Killing cap ship by shooting antenna

[Runner]

I have a simple question to egosoft, one that I'd like to see the public here discuss as well.

In any future titles, will capital ships finally become modular and interactive? What I mean is that currently a capital ship is just a single huge 3D model without any in-game functionality besides being a ship and all that. You can't target and damage specifically the engines, the shield generators (even X-Wing vs. Alliance had that!) or single turrets.

I tested it: I was able to kill an argon m1 simply by repeatedly shooting some antenna only! First shields went down, then hull strength and in the end it blew up. That not only feels very strange, but it also takes away a lot of tension from battles and also from the joy of possessing such a battleship.

This would also naturally lead to a minigame where during a battle you could (optionally) try to concentrate on managing efficient repears of the various parts of your battleship. (Of course assuming a better UI than the current one - something similar to Silent Hunter 3)

So, will we see anything like that anytime soon?

[KipperTheFish]

Maybe I you are unhappy with the way X3 plays, you should continue to play Silent Hunter 3.
There are a few things that are a little "quirky" in the game, but most here love it and don't see a need for any additions that will push our processors over the edge.

[Gotcha!]

@Kipper: I find his question not so strange, you seem a bit rude.

It should be easy enough to make antennas no-clipping or something. It doesn't have to involve complicated stuff. It's kinda strange to blow apart a destroyer by melting an antenna.
I'm not bothered by it though. Never noticed it either.

In the future games will probably have a system like this; Repeated fire into a specific area to shut down specific systems and stuff like that. Or blowing away parts of ships. But let's all wait 'till we can buy a 10ghz.

[apogee]

Funny, i was in a hyperion on an assasination mission, the mark being in an orca. The front of the orca has 2 prongs each side of the docking bay, and during the fight i clipped one of these prongs and caboom the orca detonates. I agree that in an ideal world, damage to non integral parts of the model should not cause the complete destruction of the target.

[Mudkest]

It's kinda strange to blow apart a destroyer by melting an antenna.

there's a reason I dont fly argon ships, and now you know it

[maverick82]

Antennas are the Achille's heel of the Titan, didn't you know?
Xenon Ks have those middle hub and Teladies have those ugly tubes...

[Nanook]

Funny, i was in a hyperion on an assasination mission, the mark being in an orca. The front of the orca has 2 prongs each side of the docking bay, and during the fight i clipped one of these prongs and caboom the orca detonates. I agree that in an ideal world, damage to non integral parts of the model should not cause the complete destruction of the target.

True, but I think Egosoft did this on purpose, just to cause the player to have to avoid spiky things on ships during combat. Just look at the 'underside' of a Xenon J or K. And imagine if you clipped that part while in an M3. KABOOM! Complete destruction of you, more than likely.

As for the whole idea of modular ships, what you're basically doing is creating 'ships within ships' which means just that many more objects to take account of and render as separate entities. That causes a substantial increase to the needed performance of a computer. Especially since there are, or could be, a very large number of such ships in a sector, or even OOS for that matter. In a game where ship numbers are relatively small, and only in the area where the player exists, then the modular thing is feasible. But in a game like X3 and its predecessors, it's probably not going to be worth the huge performance hit. Personally, I wouldn't want to see Egosoft go to all that effort for something relatively minor. I'd rather see them put most of their efforts into other aspects of the gameplay.

[apogee]

Funny, i was in a hyperion on an assasination mission, the mark being in an orca. The front of the orca has 2 prongs each side of the docking bay, and during the fight i clipped one of these prongs and caboom the orca detonates. I agree that in an ideal world, damage to non integral parts of the model should not cause the complete destruction of the target.

True, but I think Egosoft did this on purpose, just to cause the player to have to avoid spiky things on ships during combat. Just look at the 'underside' of a Xenon J or K. And imagine if you clipped that part while in an M3. KABOOM! Complete destruction of you, more than likely.

As for the whole idea of modular ships, what you're basically doing is creating 'ships within ships' which means just that many more objects to take account of and render as separate entities. That causes a substantial increase to the needed performance of a computer. Especially since there are, or could be, a very large number of such ships in a sector, or even OOS for that matter. In a game where ship numbers are relatively small, and only in the area where the player exists, then the modular thing is feasible. But in a game like X3 and its predecessors, it's probably not going to be worth the huge performance hit. Personally, I wouldn't want to see Egosoft go to all that effort for something relatively minor. I'd rather see them put most of their efforts into other aspects of the gameplay.

Agreed, thats why i said "in an ideal world". It's just a case of avoid them prongs!

[Flybye]

Yeah something like this is VERY possible, but would take a HUGE performance hit on our CPUs.

