Wow, this is way more than I wanted to write so, not being that great of a coder, I tend to spend lots of my free time working on theories for improving games and game interfaces. One of the design docs I've been working on is for a game with large, custom starships. I'm talking about ships ranging from 10m long shuttles, 100m gunships, and 100km long fleet carriers. Ok, I spent way too much time to type up stuff that doesn't really matter. but I'll keep it there anyway. I'm thinking for controling a large space ship, in full 3D space, for navigation and weapons control, using only the numpad (yes, I know sort of kills laptops, but could remap them to somewhere else) to enter commands. I haven't mapped all the keys out yet, but I'm thinking something like press 1 for Nav Inputs, 2 for weapon input, 3 for Taget codeing (setting priority for targets, maybe you want to set all the small ships as main targets, leaveing larger ships for later, or use your weapons to target and take out all their sensor drones) 4 for preset maneuvers, 5 for special Navs. (Special navs being things like setting orbits, or going to 'waypoints' like gates, planets, astroid belts, or stations, etc) and 6 for drone control. so you will start by hitting Enter, tapping your number for base menu and hit enter again for the next stage. What I'm not sure is what way to do nav inputs. For now we'll stick with simple degrees, based off current heading of the ship. A 3D heading can be made up of 2 angles, X being the circle on the flat, and then Y being a cicle perpendicular to X. There is also the issue of rolls, so a Nav input is 3 numbers. X, Y, Roll. without a Roll, the ship would turn, rolling itself to be level on the new heading. X would be nose side/side, Y nose updown, Roll and optional value that won't matter much except for special combats (rolling to protect a damaged side?) any value can be skipped by pressing enter again, rather than 0. Positive rolls being right side down, negitive being left side down. (lean to right, lean to left basically) A nav input would be like Enter 1 Enter 10 Enter 90 Enter Enter Ship turns 10degrees to the right, and then up by 90. We're talking ships larger than a modern aircraft carrier, so none of them are going to be lightning fast course corrections. enter 1 enter enter -90 enter 180 enter Ship pitches straight down and rolls so the top is facing away from the direction it was traveling. Now for weapons, large ships would have their wapons made up of more than one 'battery' a collection of missiletubes, energy weapons, or guns. So you select weapons input(maybe 3 base inputs, one to select and fire with current ammo, one to select target change ammo and fire, and a last to just change ammo) , battery, tubes/guns X to Y of Z (Z isn't input, X=Z or more skips Y input, on battries of unloadable tubes, just 1 number is needed, if that is Z+ then volly is skipped), target number (subtarget number if lock is clear enough to target parts of the ship), and volly amounts, (0/enter fires atwill till target is destoyed). (When a sensor picks up a target it is very sure about, it automatically adds it to the list, every target in the list will have an icon to denote what type of sensor is flagging it, careful attention is needed by the player not to end up shooting at 'ghosts', drones set up with footprint amplifiers, making them look like a large ship when it is only a small cargo pod basically) Order goes: base option battery tubes tubes target subtarget volly enter 2 (weap) enter 1 (say our missile battery, of 20 tubes) enter 1 (X) enter 5 (Y) enter 1 (target at the top of the list) enter 1 (one shot from each tube) enter So, I've spent awhile on this, what are people's thoughts. Could you see yourself slugging it out in massive ships using mostly just your numpad? Hard to get into the swing of it I'm sure, but once you do, it would be blazing fast. using Notpad, I can enter course corrections in seconds, and then quickly enter weapon commands, all in seconds, managing a mockup system of 10,000 guns, against 100 targets. Mind you, I did this all out of my head, with no feedback, which would make it even easier. Thoughts? (besides saying I'm mad, I'm well aware of that already thank you) Do you think you could use such a system in a multiplayer game? What are the biggest issues you see with this input scheme? Should an option to "fire at will" for all guns be included, or is that too simple? ########## Can skip ############ Short discription of the game: (This may be expanded to a MMO, but it doesn't really matter) players enter the game, with a bit of cash, and friendly to one super power, with a massive fleet of warships, controling several star systems, planets, and space stations. Player would buy a ship, and move out into space, trading, fighting, being a pirate or smuggler, all the classic space game options. There will be several different Super powers, and many smaller factions, all with their own goals and such. Some allied, some indifferent, others at war. Space is vast, thousands of stars, tens of thousands of planets, and millions of astroids. Combat in the game will be much like submarine warfar is today. Lots of stealth, and hopefully killing your target before they even have time to react. Stealth is key to the game. If your ship is large and powerful, it won't help you against the small guy you can't see. Traveling inside a system, well, standard science doesn't offer a fun way to travel. No player wants to spend 2 years traveling between planets, and in a MMO game, time compression won't work, so that brings us to different sciences. Warpdrives. Warp isn't bad for going fast in a straigth line. Traveling 2 or more times the speed of light in a bubble of folded space gets you from earth to mars fairly quick, but standard warp lacks the quick speeds for travel between stars. Warpfields would emit a fair amount of sensor noise, not enough to pinpoint for sure, but a highlight that would be investigated. Foldspace. Folding space is nice, point A to point B without traveling between. Doesn't really matter if B is just down the street from A, or if B is on the other side of the galaxy, it takes the same time an energy. Fairly snappy to get running, just a few seconds. Downsides are the amount of energy released, which pinpoints you to anyone nearby, and also blinds your sensors for awhile. The size of the ractors needed to power a fold drive mean you either stand out on sensors if you want enough power to instantly jump, or you have a very long wait as you powerup for a jump. Foldspace also has the problem of errors like, rather than folding into orbit around a planet, you come out INSIDE the planet. Good pilots with the best equipment will be able to jump into close orbit around a sun 95% of the time, where