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quantum_dragon

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  1. First of all I would like to say EvilleJedi, its pleasure speaking with someone who looks like they have done more homework than I have You make some very good points on the ship travel speeds on the "in system" part of things. I have read only a few books myself, but do recall similar references of 8 hours and such of in system travel. From a non-combat, logistics point of view those speeds are completley acceptable. For combat however, as you said "how do you reconcile that with the action scenes? you really can't." Two fighters flying by each other at 3,000 to 4,000 km/s wouldn't even't register in each others vision, let alone the feasibility of being able to keep track of each other in a dog fight. I am sure we both could probably go on forever discussing the possibilities of why it is that way, (maybe start another forum topic on that heheh) and find a way to justify the two very drastic differences, including why they don't use those "cruising" speeds when catching someone or running away, or the point of having a smaller ship to run when a big cruiser can go just as fast, but the end result is, that Sins' physics and AI engine wouldn't even remotely support whatever we came up with...lol. With that being said, a compromise has to probably be made between the canon of the "Combat" and the "Cruising" speeds. Lets face it, the "stats" of the star wars universe seem at times to contradict itself, along with what you "SEE" in the movies. (also given that movies skip through time due to limitations in viewing time and film. So the next scene could actually be sometime later, not just a second or two) These indiscrepancies is probably why there are so many "Retcons". http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Retcon ( I would hate to see how many there would be if someone tried to consolidate the speeds people mention in books, stat books, comics, games, and what you see in the movies.) Anyhow, with trying to come up with a compromise I did find a "safespeedscalar" for maximum speed and linear accel and decel. Upon playing with it, I did find that in gravity wells with no enemies present, ships can be made to go much faster, I even did a 100 and they went a hundred times faster XD, but still flew their normal speeds if enemies (including pirates) were present. I was thinking with a combination of using the safe speed scalar to make the ships go faster, to represent a "cruising" speed (since in space if you can keep significat thrust you can keep going faster but this would make manuevarability very hard as at those speeds, the manuevering jets would have a hard timing countering the momentum and velocity, so you wouldnt do this in combat.) and raising the jump angles, we could improve the non-combat playability of the game. Now you wouldn't want to raise the safe speed scalar to much, a) cause it would just seem kinda stupid b) you don't want getting through non-enemy or your own space to be "too-fast", otherwise you wouldn't have to consider tactical or strategic options in defense or offense, if you can just run around really quickly. Right now I have been messing with the scalar making maximum speed 2 or 3 times faster when safe, (so theres not an obnoxiously obvious difference,) plus having the higher jump angles, and I have also raised the overal speeds slightly, to be a little less movie canon, but have a little more playability. When I am done, if it is alright with you guys, I will send Evader and EvilleJedi private messages with links to a zip file with the changed game info files for 1.0E and if you approve maybe I can help with the rest the mod. Also as a side note I did change one other thing which was the particle size of the shots coming from fighters. I didn't think turbo laser sized shots fit small starfighters. They are now more accurate to the size you see in the movies.
  2. LOL yea for sytems that are mostly touch screen, they have a nasty tendancy to explode don't they?
  3. Just updating and letting everyone know I didn't die. So far, speed adjustments feeling pretty good. I had to go along with class speeds like you mentioned nova because otherwise you would end up with the lucrehulk crawling way to slow and republic capitals achieving near star-fighter speeds if i went with using Gs as a base speed. To compensate i changed some ships acceleration factors to reflect the canon g numbers. Sorry if there a lot of errors in my post as i was using my phone to update.
