Its worth noting that we generally don't design things in a lot of detail beforehand. We discuss a lot of things in IRC and on the issue tracker, and usually come to vague consensus, but nothing is really decided on until code appears.

Factions are certainly planned, and presumably at least some of them will have some for of military presence. What that will look like is presently unknown.

The general consensus is that the player is considered to be a lone character with no particular affiliation - just a random guy in the emptiness of space. Based on that its unlikely that the player would ever be part of a standing military. That said, we have discussed the idea of having "wingmen" (ie your party) and being able to issue high-level commands to them, so this might simply be an extension of that.

Convoy missions are something wanted/planned. One particular model for that would be that you're docked with a large ship which has basic refueling and servicing facilities, and you are launched on attack.

We already have that to an extent. The bit we don't have is the persistence of working for a single company - right now you just take jobs from the board. It would certainly be possible to implement a "private" company board that you could special jobs from. You could almost implement that right now via Lua scripts.

Yes, extremely unlikely. Pioneer is a game about space flight. Taking you out of your ship presents a huge number of conceptual and technical challenges. Its better that we just stick to making a great space game and leave the shooters to other games 🙂

thanks for the quick responce .......yeah like i say ......i can dream lol 😀

Hmm I always thought that frontier's main enphasis was on choice. Infact you could even join the military in fe2 and ffe, athough in my opinion the missions were hardly worth doing. I think that not eventually including this element would be a bit of a step back. Of course, what really needs working on before anthing like that could be tackled is the combat.. which leads me to my question.

Is anybody thinking about what kind of direction to go in regards to the combat? I've been thinking and the more I think about how awkward high speed combat can be (we all remember the endless jousting battles) the more I think it would be better to avoid it completely. Perhaps instead of having enemies persue you at high speed through space, they could instead put more work into choosing where and when to attack. What I mean is perhaps ememies should wait to attack you when they know you have slowed down greatly, like perhaps around starports or within planetary atmospheres. Ambushes could be the most common forms of assault.

The thing that used to bug me the most in fe2 was the fact that pirates could hone in on you travelling at immense speeds through space, but as hard as I tried, I couldn't do the same. Have there been any ideas floating around at all, because since pioneer is already looking so good, it is a bit of a shame that such a big thing as the combat is being slightly overlooked. Of course, these are just ideas though, so take them or leave them. Sadly I am a mere mortal unable to program, and I know how annoying it can be when people unable to have any real imput start making demands 😉

The endless jousting matches were not because of high velocities, they are inherant to unskilled pilots lobbing at each other in a newtonian physics engine. In original frontier and FFE they were also unavoidable due to lacking lateral thrusters, which meant that the neccesary maneuvers to make it interesting simply were not available. This changed in JFFE, where at least YOU had lateral thrusters, while the enemy AI still didn't use them. As a result, if you had a slight edge maneuvering wise and knew what you're doing, the enemy didn't stand chance (this was slightly mitigated by neccesary information like relative speed and distance not being available on the HUD, but still).

Fact is, in a newtonian environment with both people knowing what they're doing, the initative in a dogfight is always with the higher maneuvering capability. If you know how to use it, you're dictating the fight, even against multiple oponents. The AI currently doesn't really know how to use it, which still results in jousting matches if the opponent has a higher maneuverability. With equally capable ships, jousting is almost inevitable, I'm afraid, that's just inherant in the physics. In such a situation, the bigger gun or the bigger number of missiles dictates the fight, and it's short, and brutal, and intensive.

This can make combat rather frustrating: If you write a good AI that can use higher maneuverability to its advantage, new players don't stand a chance. If you make the AI more aggressive when maneuverability is equal (i.e. not holding back with the missiles, and thinking about when to use its gun so it doesn't overheat), new players don't stand a chance. If you don't do those tweaks (the first one is pretty hard to do actually), the AI doesn't stand a chance against an advanced player.

Making it a difficulty option has its own problems, as new players will complain about jousting matches on low difficulty, and about being mercylessly slaughtered on high. Still, this might be the best way to go.

But usually, the first thing to tell a player that complains about jousting, is: You don't have those missiles under your wing to look cool. You have them to overwhelm the enemy before he even knows what's going on. Don't hold back on them!

As far as I remember, the autopilot in FFE could do the job. The hard thing was getting a target...

But you're a modeler. Last time I checked, this project had quite a lot of programers, but a bit of a lack of good modelers. It shows in many of the ship models (actually, more in their textures), if I may say so. I'm sure if you contribute a few models, the Devs will gladly lend you a few ears 😉

Another point to consider about combat is turrets. Or more generically: attachment points.

