Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Currently, every turret is another variety of Lock-F1-Damage, with miniscule mechanical differences other than range, tracking, capacitor use, and cycle time.


Lasers -- These should lose their 'cycle' mechanic, and become remote-projection of negative recharge. Whatever the mechanic is to calculate shield recharge, apply that in a negative amount to simulate a constant energy weapon 'burning' damage into the target. This would eliminate waste and 'overkill' on targets. Volatility on advanced crystals could be re-calculated by simply using burn time instead of cycles.

From a graphical standpoint, the laser effect would need to be constant, and follow smoothly whether it is currently tracking or not.

Artillery -- Should travel according to their muzzle velocity. Travel approximately 100km/s. Graphics should just barely show the projectile in motion, and maybe including a nicer hit explosion/effect would improve immersion. These howitzer shells are basically 'instance-propelled missiles' and the slower muzzle velocity than railguns and autocannons is to keep the payload in tact. Most of the damage here is from that payload, not the impact.


hybrids - these remain largely unchanged. I wouldn't mind graphical updates, but they would remain as the instant-application, single-impact damage platform.

Also, turrets have various damage types built into the ammo directly, with lasers', the longer range ammo filters out the thermal damge. Well, what if that was done automatically, instead of by the ammo just doing 80% em 20% thermal at all ranges, have an ammo with 100 damage of EM with 100km falloff, and 100 damage of thermal with 20 falloff.

Railguns work much the same way, what if instead of long range ammo 'just doing more' kinetic than thermal, the shell 'cools' as it travels through space, dealing less thermal damage.

Should I point out that eve is spaceships submerged into liquid?
Yeah I know... Warp drive creating drag effect...

Just saying.

OP it's about fun, go play something else if you want realism.

No to "realism" yes to different Weapon behaviors

Lasers like that would be awesome. Couldn't care less whether that makes it more realistic or not.

I always get annoyed in games how lasers are so often just a pulse, rather than a solid beam. IIRC FEAR used to have an awesome laser that was like this.

just imagine ur lasers missing out on several volleys of fire between targets due to lag :(

and with arties acting like missiles, thats a lot more lag

Actually, I prefer this to the method stated in the OP -- because this takes into account Rate of fire skills, modules and implants.

Ah, damage-over-time for beam lasers (and only beam ones, not the pulse lasers). How I wait for the day this happens

Updating to reflect current consensus:



Lasers: Keep their current cycle time, but get damage-per tick mechanics similar to mining lasers. The graphical effects of pulse lasers becomes a series of pulse, and beam lasers a steady beam. This more accurately reflects the flavor of lasers 'burning' damage over time.

Damage applied and tracking can be calculated exactly as it is now, per-cycle, so no mechanical or coding changes are needed except for when the damage is applied. (Divide applied damage by ticks, apply it each time)



Artillery Gets a couple second delay built in to impact. Shells cannot travel instantly or the warheads would be destroyed on fire, so inherently there must be a travel time. Tracking, damage application, etc. are all unchanged, damage is just applied 2-3 seconds into the cycle.




.// additional : armor repairing. On the topic of constant-effects instead of single-action, armor repairing should reflect nanites rebuilding the armor over time, not an instant plate of armor appearing out of nowhere. It would be interesting if the capacitor use would also be spread out over time, but it could be justified that a 'batch' of nanites needs to be energized before being applied to the armor.

Because not-reading the discussion and posting rubbish anyway is pretty fun.


As this has progressed, we're worked out a way to make this effect work, in theory, without changing architecture much.

load wise i doubt there will be to much of an issue, depending on how "realistic" they want it to be. the coding can either be tick based or pre-calculated, the latter being just a little extra data added to every package and a visual update while nothing gets changed in tracking, but the former would tenfold the amount of ticks and tracking/damage calculation on every laser turret, which might cause some issues.

i am however going to assume coders have tricks to make these kinds of systems work better.


on the armor repair thing, i would say yes. but i could also see them make that another module all together (like passive/active shield tanking)