Like everyone in the world ever, I'm working on a space sim; a combat/trade/exploration game in the style of the Elite family. I've got a few ideas about how to provide the player with the ships he'll want to buy/win/steal, and I'd like to run them by you. Fixed hull, fixed equipment There are various ships with fixed hull designs. Weapons will be customizable. Pros: Simple to implement. Easy to understand. Cons: Turns game into a simple race for the most expensive ship. Fixed hull, customizable equipment There are various ships with fixed hull designs. Internal and external components will be customizable, including generator, drive, computers, sensors, life support, cargo hold, ammo storage, weapons. To avoid reducing the game into a race for the best equipment, you wouldn't be able to install only the best equipment in a single ship, software and hardware incompatabilities would mean that you'd have to have a mix of high-quality and normal-quality equipment. Pros: Still simple to implement. More strategy. Cons: Slightly more difficult to understand. Customizable hull There are no fixed hull designs. Ships are built out of interconnected modules (such as control rooms, life support, engines, crew cabins, fuel tanks) and plating attachments (such as external sensors, small weapons, airlocks, shielding), in the style of Lego or Mecano. 'Prefab' ships are available, but the very best ships will be those the player designs himself. This opens up new profit-making opportunities for a player interested in trading: ship construction. The incompatible equipment plot-device from above could be used to introduce extra strategy. Possibly the super rich could afford to have very large fixed-hull ships made, but most people wouldn't want to risk putting all their eggs in one basket (if a comet smashes your capital ship in half, you'd rather be able to reattach the parts of your ship that survived and make your way to the nearest shipyard than have to spin aimlessly in space until someone can come and rescue you), unless the ship was too small for that to be cost effective. Also, ships designed to enter the atmosphere would probably need a fixed-hull. Pros: Maximum strategy and customizability. Ship design is fun (IMO). You could separate the saucer section. But only if your ship had a saucer section. Obviously. Cons: Maximum confusion. Ship design may overshadow other aspects of the game.

I vote "ship design is fun."

If some players are confused, they can just buy pre-fabs.

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Original post by Nathan Baum Like everyone in the world ever, I'm working on a space sim; a combat/trade/exploration game in the style of the Elite family.

You have my immediate, unqualified support. If I were a billionaire, I'd lend you money. In fact, if I were a millionaire, I'd lend you money. Since I am only a hundredaire, the best I can do is an atta boy!

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Fixed hull, fixed equipment There are various ships with fixed hull designs. Weapons will be customizable. Pros: Simple to implement. Easy to understand. Cons: Turns game into a simple race for the most expensive ship.

The benefit of this is in playtesting and balancing. Will it be important to beat fixed missions, or go PvP? If so, this might be the better option to at least start. You can also really create a sense of legendary ships people aspire to, such as the "void hawk" or the "stiletto."

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Fixed hull, customizable equipment There are various ships with fixed hull designs. Internal and external components will be customizable, including generator, drive, computers, sensors, life support, cargo hold, ammo storage, weapons. To avoid reducing the game into a race for the best equipment, you wouldn't be able to install only the best equipment in a single ship, software and hardware incompatabilities would mean that you'd have to have a mix of high-quality and normal-quality equipment. Pros: Still simple to implement. More strategy. Cons: Slightly more difficult to understand.

This and choice one could be similar if choice one had a wide number of ships. Otherwise, I personally like this because it has more of an RPG customization flavor. I like the weapon/system incompatibility idea. If you DO choose this, please allow players to carry excess equipment (in cargo) so that they can stop and different ports and outfit based on current threats. Nothing is worse than having fixed customizations (like Escape Velocity) that you have to resell to the manufacturer (at a loss) because they don't work as well as you thought they might against certain enemies.

Btw, who is the target audience? Option #2 appeals to the core action-strategy folks, if EV is any measure.

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Customizable hull ... Pros: Maximum strategy and customizability. Ship design is fun (IMO). You could separate the saucer section. But only if your ship had a saucer section. Obviously. Cons: Maximum confusion. Ship design may overshadow other aspects of the game.