In other games you see ships of varying sizes, though usually larger ones, adorned with rotating turrets and missile pods.

That's something that would be quite nice to see in Pioneer too I think as it seems strange that they're not there already.

On the authoring side it could work like the existing engine/thruster locators with a list of places and orientations of where things can be attached to the outside of the ship. It would probably be easier to do from a modelling package like Blender/3DS Max etc but perhaps we could extend the modelviewer to support it? It already looks like it has ray casting support.

For gameplay reasons we might require that the player owns a special battle computer or something, which might actually be illegal in some systems.

Hmm, lots of implications 😆

Just for you I've uploaded a tested, and stripped down, version of the Military Drives additions for you to try.

https://github.com/fluffyfreak/pioneer/downloads

Could you try that please?

Andy

yes but we have to remember ..games need pick up and playability to appeal to a wider audiance ....i know a few scifi fans that are discoraged by the controll system and the wide learning curve ....and forcing people to learn shit just because you yourself are good at is never a good idea ..........tbh its this difficulty that makes universal combat (the game) so shite despite having some excelent ideas

having said that i love the newtonian model ........it forces you to change tactics dependant on ship size ....i can imagine this happening anyway ...with small fighters jousting and leviathans lining up and broadsiding each other .......but having said that ...the tactics shifting for a ships class would still be their for an oolite controll method anyway........the oolite forces you more into flight sim territory .....engaging using scizzor moves trying to get on each others six (breaking till someone overshoots is a fave of mine lol) ....and still your larger ships would need to broadside (or just get them in range of the long nines ..depending on your pleasure lol .....i still think of big ships like old galleons in space lol)

so here are some ideas of mine ....feel free to ridicule at leasure

1 ....have elite mode/oolite mode selectable

elite has newtonian ...oolite gives instant stop/direction change capibilitys ......but make oolite mode A ...only reach deadly rank or somthing like that ....and B make playing in this mode net less points per kill ..just to give them the incentive to learn to fly like an elite

2 .....upgrade to the taccom

i find that my nav comp always wants to target the ships in red ....but it wont automaticaly hone in on it ......it just flys towards the green even when the red selection is the only thing selected, ..so how bout this

A ..the red sight focuses turrets in that direction (if the ship has any)..the green focuses the craft .....so you can command turrets without actualy sitting in them and still controll the directon of flight/ forward gun mounting .(this would be possible because large ships have a crew .....and this way i wouldnt always feel like im paying them for doing fuck all)......if the ship dont have turrets ..you cant select a target using the red sight, ....this means you can use the autopilot to fly towards an enemy automaticaly whilst you concentrate on arming torpedoes/missiles (yeah torpedos would be effing cool lol) and firing the front mount (all fingers and thumbs me) ...of course ...autopilot kills score less than a manual controll/set speed one does .......just to give incentive to learn to not use it ....it feels a bit like cheating but its a handy trick to have in your arsenal tbh

B improved interface .....i could never get the hang of the combat computer in FFE .....thought it got in the way .....so it would need making better if this feature got added

3 .....improve the message system

all to often i find i bring up the weapons controlls only to find that by the time my mouse pointer gets to click the missile/torpedo (yeah torps would be cooler lol) the scanner has changed because the game wants to tell me im at red alert again or getting fined sommore,

i find that once im under attack ..i know and dont need reminding ...so why not

A have the console simply light up differant colours for differant situations possibly with a short siren

blue = all clear

green = ships in this sector are broadcasting a freindly signal (this could be used by pirates to suprise you so be careful)

orange = ships in this sector have taken up hostile positions towards you ....please state your intentions and manifest log

red = red alert ...you are under attack ......hostlies are powering up weapons .......raise shields and prepare to fire back (powering up shields and weapons ...another cool idea lol)

an orange alert status is taken ...either by police after you fire a weapon or by navy ships in communist/imperial systems ....especialy if you carry a federation ID signal

orange status prompts comms to open up as they hail you ...you can then respond ...telling cops it was an accident ..or to go to hell, (all to often i have been blown out the sky because i couldnt open a channel quick enough .....perhaps they should hail you first)

perhaps their is also a button on the console that allows you to state the signal that YOU broadcast personaly .....enabling you to turn the trick pirates will use to jump you to your own advantage

B .....simply putting all comm messages somewhere on the screen not tthe scanner would reduce the faffing cos you cant fire a missile ....cos your computer wants to constantly update your fine status/ tell you your under attack .....so it keeps annoyingly switching ........i can still see through the text so its ok just for one quick message update and it grabs your attention better .....plus it stops the switch

these are just my ideas ..take the good and dump the bad ....debate about the rest at your will

oh ...and if anyone needs skins for their models give me a shout

This shows a distinct lack of understanding of the scales in Pioneer. If your ship flew like one in Oolite, it would takes months, possibly years, to fly to another planet. It would require a complete rewrite of the autopilot. It would require that we stop all planets and space stations. Did you realise that Earth is travelling around Sol at 30km/s? Everything in the entire game is in motion relative to something, because it's modelled with Newtonian physics.

