Killer Wolf wrote:i tried the reverse idea of this thread, setting coded limits to keep ships w/in sensible ranges that would be "realistic" for the universe and also allow missions to be written that would work to a similar degree for everyone, and pretty much got shot down, so how come this idea is warranting serious discussion?
Well, it's a forum, thus the random-audience-of-the-day™ gets to decide what is warranting discussion, simply by discussing it or not.
I for one am just publishing some of my private musings related to keeping überness in check. I am not proposing general rules. But I am trying to find (and make transparent) a way on which I can proceed for my future Oolite contributions.
Personally speaking, and as a mission designer, I like to control the environment in which my mission takes place (and indeed, I'm talking about mission design that is more complex than a pure shoot-em-up). Yes, I know, it's a vain undertaking, but I feel it's necessary to a certain extent. And that's what my musings are about.
One way to give me—and not only me, but all of us—control would be clear and binding restrictions on ship and weapon specs. Everybody would know in advance what to expect, and what
not to expect. Obviously this way is not viable. The developers won't set coded limits, and the ship designers won't restrict themselves. We have to be realistic. Even if most of the ship designers would voluntarily follow some code of conduct, we'd never get everyone on board.
Therefore, if I want control, I have to find a way to exert it myself, in my respective mission OXP. The possibilities I am exploring include a certain degree of hand-tailoring and tinkering with some parameters. For instance, if I want to bring an element of thrill to a certain situation by giving the player very little time to carry out a task, I could make the amount of time variable, depending on the player ship's speed. I am also contemplating other ideas, like temporarily removing certain über equipment from the player's ship during part of a mission under some mission-related pretext. The ur-example for that is Assassins, which takes away your cloaking device whenever you go after one of your marks. So it's not even my own idea, or a new idea, LittleBear did it already years ago. What exactly I would and could do, would of course depend entirely on what my next mission is. The one I am working on even since before Cataclysm for instance has an important time-critical component, therefore player ship speed matters (and the replacement of the torus drive with time acceleration will matter even more, because it will mean that I'll have to
extend the time frame, because the player will become effectively slower).
What it all boils down to is: Oolite's world is a complex and interdependent system. Tinkering with one aspect of it (like player ship specs, or weaponry) has an impact on the
whole system. Ship designers are perhaps not always aware of this fact and its implications. Players don't need to be aware of it. Mission designers are perhaps a little more aware of it, and sometimes feel the need to deal with its implications.
That's what the debate about balance is all about.
Dragonfire wrote:On the matter of game physics and whatnot, I thought I'd repost the outcome on the debate that spilled over into the IRC.
... I'm sorry I ever brought it up.
As I said before, we're most likely going to have that debate again and again in the future, just like we had it again and again in the past. Nothing wrong with that. So you don't need to apologize, or feel bad about it. Your only "mistake" was to assume that the outcome of a debate on the IRC or here on the boards would "solve" anything. It doesn't, and it can't, because there will never be any agreement among all interested parties, simply because there are new interested parties joining every day who have the same right as everybody else to make their views known and have them discussed. This is why the key issues have to be debated again and again. Realism and game balance
are definitely key issues.
This is actually another key issue.
I don't know how you mean that statement, but I assume you mean to say something like "it's
only a game, so we all don't need to bother so much". Correct me if I'm interpreting you wrongly. At least it's a possible interpretation of the statement.
Interestingly, I could make quite the same statement, and it would mean something quite opposite. It's a game, and I want it to be a
good game. Each game, and especially each good game, has two necessities: a set of fixed rules, and the right balance between "too hard" and "too easy". Oolite's rules (or at least part of them) are the "game physics". They don't need to be realistic with regards to RealLife™ physics (and they distinctly are not—for starters, there are no real life equivalents to Oolite's non-newtonian flight model, and to witchspace travel), so that would be a meaningless realism-debate. But they have to be realistic with regards to
each other. One example: in a world where typical trade ships achieve speeds of between 0.2LM and 0.35LM (whatever "LM" means), and a police interceptor has a top speed of 0.42LM, and nothing is faster than that, it is only logical to assume that this world's physics (whatever they are) don't allow normal top speeds much in excess of that. That's not to say that there isn't a chance for an experimental craft that can go considerably faster (albeit probably not double the previous top speed). But it isn't reasonable to assume that the next generation of mass produced everyday trade ships will suddenly have double or triple the top speed of their predecessors. (Much like—and this is a real life
analogy, not a direct transfer from real life into the Oolite world—today's consumer cars may go 150-200 km/h, and tomorrow's cars may top that, but certainly not even get close to 300-400 km/h.)
In a good game the rules don't need to adhere to the physics of RealLife™. But they need to be
consistent. So my argument would be: exactly
because it's a game we as the people who are modifying it
have to bother, as long as we intend our modifications to become available to others who don't have our deeper insight into its mechanics.
And on this note I end this far-too-long post.