My guess is that this should be fairly impactful to gameplay or it'll feel tacked on. Is there any reason NOT to put the engines forward? Is there any reason not to have a pencil-thin hull connecting two huge spheres?

This should, I think, be fairly detailed if you do it, meaning that construction affects stress or emissions, which in turn affect turn rate, acceleration (stress on struts or spars), radiation poisoning, etc. It should also affect which modules are more likely to be hit (from different directions).

If it only affects combat, I'll just design a wall of guns and run at the enemy because it's likely the best min-max strategy.

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Original post by Nathan Baum Fixed hull, fixed equipment Cons: Turns game into a simple race for the most expensive ship.

Not necessarily - you can still set out various paths of ship types for the player. Balancing speed against armor, cargo space against acceleration and raw size against fuel costs will still allow for a lot of variety in gameplay. You´ll still be able to have your scouts, fighters, couriers, destroyers and freighters.

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Fixed hull, customizable equipment There are various ships with fixed hull designs. Internal and external components will be customizable, including generator, drive, computers, sensors, life support, cargo hold, ammo storage, weapons. To avoid reducing the game into a race for the best equipment, you wouldn't be able to install only the best equipment in a single ship, software and hardware incompatabilities would mean that you'd have to have a mix of high-quality and normal-quality equipment. Pros: Still simple to implement. More strategy. Cons: Slightly more difficult to understand.

My favourite. The additional options will not be *that* hard to understand, especially if you manage to find a good system to visualise type and space requirements of the different components. Customisation does not have to mean it´s complicated.
Also, this allows for developer-controlled visual design of everything, which imo is a major factor. Especially with the aforementioned predefined ship hulls that will definitely help to give the different races/faction/whatever an identity. Will also allow for interesting, Millenium Falcon type customisation stories. Turning a freighter into a gunboat or a luxury yacht into an armed courier is *fun*.

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Customizable hull Pros: Maximum strategy and customizability. Ship design is fun (IMO). You could separate the saucer section. But only if your ship had a saucer section. Obviously. Cons: Maximum confusion. Ship design may overshadow other aspects of the game.

I think the strategy element may easily run away with this model - since the types and reaches of modifications will be harder to track, it will be much easier to overlook imbalances in the game. Also, with so few restrictions on players I suspect that the whole system might inadvertantly tip towards some optimum anyways.
Also, some if not all ship creations will have that inescapable lego look and be ugly. Also, will be a major pain to implement and balance. If you run out of time / motivation you´ll have a half-finished space game, with this option you´ll probably have an uglyship construction kit(tm).



And I just realised that I´m still addicted to Elite. A litte.

So on consideration, these options are slightly changed.

Fleet building

With this, the player is more concerned with building up a fleet of ships than with having one or two heavily customized ships. It's okay if a ship can't have a cloaking device installed, because the player will probably have another ship which already has one. The fact that certain combinations of technologies will be very hard to find forces the player to use quite different strategies. It also encourages exploration, because the player may be looking for a shipyard that builds ships with unusual loadouts.

This doesn't mean that customization is out of the question. But prefab ships will be very cheap, whilst customization will be very expensive. Most players simply couldn't afford a fleet of a hundred heavily modified ships.

Ship customization

With this, the player is chiefly concerned with pimping his ride. Most likely the average player will only have one ship. This offers a sense of continuity that isn't present in the fleet building game: the player might own only a handful of ships during the entire game. I think this allows the ship itself to develop as a character, which could be interesting.

This doesn't mean that hull customization is out of the question. It would be expensive, though, and only a certain limited set of customizations would be possible for each ship, mostly involving making the ship bigger so you can fit more stuff in.

Customization of the ship's visual form would be possible fairly cheaply. Paint jobs and decals would be commonplace, and fins, spoilers and other completely functionless attachments would show the other players how much of a pimp you were.

In addition, some modular hull designs might still be present, but not quite as common. If your large cargo transport is under attack from pirates, you might want to disconnect the cargo pods and flee at high speed. These kinds of modular ships would be rather like trains.

