Combat Overhaul Ideas

[TheCiscoKid]

I take the blame for that, albeit cholmonster's doing.
His wiki industry exceeds my oxp efficiency.

Ah, gotcha! Makes sense and I'll definitely have to try combining some of your mods and see what I like. Variable masslock too.

It seems like there'd potentially be some value in:

Laser Damage Scaling OXP, with options to...
-Change the min/max damage of different laser types
-Change their max range
-Change how granular the damage scaling is
-Bias the scaling towards either extreme (so lasers could drastically increase in strength when you get closer than half-range, but before then they stay relatively stable. or vice-versa, laser damage could scale a lot from a distance, but start to level out as you get to close range)

Ship Speed Equalizer OXP, with options to...
-Increase all player ship speeds by 50
-Increase all ship speeds by 50
-Decrease player Cobra speed by 50

Certainly not trying to just be an ideas guy or cheerleader for other programmers, but I assume these would be relatively basic for someone who is already practiced in the Dark Side. If anyone *wants* to make these, be my guest, but rest assured I'll get to them eventually if no one else does. I just might have to ask some questions while I tinker

[Wildeblood]

-Bias the scaling towards either extreme (so lasers could drastically increase in strength when you get closer than half-range, but before then they stay relatively stable. or vice-versa, laser damage could scale a lot from a distance, but start to level out as you get to close range)

Real world laser weapons are focused, just like any other optical system, and have one particular range where they do maximum damage.

[TheCiscoKid]

Real world laser weapons are focused, just like any other optical system, and have one particular range where they do maximum damage.

I imagine our lasers change their focal point dynamically to apply maximum damage for the target range /handwavium

Would it be interesting to have an optimal range for the laser, and deviating from it by moving closer or further away would reduce the focus, and subsequently the damage? Would a laser also have less range/narrow at its focal point?

[Redspear]

Would it be interesting to have an optimal range for the laser, and deviating from it by moving closer or further away would reduce the focus, and subsequently the damage? Would a laser also have less range/narrow at its focal point?

If it would satisfy you from a gameplay as well as a realism standpoint then why not.

If not however, then you already have your explanation:

I imagine our lasers change their focal point dynamically to apply maximum damage for the target range /handwavium

That's how the lens most of us know best works, right?

[Cholmondely]

1) I understand that the range et cetera of lasers is massively reduced by atmosphere. We might wish to include that in a more realistic lasers OXP.

2) "Focus" of a laser: does this really apply? I thought that the beam was supposed to be homegenous and thus attenuation would be the only effect which could affect it. Different of course when there are two or more lasers focused on the same spot ( Multiple Lasers &  Separated Lasers ). I would presume that the vanilla game enigne can handle those perfectly adequately.

[Cholmondely]

good gameplay can justify all sorts of nonsense.

I've been poring over your YouTube channel and notice a lot of content on other space games.

I understand that combat in Newtonian games is perforce very different. As on the backside of our wiki and here: https://www.childrenofadeadearth.com/ (there used to be several essays on this site about how combat would work with real weapons - can't find them now).

Question: what combat strategies have you noticed in other non-Newtonian games?

Edited to add:
1) https://childrenofadeadearth.boards.net ... technology
2) I notice that on the Wikipedia Laser page that the main use of lasers in contemporary warfare is as aiming devices. So  SniperLock etc should be built into them, surely?

[MrFlibble]

2) "Focus" of a laser: does this really apply? I thought that the beam was supposed to be homegenous and thus attenuation would be the only effect which could affect it.

In real life, most laser systems will have some form of collimating lens, but a truly parallel beam is not possible.

I used to mess around with 'tube' lasers, He-Ne, red light at 632.8nm, and could, at night, easily put a spot on a building about quarter of a mile away with the mere 2 milliwatts output.

Memory is fuzzy, as this was many years ago, but at short-ish range, the beam was probably about 0.75mm diameter, so an area of about 0.44 square millimetres. This would give power density of c.4.5mW per square millimetre, (4500W per square metre). I'll assume a divergence of 1 milli-radian.

With the help of https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/ ... divergence : By 400m away the 'spot' would in reality be more of a speckled splatter, and would be about 400mm across (that would not be obvious from the originators perspective). Not accounting for atmosphere that'd give us about 160 nanowatts per square millimetre, or 0.16W per square metre.