You can't just fit a switch to that. You'd need to rewrite the game. Put simply, people who would like to play Oolite are going to have to download it.

As Brianetta explained, Oolite mode is impossible. The universe in pioneer is not abstracted enough to allow that abstract a flight model.

I do agree with most of your interface suggestions, though. IMHO it wasn't the best idea to copy the Frontier interface, as I really think it was already outdated the day FFE came out (except for the 3d scanner, that was still ahead of its time), but I already ranted about that once here, no need to do it again.

The combat computer in FFE was broken. Everyone agrees that it had no use whatsoever 😉

What makes universal combat so darn difficult is blatant lack of documentation and tutorials. Once you get the hang of it, it isn't that complicated. Now, if Pioneer documentation is going to be as good as the developement documentation so far, I think we'll have nothing to fear in that sector, but it's good to keep in mind.

Problem is, If you have a newtonian flight model, you have to get the hang of it. A bit of flightschool somewhere maybe, but weather you play Vega Strike, Evochron, good old I-War or pioneer, the rules are all more or less the same (just that in pioneer, relative velocities aren't artificially limited). Some autopilot help might be of great help here. a match velocity AP that does nothing else than trying to keep relative velocity at zero while still being overridable by user input (so you can maneuver, you know), for example, should be a good help for most beginners, and even apreciated by more expierienced people if it can be engaged/disengaged easily. My Evochron flying was mostly based on letting the automation take care of my velocity while aiming and kicking it out again when evading (and firing missiles all around me, 'cause evochron is somewhat less forgiving), something like this should work quite nicely in Pioneer too.

aaaand, a hundred times this.

Currently I have seen the interdictor and the flowerfairy in the game that both don't have skins, although I'm not sure the flowerfairy is worth the effort.

Imperial Courier and Trader have something, but it's rather bland. They have pretty nice models though, a good skin would bring them a long way. Anyways, no pressure...

This is coming. The scanner is getting buffs for alpha 16 and now the messages are really pissing me off. Annoying a developer is a guaranteed way to get something changed 🙂

im on em .........i like the look of the flowerfairy ......so im working on giving it specs more to my likeing with a new name lol .....just for me of course .....but yeah i will have a go at retexturing those ....now if anyones got the texture map ...or an unwrapped version of the model (since i cant find it in game) it woild be a help but it dont matter

never said i understood lol ....im just offering ideas ....i totaly forgot about the planets.. tbh......but their has to be someway of giving the game more simple pick up and play ....its bloody frutrating sometimes

Is this really the case at the moment? FFE actually required you to fight, so it was indeed difficult to learn Newtonian combat on the go while you had three dudes shooting at you—not to mention the countless cases where you explode within literally a couple of seconds after they open fire. Pioneer gameplay, on the other hand, doesn't need anything but autopilot for most things, so it's basically point-and-click.

That, though, is a situation that will only last until the need for combat is put into Pioneer, most likely in the form of pirates. I have to admit that I tried the combat scenario in "start new game from debug point" and found it next to impossible, even with the setup used for FFE, pointing with the mouse and controlling thrusters with the left hand. I never got all that great at fighting in FFE, and here on top of that you have non-instant weaponry to deal with. If the game actually starts sending pirates after me at some point, I'm going to be hearing a lot more of that Pachelbel's Canon, that's for sure. Fun? Quite possibly. Frustrating? For many, certainly.

I really feel that this is one solution to consider. If you think about it, Elite, Frontier, and all the games that take after them only offer one real threat to the continuation of your game: dying in combat. That's literally the only way to game-over if you know how not to crash your ship; other than that, surviving is about how efficiently you can grind up your money so that you can make yourself safer from dying in combat[1]. There is definitely a box here that we—maybe not the Pioneer team, but definitely somebody in the space sim community—can be trying to think outside of. Does it make sense that if pirates didn't exist in space, we would be able to keep flying around forever? Does a space sim need pirates as a device to partially enforce our mortality[2]? It would be intriguing to have instead a Firefly-type situation where you needed to scrounge up all the money that you could, just to keep your ship going. It would also be a radical departure (too radical for Pioneer?) from the Elite/Frontier model where there is almost no economic pressure on the player, and all the player needs to do to buy the best ship in the game is to grind long enough.

