The developers cover ship-hull advertising panels, an Arena Commander tutorial planned for 1.1, and joystick control of gimballed weapons. They also discuss shield handling of splash damage, missile arming, Constellation turrets, stealth via signals, thruster changes and weapon grouping.
TL;DRThey are looking at letting players carry clan-tag advertising panels on ships, with in-game companies possibly paying for the ad space, first for the Hull series and later expanded.
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Dan Tracey: We're looking at doing the Hull series concept, and one of the setups that'll be shown will be external panels that'll be setup like billboards, with clan-tags or whatever. So one of the things we want to do in the PU is actually allow players to take on these jobs, saying "I'm travelling from Terra, to say, Stanton, and because of that time spent in space, I'll have these advertising spaces available". Some in-game organisations/companies might pay for that advertising space for that time the ship has spent in space. We're looking at doing this for the racing part of the game as well, and the paint system that we've been making right now will allow this from players. So mainly for the Hull series at the moment, but we'll expand that in future.
Dan Tracey: We're looking at setting up one for Arena Commander in, I believe, 1.1, is the UK designers are setting up a tutorial level that helps you get used to ship controls etc in free-flight mode. It'll set you up with "babies first steps" in AC, without throwing you into the deep end and expect you to know everything about ship. Even for the veterans of the game, who might not know about all the fine tuning of things like power setups etc. We want even new players to get used to and learn quickly.
TL;DRThey want to try simulating planetary orbits within instanced local areas, but it would be difficult, the prototype is broken, and they can't say it's definitely possible.
I have no idea, I've been stuck inside the ships, mostly in cargo stuff!Dan Tracey: I actually developed the early parts of the star-map, for the original prototyping of the PU. The prototype is there, though it's completely broken right now, but it's there and it did work. We have talked about this a lot with Austin and the PU team about how we're going to instance out certain sections of star systems so that was you have a local area which is instanced to a particular server, to set up a realistic scale. What we wanted to do is to extrapolate from the star system, so a bit like a top down view of a star system showing planets orbiting at different rates, then bring that into these individual instances realistically. This is going to be a headache to make, but we are going to do it, or at least try to, we'll let you know when we have more specific information. Right now it's a lot of setting up the back end servers, implementing double precision, but we haven't been able to thoroughly test beyond that, we're working on and looking at jump points with more priority. I don't want to say it's definitely possible, but we're looking into it and we'll let you know as it comes up.
TL;DRThey are looking at joystick control of gimballed weapons, but earlier attempts didn't feel right and scheduling depends on producers, since other work currently takes priority.
Yeah, we're definitely looking at this one, I've actually been looking for quite a while, even back at 0.9 I was working on a system where joystick users are given control over the gimballed weapons using a hat on the top of the stick to guide the aim around. Rather than a mouse control where you'd aim within a grid, the hat would be more of a radial system. I actually got it working, but not in a reasonable time for release. It didn't feel right though, and in AC you want to feel like your actions are directly translated to actions in the ship, not that they're being interpreted somehow. Since then we've been looking at alternatives, like the look ahead mode, hooking up look-mode to those controls etc.Dan Tracey: Really the basic implementation of that is trivial, hooking those controls up, but it's something that we'd need to provide customisation for etc etc, so really the question is when will the producers have enough time to schedule something like this for the designers/coders etc to tackle. Controls is a big concern of ours, and we're addressing each one at a time. There's just an incredible amount of work that we need to put in to other parts first.
Yes. Shield behavours are getting a whole pass, and one of those is setting up your shields to being better at handling splash damage vs direct damage, or energy vs particle etc. These are all things that will directly affect it. That said, missiles exploding on impact are only if they're strike missiles, proximity missiles will explode if they get close enough and start to lose range, so depends on the missile.Dan Tracey: And of course in future patches, you'll see different weapon types and explosion types, so keep checking back and see how the new guns or ammunition change their damage based on how shields are configured etc. You might see a new type of gun in 1.1 that has interesting effects too....
TL;DRShooting an unarmed missile is intended to make it harmlessly break apart, while armed missiles will have a visual indicator and can explode if hit.
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Dan Tracey: What we're looking at doing (and what Chris Roberts wants to happen) is that if you shoot at a missile that's not armed or activated it's not going to explode out of nowhere, it'll just disintegrate, breaking apart harmlessly. But when it IS armed and activated, we'll have a visualisation that indicates that, maybe a light on the nose that's visible at close distances. With the hornet for example, you know they're being armed as the missile doors come down, and if you hit those while the shields are down, then yes, they will explode.
