Killing cap ship by shooting antenna

[CraftyPilot]

P4 achieved that threshold; however, if you check the new dual and quad core processors, you'll notice a significant drop in processing speed. Down to around 2.25GHz on average; this is because they've reduced the size of each processor core, each core being the equivalent to an old processor, and thus the overall capability of each individual core.

Uh...sorry, but that's utterly wrong. The reason the clock speeds on newer processors is lower is because they are considerably more efficient than the old ones; even in single-threaded benchmarks (such as most games, for a start) something like a Core 2 Duo E4300 (which runs at 1.8GHz) walks all over the old 3+ GHz Pentium 4s. Considering that people have got Core 2s to run well in excess of 3GHz I don't think 4GHz is such a huge leap!

Practically, it is like your dual core has the game thread through one core and other programs thread through the other. My is the Pentium D945 3.4Ghz x2, 2mb x2 L2 cache, this means my game runs at 3.4GHz with 2mb cache but more efficiently than through a single core due to less compressed threads running through a core and it is hyper threaded so more X3 material can thread through a core.

[Runner]

Ah guys, please stay on-topic! Discussions about CPUs (without any knowledge about the design of CPU, obviously) are really offtopic.

To the comments about modular ship design requiring tons of GHz - that's nonsense. as LynkDead pointed out, XWing had that. And it would simulate hundreds of fighters and dozens of capitals ships on a 0.1GHz machine effortlessly!

Also including hit-zones isn't nearly as CPU intense as you might think. But that depends on how X3's engine works, which I don't really know.

And as someone else pointed out, these battles were a lot more tactical and intense. And because I'd like X3 or X4 to be the perfect space game, I do think that modular ships are sorely missing.

Other games that had modular ship design are the following (please add others I don't know):
Freespace (you could shoot turrets)
I-War 2 (with an elaborate damage system, but without visually damaging parts)
all battle cruiser games (same as with I-War2)

So I'd still like to hear some answer from egosoft, if that's possible.

[xTemon]

P4 achieved that threshold; however, if you check the new dual and quad core processors, you'll notice a significant drop in processing speed. Down to around 2.25GHz on average; this is because they've reduced the size of each processor core, each core being the equivalent to an old processor, and thus the overall capability of each individual core.

Uh...sorry, but that's utterly wrong. The reason the clock speeds on newer processors is lower is because they are considerably more efficient than the old ones; even in single-threaded benchmarks (such as most games, for a start) something like a Core 2 Duo E4300 (which runs at 1.8GHz) walks all over the old 3+ GHz Pentium 4s. Considering that people have got Core 2s to run well in excess of 3GHz I don't think 4GHz is such a huge leap!

Don't mean to lean on the off topic here; just have to explain my argument

GHz is defined as operations per second, and while you can config your processor to run your OS and game through seperate cores, it's still only doing #GHz operations per second on each core. Doing the config to seperate the usage for each is all well and good, but my OS, with VISTA basic emulation over Windows XP Home, runs less than 0% even when jumping between menus and windows; the game on the other hand cycles it up to about 90%.. perhaps my error is in my understanding of usage, but my OS runs entirely from RAM as far as I know.

Never had a look at the D945.. pretty impressive

[Nanook]

Ah guys, please stay on-topic! Discussions about CPUs (without any knowledge about the design of CPU, obviously) are really offtopic.

To the comments about modular ship design requiring tons of GHz - that's nonsense. as LynkDead pointed out, XWing had that. And it would simulate hundreds of fighters and dozens of capitals ships on a 0.1GHz machine effortlessly!....

Hundreds of fighters and dozens of capitals??? Hmmm, I remember playing those games but don't remember anywhere near that many ships onscreen at once.

But irrelevant, anyway. You're talking about sprite-based graphics, not real 3D. Huge, huge difference in processing needs.

[Andaius]

Xwing vs Tie fighter you only had one battle field of stuff to run and that was the whole "universe". In X not only does it have to render all the models, weapons fire, stations, etc. etc. it has to run all the scripts for them and the rest of the universe at the same time. How good do you think Xwing would have run if you have 5-6 such battles going on at the same time while also having the trade fleets and movements of all said ships to keep track of?