Ship construction

I think this would work best as an external tool, rather than being an integral part of the game. There'd be two aspects to it: making custom equipment, and making custom hulls. Custom hulls could be built from prefab components, or created in 3D editing software and imported, the former obviously being preferable for the casual modder (a profession modding team, making a set of similarly designed ships, would probably import prefab components from an editor and then build ships out of those). Custom equipment would be built out of scripts.

Rather like the item editor in NWN, a custom-built hull or piece of equipment could hugely unbalance the game. So we'd say that, in online play, only approved ships would be permitted (unless the server explicitly permitted anything).

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Original post by Wavinator You have my immediate, unqualified support. If I were a billionaire, I'd lend you money. In fact, if I were a millionaire, I'd lend you money. Since I am only a hundredaire, the best I can do is an atta boy!

[grin] Thanks!

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Quote: Fixed hull, fixed equipment The benefit of this is in playtesting and balancing. Will it be important to beat fixed missions, or go PvP? If so, this might be the better option to at least start.

Good point. I'm planning for the game to be more in-depth, although some players will want to play it shallow. For players who want to follow a simple path to victory, they're probably not that interested in managing their equipment.

The game would have to ensure that even if more sophisticated ship design options were available, following the simple 'story arc' would be possible even using prefabs. Then it would be optional subquests that require you to be clever with your ship design.

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You can also really create a sense of legendary ships people aspire to, such as the "void hawk" or the "stiletto."

This is also true. Of course, you can still have a similar sense of the legendary with equipment or modules. Another idea is that instead of saying that a particular design of ship is legendary, you would have D&D-style 'Masterwork' ships, made of the same equipment/modules as any other ship, but with extra bonuses because it was put together by a Master Engineer.

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This and choice one could be similar if choice one had a wide number of ships.

Similarish. I'd certainly plan for #1 to have a wide variety of ships. There would be an assortment of shipwrights would would make equivalent ships. Something I might look into would be the possibility of procedurally-generated hulls. Then each industrial system could have its own set of parameters and an assortment of ships that look similar, and have similar sets of loadouts (a system might specialize in cloaking devices, for example).

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Otherwise, I personally like this because it has more of an RPG customization flavor. I like the weapon/system incompatibility idea. If you DO choose this, please allow players to carry excess equipment (in cargo) so that they can stop and different ports and outfit based on current threats. Nothing is worse than having fixed customizations (like Escape Velocity) that you have to resell to the manufacturer (at a loss) because they don't work as well as you thought they might against certain enemies.

Oh yes, that is very irritating. I've not played Escape Velocity, but other space sims do exactly the same and it can be quite tiresome.

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Btw, who is the target audience? Option #2 appeals to the core action-strategy folks, if EV is any measure.

Fundamentally, I'm the target audience.

The game is intended to be a mixture of the combat, trade and exploration of Frontier: Elite (still my favourite space sim) and the character development and narrative of D&D. It should appeal to fans of those action-strategy-simulation-roleplaying games that nobody else has been foolish enough to make.

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Quote: Customizable hull My guess is that this should be fairly impactful to gameplay or it'll feel tacked on. Is there any reason NOT to put the engines forward? Is there any reason not to have a pencil-thin hull connecting two huge spheres?

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This should, I think, be fairly detailed if you do it, meaning that construction affects stress or emissions, which in turn affect turn rate, acceleration (stress on struts or spars), radiation poisoning, etc. It should also affect which modules are more likely to be hit (from different directions).

Whilst I'd want to have this dependent upon the player's difficulty setting, I quite agree. Many aspects of your ship's behaviour would be dependant upon how well you put it together.

For example, if your ship's center-of-gravity doesn't match the spatial center of your ship, then your ship won't be able to rotate so quickly. The further away the CoG is from the center, the more your rotation would be effected.

It seems obvious that damage would be dealt to specific modules rather than to the ship as a whole. There would be energy shields and hull plating to get through first.

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If it only affects combat, I'll just design a wall of guns and run at the enemy because it's likely the best min-max strategy.

To see why this wouldn't work, we can look at why this doesn't work in reality. A weapon is a very small thing, compared to the large amounts of mass that are required to keep it working. Guns require ammunition, ammunition storage, loading mechanisms, power supplies, cooling systems. A ship with a wall of guns on the front would have to have a long tail of largely undefended support systems behind it. An agile enemy would have no trouble skirting around the range of your gun-wall and attacking the tail.

