually? Not without a major theoretical breakthrough or a major technological advance like getting current-generation super-computer processing power into home PCs.

[pmenso57]

Gotta say, after 12 pages of this thread all I'm seeing is a few armchair game designers making completely unfounded assumptions about how they will hate a system that they haven't seen and know almost nothing about. (Anyone who has ever worked in the industry knows exactly what I mean when I refer to 'armchair designers'.)

(FWIW, I do this kind of thing professionally though not in games.)

Given the specific information provided, however, leads to two things:

1) Fact: According to the (probably not-yet-completed) design, capital ships will not be directly flyable for whatever reason. This is a loss of one of the things that I like about the current games.

2) Extrapolation: Given the above, the gameplay mechanics used in the new game may be significantly different to what we're are used to. If true, that may (in an overall sense) be something I happen to like more, and may be something I like significantly less. However, it puts what the next game is going to be like squarely in the realm of "largely unknown"--just like virtually every other game (most of which suck). If, OTOH, the game was described as being something that had all of the same functionality (but improved) + new stuff. I know I would like it.

This ends up coming down to personal preference. What I like less others may like more and vice versa. However, I'd prefer not to get excited about or look forward to something for a year only to be disappointed. That isn't a hissy fit. Egosoft can do whatever they want, including to listening the opinions of their users (or subset thereof) or not as they choose. If the status quo remains (i.e. no capital ship flying), there is a significant chance that I won't particularly like the game. There is still a chance that I will. However, even if I don't, I wish no antipathy to those that do or to Egosoft.

[pmenso57]

Also, a metric ton of sci-fi novels have large spaceships that are not 'piloted' by the captain directly (or, in fact, a human being at all) - so the claim that nearly all sci-fi things have that is just ridiculous.

Regardless of the actual percentages, the point remains that it is a typical sci-fi gimmick... There is some sort of emergency scenario and manual control is taken by someone.

[pmenso57]

In episode III of Star Wars, in the begining, Anikin and Obi Wan land that cruiser on Coruscant...

Star Wars has only 3 true episode's IV, V, VI. The others were a desperate attempt by Jar Jar Binks for a shot at fame and glory, after getting booted from Simon Cowell's X Factor

Absolutely, and well said. It just shows how something great can turn into garbage even when headed by the same person (who supposedly had the resulting grand "vision" all along).

[Mr. Stubb]

I put a lot of time into reading this entire topic so that my post wouldn't sound r*******, and here's what I have to say.

You will be able to be aboard your own capital ships in X:R, ES is not run by a bunch of deaf idiots who don't pay attention to any sort of protest thrown at them by their community. That being said, you'll probably even be able to pilot it manually if you're so inclined. That's what the X-series is all about, doing whatever the hell you want. I can think of very few cases in which they've actually completely removed a feature.

I don't doubt that the game will be very different from it's predecessors, but many of the aspects the we love will still be there, and I'm sure that there'll be several new aspects which will come to be equally cherished. In short, quit fussing and wait for the next news update. It will be sufficiently, but not overly, revealing.

-Mr. Stubb

[Tolmos]

You will be able to be aboard your own capital ships in X:R, ES is not run by a bunch of deaf idiots who don't pay attention to any sort of protest thrown at them by their community. That being said, you'll probably even be able to pilot it manually if you're so inclined. That's what the X-series is all about, doing whatever the hell you want. I can think of very few cases in which they've actually completely removed a feature.

-Mr. Stubb

If this turns out to be true, I'll be the first to pre-order X:R, and will continue to lavish much fanboyishness their way.

...

Just sayin' >_>

[Mightysword]

There are no different between fighter combat and capital ship in X

I know that, but there's a HUGE difference between what you said in the quote and what you're saying now.

not really ... Earlier I said they're no different, later I say they are no different to one another ... how does that make a HUGE difference?

Chaff, point defense, ECM, anti-beam defcharge, reflective coating

Are defensive, not utility. A tractor beam would be utility.

Wherever, it has seen places classified thing into core classes and utility classes. Shield and Armor are core defense, while things like ECM/Chaff are considered defense utility. Anyway, I don't see why you want to get technical like that.

It should be obvious (at least I hope so) that I'm talking about their mechanic.

Everything you've said has been far from obvious.

And really, there are cannons with the fire rate of machine guns, called autocannons. .

I'll not sure how far from obvious they were, but I get a feeling you just try "not to get it". I said...

I want to see the kind of difference between ***a Machine Gun on a toperdo boat*** to a ***105mm cannon on a battleship.***

I mean ... how more specific can I be? IMO, it was pretty obvious I was comparing of small direct fire class from a mounted machine gun to the batteries you find on a warship. I never said anything about an auto-cannon. Any way let drop this if this is the direction you want to take the argument, whatever it is it should be clear what I'm talking about, if not then then now, that's the whole point.

[recnelis]

Goodness, i didn't think my post would be this popular..

[SIMON POPPLEWELL]

Goodness, i didn't think my post would be this popular..

See what happens when you open a can of worms....