Many of you are siting games that only exists as a "single sector" in X's games terms. So basicly unless you want to remake it so the only universe is where the player is and everything else doesn't exist until loaded when the player enters into it. You may have to adjust you expectations.

Have you guys played with fleet battles in X3? Slow down any? Well just think take that as a base and add even more complexity too it. Do you think that would slow it down or speed it up?

[shifty_powers]

P4 achieved that threshold; however, if you check the new dual and quad core processors, you'll notice a significant drop in processing speed. Down to around 2.25GHz on average; this is because they've reduced the size of each processor core, each core being the equivalent to an old processor, and thus the overall capability of each individual core.

Uh...sorry, but that's utterly wrong. The reason the clock speeds on newer processors is lower is because they are considerably more efficient than the old ones; even in single-threaded benchmarks (such as most games, for a start) something like a Core 2 Duo E4300 (which runs at 1.8GHz) walks all over the old 3+ GHz Pentium 4s. Considering that people have got Core 2s to run well in excess of 3GHz I don't think 4GHz is such a huge leap!

Don't mean to lean on the off topic here; just have to explain my argument

GHz is defined as operations per second, and while you can config your processor to run your OS and game through seperate cores, it's still only doing #GHz operations per second on each core. Doing the config to seperate the usage for each is all well and good, but my OS, with VISTA basic emulation over Windows XP Home, runs less than 0% even when jumping between menus and windows; the game on the other hand cycles it up to about 90%.. perhaps my error is in my understanding of usage, but my OS runs entirely from RAM as far as I know.

Never had a look at the D945.. pretty impressive

I'm afraid that you are making the mistake of mistaking brute force for actual computational power. Although a 3ghz pentium 4 has a higher clock speed, (and thats all that 3ghz means, it is NOT a true indication of computational power), it is far less efficient than a E4300 running at 1.8ghz.

A good example of this is when the k8 range of amd processors were released. A 3200+ Athlon64, running at approx. 2ghz, will give similar performance to a p4 running a full 1ghz faster in terms of clock speed

heh this quote:

The megahertz myth, or less commonly the gigahertz myth, refers to the "hertz myth" error of using clock rate to compare the performance of different microprocessors. While clock rates are a valid way of comparing the performance of different speeds of the same model and type of processor, other factors such as pipelines and instruction sets can greatly affect the performance when considering different processors. For example, one processor may take one clock cycle to add two numbers and another clock cycle to multiply by a third number, whereas another processor is able to do the same calculation in one clock cycle.

Have a read here

[aka1nas]

Don't mean to lean on the off topic here; just have to explain my argument

GHz is defined as operations per second, and while you can config your processor to run your OS and game through seperate cores, it's still only doing #GHz operations per second on each core. Doing the config to seperate the usage for each is all well and good, but my OS, with VISTA basic emulation over Windows XP Home, runs less than 0% even when jumping between menus and windows; the game on the other hand cycles it up to about 90%.. perhaps my error is in my understanding of usage, but my OS runs entirely from RAM as far as I know.

Never had a look at the D945.. pretty impressive

That's where you are confusing yourself.... Ghz is not operations per second. It's merely a measure of the clockspeed of a chip. It's a worthless number if you don't relate it to how much work the chip can do per clock cycle. Netburst-based CPUs like the P4 and Pentium D do relatively little work per clock cycle. This is why a 2Ghz or so Core 2 Duo can beat out a 3.4Ghz Pentium D in most applications. The Core 2 architecture (as well as the K8 architecture) accomplish more work per clock cycle.

Also, the CPU utilization number given in the Windows Task Manager is just a function of CPU-time, not CPU resource allocation. Interactive applications like games typically will take all available CPU time as they need to be responsive to events like user input, etc. A task can be using 99% of your CPU time and barely using any of the execution units on the actual CPU.

[philip_hughes]

I think ill do something a bit strange here and go back on topic

Im about to zip off to the creative forum and finish off a story which does give a technobabble reason why shooting the arial would work.

