Creating hulls procedurally? Why? Ship design is fun, and in any case you´re not going to need that many all in all. Privateer made do with less than 6 playable ships, and with what you need for opponents I´d invest the extra effort and design them all by hand. The end result will be much more appealing for it.
Also, it doesn´t necessarily mean that it´s a bad thing if the player doesn´t own all the available ships in the game - makes for replayability. Be a freighter captain the next time.

I´m not too sure mixing garage types is necessary or very gameplay-enhancing. It will give the player the greatest range of freedom (which is great), but add a lot of complexity which, especially given the fact that you want the ship to be a central point of the gaming experience, might detract from the overall. The more limitation you have in this area, the more important the ship(s) the player can have will be. If there is no cap on ships you can own, they will become anonymous as soon as the player hits a certain amount.

Since I´ve played EvE Online for a bit I´m not too much of a fan of huge parked fleets anymore (they´re nice to have, but they´re no fun to manage), so I´d probably go with a "one base, limited ships" model. Let the player start out with the classic elite-esque tiny ship, and as soon as he can afford it he can buy larger vessels with some carrier capacities. At this point some (friendly, for hire) AI pilots could come in handy to let the player use his ship park to the full. I´d put the cap at "no ship storage" (due to the keeping track of ships and the detraction from the "pimp my ride" experience), "one carrier" and "no more than 3 ships in a carrier".
So you might have freighters or military ships with a bay for one fighter (or shuttle?) up to small carriers with up to 3 fighters. Anything above that would probably allow the player to optimise for firepower too much, which will make mission balancing a drag.

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Original post by Hase Creating hulls procedurally? Why? Ship design is fun, and in any case you´re not going to need that many all in all. Privateer made do with less than 6 playable ships,

But then I'm not making Privateer. [wink] Anyhow, I fully expect to have manually designed ships. The procedural hulls are a possibility to allow each star system to have a visually distinctive style of hull design.

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I´m not too sure mixing garage types is necessary or very gameplay-enhancing. It will give the player the greatest range of freedom (which is great), but add a lot of complexity which, especially given the fact that you want the ship to be a central point of the gaming experience, might detract from the overall. The more limitation you have in this area, the more important the ship(s) the player can have will be. If there is no cap on ships you can own, they will become anonymous as soon as the player hits a certain amount.

That's intentional. Either you concentrate on having a few heavily customized ships, or you concentrate on having a fleet of largely unmodified ships.

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Since I´ve played EvE Online for a bit I´m not too much of a fan of huge parked fleets anymore (they´re nice to have, but they´re no fun to manage), so I´d probably go with a "one base, limited ships" model. Let the player start out with the classic elite-esque tiny ship, and as soon as he can afford it he can buy larger vessels with some carrier capacities. At this point some (friendly, for hire) AI pilots could come in handy to let the player use his ship park to the full. I´d put the cap at "no ship storage" (due to the keeping track of ships and the detraction from the "pimp my ride" experience), "one carrier" and "no more than 3 ships in a carrier".

I don't like arbitrary limitations. Why not 4 ships?

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So you might have freighters or military ships with a bay for one fighter (or shuttle?) up to small carriers with up to 3 fighters. Anything above that would probably allow the player to optimise for firepower too much, which will make mission balancing a drag.

I've got two ideas for coping with mission balancing.

Firstly, most missions will be generated 'at random', even those on the story arc will be partly random. The game will take into account the firepower and technology you have available to help ensure that missions are challenging.

Secondly, you'll be offered missions on the basis of "prestige", rather like Elite's "elite rating". You earn prestige on the basis of how challenging the mission was. Although you could hire a hundred wingmen and get them to come with you to destroy a single pirate ship, you'll earn less prestige than if you did it by yourself. The mission briefing will tell you how many ships you can use before taking a prestige penalty.

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Think of the game as an RPG. Ships are just customizable armor and weapons. Some RPG players like to have a small selection of inventory items buffed up with spells, whilst some like to have a large selection of inventory items. If a character has a hundred swords, that doesn't make him any more powerful. But if he has a hundred party members as well, that obviously does. Similarly, having lots of ships doesn't upset balancing, having lots of wingmen who can fly your ships for you does. In fact, having lots of ships can make the game even more difficult because the game generates missions according to your ships' abilities: but you don't know which ship the computer has designed a particular mission around.

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Original post by Nathan Baum The procedural hulls are a possibility to allow each star system to have a visually distinctive style of hull design.

