Topic: A few game design questions!! and a bit more :)

[Recon]

Just want to toss these out there.

what is precursors basic unit in space going to be, ( ie 1 unit in CS = how many m/km) ?
what is the maximum speed in km/s a ship can travel in normal flight.

think these are pretty basic and hope we have at least some suggestions, I'v being doing some number crunching and I keep coming back to these numbers as being very important.

for example 1 unit cs = 10m gives a max sector size of 1000km , this is not to bad as long as our ships are not travelling 500 km/s. also large planets are over 60,000km raidus , this still going to be a bit of a problem.

think the actual game play needs to be thought out better. If we going to have space battles we need to keep the max speed of the ships low.

My idea at the moment is as follows

Fighter class:
   high acceleration
   medium top speed
   good manoeuvrability
   short range ( can only get around a planet system ).
   good short range weapons.

Trader / Miner :
   low acceleration
   low top speed
   medium manoeuvrability
   long range ( got an in system drive for planet hopping / upgradable to a solar drive  )
   medium short and long range weapons.

Frigate
   medium acceleration
   high top speed
   medium manoeuvrability
   long range ( got an in system drive / and solar drive )
   good short range weapons and medium long range weapons.

Capital Ship
   low acceleration
   high top speed
   low manoeuvrability
   long range ( got an in system drive / and solar drive )
   good short range weapons and good long range weapons.
   can spawn fighters

The idea being that we try to limit the speeds of ships when they fighting. By creating certain assests for people to fight over like bases and space stations we should be able to concentrate groups of people into battles. We use stuff like in system drives to cut out most of the time involved in travel from planet to planet ( use mass of a body and mass of a ship to calculate how close a insystem drive can get you to a planet ).

At a higher level, we got two sides, we start off with a couple of systems with bases/stations. These  are the factories of the game.Only in systems with bases can you spawn, trade/ buy ships or supplies. when a system has a base belonging to one race the other cannot build a base in that system till it has destroyed all enemy bases.

A player may spawn at any base belonging to his race, but ships and inventory will not spawn warp with the player. fighters are free at bases but have to be bought for capital ships, a player can also use the bases defensive weaponry. The person/group who build a base in a system are basicly that systems lord and get a cut of all transactions in that base. Money is created by mining and killing enemy ships ( traders are not considered enemy ).

anyway, I'll stop there as this is getting to long.

So what you think?

[Rosencrantz]

One addon thing about the sector lengths that I just thought of.

What are the pros/cons of separating a solar system into N chunks where each chunk is a CS sector?
And N is dependant on the size of the systems? One of the benefits I see to this is that we can set the unit size to something
useful. The other benefit is that we can use the sectors as actual in-game navigation. To navigate in maps you have to have some sort of reference point with measurement axes. And "sectors" are sterotypical units in sci-fi for this sort of thing.

[Morgul]

Well, there's a few issues that need to be addressed here. We've talked about it, and it makes _no_ sense to limit maximum top speed, from a physical standpoint. There just isn't. However, with that having been said, it also is not practical to dogfight at 10,000,000m/s. So, here's the deal. Most ships will limit the maximum speed they're going at on a sort of slide scale. This way, the pilot can just kick the engine on full thrust, and get away if he needs too, but under normal circumstances his ship will maintain the requested speed he wants. For most dogfighting it will be around 80 to 200 m/s. That seems to 'fit' best.

So, here's the dilemma: Without a hard set maximum top speed, your going to have a difficult time deciding on the right size for things. Secondly, I was thinking 1 CS unit is 1 meter. (IIRC we can have floating point lengths for things, so this isn't an issue for the modelers.) So, working with 1 meter and a max speed of several thousand meters per second (or even no max speed at all) we've got an issue. Say the target speed is about 200m/s. Fast ships will be in the 250-320 range, and slow ships will be in the 80-120 range. We'll allow people to go faster, but they won't be able to dogfight very well.

I hope this gives you something better to work with.

--Chris

[Recon]

I was thinking 1 CS unit is 1 meter

 100000 (around where CS stops working )  /  (1 m X 1,000 ) = 100km 

while 100km would be ok with things moving at 320m/s , we going to require 3 seperate scales to track all this. A large scale to cover out to about 60AU , a medium scale to handle out to about 100,000 km , and the the small scale for everthing less than a 100km. Only way I can see it working. On a positave note I got it rendering a 2d background, the dark cloud is that it seg faults when the screen get to a certian size . so currently I'm looking at doing 4 render passes per frame. Will be interesting what FPS we get with that. Only good thing is that most of the passes will have very little to render.

regards