In Oolite, I find myself imagining that the lasers have collimating optics which automatically focus to the desired beam width at whatever distance the target is. The hard cut-off being a limit of the focusing technology, which could also be affected by quality/price. It might be more believable if that hard-cut off happened gradually over say the last 10% of the max range, or more for cheaper lasers.

[Wildeblood]

"Focus" of a laser: does this really apply? I thought that the beam was supposed to be homogenous and thus attenuation would be the only effect which could affect it.

Here, watch this from 7 minutes, 47 seconds, in to about 11 minutes in, where he starts his advertorial.

https://youtu.be/xNmbvaUzC8Q?t=468

[TheCiscoKid]

I've been poring over your YouTube channel and notice a lot of content on either space games.

Sorry I'm a bit confused as to what you're asking, I wouldn't say my youtube channel has much space stuff?

[Cholmondely]

I've been poring over your YouTube channel and notice a lot of content on either space games.

Sorry I'm a bit confused as to what you're asking, I wouldn't say my youtube channel has much space stuff?

Elite, Captain Blood, Starflight. I presume that there are sveral other games in the other folders, but since I only know about Elite/Oolite, the names will mean nothing to me.

But the question remains... how many other ways of fighting in space sims are there other than sniping & dogfighting? Or is that it for the non-Newtonian genre?

[TheCiscoKid]

Elite, Captain Blood, Starflight. I presume that there are sveral other games in the other folders, but since I only know about Elite/Oolite, the names will mean nothing to me.

But the question remains... how many other ways of fighting in space sims are there other than sniping & dogfighting? Or is that it for the non-Newtonian genre?

Ah yes, the playlists! Thought that might be it but didn't want to assume.

Captain Blood doesn't have combat afaik, I just saved it as a reference for 8-bit planetary landing (and it has some interesting ideas and presentation aside, I quite like the hyperspace effect, procedural planet surface texturing, etc...). Starflight's combat is top-down 2D, probably most comparable to Netrek, Star Control, Escape Velocity, Starsector and Endless Sky.

A more interesting game to look at in this respect would probably be Space Rogue, if I remember correctly it has a button that lets you toggle pseudo-newtonian physics on so you can drift past someone while aiming at them, but the core certainly took inspiration from Elite.

Star Fox 64 has a foundation for rather deep, non-Newtonian flight combat, the actual input method is heavily based around the N64 controller rather than keyboard/mouse/HOTAS, but the gameplay verbs are very similar.

I actually don't have any experience with Star Wars games, Wing Commander, Freespace, Star Citizen, No Man's Sky or Elite Dangerous so I don't want to pretend to be an authority on the matter - what I know well is *arcade* game design, insofar as Elite has overlap with Defender or Asteroids (i.e. Energy Bombs), I'm your guy.

This is going to be an overly simplistic take, but I still think there's underlying truth to it: sniping boils down to pointing and clicking, it's kinda testing the same skill whether you are navigating a desktop GUI, getting headshots in an FPS, or sharp-shooting in a space sim. I find games focusing on movement much more distinct and interesting, it might be better to think about the strategic space of *dodging* rather than *shooting*, and see where that leads.

To break up "pointing and clicking" a bit more, there are some distinct fundamental flavors that FPS games take advantage of:
-prediction (rocket launcher, crossbow)
-tracking (lightning gun, chainsaw, flamethrower)
-precision (railgun, melee weapons)

At the very least we'd ideally want to ensure the player is doing all of these - predicting their movement and clicking ahead of them, keeping them centered in your crosshairs while continuously firing, and simply clicking directly on the target.

[Cholmondely]

Red Herring.

It might be a good idea to start a new thread or two for your ideas on trading and on a spying career. The stuff in the chat room will eventually be erased from existence... and linking back to it is awkward.

I've tried to collate the relevant lore for your spying idea - see here: https://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Lore#Oolite_OXP_Lore

[TheCiscoKid]

Red Herring.

It might be a good idea to start a new thread or two for your ideas on trading and on a spying career. The stuff in the chat room will eventually be erased from existence... and linking back to it is awkward.

I've tried to collate the relevant lore for your spying idea - see here: https://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Lore#Oolite_OXP_Lore

I think I know just the way to do it, uno momento por favor, and thank you for the lore references

In regards to this topic, I don't have any personal stake in the realism side of a Laser Damage Scaling OXP, but I *would* like such an OXP to have options that can account for laser physics that players now or in the future might want to play with. That's why I brought up biasing the scaling towards max or min range, but it sounds like it'd be valuable to set the laser's strength at specific distances inbetween as well.