Good idea - but how many star systems will there be? And will the player be able to remember them all? I´d go for a handful of different looks based on region /empire/manufacturer... if you have anything close to the elite number of systems, the sheer number of differnt looks will be so vast that it´s essentially wasted.

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I don't like arbitrary limitations. Why not 4 ships?

3 is the highest number the human brain can visualise without having to resort to math. It´s usually a good limit for anything in that area. If you don´t like externally imposed restrictions at all, below might be a better solution.

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Firstly, most missions will be generated 'at random', even those on the story arc will be partly random. The game will take into account the firepower and technology you have available to help ensure that missions are challenging.

sounds great - be sure to provide some sort of difficulty spread, not all players like it hardcore. ;)

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Secondly, you'll be offered missions on the basis of "prestige", rather like Elite's "elite rating". You earn prestige on the basis of how challenging the mission was. Although you could hire a hundred wingmen and get them to come with you to destroy a single pirate ship, you'll earn less prestige than if you did it by yourself. The mission briefing will tell you how many ships you can use before taking a prestige penalty.

hm, I don´t really see what mercenary missions have to do with any sort of rating that´s based on challenge. A competency rating of sorts won´t be a bad thing (especially for story missions), but to base missions entirely on that seems a bit excessive. Especially since high prestige would also indicate some level of foolhardiness. After all, when it comes to contracts a lot of customers look for solid service at competitive rates.

How about turning it into a business deceision altogether?

Let the player have as many ships as he wants, and as many pilots on his payroll as he wants. As a limiting factor introduce logistics. The player has to hire transportation to the mission area. The player might have transports / carriers / jumpships (depends on how your universe is going to look) himself, that will incur costs for each run they make.
The more ships he´ll take, the more running costs he´ll have, the less profit he´ll be able to make off the mission. Which effectively allows the player to balance difficulty against profit.

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In fact, having lots of ships can make the game even more difficult because the game generates missions according to your ships' abilities: but you don't know which ship the computer has designed a particular mission around.

You have to be very careful with that, whatever variables you use for choosing mission difficulty will have to be averaged out somehow, so you don´t cripple the player by forcing him to figure out what configuration the mission is based on.

I guess you should think twice before implementing the third option, because you may end up loosing a lot of time programming it and all players will use one of the predefined designs, of course unless the whole gameplay is based on this feature.
I've seen lots of games with lots of options (eg. to set up AI behaviour or to set up every single option for a car physics) but 95 percents of players are using the predefined ones because players are eager to start playing, not spending time inside bases.
But as I've said if configuring your ship is the main feature of your game play then choose the third option, otherwise I advise not to waste your time.

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Original post by Hase Quote: Original post by Nathan Baum The procedural hulls are a possibility to allow each star system to have a visually distinctive style of hull design. Good idea - but how many star systems will there be? And will the player be able to remember them all? I´d go for a handful of different looks based on region /empire/manufacturer... if you have anything close to the elite number of systems, the sheer number of differnt looks will be so vast that it´s essentially wasted.

Yes, I noticed that I agree with you. I don't want to arbitrarily limit the size of the game world, so it will be a full Elite-style galaxy with billions of procedurally generated systems, with local systems defined manually.

All inhabited systems will obviously have been settled by people from another system, and the rate of colonisation has been increasing. There was time in the initial slow expansion of the human empire for each colony to develop a unique style. But now the empire is expanding more rapidly, and there is more contact between systems. The handful of ship styles have more-or-less stabilised.

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3 is the highest number the human brain can visualise without having to resort to math.

I heard it was 7...

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Quote: Firstly, most missions will be generated 'at random', even those on the story arc will be partly random. The game will take into account the firepower and technology you have available to help ensure that missions are challenging. sounds great - be sure to provide some sort of difficulty spread, not all players like it hardcore. ;)

Oh certainly. Hell, I might want an easy game now and again, if I'm just playing it to relax. Might want to just explore the galaxy and look at the pretty pictures.

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Let the player have as many ships as he wants, and as many pilots on his payroll as he wants. As a limiting factor introduce logistics. The player has to hire transportation to the mission area. The player might have transports / carriers / jumpships (depends on how your universe is going to look) himself, that will incur costs for each run they make. The more ships he´ll take, the more running costs he´ll have, the less profit he´ll be able to make off the mission. Which effectively allows the player to balance difficulty against profit.

This sounds promising.