Energy weapons don't require ammo, but certainly require energy and cooling systems. You could cover a cube with lasers and put several fusion reactors on the inside, but some of the ship's surface would have to be given over to radiators, or else it would overheat and explode. And once a ship has radiators, an enemy can destroy them and cripple the cube. In addition, in order to make the lasers effective, the ship would also need to expose sensor equipment to the outside, otherwise it wouldn't know what to shoot at. That equipment can also be the target of attacks.

Utimately, if a playtester figures out a way to make an übership, one can assume that the virtual people in the game would have figured that out, and would have developed special weapons and tactics designed to defeat it. e.g. It might be difficult to get near enough to the cube to destroy its radiators, but fire some balls of reflective goo at it, and the radiators won't radiate any more.

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Original post by Hase Quote: Original post by Nathan Baum Fixed hull, fixed equipment Cons: Turns game into a simple race for the most expensive ship. Not necessarily - you can still set out various paths of ship types for the player. Balancing speed against armor, cargo space against acceleration and raw size against fuel costs will still allow for a lot of variety in gameplay. You´ll still be able to have your scouts, fighters, couriers, destroyers and freighters.

You're right, of course. It's deeply unlikely that there would ever be a single ship that was the best for all jobs. If the player could buy many ships and keep unused ones in a garage, then this actually becomes quite strategic. Take the wrong ship to an engagement, and you can't just run to the nearest starport and get it upgraded, you'd have to go all the way back to your garage. If travel is expensive, this would force you to think carefully about how you use the ships in your fleet.

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Quote: Customizable hull I think the strategy element may easily run away with this model - since the types and reaches of modifications will be harder to track, it will be much easier to overlook imbalances in the game. Also, with so few restrictions on players I suspect that the whole system might inadvertantly tip towards some optimum anyways.

This may be a very real problem. I want the game to be able to automatically generate challenges that the player will actually find challenging. That would be a lot easier if it was possible to look at a ship and come up with a simple metric to determine how good it was. But figuring out the strengths of a modular ship will be very difficult, perhaps even NP-complete.

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Also, some if not all ship creations will have that inescapable lego look and be ugly. Also, will be a major pain to implement and balance. If you run out of time / motivation you´ll have a half-finished space game, with this option you´ll probably have an uglyship construction kit(tm).

Balancing would indeed be a problem. I'm coming to the conclusion that option #3 is fine for a starship construction game, but is likely to be rather tricky to work into a larger game.

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And I just realised that I´m still addicted to Elite. A litte.

I'm a lot addicted to Elite. (Frontier: Elite, at least.)

I've always wanted a elite-a-like with highly customizable equipment, at the same kind of level as in Mechwarrior 2.

I'd be inclined to go for option 2 mostly, although if you felt like implementing it it may be interesting to include certain shipyards who can build a hull to order. Or perhaps an option 2.5 - where the basic hulls are fixed but can be extended with additional modules.

You'd maybe start off buying an off the shelf ship complete with basic weapons and equipment. You could then refit or modify it as time went on, adding new weapons, and/or superior cooling systems and power units etc. to improve overall performance.

There could be all kinds of subtle tradeoffs. Passive cooling systems aren't terribly effective and take up a comparitively large amount of space, but active cooling systems require power and make your ship more vulnerable to IR detection. Larger power units can provide more power to drives and engines etc. but generate more heat - which then has to be dissipated somehow... Solar panels give you free energy, but it varies according to the distance to the nearest star, plus they need to be large to generate a decent amount of power. Hydrogen fuel is readily available from space stations, or can be mined from gas giants or stars like you could in elite - but it takes up space and is finite.

You could also have multiple systems, and the option to divert power to and fro like in I-War. So if you're in battle, you'd fold up your solar panels and activate the fusion powerplant. You'd use passive cooling as long as possible, but divert power to the active cooling systems when necessary. Although this may be getting too complex.