And now I need to shut up or write my own damn game. 😉

_________________

[1] The Elite games have a weird difficulty progression where the constant upgrading means that the game gets easier over time, not even considering increases in player skill.

[2] The whole existence of pirates in Elite and Frontier is totally absurd: they float around space blowing up newbies for the negligible amounts of cargo they happen to be holding, only to be slaughtered wholesale by the first competent pilot to come along. I always wondered why they stuck with the piddling returns and inevitable death of pirating when there was so much more money to be made in even the most innocuous trading.

The Interdictor and the Flowerfairy are scripted models. They're both in /data/models/ships.lua. Look at the Ladybird Starfighter for an example of how to texture them. Texturing the Ladybird was the first thing I did for Pioneer. I haven't gotten around to texturing the rest of the default ships in that file. I'm sure you'll do a much better job. I was thinking of using the Sidewinder's hexagonal texture on the Flowerfairy. There's a kind of flower effect with the different colored hex looking a bit like the center point of the flower. That thought is as far as I got before I started messing with the stations. Have fun! 😀

The flight model in Pioneer is quite a bit more advanced than in Frontier. You will have more success if you learn to use all six thrusters well. Jousting doesn't work 🙂

That said, combat is one of the parts of Frontier that needs the most work. Basic combat flight is mostly done, but a full combat system (if you like) needs to be done. The AI needs tactical knowledge (when to fire missiles, when to trigger the ECM) and the player probably needs more information and tools available. How ships actually join and leave combat is another huge problem that we're only just starting to get a handle on.

So don't worry too much - combat will probably look very little like what's currently there.

These are good thoughts. I quite like the idea of having to scrounge for parts to keep your ship alive. That's the sort of thing I could expect you needing to do in hostile outer systems, where the opportunities (and profits) are high but things are dangerous and quality repair services are hard to come by. Ship parts should presumably be cheap and plentiful in core safe systems, but the profit margins should be close to non-existent.

We very much recognise the need for a proper economic model. Its still undecided as to what exactly that looks like.

The next question we should be asking after what you've written above is what should the goals of the game be? Obviously there's no hard endpoint, but we can wonder why is the player doing what he does? Is it to accumulate wealth and perhaps buy a moon one day? Is it influence? Fame? (medals/combat rating). Infamy (again, medals/combat rating). What other options are there. Keep in mind that they're things we have to be able to reasonably put into a space game - we don't want to become The Sims 🙂

I'm all for running costs. Profit is easy, and in the late game your only limit in Frontier was the allocated size of your cash integer.

Big ships shouldn't just cost a lot to buy, they should be almost prohibitively expensive to run. Crew should sap your funds, maintenance should be frighteningly expensive - to the point where a player might even want to consider a downgrade.

In Frontier, the growth of my ship was exponential and self-fuelling; the only limit was locating crew, and that was an annoying way to slow me down, not a fun one. Once I got my Panther, though... well, crew costs were more than paid for on each run, and the only real decision I had to make was how big a gun to put in each turret, and how many shields to throw into the hold, leaving room for cargo.

Even the 4 Cr. docking fee in Sol stopped being an issue after the first couple of cargo runs in the game. Perhaps bigger ships should pay bigger berthing charges, too.

It's the reason I wrote the drive breakdown and servicing script. Perhaps, there, the bigger engines should be much more expensive to maintain than they are right now.

@Brionetta, I think the economic pressure shouldn't be so strong to become the major factor in the game (It's a space simulator, not an economy simulator after all), but otherwise I agree with everything. Maybe maintenance costs could be modified by a difficulty setting.

As for introducing more detailed running costs per se, I think that should go hand in hand with a detailed damage simulation, which would increase the fun of pretty much all aspects, from combat to exploration. Ships parts break down over time, and obviously a lot faster when they're getting shot at. Having expensive repairs for large ships would also be a good motivation for players to not turn their trader into a battleship, because getting shot at in a smaller, more agile vehicle is so much less expensive.

As for combat itself, since we're already talking about it, here's two suggestions running through my mind. First to consider is that almost all sims with a newtonian flight model have active targetting. I.E. the gun can swivel and aim itself at a target within a certain angle. I think this would be a very good addition to pioneer as an upgrade. I'm thinking of a narrow angle carriage and wide angle carriage. Make them weight a few tons, and the wide angle carriage a few tons more so that building them into a small ship that already has a maneuvering advantage is impractical, but at least a narrow angle carriage should be among standard equipement for anything that isn't a pure fighter craft, right there with the gun cooler.