In general, ships are self-sufficient. They can move between systems without aid from carriers or whatever. But your pilots will obviously still want paying so they can afford oxygen and food, and your ships will need maintainance costs when they are damaged, and storage costs when they are docked (unless you have your own dock, but then you have to pay the staff of that dock (unless it's unmanned, but then you have to defend it against pirates)).

Of course it needs to be balanced so that the cost of not taking a ship and pilot out is lower than the cost of taking a ship and pilot out. It also requires a different kind of gameplay. The "hundred wingmen" line was an exagerration. I'd expect a 'busy' wing to have from 6 to 10 ships on it. Depending upon the complexity of missions, the game could need a 'Rainbow Six' style planning stage where you set out a schedule for the mission.

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Quote: In fact, having lots of ships can make the game even more difficult because the game generates missions according to your ships' abilities: but you don't know which ship the computer has designed a particular mission around. You have to be very careful with that, whatever variables you use for choosing mission difficulty will have to be averaged out somehow, so you don´t cripple the player by forcing him to figure out what configuration the mission is based on.

The point is that it's intended to cripple a player who's been collecting hundreds of ships. A player with 3 or 5 ships shouldn't have too much difficulty figuring out which is best suited to the task. A power-gamer with 20 ships had better be paying attention or he'll find himself in trouble. Whilst a hopeless munchkin with his fleet of 500 ships has no chance.

Of course, if you have 500 identical ships, then that's different. But only an idiot would collect 500 identical ships. A proper munchkin is going to collect 500 ships each with unique abilities, under the illusion that doing so will make him more powerful.

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Original post by SandmanI could go on for days with this stuff :)

LOL [smile] same here, so I'll rather do as I so often do and point you guys out towards the GURPS roleplaying system. Which among other things, has rules for building vehicles.
In the current sourcebooks I have for that system (a RPG called Transhuman Space), there are tons of hard science rules for building your own spaceship, from hull size to the amount of fuel you are going to need according to the type of engines you want to install on your ship. Good Lord they even have formulas for calculating speed vectors during space combats (and I must point out I am on about a pen and pencil RPG, here).

I am not a big fan of this kind of systems for pen and paper, but I just cannot possibly understand how no one has tried to use such complete and detailed rules and put them in a freaking computer, whose job it is to do this sort of tedious calculations... [rolleyes]

Just a little injection to the conversation... The original post talks about the best ships/hulls and the best equipment. The very concept of something being the best of its kind should be avoided, because that means everybody will end up at the same configuration if given sufficient time, and can't advance any further because the game doesn't have anything better than "the best".

Rather, you should try to provide a variety of different but competitive options balanced in a rock-paper-scissors manner. For example any super-weapon should have a weakness or a (semi-easy) way to counter it so obtaining it won't automatically cause you to win every fight against every opponent. The death star ray may be able to destroy planets but is useless against those pesky little fighters that can drop torpedoes into your cooling vents.

In the current sourcebooks I have for that system (a RPG called Transhuman Space), there are tons of hard science rules for building your own spaceship, from hull size to the amount of fuel you are going to

And most of them are wrong. Then again I don't know if I seen lastest sourcebooks.
Basically you might like to look at project rho to get a lot of ideas


Look at atomic rocket part of the site. Some of the rules apply also for advanced space warsh

That's a very good point, fingers :)
In Elite, I remember clearly that once you had the Jaguar (or was it a Panther), if your goal was to become a merchant, there wasn't really any point in getting any other ship... maybe lower faster ships costed cheaper in fuel and where better for skirmishing, but I could just equip my ship with huge guns, huge shields, and fill my cargo with valuable merchandise that would amply pay my expenses of fuel.

In comparison, in TS, depending on your needs, you'd have a wide variety of choices.
Your ship can use plasma sails (gigantic electromagnetic sails that use the solar winds to properl the vessel...not very fast, but still);
or you could use an antimatter reactor. Extremely dangerous if not properly done, and utterly expansive, but highly powerful.
Or you could grind the structure of an asteroid or comet and use this as propellant.
Gee, why don't you go and check this guy's page out

One thing I find slightly, hum, dissapointing, is how dry and bland hard science spaceships always end up looking.
It's only the rare odd one that looks cool. For instance the ship in Event Horizon, is a very good blend of hard science and still impressive looking one :)
I guess not everybody can have the hard science touch AND artistic sensibility...

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Original post by Raghar project rho to get a lot of ideas

Best. Site. Ever.