As much as we love explosions, it seems like it would be a huge recipe for disaster to fly a Freelancer MIS if any explosion near them would cause a chain reaction, seems like it'd be a short flight.
TL;DRThey acknowledge turret tracking is painful when the ship moves in all directions, and are improving it so the view partly tracks the world as the seat code is refactored.
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Dan Tracey: I guess in a roundabout way, you're asking if I'm riding on a tank, in the turret and my driver is rotating around my turret has to follow him. There was a turret setup in Crysis where the turret kept its rotation relative to the world rather than the vehicle. This is something we ran into when we first implemented the turrets in the Constellation for the gamescon livestream. When we were in the turret and the pilot is flying around in all 6 degrees, it was a huge pain in the ass to track your targets.
As soon as Paul got a hold of it he said he had to change that right now. He actually passed that job off to Mark to do, but he got it working so that the view kinda tracked the world a little as best as was possible with the movement of the ship. Best example would probably be the Halo's warthog turret. That's something that we've already looked at, and we're improving the turret system as we refactor the seat code.
Yeah, we've got our signal system set up so that if you're not emitting IR or EM radiation and you've only got your cross-section (visual) then you'll be much harder to find. And if you're really close to something like an asteroid with a large and noisy cross-section, then you'll be really hard to find with all the noise that creates. Which you'd expect! You could easily miss if a ship was there, that asteroid is bumpy. A resounding yes, in sum.
TL;DRChanges are coming so maneuvering thrusters draw most of their power from the main engine, and mass placement and symmetry will affect handling, with cargo effects still to be seen.
There are definitely some changes coming to thrusters etc. Those things are currently being looked at to bring them more in line with how our component system is shaping up, now that we've actually started getting it out into players hands, seeing players swapping around weapon load outs etc. We're looking at how these systems will hold up to that experimentation. We're looking at manoeuvring thrusters deriving the majority of their power from the main engine. To have a functional spacecraft you really need to have comparable thrust on all axis. Imagine having only large thrusters in one direction, sure you could get up to speed, but good luck stopping. To make up for that, we've made the thrusters to have much larger capacity than you'd expect give their size. As a consequence, if you lose your engine, you can still fly pretty well at the moment. We're looking to rectify that by making the extra power come from the main engine, so if that's lost, you'll have fairly weak thrusters and slide around a bit. As far as controls and manoeuvrability goes, I think we need to wait to see what cargo does to the mix, because a heavy cargo ship will definitely not handle the same as something like the hornet that was designed to be a dogfighter.Dan Tracey: Since now everything added is adding mass to your ship, you'll really want to examine where things are placed. If you're placing your heavy cargo near your centre of gravity, or storing a lot of ammo for your ship's guns etc it'll have an effect. Even if you've got a heavy cannon on one wing of your hornet and a light repeater on the other, the ammo storage and additional weight of that cannon will throw your flight model off a bit. Definitely something that needs considering.
Symmetry is going to matter, because these engines create so much torque. There's even a bug where the 350r at the moment can lose 1 engine, which KILLS acceleration, not because of the reduced capacity per-se, but because that offset engine creates so much rotational torque it has to operate at like, 5% capacity in order to be compensated for.
TL;DRWeapon grouping is being expanded so weapons can be in multiple groups with options like chain-fire or semi-auto, plus add-ons and avionics-based options, though the answer gives no timing.
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Dan Tracey: Basically this comes down to your weapon-grouping. If you wanted to set up a chain-fire system, Zane is looking at setting up grouping for more customisation. You could have each of these weapons in multiple groups so you could fire them with whatever interval you wanted to. With these weapon groups you might have a chain-fire or semi-auto mode on each of these groups, so you could have an alt-fire on one that's a primary fire on the other etc. These are things that are being looked at and expanded upon as we go, but it's all about setting up the usability, so how you're setting them up, how you're firing them, and we're looking at systems that can activate or deactivate even other parts of your ship. Other things we're looking at are weapon add-ons, things like additional batteries, or camera systems so you could switch to that camera system etc. It's not directly related to the ship, but for the item itself. But yes, we're going to expand upon the system, which applies to missiles too, so they might interface with your ships avionics etc. You ships avionics might be a military grade one, where maybe there are more weapon grouping options available, or better locking systems, or automated defence systems upgraded to track different targets etc.