I could go on for days with this stuff :)

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Original post by Sandman There could be all kinds of subtle tradeoffs. Passive cooling systems aren't terribly effective and take up a comparitively large amount of space, but active cooling systems require power and make your ship more vulnerable to IR detection.

I'm not an expert on active cooling systems, but what I saw from a quick glance at google suggests that they also need some kind of coolant that is used up in the process.

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So if you're in battle, you'd fold up your solar panels and activate the fusion powerplant.

I absolutely love the visual image of a ship folding its solar panels into the hull and firing up its engines as it races into battle.

addressing the issue of the garage, since you mentioned it...

The orginal Elite (and almost all games descended from that, with few exceptions) are a one-man one-ship show. Since this is pretty much in keeping with your #2 option it brings up two pretty major points:

- Ship Customisation offers nearly endless possibilities of fun, especially if you allow the player to modify hulls and more integral ship systems as well. The players will spend a lot of time with each ship they own, and have great fun building and extending it.

- The same focus will also deter the player from purchasing a number of ships, since the off the shelf ships (even if it´s a better model) will never have the tuned efficiency level of the old ship. New ships will be bought rarely, and with large steps between. This is a major drawback if you intend to have lots and lots of different ships (/ship hulls) in the game.

So, about that garage.

One alternative is to allow the player to have multiple ships and store them... wherever, really. Just park them at a starport, buy a new one and blast off. Will leave a litter of small, unused ships throughout your world. EvE-Online works like that, and the effort of keeping track, let alone moving ships is tremendous.

On the other hand you could go I-War2. One fixed home base, where all your "base" stuff is done. Has the advantage of all the gear, ships and whatnot being together in one place. Isn´t really suited for large universes however, unless you have some sort of hyperspace highway that lets you get quickly to wherever the action is.

The third alternative would be to invent a mobile base. Let the player have a mothership of sorts. Needn´t be anything grand, but invent a reason for it to be there. Maybe it´s a regular ship that you have to buy off the market, maybe it´s there from the beginning. Maybe only a special class of ship can perform inter-system jumps. Could be an AI-driven ship tender / cargo hauler that needs protecting from time to time...

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Original post by Hase - Ship Customisation offers nearly endless possibilities of fun, especially if you allow the player to modify hulls and more integral ship systems as well. The players will spend a lot of time with each ship they own, and have great fun building and extending it.

Yep, that's part of the plan. The ship should become a second character in the game. With component and hull upgrades, a determined player could play through the entire story arc with just one ship.

However, I'm wary of assuming that everyone will enjoy having just one ship.

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- The same focus will also deter the player from purchasing a number of ships, since the off the shelf ships (even if it´s a better model) will never have the tuned efficiency level of the old ship. New ships will be bought rarely, and with large steps between. This is a major drawback if you intend to have lots and lots of different ships (/ship hulls) in the game.

Certainly it's a drawback from the perspective of the amount of work involved creating all these hulls. If I can't figure out a way to generate lots of hulls procedurally, then I'll probably only have a small selection of hull types.

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So, about that garage. One alternative is to allow the player to have multiple ships and store them... wherever, really. Just park them at a starport, buy a new one and blast off. Will leave a litter of small, unused ships throughout your world. EvE-Online works like that, and the effort of keeping track, let alone moving ships is tremendous. On the other hand you could go I-War2. One fixed home base, where all your "base" stuff is done. Has the advantage of all the gear, ships and whatnot being together in one place. Isn´t really suited for large universes however, unless you have some sort of hyperspace highway that lets you get quickly to wherever the action is. The third alternative would be to invent a mobile base. Let the player have a mothership of sorts. Needn´t be anything grand, but invent a reason for it to be there. Maybe it´s a regular ship that you have to buy off the market, maybe it´s there from the beginning. Maybe only a special class of ship can perform inter-system jumps. Could be an AI-driven ship tender / cargo hauler that needs protecting from time to time.

All of these options are compatible with each other. A player could choose to have a ship in every port, all their ships in one starport, or all their ships docked in a mobile carrier.

Of course, you could pay a shipping company to ship one of your ships to wherever you need it to be. So you could order a ship transfer to a particular starport, and run some light missions in your current ship until your order arrives.