A good system to do this was lets say you have a completely snap together ship you''re building. You start with a hull, and that hull has lets say 3 types of connections for the engine, 2 connections for the hyper drive, a shield generator carriage, 10 weapon mounts placed across the hull, and then 15 other generic connections for various other ship systems.
So you buy an engine that only has 2 of the 3 connections on it. No problem it connects fine but your hull isn''t being used to its full potential. If you buy an engine that has 4 connections, the hull could only match 2 of those connections and you aren''t using the engine to full potential somehow. If you were to buy a regulator to connect the last 2 connections on the engine to the 1 extra connection on the hull, then you are now using everything to full potential. regulators and adapters could be as common as parts at radioshack.
same deal goes for the rest of the components. components should just connect straight to the hull. One of the connections going to the engine might be tied to one of the connections leading to the hyperdrive. You could place a supercharger component in the middle of that connection to boost the hyperdrive power but leads to more breakdowns.
If your hull allows it you could replace various bulk heads and outer panels with higher rated armour, more connections, stealthy materials, all that kind of jazz.

weapons could be single guns that you place one on each connection, or they could be a big heavy mount that needs 3 connections in the right configuration to mount onto. if you have 3 free connections near by each other but they do not match the configuration that the heavy mount gun neads, then you could buy an adapter that takes the configuration you have to the proper one needed.

another system you need to take into account is fuel systems. what type of fuel does your engine take, how is the fuel fed to the engine (most likely through one of the engine connections), can you add anything between the fuel and the engine to increase efficientcy or power.

for modifactions you could tweak the properties of your connections between parts. like if they resonate at 300thz or 250thz (terrahertz heh). other fields to be tweaked could be valve pressures, flow rate, or anything else you can think of that seems signifigant to the type of connection.

now getting into the puzzle based idea you had of modification. You could look inside your components and move parts around, reconfigure circuits inside them, add resistors or signal modifiers, chips that you bought, any little pieces as long as there''s a space for them inside. It could be based like the inventory window in diablo. Some pieces inside could be static and can only be replaced with a new one of a better one. then you have to worry about the connections all lining up. If the fuel intake connection on the engine ends up feeding into the hyperdrive connection after you''ve modified pieces, then you could have a serious problem. If it leads into a injector then into the manifolds then you got yourself a better deal. how you configure the route it takes through your engine core is up to you.

the whole concept of this idea reminds me of an old game i used to play way back on my 286 machine called LITESPEED. If only i could find that game again, the engine modification system on it was glorious how it worked.

I''m so glad about all the input from others. Gave me a lot of new ideas.

One of them is the puzzle system. I may still have that in there but maybe not as much as I had originally planned. I definitely like the physics idea and that people could learn how to upgrade a ship using the skills they learned.

Another part is building ships. Normally I wouldn''t allow for a ship to get a new hyperdrive or engine. They are pretty much integrated into the whole ship. It would be impossible to replace it without tearing apart the whole ship. But.... I didn''t think of building a ship from scratch. That would take a lot of work to make sure people''s designs are valid... or at least have a whole slew of parts and hulls and let the player peice them together. You''d need a lot of money to do so though. Or maybe not.

I think my next problem now is how to actually do this. I''ve got so many parts to my game that hopefully i can put it together without overwhelming myself.

On a side... I''ll allow people to overload parts. It will come at a cost if you don''t have the proper protection... like you can overload the engine but that might blow out the power distributor.

Taking iNfuSeD''s snap-together connectors and running with them (don''t try this with scissors!) one obvious optimisable quantity is connection distance (the longer the distance between source and sink, the higher the percentage loss in transit) - standardised components will have a certain amount of hidden distance internally, which limits performance, but allows complete plug-and-play, while various adapters between different custom geometries will each add distance.

Additional constraints are provided by having interference between components (the nuclear reactor had better not be sharing the same compartment as the crew''s quarters...) and the risk of cascades and splash damage if a component malfunctions/is damaged.

Hard-wired fixed connections (require an adaptor to convert to incompatible geometry) are more efficient than soft-wired reconfigurable connections (just need a screwdriver and time to customise the geometry to fit) but adding the adaptor makes them less efficient overall - so while the killer spec spaceship outperforms everything else around, it needs custom parts for upgrades and repairs which take extra time and resources to repair, and a lucky shot can burn out all the key components leaving it crippled. The off-the-shelf reliable model can''t reach the same levels of performance, but even with 90% of systems down, it can still keep fighting, or at least limp back to base...

As for the puzzle ideas: a simple grid based blank "circuit board" which allows you to set/unset grid lines as conductors, and install/remove black-box components - scaling this to different detail levels then allows the black-boxes to be constructed of smaller black-boxes, which in turn are... As a physical interpretation, suppose the standard construction plate used to make spaceships has a number of universal conduits (tubes capable of carrying just about anything) running through it, which connect with adjacent plates to form a grid running throughout the hull, and within all the bulkheads - with standard universal interface points at appropriate node positions - conduits and nodes can be sealed off permanently (effectively turning them to virgin plating) or temporarily (reversible, but susceptible to being re-opened by damage) which affects future upgrade potential. Standard models may well have many of their unused connections permanently sealed, only leaving a few for custom upgrades.

By having universal conduits/nodes, it''s possible to multiplex a connection to carry different resources simultaneously (or the same resource using time multiplexing) - probably with a slight reduction in quality and a moderate increase in risk from damage - in the case of time multiplexing, the model assumes that the two destinations don''t actually require the resource all the time, and most of the time they don''t both need it at once - the effects of the occasional simultaneous request probably gives something like a 10% degradation in supply overall (continuous demand would give a 50% degradation)

I hope all this is at least interesting, and possibly also useful

This might be a little off topic, but at the same time on topic, in a weird kind of way. Does anyone have a Sound Blaster Live(or Audigy / Audigy2) card with the kX Audio Drivers Installed

Their drivers have a neat analog signal router/chipset interface. The signal inputs for each hardware interface are represented in flowchart type graph, and you can "virually" hotwire the card through different componets/effects and get different audio effects.


kX website

To swap left and right channels, you could just use the router and swap the "wires". Or you could reroute the audio channels through a reverb or chorus chip, to produce those effects.

Its a pretty neat soundcard driver. I've never really seen another one like it. Too bad my SBLive! has exploded. (not related to the drivers)

But anyway, I my brain just kind of put two and two togeather, and I suspose that it would make for a really good real world reference.

[edited by - kryat on October 28, 2003 11:21:25 AM]