These forums have been archived and are now read-only.

The new forums are live and can be found at https://forums.eveonline.com/

Assembly Hall

 
  • Topic is locked indefinitely.
Previous page12
 

[Proposal] Manual Flight/Combat Control
Author
Previous Topic Next Topic
Imigo Montoya
BreadFleet
Triglavian Outlaws and Sobornost Troika
#21 - 2012-02-09 23:47:00 UTC
One huge con that most people seem to miss out when suggesting manual flight control (there are SOOOO many), is that it would require a complete change in the fundamental networking architecture of the game.

EVE is made to handle the key requirements of a single shard MMO, which include:

  • Large numbers of players can gather in one place
  • Players come from all around the world (it takes much longer for their packets to reach the server and vice versa)

The implications are that network traffic between clients and the server need to be minimised (both in terms of packet size and how often they are sent back and forward), and there is an exponential increase in network requirements with each client in the same area (one new client doesn't just add one more lot of data to be sent out, it needs updates about its state changing being sent out to all other clients).

Manual control which would not only make yaw/pitch/roll (facing/orientation) manually changeable, but also significant to gameplay, would require significant amounts of data to be sent over the network and would also require that data to be sent a lot more often.

There are neat tricks that the network magicians programmers can do, but the fundamental technical design considerations are still there.

Homeworld is not an MMO, and therefore doesn't have the same design constraints so the comparison has no value.
Sephiroth Clone VII
Brothers of Tyr
Goonswarm Federation
#22 - 2012-02-10 20:45:36 UTC
Being that ships in eve have turrets, the only way first person freeform controls or gunning would work is if you could have multiple people commanding different parts of the same ship.

In the case of carriers, you would need people being able to command fighters.

But I would say it could add allot to the game, if it were possible. Eve has many good features and this could enhance it, black prophocy is a example of a game that has that one feature, but lacks many of the dynamics of eve (player driven content, supreme market, and destructible ships add a wonder to the game that drive it forward). So it would be great that eve could steal that one idea that makes black propocy interesting, and take it themselves.

One thought to give players some kind of ship for dogfighting, is to have frigs be able to do it. They may be large compared to earth based fighters but still could be relatively maneuverable. They need to be large considering they are self sufficent vessels that can travel in space long distance. Have non-turreted weapons for them. (small chasis and manuverable they have one disadvantage).

If the lag issue exists then that kills the idea, but still what if it wasn't a issue.


Though... this idea would drastically limit the size of fleets, if you had to have 9 people for every battleship. That unless from one gun you could point it manually and all the other guns follow to aim at the same spot. In that case could you autopilot the ship and manually aim the guns? Personally I would say firing guns is a bit funner then being space barge captain trying to maneuver something that has no maneuverability. If free flight is allowed can the ship can still be auto-piloted like normal, or follow directions in fleet, fleet formations?

Does this open up area damage on ships, attacking one area and direction does more damage then others.

Also would this revamp the skill system. Would your shots hit because you aimed right, or because you motion tracking skill is high enough, how would that interact. How would targeting work, would that be gone seeing that you could just point and shoot, or would jamming remove crosshairs, give static?

This could change the game.
Krios Ahzek
Royal Amarr Institute
Amarr Empire
#23 - 2012-02-10 21:19:43 UTC
Manual flight would be a pain for anything that goes less than 1 km/s

 Though All Men Do Despise Us
Previous page12