Then there's the ECM, which was really broken in Frontier and FFE. Having a dead-certain countermeasure against some missiles while having zero against others was too easy a solution. Rather, ECM's should have a certain chance to bring a missile down. The better the ECM, the greater the chance, up to somewhere around 90%. Missiles have a certain resistance factor that can diminish those chances, so it's not an all-or-nothing affair. Plus, if there are multiple missiles, the ECM should only be able to bring down one at a time, so that overwhelming an opponent with a missile barrage is a viable tactical option (instead of being frontierian roulette, because there's a good chance that they'll just blow up in your own face)

whilst were taking ship parts and paying for crew ......expanding on my alert status and new targeting ideas ......as i said before it would be nice if the crew that drain your funds could actualy fire the turrets for you (you just select the target and presto the turrets are manned ......in a bigger ship this is how it works anyway and it takes away the frantic trying to move the ship whilst manning the turrets thing ....

plus if your talking ship parts ......would it be an idea to be able to select witch parts of a ship to target and damage ......that way you can target a pirates engines and take him out ......of course the same can happen to you ....so perhaps that same said crew can be used to make inflight repairs to certain parts ......speeding up your hulls auto repair (or maybe making it cheaper to not have one)

hell you could use gunners skill and repair ability to sift the wheat from the chaff when hiring crew members for your big ship ........no one wants to have a gunners mate first class phillip asshole as their gunner do they lol

im just thinking ..im fed up of paying these guys for simply needing them to fly so I can do everything else lol ......it dont have to be overly complicated .....perhaps just an assignment button on your inventory.......but it could work

The ships we have currently aren't really big enough for such pin-point work, and it would need a lot of ship-dependant scripting (defining damage areas). Could be done, but I don't know how much it would add to the gameplay.

I just had the pleasure of meeting an imperial courier on the road a few minutes ago, and from the encounter I can kind of conclude two problems with combat that could be solved pretty easy, I think.

First, Ships take too much punishement. It prolongs dogfight too much, even if there's just one and he's unshielded. Fighting against smaller craft takes longer because it's tough to hit them, I can live with that. But the sheer amount of punishment that courier soaked up was a bit exagerated.

Second, heavy ships have too high turn rates (indeed, so far I have been unable to make out significant differences in turn rates between individual ships). There goes the main advantage of small craft, and that's why currently even fights against a technically slower opponent still turns into a strafe-fest. I think we should tweek those turn-rates a bit.

Completely unrelated, I just died the most awsome death after disposing of that courier: The starport I targeted to land was pretty exactly on the opposite side of the sun, and the autopilot of course first aproached the star to then maneuver around it. I got a bit too close however, and even with dumping all my cargo my mains didn't have the power to pull me out of the gravity well 😆

I made a slow ass-first dive into a star (I guess I could have deactivated the autopilot and instead of the frantic "pull away" maneuver tried to sling myself around it, but it was too fascinating to watch).

Take a Hammerhead out for a spin. Literally. Once you set it going, stopping it can be hard work, too.

My scout missions are done, where should I upload it? I don't have any webspace...

You could make yourself a GitHub account, fork the Pioneer repo' and then you've gone the full developer route 🙂

Otherwise I believe you can just attach the script to your forum post with the "upload attachment" tab beneath the message window.

Ah, I searched for something like that, didn't see it down there.

Anyways, this will need some testing, proof-reading, and translation (tested it pretty thouroughly, but you never know). It also doesn't work with Alfa 15, it needs at least the nighly build from 2. November.

I apoligize in advance if this not not the right place to bring this up, but I was reading a previous discussion about relative speed for ftl jumps. What if jumping to a target with relative speed meant having to first attain relative speed before jumping? This way, jumping to a station or planet could be done at low speed or when stationary, but intercepting a moving craft would take a little work? My thinking is, if a target can be identified by scanners BEFORE jumping, so should its heading and velocity, allowing the player to build up speed before attempting to intercept.

If there was a built in level of error in where the jump leaves the player, having a high relative speed when trying to dock with a station could be disasterous, as could jumping into a group of pirates when moving slowly.

Say, has anyone ever succesfully set down on an asteroid? I'm sitting there alright, but altitude is still shown as 29m and I don't get a landed message (and my survey doesn't start, of course. Just my luck that the first code test happened to pick an asteroid as the target!)

I have. It's not easy. Are you actually landed, or just buried in the surface? You can only land if your wheels are pointing toward the middle of the asteroid, which can be a real bugger to judge.