  4. Oops... I never thought about how easy it would be for enemy fleets to sneek passed if the jump angles were higher I know I'm probably getting off topic a bit, but what about making jumps take more anti-matter, and significantly lowering anti-matter regen in enemy space? So if you jump, jump, jump, you pretty much can't use your special abilities in combat, and could end up "stranded" in a hostile planetary system for a bit. (Allowing planetary defense fighters to harass you, and since you cant regen anti matter, losing your own fighters further handicaps your fleet, and also allows defending fleet to have a chance to catch up.) I know this would probably mess with balancing a bit, and would have to be reworked, but that would address the issue I think. I also think this would be cool as a good representation of "supply lines." Another reason I like the lowered anti-matter regens is because I think fighters shouldn't be "built" on board ships, but rather "resupplied" (represented by anti-matter regen) when in friendly space... This of course would probably require a little more balancing on the fighters, and maybe have bombers present a little more of threat than they do now since once they are gone, they are gone for a while. (Could even have "Fighter Factories" be anti-matter restorers. With the exception of Yuuzhan Vong who can grow things on their ships anyhow. ) My offer to help rebalance the fighters other than speed still stands, as I would like it so they seem more valuable (like they are in the movies) and fleet engagements are a little more logistitics involved...That and I have a thing for fighters as you can probably tell.
  5. Ok while waiting to hear back from EvilleJedi, I have been working on the issue of inter-planetary travel. With the capital ships moving so slow and having to fly through a grav well before re-entering hyperspace, its painstakingly slow to travel through multiple systems. If anyone would have any of their own ideas please feel free to post them. Below are a few of my own ideas: Idea 1: Make it so Empires could build "Nav Bouys" or HyperSpace lane stations or something along these lines that use a logistics slot. These Navigation Bouys would act as instant travel between other established Nav Bouys or Hyperspace lane stations. Thus Allowing empires to instantly travel to distant established planets. GAMEPLAY: Now a fleet would still have to fly to the edge of the grav well of the current planet they were in, but then could jump to several planets away in a single jump. Thus eliminating the time consuming process of having to fly all the way through multiple grav wells and then jump multiple planets, but still take a while on initial colonization and exploration. TACTICS: This would also allow interesting tactics. Such as launching a smaller fleet to do a faint to attract a fleet someone might have standing by the edge of a gravewell in a "staging" area. Once attracting that fleet and getting it to fly far into a grav well, someone could then launch their main fleet at another planet, while their smaller fleet runs. Thus taking a while for the defending fleet to flyback to the end of the grave well and engage the main fleet. Keep in mind it would still take a bit for an attacking fleet to reach the planet its attacking itself too. This would involve Strategic thinking as well as tactical now when dealing with attack and defense of planets. Idea 2: Essentially the same as idea 1, but somehow incorporating it as a planetary bonus for all planets instead of an actual structure that has to be built. This way if you lose the planet and take it back, you wouldn't have to rebuild anything. This way also makes more sense giving another actual reason to explore a planet. Gameplay and Tactics would be the same. Idea 3: (currently experimenting with) Seeing if modifying jump angle would allow a capital ship to jump into a grav well, then only have to change facing and jump to the next planet without having to travel all the way through the grav well. Exception would be if the destination grav well is directly on the other side of the planet of the current grav well. In this case a capital ship would have to fly to edge of the grav well that has LOS to the next planet. I will continue experimenting. If I find that I can use the planetary bonus then I might need your help Nova Cameron since I know your making a galaxy mod, and have more experience with editing planetary bonuses and knowing how they work than I do.
  6. Lol ok, I totally misread that post. I thought you wanted what would cause that many G as a base KPH... I was thinking you wanted a y-wing to go 87,000 Kph I understand now... I just want to double check though: Given G = Kph / that would make an x-wing pass the length of an ISD in about 1.55 seconds at full speed. A Tie which is 4100G (from what I found) would pass in about 1.41. I can work with that. I will have two sets of Game Info files then; one that stays true to the balancing the mod currently has (my first post) and one that will have all the differing ship speeds using Nova's provided stats.