because of all the sensor noise from the sun, no one would notice. That other 5% of the time, it gets rather hot, rather fast. Gates. Gates are similar to Foldspace drives, except they are stationary buildings, connecting one or more points in space. The most common would be always connected to the same gate, unable to change, but offer cheap means of fast, safe travel. These can be any size, from connecting a space station to a planet to allow people to step between, or a large orbital structures allowing the most massive of ships instant access to far flung stars. Gates have the disadvantage of basically being a becon for foldspace. With the correct equipment, someone can use a special built gate to lock onto another gate, allowing them to gate in. Drawbacks to doing so are: What if someone else is gating in as you are? nasty things happen then (will need to work out a way to keep people in a multiplayer game from sending waves of junk through a gate to destory ships. or work out a way to make it a viable tactic, without being a source of grifing). Also accidently locking onto a gate smaller than your ship leads to very bad things. Slipstream. My favouite. Slipstream uses something between foldspace and warpdrives. A small burst of sensor noise is all the warning you get on either end, not using much power. Its drawbacks however are that the player must then guide their ship between the strange network of tunnel like space that forms between stars. Some streams are larger than others (and ingame devices can be used to enlarge some) larger streams allowing bigger ships to travel through easier. The wider the stream, the fewer turns there are. The biggest (allowing those 100km long ships passage) would be dead straight, where as small ones would be so twisted and narrow, that on someone in a small shuttle (carrying the most advanced slip stablizers) might be able to navigate, with extreme risk. Ship Combat. Main ship combat is going to be deployment of sensor drones to pinpoint your target. You can't hit what you can't see (without a LOT of ammo that is) and you can't shoot at what you don't know is there. Background story will include treaties to limit unmanned craft to sensor and cargo carriers only. No weapons. After using drones (or your ships active sensors, which would light you up like a supernova for anyone trying to target you) to get a target lock, you would then fire on your target(s), using several options for weapons. I'm thinking the main weapon of the game will be Missiles. Missiles however can be fired on by counter missile batteries (either guns, or other missiles) which means in large battles, victory goes to the one that can pump out more missiles than the other can counter. (Several choices for missile launchers. A basic one being a group of missiles, each stored in its own launch point on the outside of the ship. Fire 1, or fire your full 1000 at once, no real difference. Drawbacks there being that since these are stored on the outside of your ship, they would be hard to armour. A few hits on them, and your whole ammo store goes up. Also they can't be reloaded easily. A second type would be more like a gun. The launcher itself is deep inside the ship, like torpedo tubes on a sub, missiles are loaded from a magazine, and fired through a tube in the armour. Advantage is that the ship can be very well armoured, you can carry a large volume of ammo safely, and swap between offensive and defensive ammo fairly quickly. The drawback is a much lower rate of fire, but can spend much longer shooting.) You can use several different types of missiles, from cheap non tracking rockets, to a range of tracking missiles. The 'best' common tracking using their own active sensors make them easier to shootdown (active sensors show up on other's sensors), while passive sensors can be fooled by other means, they are much harder to be shot down. after missiles, there will be rail guns, and cannons. Rail/coil guns are highspeed weapons, spitting out highspeed bullets that are hard to track, and hard to destory. The problem with them is that if the target gets too far out, tracking is hard, and it is much harder to hit. (better, 'smart bullets' can track the target some as they fly towards it, but are easier to shoot down) Another drawback to the railgun is the ammount of power makes a large amount of sensor noise. This sensor noise is lessed by a lot with cannon, which uses chemical reactions for the power, much like guns do today. The drawbacks on tracking are even greater with cannon, which travels much much slower. Also have another drawback of being bigger, meaning you can carry less. Both can be scaled to different sizes, from small, short ranged things to shootdown incoming missiles, to large, 20m+ cannons to take down capital ships. Guns and Cannon however can overheat, but slowly. Then there are energy weapons. Energy weapons are highly scaleable, like cannons. Their advantages are having such high speeds, that they rarely miss, and there is no real way to stop them from hitting. Can't shoot them down. Some would even be faster than light. Their problems are being very weak per shot, producing a large amount of sensor noise, and may overheat fairly fast. However, their biggest advantage is near unlimited ammo. several point defense batteries that can hold off missiles, coupled with long range, highpowered Capital Killers can see it holding out against waves of ships, even if it is easy to target. Others will run out of ammo before it does. So this brings us to the main idea to this post, ship control. For any of you that have played EVE online, you might know how limited ship control really is. It can be hard, getting the ship to respond and go where you want it, and you can't really get into a dog fight. (not that you need to with their weapon setups, but since I want to be able to have a game where you can taticaly take out weapons on one side to give you a blindspot to hide in safety in, or cripple other parts of the ship, I'm looking for a more complex system than EVE) I'm thinking much of the ship controls being AutoPilots. Very important for orbits (a system where you need to follow an Orbit Contoler station to enter a safe orbit could be fun. No simple bouncing off another ship taking a bit of shield damage, if you get a 5million tonne starship hitting another at 20m/s, you are going to do more than just scratch each other's paint. Also, if you are a 200tonne shuttle getting run over by the 5mill tonne at 100m/s, well, fly on windscreen anyone?) Orbits would for the most part be simple controls, orbiting at a range, and setting the angle of orbit. If you are out of 'standard' orbit (an angle of 0 from the equator) then you are at risk of finding someone else at the same orbit level as you, but at a different angle.

