Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Pretty straightforward observation here. One of the things I, and I'm sure many others, clamor for is glorious missile launcher graphics; when you fire 8 missiles at an opponent, you should see more than just a single blob of light race towards them. Or rather, you should have the OPTION to see more than just a single blob of light race towards them.

Missiles already possess a client-side graphic in that, when they hit, they do a little jinking-type manuever before smashing into the enemy ship. What I want to know is, what's stopping programmers from just adding in missiles that start from different points on the ship? Effectively, it's still calculated from the center of the ship -- just like turrets fired with half of your battleship outside optimal and half inside it all still are calculated as if they are right at optimal range, given the ship's center's location in space -- but the option to see missiles blast off towards targets would be awesome.

I'm not even asking for this to be mandatory -- just throw it in as an optional graphical tweak, like turret anims and, for that matter, projectile/laser/railgun graphic effects.

I was trying to find a cool picture of a Drake firing a volley of missiles, but go figure, no one has drawn that as fanart... yet. Still, that is my point -- CCP doesn't even need to necessarily add missile 'turrets', per se, but just add onto the textures missile points (see Crow, Caracal (look at the base of its "wings"), etc.) or use existing ones (Drake, of course). Again, all the math is still done assuming the center of the ship, the graphics just show (to the client, IE you) that the missiles are coming out of the hole where missiles are apparently supposed to come out of.

The only problem is with enemies behind you, or which you are orbiting, but it's not like missiles can't turn. I don't think people will complain that much that they get their hit logs slightly before the missile appears to hit, when they've been fine with turret hit logs appearing whenever they feel like it already...

1.) Again, just take advantage of 'flat spaces' on any given missiles ships. Peg in some circles like with the Caracal, where you don't need actual "launchers" like the Drake has (although these can likely be added readily to some designs, see Crow compared to Condor). I admit, this is probably the hardest part of the design.

2.) Then just keep the points of light, just have them come from different parts. I'm not too concerned about seeing the missiles, I just want to see them launched.

3.) Unsure what you mean here, are you talking about CCP's servers requiring more calculations or something? Again, this can be client side, just like turret effects; and now, with misses being added in for turrets, you can't make the claim that weapons' animations must be precalculated, and always hit the same spot, because they won't anymore. If you're talking about in-game CPU, why would this affect anything? It's just a graphic. That's like saying the fact that turrets can pop in and out means that they have more CPU use in-game, since they do more than just shoot now.

4.) Then keep it as it is, where each missile is, FOR THE CLIENT, an individual object/point of light, but so far as the server is concerned, that volley is one moving object. Same as turrets volley-firing, and again, now that they can be programmed to miss for the clients' graphics, you can't argue that this is because they're 'easier' to depict.

5.) Again, are you talking about in-game? I'm not asking CCP to add missiles to every ship, nor do I want them to; similarly, I'm not asking for any sort of rebalance or mechanic change at all, just a visual one.