  7. The problem with G is that we don't really know what "G" is in the Star Wars Universe. Unless of course someone can tell me. From what I can find in WookiePedia, and from listing of ship stats in XWA, is that G is a unit of acceleration. In some some of the books, you read about pulling high "G" manuevers making g-force compensators stressed, which also supports that Gs in the Star Sars universe is a unit of acceleration. Unfortunately we don't know how one of "their" G's is, in respect to "ours". G in "our" Physics is a also measure of acceleration. Then assuming a G from Star Wars is the same as a G from "Our" physics, that would mean that just the y-wing (2700G) after one second of acceleration would be travelling at 54,357 miles an hour. While useful for crossing great distances in space, in combat this would be utterly way too fast for any human being to even SEE a star destoyer while passing it, nevermind shoot it. However I am not a physics major so I could be off on some of my calculations, but it should be fairly close. This of course could be their "Cruising" speed for interplanetary travel and not their "Combat" speed. In either case however, we can't really use that information unless I know exactly what their G is. This leaves me back to using dead reckoning on how long it takes a fighter to cross from bow to stern of a Star Destroyer as reference. Then use the percentage of differences in the numbers to calculate the difference of speeds in game. I swear for some of this Sci-Fi stuff, people just come up with numbers that sound good without ever actually thinking about what they are putting . Star Wars for the most part does pretty good on this, sublight speeds being one of the few exceptions. Just don't get me started on how much of Star Trek's numbers on things don't make sense at all with what you see in the TV shows or movies. To answer you question on hyperspace speed Nova, from what I understand, you can only change the speed for all ships for all factions going from between planets globally, or between stars globally. No seperate hyperspace speeds for different ships. You could however give certain ships a special ability thats always active that gives them a percentage jump speed increase, thus making them faster than other ships. However then you would have a fleet of ships all arriving at different times which would be bad; both tactically and as a gameplay mechanic IMOP. This could be useful for making a "scout" ship like the Millenium Facon that has really fast jump speeds though.
  8. I appreciate the offer Nova, if you have sources that post the actual speeds of the fighters in space then fantastic! Please post them as I can work out a generalized speed off them. I will point out that there are several problems that may arise from trying to follow exact statistics on this stuff: Getting perfectly exact speeds. To achieve this you would have to probably have a software that makes a recorded video to watch in slow motion the precise moment when the fighter passes the stern and bow of the ship, as even differences of a few tenths of a second (easily within realm of human error when watching in real time) would make a several hundred mile an hour difference, and honestly, I don't have the time to do that. First main problem (assuming your using the same sources as me) is the only speeds available that I know of for starfighters is Kilomters per Hour in atmosphere or MGLT in space. The KpH speeds are about equal too or slower than modern day jetfighters. Given however they are STAR-fighters and are not aerodynamic, this makes perfect sense. Unfortuantely KpH information doesn't translate well for speeds in space where there is no resistance from atmosphere, and reaching greater speeds would be easier for starfighters. With MGLT, there is no base information if this is provided as a constance of acceleration or as a unit of measure. You could go crazy and use MGLT to find out the percentages of speed differences between fighters, however, given the limitation of the AI and game engine in Sins, going this detailed is a mute point. Not too mention the balancing issues since all CIS and republic fighters would have to be slower given they are older tech. The Second problem is if we were to accept the speeds in atmospher as acceptable speeds in space, then (forgive me as I like Mile per hour over KPH) that would mean the fighters are only going a little over 700Mph, which is half what I have them set out now (roughly 1440mph relative to ship scale). Which mean that the fighters need to be moving half the speed they are now, and that means halving capital ships speeds. (otherwise fighters would have a hard time catching up to capital ships which would be lame and non canon.) I don't mind redoing my work, its just if that is the case, then the Capital ships would be even slower than they already are. Currently it already takes capital ships several minutes to cross a grav well. Having them even slower would be insane. We would be reaching a point of canon vs playability. With that being said, right now I am working on possibilities of resolving how long it would take cap ships to go from grav well to grave well (more on that at the end of my post.) Lastly, as I touched a little on earlier, would be maintaining balancing issues. If we tried to go with the the "real speed" of the fighters, you will end up with slower fighters from the old republic and CIS factions since it is older tech. In retro-spect I am not too familair with the ep 1-3 tech so I don't know for sure if it is indeed slower, but it makes sense since it is older. Now balancing could be done to compensate for this, with certain factions having stronger fighters or more of them, but I was mostly wanting to make it just "feel" more like star wars, not mess with their balancing. If it comes to pass that I am asked to do some balancing with fighters I will gladly do so with a passion. Another thing to just point out here real fast, is the limitation of the AI in the game. Fighters only have two speeds that they seem to go. Stopped, and full speed. Which is why when you set fighters to follow capital ships they "bounce" back and forth from going full speed to stop. This can be resolved by adjusting deceleration and acceleration, but as far as the AI is concerned its either stopped, or pedal to the metal. From this, going through all the trouble of getting every fighter's speed fine tuned is a mute point since it provides no real combat advantage in fighter vs fighter combat. I did keep the fact that interceptors are faster than fighters, and fighters faster than bombers. Mostly for "if they decided to run," and minimal canon purposes. Plus bombers are supposed to be slower. Sorry If I rambled on, I didn't a get a lot of sleep due to work. I will post some more information on my solution for slow travel time for capital ships going grav well to grav well.
  9. Fantastic, I will send him a message shortly. First however, I am refining fighter movement a bit more. I had to lower angular acceleration and deceleration as they were too high and causing them to wiggle in flight and when sitting still. I also completely removed strafing accel as well for better and more realistic "canon" movement. I also think that his correction will improve system performance with use of fighters as the accel was so high the fighters were constantly trying to correct them selves because they would "turn" passed correct facing and would try to compensate. I will do some more combat runs and then I will contact evillejedi
  10. I am really glad that Eville Jedi isn't a friend of the rock-paper-scissors approach because any galaxy spanning empire would just include all strengths and weaknesses into one big ol ship anyhow. Not to mention Star Wars was never really big on a rock-paper-scissor approach. With the exception of fighters taking down turbolaser oriented capital ships, or giant deathstars...lol As for repair and shield restore abilities, I am double grateful you do not have those in this mod. It comes down to fleet size and tactics now, and knowing when to cut your losses, retreat and let your ships get repaired or recharge their own shields. Like modern navies would have to do. I could see a resupply ship launching little shuttles to repair a cap ship, ( similar scenarios that have happened in some of the x-wing/tie games.) but that would be the extent of it. I love the fact there isn't some big old dumb magical DNA strand looking beam, stretching across space "magically" restoring another ships shields. Always hated the overly visually gaudy "special abilities" you see in these kinds of games. A little icon to let you know something is "active" is ok, but seeing the hand of God appear from no-where and doing something... that drives me crazy. Unless of course your talking force storms caused by the Emperor onboard the eclipse, but thats only cause its visually something that actually happens.