I have thought about a Captial Space Ship simulation. One point is that controling it should not be difficult for the player. There was a game called "Battle Cruiser" (iirc) where the player was in control of a large space ship. The game didn't do too well because the controls were hard to learn.

A more intuitave system would be to use the mouse an the input device and have a system like yours as a secondary input system (for precice control). You could even just use a series of text boxes for the input with apropreate lables (so the player can just "Tab" through them or select them with the mouse) and a "Commit" button. By useing standard "Windows" like controls you can make it easier for the player to learn the controls of the ship and therfore get more players.

One advanced idea I had (advanced for codeing it rather than learning it) is to have the ability to have prescripted manouvers. These would be selectable from a list. When a player excecutes one of these prescripted manouvers the program runs the script which is a series if inputs about the pitch, yaw and roll of the ship. The next part of the script then excecuts once certain conditions are met (reaching a certain orientation, time, etc). This would enable the player to create a set (or download them from other plaeyrs) manouvers that they could use in the game without having to enter all the instructions themselves.

For example: A script that had the ship do a half loop and then roll over to right its self (this is a manouver done in fighter planes) moght look like this:

angle OldPitchAngle=PitchAngleangle OldRollAnge=RollAngeUntil PitchAngle=OldPitchAngle+180do   PitchRatePercent=100endPitchRatePercent=0Until RollAnge=OldRollAnge+180do   RollRatePercent=100endRollRatePercent=0

With a scripting system like this you could allow the player to focus on other tasks like firing weapons, directing repare crews, etc.

As for weapons, why not have a system like in an RTS. The player can select guns (grouping them even) with the mouse and then selecting the target with the mouse. The weapons will then see if they can shoot the target (ie it is within range and fire arc) and then shoot. You could also have "Standing orders" like fire at will, target specific subsystems, etc. This will make weapon control mauch faster than manually entering the numbers in (and you can also set them to target empty space so as to lay down cover fire or area denial fire). You could also inclue your system as an alternative (for if the main targeting computer goes off line due to damage or such).

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Ship Combat. Main ship combat is going to be deployment of sensor drones to pinpoint your target. You can't hit what you can't see (without a LOT of ammo that is) and you can't shoot at what you don't know is there.

In a discussion on another forum we were having a discuassion about capital space ship combat. We came up with an interesting tactical balance. The system is simialt to the game Scissors/Paper/Rock.

Basically Captial Ships are large enough and armed and armoured enough to repell fighter attacks. However, they can not replee the large torpedos that can be carried by Bombers.

Bombers have a large mass (all the torpedoes) and so are not as manouverable as figters. They have also scrificed small weapons for increased torpedo loadout. So these ships are quite vunerable to fighters.