Give it a few years, and it will happen. It's not a question of whether it will happen or not, it's a question of WHEN

I'm looking forward to the day when we can grab a small, rather indistructible ship, and flying right THROUGH a capital ship. Imagine seeing a hole through the ship and seeing wares, people & pieces flying out. Or being able to literally slice a section of a ship off with a Gamma Kyon Emitter. It is all very possible, just not viable at the moment. 10yrs ago I never would have thought games would look as beautiful as X3. 10yrs ago 3d accelerators were just hitting the gaming consumer market. The future will bring many surprises

[bob hope]

Nanook, a lot of the ships in game come in lots of parts anyway, and i dont see things like a lot of earlier games out there actually being that bad on the computer, in fact multiple parts can make it easier for the game to load the models, whereas 1 large mesh can make the whole thing painfull

[Switch 9]

SC: Bridge Commander had that. It's fun, but having to micro manage internal subsystmems would distract from the whole Build Fight Think thing ES got going.

[Artemis404]

Wait, wouldn't this similar to headshots in FPS games? Those models have designated areas, like the head, where hits will cause far more damage. Do you think it would be possible to section off ships like that and say, instead of causing more damage in those areas, the amount of hull that you destroy is limited in each area? This would mean you can't shoot the same small spot until the ship explodes, and you'd have to move elsewhere.

That won't stop damage from hitting aerials, but if you sectioned it right you could only do so much damage to the aerial before having to move somewhere else to finish the job. Obviously there would only be a need for this on cap ships.

EDIT: Although I suppose you could add damage bonuses for hitting somewhere like the bridge of the ship to represent you vapourizing the command crew...

[Bane_v2]

I don't think it would be 'relatively minor' at all nor be as resource heavy as 'ships within ships'.

For one, ship subsystems would add quite a bit to the tactical side of the game. Take capitol class ships: do you try to cripple the beast by taking out the bridge or the engines? Perhaps you want to blow up a turret or two to give yourself a gap in their defenses where you could launch a torpedo with less fear of it being shot down. Or even take out the hanger so it can't launch it's fighter wings.

Of course if subsystems can be destroyed they must also be able to be repaired. Enter alpha, beta and gamma engine cores. Or alpha, beta, and gamma shield generators. With some sort of power or physical space limitation in place it could add a lot to the ship building side of the game. What is the purpose of this ship? Do I want more speed but less shields? The reverse? No speed but maximum weapon energy?

Darkstar One had a pretty neat system where there were three areas of the ship to upgrade and you could upgrade each area a max of 10 times for 30 total upgrades. The kicker was there was only 20 upgrades available in the game so you had to choose how to customize the ship.

As for resources I don't know if they'd need to change the quantity of 3D models per ship, especially if they didn't add a new visual damage model. Just a change to the way weapon hits are calculated based on the type of weapon, what system they hit and the level of the system (if there were alpha/beta/gamma versions). Obviously I don't know for sure how much of a hit this would have on the CPU, nobody does. If they 'dumbed it down' for OOS battles like they already do and reserved the more accurate calculations for IS battles I would bet it wouldn't be beyond the capabilities of our current systems.

Sorry for the wall o'text.

[xTemon]

Don't you mean, wait until our grandchildren can buy a 10GHz

[Nanook]

Don't you mean, wait until our grandchildren can buy a 10GHz

Considering that we currently have PC's at 4+ GHz, and some of us have grandchildren already (one of mine's in the Air Force ), I'd say, maybe the next couple of years or so?

[CraftyPilot]

@Kipper: I find his question not so strange, you seem a bit rude.

It should be easy enough to make antennas no-clipping or something. It doesn't have to involve complicated stuff. It's kinda strange to blow apart a destroyer by melting an antenna.
I'm not bothered by it though. Never noticed it either.

In the future games will probably have a system like this; Repeated fire into a specific area to shut down specific systems and stuff like that. Or blowing away parts of ships. But let's all wait 'till we can buy a 10ghz.

Lol, or a quadcore that the game will utilise.

[MoonHeadJohn]

I got my very own M2 yesterday and really it isnt all thet great... I mean ou can have some of the best weapons on it and shields but its just the speed which lets it down (Really its for the best cus you cant really overpower it... that wouldnt seem right)

[xTemon]

@nanook

I'm not so sure..

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. This reduces the capability of the whole processor, making it only moderately better than an old P4, if Pentium, or Athlon64, if AMD. IF this trend for fitting more processor cores into each Processor continues, we'll likely not see a 10GHz processor for a long time as they are going to be working more on fitting old capability into smaller processors.. next step is a jump to 8 cores, possibly two quads stacked, though I think nine would be far more practical.

Running a program like X3, single threaded, on a dual or quad core is effectively the same as running it on an Athlon64 3500+, a 2.2 GHz processor.

[LynkDead]

The idea of modular ship design requiring tons of computer resources just doesn't sound right. I was taking out ships' shield generators and engines back in the X-Wing and Tie-Fighter days.

There might be limitations in X3 itself, but ships with various destructable parts is not a new concept at all. It was actually one of the things that struck me as odd to not find when I first loaded up X3.

[pjknibbs]

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!