  11. No, they would have to re-route all power from "Non-essential system" to the shields, and cut life support to send a signal to starfleet requesting permission to return fire, while waiting for updates on "New Prime Directive Protocol" relating to Galactic Empire interactions. Sorry.. couldn't help myself
  12. First and foremost, fantastic job on the mod, very indepth textures, modeling, and effects. Really grade A work you guys have going here. Now I am not sure how far you guys have gotten considering I played the 1.0E which you guys released over 6 months ago, and this being my first time here, I wasn't sure where to post this, or if it is even needed. So I apologize if this is a redundant rule breaking post. Now I didn't play the 1.0E for very long (I know what your thinking but hear me out!) because the first thing I noticed was the fighter movements and ship speeds. I am sure you guys have heard a lot of this, or know it already, so I went ahead and did a little work on my end. I figured if everybody critisizes, who's left to fix the problems right? And since from what little I have read, you guys are busy, and like me don't have a lot of free time on your hands. Anyhow, first let me explain my basis for the speeds I chose and why I didn't like the speeds you have. Also I apologize again as this will be a very long winded post. Now what I was able to come up with was fairly easy to achieve because of your guy's excellent scaling of ships. With that being said, even though you guys are going for a total conversion mod, the ship movement and fighter movement still felt very much like regular sins, with the inherent overly fast caps and the proportionally but unlogically faster fighters. I also hope no one is offended by my liberal modding of your ship speeds, I did it mainly to contribute to this awesome mod. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO SKIP PASSED A LOT OF THE TECHNICAL BABEL ON SHIPS SPEEDS AND WOULD LIKE TO GET TO THE CHANGES, SCROLL DOWN TO GREEN SENTENCE. Now I will start with your overall speed choices for both capital ships (capital includes frigates and cruisers) and fighters. You have your fighters set for double the speed of your capital ships, with fighters having a much higher acceleration and maneuverability than capitals. This isn't too far off the beaten path since if you watch Star Wars: A new hope you see an ISD chasing a YT-1300 (Millenium Falcon) and keeping up. However most fighters are easily twice as fast as a YT-1300. I know that a yt-1300 is probably faster than an ISD, especially if you haved played any of the x-wing, tie-fighter, or Xwing alliance games and accept them as canon. The argument is mostly to justify the capital ships speeds being higher than 0 when compared to fighters. However, their speed is much to high especially when you add fighter speeds in on top of that. Taking a squad of fighters, I set them still in a gravity well and then told a Star Destroyer to fly by them. The star destroyer blew passed them like a bullet. You may respond with, but didn't you say in the previous paragraph that capital ships should have some speed? Well yes thats true, but considering that a Star Destroyer is a mile long... a MILE long ( http://www.theforce.net/swtc/isd.html ), it shouldn't just speed by like Sonic the Hedgehog. Using my experience from the x-wing/tie and x-wing alliance games as well as a few others, including movie scenes (Empire Strikes back when millenium falcon floats away with trash), I adjusted the speed of capitals to more correctly match how fast they should pass a non-moving object. Now this speed is probably still a bit higher than what you find in SOME of the games, but I feel it still reflects the speeds depicted in the movies. If you feel it should be even slower still, at the speeds I selected it already takes a good while crossing a gravity well, (which is fairly realistic and star wars like to me) any slower and well, nap time between engagements. Now onto the fighters. Even with a capital ship not moving, the fighters fly by them in a blink of an eye. At first that would make sense considering that capitals are slow lumbering hulks and fighters fly by them on strafing runs. Again however, take in the scale of these ships. An ISD is about a mile long ( http://www.theforce.net/swtc/isd.html ) if you fly a mile in a flash, your going pretty stinking fast. You might think, "well yea that makes sense, fighters would fly a mile pretty quickly." But take the following into consideration: A car traveling at 60mph would take 60 seconds ( a minute ) to drive the length of a Star Destroyer. Now you might think thats fast, (or slow) but take a picture of a side profile of a ISD on you computer, now run you finger across it at a speed that would take 1 minute to do. 1....2....3....4....5....6.... you shouldn't even be passed the first tenth of the ship yet (you get the picture). So now if you think of flying by an ISD in an instant, your going way to fast, like trying to hit a mail box with one shot while flying a Jet Fighter. In the games, and the movies, it takes typically about 2-3 long seconds for a tie fighter at full speed to fly by a Star Destroyer (I may be slightly off, been a while since I watched the movies). This actually works out rather well. If you take that same car: 60mph takes 1 minute to drive the distance of a Star Destroyer than doubling it's speed: 