Fighters are fast, have limited range and weak weapons (compared to capitals and bombers). They are fast enought to dodge and even out run the large anti capital ship missiles that the bombers have, but due to their weak weapons and little armour, they are not much of a threat to the capital ships.

So we have a system where Capital Ships beat Fighters, Fighters beat Bombers and Bombers beat Capital Ships. This means that all ship types are needed in a fleet and therefore gives the players stratigic and tactical decisions that need to be made in the game.

Sensor drones, decoy beacons, and other electronic warfare techniques could also be used to mask the location of a Capital ship. This would make visual (or at least close range detection) more important. So you would need to send out fighters to scout areas (which makes a sub type of the fighter a viable ship type too - but this can be handeled by loadouts). Bombers, once the target is located, can be sent out as a long range missile will not be able to react like a human could to changes of the target's possition. Fighters can be used to escort the bombers and engage any fighters that try to take out the bombers, but the fighters them selves will not be able to destroy the enemy capital ship and might be capable of intercepting the anti capital ship torpedoes.

Now, I'm seeing scrips as fairly simple things, (rolls, switching weapon loadouts, deploying and recalling drones


However, I think my idea of using the keypad wouldn't be as quick (atleast for course corrections) as using the mouse. Hit the hotkey for Nav, a circle appears around your ship on the 'floor' plane, with a line pointing straight out from the front of your ship. Another circle (center at the center point of your ship) going up from the center line of your ship. Moving the mouse left/right will turn your ship, up/down will pitch the nose of the ship updown. Holdright click and move side to side for roll. when everything is where you want it, release all mouse buttons and your ship starts to exicute the movements.


To handle weapons, along the left side of the screen (also accessible via hotkeys) are your weapon types. Missile/Gun/Energy (Also divided into Off-only, def-only weapons, and for the missiles MultiAmmo). Clicking that gives you access to the batteries, click one, or shift click several (Which limits to all tubes firing). This opens a new menu for which tubes, a bar the whole length of the screen, top to bottom. Starts at 1, ends at however many tubes there are in that battery (this is skipped if you selecte more than one battery). Each tube would then be colour coded (ready, inuse, offline, and ammo type). Clicking two points sets all tubes between (and including) the points to fire. Then another slide and a few buttons to select how many times they fire. The buttons would be for Single/double/10/At Will. Then click on a target.



As for the small 'bomber/fighter' ships, I don't much care for that, as we're talking about massive ships, putting Point Defense Lasers/guns/missiles to knock down the flies would be easy. Small ships also wouldn't have capacities to carry the countermeasures to defend against missiles after they get a lock. However, there will still be an advantage to small ships, as fast strike and recon boats. The power needed to move a 1,000,000,000tonne planet killer is going to light up sensors in a whole system, where as a 2tonne thing flying around is going to be very hard to pick up at range. They would be the tools for smugglers and spies, and maybe for slipping in past defenses to drop mines next to critical exposed systems (weapons ports, docking ports, sensors, engines/thrusters, shield emiters)


A few notes about senors, there would be different ones, each suitable for detecting different emmissions, visible/nonvisible light, radiations, gravity, etc. However each works at different ranges, and ships can be designed to limit their emmissions. But some models might interfear with each other, meaning the chances of being able to see EVERYONE are slim. (I have plans for a system to allow user designed ships, in the MMO setting this can be fairly important, but limited by needing reallife months if not years to research how to limit emmissions, improve speeds and armour, calibrate engines and sensors. Would mean the guy that just started the game isn't likely going to bother designing his own ship, as the ones on the market will be much better anyway) This also means being able to HIDE from everyone is very slim.


being able to pull off fighter style moves won't be possible, so the scripted movments won't be too big of a deal, but I do plan to figure out a good way to use these (mostly for drone and weapons fire, reballancing your missile load outs, picking from planet killers/ active vs passive guided, counter missiles, etc. I'm sure some moves might be useful, enter orbit, dip behind a planet to change course and come back at them from another angle, that sort of thing. I think I would need a combat demo first to really work out designs for that)

The reason that a scripted manouver would be usefull is for manouvers to sweep through fire arc (for one). If you fired all weapons on one side the you will have to wait while they reload/cool down. If you then roll the ship 180 degrees you then have weapons that are ready to fire. By doing this you can maintain a higher rate of fire than you could by being stationary. Although manouvers would be slow, they are important.

But why scripting? Well if you have 100 guns to manage (timeing and such), manouvering the ship will take up a lot of the player's time and they will not be as effective (make mistakes).