The ships have a damage mitigating device on their hulls so that one shot does not decompress the entire hull or shoot off a wing etc. It spreads the damage over the entire ship. This is why the hull is only seen as a green line that goes down. Once the damage is too great, the ship simply cannot hold together anymore and has a masive catastrophic failure. Boom.

[Kazuma]

Hz is most closely associated with current, or rather; the amount of electrons in flow over a unit of time... ermm.. a coulomb... the concept of 'time' really just comes from how many times a pole completes a cycle of rotation within an electric generator (ed. or a cycle of somthing does something); again depending on how this is rigged you can get some phase out of it and improve your average rms (as your not in the falloff as much considering AC power). When it comes to PC stuff, all those big monster capacitors crammed in and around your processor are for the most part, doing just that; keeping the burst up and thereby the rms up, so the proc has more juice to gobble. More to the point, unit of juice is available for gobble given a period of time without going nova in the case. Unfortunately, with all best intentions this pushes materials to there limits so we get some neat stuff like 'duo' cores and whatnot; which for all practical purposes are multiple cpu's; which is a nice way of saying... you can only cram so much crap on a .18 micron piece of copper without industrial cooling or exotic materials/gimmicks to open up the perverbial electron highway.

I spose if any of this stuff impresses me, its that machined tools are so refined that this stuff can be built to run at all; with as little failure as it has, considering the mass scale of production. Theres an aweful lot of logic gates on a lill' itty' bitty' tiny piece of sand. Thats the magic!

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,62851,00.html

for those that care, the above linky is a decent read.

[Kazuma]

Now back to topic;

Silent Hunter 3, man what a great game, and yes Runner; I think the whole concept of hard points exc is an excellent way to go forward... although we are now on the slippery slope of GAME vs. SIMULATION; and as I have found, and I am sure you may find, there are camps on both sides of the topic in the X community... heck, you may even catch me lingering on the game side from time to time... just visiting, you know.

Theres a whole mess of peeps (whom will remain nameless), that will expound on topics... and have never actually done it/come close to it in the real world... then tell you how wrong your are, welcome to the internet! Personally, I like where your head is at! Keep it up, I need more peeps on the SIM side!

[Pyre]

I agree with the cap ships need damage models, i mean, it *is* kinda silly to vape a cap just by spraying it with fire, and attacking specific sections make more sense, as fighters become less dangerous in numbers, but WAY more dangerous when the shields drop, but if Cap ships get target models... will fighters?


id hate for my shields to fall, and cop a lucky IRE hit in my cockpit... which would technically blow the pressure inside the cockpit....bad way to end the game.. and not fun at all

I suppose they should only implement it on cap ships... but then that wouldnt be a true sim huh?

[Thera]

I look at it like this.


[SHIELDS] == simple
------------
[MOLECULAR BINDING GENERATOR] == Instead of Hull This is a measure of how well the hull components are held together and provides defence against micro meteorites. Hitting an unshielded hull overloads this and applies damage to this device. this reduced stability, forces the on board systems to restrict speed so as not to damage the system more through vibration. when its depleted, there is no binding force protecting the hull from space itself, so when a penetration occurs, the resulting explosive decompression is fatal, and of course explosive.
[/b]

[Kazuma]

When we start to contemplate a relatively simple thing/upset such as 'the antenna' being equally important to the overall intergrity of a ships hull from a game standpoint, sure, its irritating; and sure theres some pretty simple fixes that could be done to correct this... how about just draw a bounding box around the hull of a ship and anything else such as antenna are simple outside the clipping plain? now you can fly through it, shoot it, apparently hit something with it; and nothing happens, problem solved. Albiet, this isnt a particularly 'grand' way to fix the problem... and may create more issues and or another thread... 'my fire just passes through the antenna and nothing happened', but it gets the job done.