120mph = 30 seconds 240mph = 15 seconds 480mph = 7.5 seconds 960mph = 3.75 seconds or cheating and using ( http://www.machinehead-software.co.uk/bike/speed_distance_time_calc.html ) 1440mph = 2.5 seconds At the speed you have the fighters moving it takes about half a second, or less, which equivalates to about 7200mph at the least. Thats not including the ship flying towards the fighters at the already high speed you have set for them, which altogether would probably be over 10,000mph relative to each other. Now try hitting a fighter flying by that fast with a slower moving turret, Impossible. It would be close to (if not) impossible for a fighter to shoot at a capital ship that is in visual range and out by the time you blink. Not to mention even trying to shoot at smaller ships like correllian corvettes, or (EEK) other fighters. Now onto the changes I have made. With a ISD not moving, it now takes around 2.5 seconds for a Tie Fighter to fly from nose to stern in game. The Tie Fighter speed is now 2.5 times greater than that of a capital ship. Where as before it was only double. However different fighter speeds, such as bombers and interceptors (for all races) range no less than 2.25 times the speed of caps, and no greater than 2.8 times the speed of caps. This of course allows the persuit of bombers, and of course retain some of the balancing (and canon) of faster fighters still being faster. Another thing I changed on the fighters is linear acceleration and strafe speed. Before the fighter would instantly accelerate to top speed, thus making it feel very unrealistic and old school game like. Now they gradually accelerate, albeit still very quickly but not instantly like little sperm looking fighters. I also changed the linear deceleration as well. Since instantly stopping from going 1440mph even with the G-force compensators would still liquify the pilot as well as damage the ship. (its still pretty close to instant for the Ai's sake, but a little better). I thought about lowering the deceleration to near zero to see if the fighters, being unable to stop in the right spot would fly around looking like a 'patrol' like they did in the first homeworld game. Will have to experiment on this. Bad effect would be higher system resource usage unless could be set to always fly back in hangar. Changes on the capital ships. They have about 1 tenth of the speed that they did. I maintained the balancing of course, with all capitals flying the same max speed. Now this makes getting across the gravity well a bit of a caveat since it takes a heck of a lot longer than it used too, but it "Feels" way more Star Wars like. Not to mention since you don't have starbases, this allows you to mount a good counter attack force, or setup a defensive line. In otherwords, it would be more beneficial to have more planets with production capabilities as a responding fleet for defense would take a while to move in. One could also lower the damage orbital bombardment does so it takes longer, but not too long. You just wouldn't want it too short so you dont end up with a cat and mouse game of running planet to planet killing everything with a opposing fleet chasing you. Another solution to this would be to lower grav well size by about 25%, so its still big enough for Star Dreadnaughts (SSDs) but doesn't take forever to reach hyperspace points. The longer travel could also be somewhat good in the sense that the Empires problem was responding to the Rebel Alliances ability to hit and run before the empire could respond, thus one could employ gurilla tactics against an enemy. I also changed the acceleration on capitals as well. With Super Capitals and Standard Capitals having the lowest acceleration taking about 10 to 13 seconds to reach full speed, and cruiser and frigates accelerating faster; taking 6 to 2 seconds to reach max speed with the exception of cruisers that were ISD size or so. As with the fighters I also lowered the deceleration, instant stop being only viable for dropping out of hyperspace but not for sublight travel. Good example to support this would be the scene in the movie where the Millenium Falcon has the ISD chasing it, dives down, and two ISDs hit each other, and you see the crew bracing themselves from hitting and sliding against the other ISD. If any of you are interested in the modified game info files please feel free to respond and I will gladly give you a link. (not posted as to not mess up with any sort of workflow system they have setup right now.) If you guys do decide to use some of my work please let me know. Also if you are interested I am willing to help balance fighter usage in game as well. From damange caused by fighters to caps, to their strength and damage they cause to each other as well as balancing of numbers, IE 1 squadron x-wings vs 2 squads of ties. I don't have a lot of time on my hands but I can do what I can, when I can. As to the future use of changes, obviously it will not work well if you guys have changed the scaling of the ships since 1.0E. Since a star destroyer would be longer or shorter and thus no longer proportionate to the time it would take for a fighter to pass by. I would ask that you guys at least give it a try as I feel strongly that it would make the mod feel much more Star Warsy XD. Sory for the long post, and thanks for the mod, hope to help out! Quantum_Dragon

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