Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I love mining lasers more.. the are kind of whimpy now.. but they used to be big and crazy loud.

I actually like the mining lasers. The animation consists of a cutting beam and a tractor beam now.

Ideally, I'd like to see particle spawn effects with weapon impacts, according to the type of weapon, as well as the layer damaged (shield, armor, structure). Weapons hitting the shield, for example, should end in blue shield fizzle effects.

Armor would be a bit more complex, and should leave weapon-dependent hit effects. Ballistic weapons would send shards of ship flying out into space. Lasers would burn glowing marks and craters into the armor. Hybrids would be (not surprisingly) a hybrid of the two, leaving red-hot scorch marks and sending molten pieces of armor flying.

Missiles already have their own very nice impact effects, especially the kinetic ones. While I am glad that the stupidly, cartoonishly massive torpedo shockwaves are gone, all the new missile effects could use a bit of graphical scaling up, by about 30%. Battleship torpedoes and cruise missiles just don't look intimidating.

Once a ship gets into structure, that is when death animations should begin. I'm talking about multiple ship fires and tons of secondary explosions ripping through the hull. Lasers should melt straight through with every hit. Ballistic weapons should blast and tear flaming debris out through the entry and exit wounds. Hybrids need to rip out masses of red-hot, molten slag with each shot. Missiles need to crash through the shredded armor and explode inside the hull, and blast out damage-type-appropriate particles of starship guts.

Also, on the note of turrets, the mapping system for determining what impact points the turrets actually hit seems a little...odd. I recall fighting a battleship rat with a cruiser at long range, and my artillery kept hitting the exact same point on the nose, over and over again. How about spreading out the effects of weapon impacts across the hull? Randomizing the impact points for weapon effects wouldn't work, because the impact effect would occasionally show up on a point on the opposite side of the hull. The client really needs a line-of-sight finder for determining which impact points the firing ship has a line of sight to, and to treat the model as a collidable solid instead of transparent when doing this calculation. This way, shots don't clip through the ship model.

Instead of converging on a single point, weapons fire would be spread out across the surface of the ship, in an attempt to hit as much of the ship as possible. It is blazingly idiotic to design a ship so that it can theoretically explode if a single point on it is attacked. Building with multiply redundant critical components is the only sensible design strategy for a warship, since it means that the enemy must destroy a sizable internal volume of the ship before it is destroyed.

Blanketing the entire side of the ship with laser fire or plasma bolts would look amazingly cool, especially when the ship gets into structure and starts visually disintegrating with each hit.

In a perfect world, we'd have ship models and submodels optimized to reflect missing/damaged armor and structure, with textures to match. The level of missing armor and structure would be congruent with how heavily damaged the ship is - and a ship with heavy structural damage and repaired armor would have intact armor plating on top of shredded and burning structure.