On the flip side of the coin, it could also be said that 'antenna is as important as the ship'; acts as an illustration of how 3d design can really display some outstanding and beautiful art; is also limited by being a very static object. In the case of FPS games... where a tank round descimates your character... but does nothing against an allready beat up concrete wall... that too is hardly realistic, as the wall would be just as vaporized as you.

To move into the realm of hardpoints, and destructable 'bits' it for all practical purposes must be looked at from the very on set of the codebase of the game/simulation... do you make it a modular function? Is it hard coded to each and every ship type? How are bits assigned to hardpoints? Now we have opened up a whole can of issue; and one that often dominates the world of simulation games, more often breaking rather then making for a good game.

I can't help but feel like this is a very subjective experience. I tend to think of the 'anscillary bits' to be as important as the whole of the story; while others may feel (and rightfully so) that it detracts from an experience they where seaking, and/or is a tedious convolution.

Lets use SH3, while its been mentioned. Game itself has no real story other then the broad stroke of 'its ww2, you have a sub, you have a crew, go forth and sink stuff'. The story I find is the personal one of 'day 47, sank a tanker, evaded destroyer; hanz was hurt... ensign gruber took over his post, engines damaged... leaking fuel'...' nursing said wounded ship back to port, carefully measuring out the speeds to get the range, exc exc; to be infinately more important and personal an achievement then anything Dan Banna... or whatever the X plot characters story was/is. The fact is, the ship became personal to me, its health critical to my further progression; and now I have had to make some decisions to cope with a situation, very cool... albiet too me.

If X worked on this same principle, I feel it would be a great asset; 'day 47, xenon ambushed us; knocked out one of there carriers... suffered heavy damage on the port side, 38 casualties... not enough fuel to make the jump back... evading patrols... venting o2, canceled the three ring circus... crew upset...' this ship and its systems, important; the capabilities of the ship... important, now the player has some decisions to make... very cool stuff; the players experience; personal.

Not everyone wants to plod through a game like this though, and thats cool... it can be kinda boring, first to admit it, I just think its infinately more entertaining to intentionally land a missile onto a cap ships antenna array as a prelude to killing it (now it cant call for help), then it is to park myself in such a way that I can just 'kill it' by nickle and dimming a bounding box... theres allready enough of this in countless games (a good bit of which have monthly subscription fees).

[Runner]

Well, actually I am not on the sim side of things. All I want is more depth to the gameplay without detracting from simplicity of gameplay. If you have selectable and destroyable subsystems of capital ships, then you don't have to care about that. If that's too complicated, just bring enough firepower and bring it all down upon your foes.

It also doesn't have to be implemented in any complicated way. Just define parts of the existing hit-mesh as subsystems, which when destroyed (or damaged) remove certain functionality from the corresponding ship. This really isn't CPU intensive inany way - they only extra amount of work is for defining all these parts during the creation of the entire mesh and additionally providing a 2D sprite that shows the layout of your ship and where damage has been dealed to.


Oh, and by the way, X-Wing did not use sprites for its ships, whoever claimed that! There ships were full 3D models!

Oh and to those arguing that X-Wing didn't have to simulate an entire universe in the background - yes. That's true. However, remember that it ran on 0.1GHz! So by today's standards there is plenty of computational power left to simulate all kinds of universes.

And of course, in OOS combat, subsystems and stuff like that could be simulated very simply by some random model.

And by the way, with subsystems damage, massdrivers (skipping shields) would suddenly become much more important against capital ships: While they cannot really damage the hull sufficiently, they would be very well suited to take out those shield generators.

[Runner]

Actually, sword of the stars also has components destroyed: from single turrets to entire ship sections. And it allows several dozens of capital ships to battle it out.

[pjknibbs]

Sword of the Stars is a 4X game like Civilisation, not a "fly the ship yourself" game like X.

[Runner]

Sword of the Stars is a 4X game like Civilisation, not a "fly the ship yourself" game like X.

so what?

It's still real-time and it still has real-time hit calculations. Whether you fly one of the many ships, or represent only a viewport really doesn't matter at all for this discussion.