Another solution (esspecially if you are looking at amultiplyer game) is to allow multiple players to operate a single ship. So you could have a Nav officer (stearing the ship, etc), A weapons officer (shooting things), a Con/Com officer (drones, countermeasures, sensors, etc, an engineer (tweaking power distrabution, organising repair crews, etc) and a Captain (someone to organise all these other players).

I think a Bridge Crew type game might be a refreshing change from all the "Lone Hero" type games on the market now (yes even WoW where you need raid groups is a Lone Hero game because you only group for individual gains, team work is transient and mainy needed only for the raid bosses). In a Bridge Crew, the group's success or failure is a combined effort (in WoW if one or two fall in a raid it is not a big problem).

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As for the small 'bomber/fighter' ships, I don't much care for that, as we're talking about massive ships,

If a 1,000,000,000 tone ship could be taken out by 20 1000 ton bombers this would be a better use of resources. Large Capital Ship are cool. But due to their nature the are not manouverable and a strike force of more manouverable ships would be able to take them down. A bomber, being more manouverable, will be able to exploit arc shadows of the weapons and thus attack the larger captial ships. The only real defence against this is the fighters.

In the game Freespace 2 they did a similar system. Although you couldn't control the capital ships (but it would have been good if you did), you could fly the fighters and bomberws against AI controled capital ships.

In that game you could see the need for bombers as well as the fighters. The fighters could not do enough damage to the capital, but the bombers could. The bombers were too slow to avoid the fighters.

Even though we are talking about massive ships, fighters and bombers feature as an important factor in the vunerabilities and strengths of them, Even if the fighters and bombers were not operated by a human directly, and AI controled.

If you had fighters and bombers operated like in an RTS (see Homeworld) by a human, this would increase the tactical and srtrategic choices that need to be made. This would open up another role for more players in a Bridge Crew type game (as the fighter and bomber commander(s)).

So you could even have at least 2 types of game in there. A Space Ship simulator and an RTS game. The different skill sets needed for each role in the game will broarden the player base you could appeal to.

How about for something diffrent, you put an actual rl crew into the ship
if one of the users collpases (logs out) controlling the say movement, your in trouble, you might ask for another crew member to take over the duties.

then just split all the controls into a bunch of diffrent subs, picture say the enterprise that had two pilots, command, commuications, weapons, scanners and however many 100s of staff
(i dunno i dont watch the show that much)

A ships crew would basically be a guild, the leader of the ship the leader of the crew, while the ship is inspace the crew can only interact with eachother
then can land on planets to change ships /intereact with others.

The parts where there isn't a player, you have the options as say a commander for ai control of that section, say if weapons, you say who to fire and when, then the ai or player is the one respoible for controlling all the diffrent weapon systems
futher down the crew line might be indiviuals with the actual see lock on scope and fire

that would be for the large ships, smaller ones might only need a pilot, or large enough to need a more staff, everything from the captain to the mechanic engrieer to fix compromised parts mid battle

It would be a interesting system, if you could get away with it
the stronger your team is, the stronger everyone is overall
no actual indiviual fighting (you could throw in a fps onboard ships/planets if you wanted for inidivual fighting)

6 people incommand of a ship aginst another ship, with players able to focus on there strenghts, I think it would be fun :)

I would say that for really huge to gigantic ships, the controls become very abstract. You tell that ship where to go at what speed, and then the ship does all the hard work that is attitude control and acceleration. Manual controls for tactical situations would be restricted as well. A useful command would be turning towards a target or waypoint, eg to protect a vulnerabe part of the ship by turning it out of enemy fire (that could be an abstract command: choose a part of the ship and then a target to turn it towards or away from).

Most of the time would ideally be spent on choosing targets for certain weapons systems or creating missions for a figter/bomber group if it's a carrier. All the stuff that requires agility should be done by the veritable fleet of support and combat ships that's around you. The weapon systems of a ship that size would likely border on the far side of strategic, with short-range defensive measures for bomber attacks. If that ship ever sees close combat with anything but desparate sting operations, then something has gone horribly wrong already.

Of course, all that would make for an extremely boring version of Bridge Commander.

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Original post by Dinner How about for something diffrent, you put an actual rl crew into the ship if one of the users collpases (logs out) controlling the say movement, your in trouble, you might ask for another crew member to take over the duties. ...(snip)... 6 people incommand of a ship aginst another ship, with players able to focus on there strenghts, I think it would be fun :)

Ever played puzzle pirate ? It works roughly that way : a captain own a ship and does the navigation puzzle while others sail, pump, load canons, etc...