[japesk]

MOdular damage is definately a great idea. I love this game as it is, and my only fear is that during the next iteration of the game, Egosoft will once again bump up the graphics engine to level that will bog down my current supercomp. The graphics engine in its current state already rocks, even by todays standards.

Adding in modular ship extensions I bet will bog the CPU, but I think building a game that is AT current standards (not cutting edge) graphics, while adding in the little (and sometimes big) goodeis would make a whole lot of sense.

I would bet that IF x4 came out, we would run through the gammut of patches again (taking 2 years) to make the game playable on standard machines.

I am a MAJOR advocate of game depth, and I love this game to death--by far more addictive than crack. But even I would like to see additions into X4 that would give us the pilots a better FEEL that small actions we take can have major consequences to the environment around us within the game-space. Thing like directional shield control, energy allocation, compnent targeting all make great sense to space combat. X-wing Alliance really made the pilot (if good) use his/her ship as a great tool for defeating targets of size. Also I really don't remember XWA bogging my (then) machine down a whole lot--I seem to remember needing to add some memory though. The graphics were great (by then standards), then gameplay was rather immersive, although the AI was a little dinky. With the advent of multi-threading, I would think that some of these issues should be non-issues.

I'm only a gamer, not a programmer, and have been starving for something that has it all, and am utterly baffled why game companies rarely listen to their current clientelle as to suggestions for future releases. I realize Ego is a small company, but why waste so much time developing newer dazzlier graphics engines, when the current one is already great, and put the bodies onto game depth.

Sorry about the rant folx, But i'm an old fart who likes games that are a bit more cerebral and intricate. I don't even care if the learning curve is as steep as a wall. Half of the enjoyment (and yes frustration) comes with the epiphanies one reaches when the light bubl goes off when trying to perform the simplest tasks within a game. My personal feeling is that the X series is NOT a game for the FPSer in us (although it does play to it). It is for that tactician and strategist in all of us. Action---Consecquence. Gotta love games that pit both against each other. And this game almost cuts the mustard, and is by far one of the best out there that strives for it.

I think it almost goes without saying, but Take the BEST from the rest, and leave all the Junk and Fluff out

[John Buford]

Having played XWing and Tie fighter in the old days I must agree with the poster. Selectable ship components would add a tactical note to space battle and even improve this very good game.

Imagine an attack on a carrier, you send in three squads of fighters, that engage the carriers defense force in a dogfight, after that is done you send in a squad of bombers to take out its engines or target other vital parts. Totally makes sense to me.

An other example would be to take out the antennas of a ship to deny it the ability to call in reinforcements or give away your position. If you loose your communication and scanning systems the map could change, aka go grey until you fix that problem. And you would have to choose, do I kill this ships engines so it cannot run away, or do I blind and deaf it first so I won't have to worry about reinforcements? Both actions do need different attack ships too, an antenna could be shot down by a small fighter if he has for example the right rocket or torpedo, but taking out the whole engines would need bigger, slower ships, limitless possibilities here.

Of course the would be repair crews, but only limited ones and you would have to priorize which ships systems are vital in the current situation. All this needs of course a lot of additional scripts and AI enhancements, it might not be possible to do something like that in X3 but maybe in X4.

And when we are at it, one very nice feature in X-Wing that could be added to X too was the possibility to redirect weapons power to your shields (and even setup front and rear shields but we want to keep it real here, right )

[xTemon]

3.4GHz = 3.4 billion operations per second, or perhaps my college likes to improperly inform there students and lead them down path's to idiocy.

shorter pipeline bursts would improve the speed; reason is simple, and put in layman's terms,

If you walk one kilometer at 7.5 km/h, how long will it take to reach your destination?

If you walk a shorter distance, 0.34 km, at the same speed, how long will it take you to reach your destination?

Reading an article doesn't make you a genius, or a computer scientist; I know I'm not one, and I also know that Wikipedia, while interesting and occaisionally informative, is a free encyclopedia, and can be accessed and edited as such. Who wrote that anyway? Who edited it afterwords? Did they know what they were talking about beyond the relation of what who said at what press conferance to get how much financing or improve investor confidence and get there stock price to go up.