i like this statement of you:

For Pioneer I think it's more important to make a believable world and set the game in it rather than make a game and build a world around it.

but i know opinions are different, i see since long different derivates of PIONEER.

one will prefere this, someone else something different, that's fine to me.

perhaps in the end each wil profit of what a different branch is developing, still there doesn't have to be one pioneer.

even your statement could be interpreted different.

i hear in it something like: "what counts is a little bit of realism as far as sci-fi could be, story i write my own"

someone else might hear in it: "foremost it has to please and entertain the player, no matter if the behave is cheated"

i can only speak for myself and what i like, i can't see in someone elses brain.

i like to stay to FE2, newtonian physics and true mechanics, story i like to write my own. if something is "displeasing" well then i have to handle this as part of the game.

but i know not everybody is totally addicted to FE2 and most see it as a boring game, no one has to tell me, i know i don't have many friends who really liked it, i guess not a single one.

in fact, my first copy of FE2 i inherited from a friend who felt it's boring.

while i couldn't stop to play it, i was addicted to it from the first minute on.

yes i'm pretty sure he would appreciate something with a good story behind no matter if spaceflight and combat is halfaways realistic or not, that's secondary to him.

while i like exactly the opposite to that, story doesn't harms, but it's secondary to me, if trading is boring then trading is boring because it's boring.

to me this reflects sci-fi, because how is a trader characterized in a sci-fi story? a totally boring fellow who finds it's a good life flying weekly the same route. just like someone who picks a job as trucker driving daily the same route, safe, safe income, safe life. "ok, buddy that's your life and i understand your decision well. but i need daily action, something new, surprising, a challange of some sort, i like to construct and solve daily a new problem, if i can't have this i would rather tear down everything and start all over".

or like one stated not to long ago: "if i start a project it has to be perfect, no matter how long it will take me" while i said, "see and i'm the opposite to you, it doesn't have to be perfect as long as it's finished soon, i have to do all in one try, more or less, else it's never finished. when i paint a picture it's finished in one try or never, even if this try lasts 16hrs at once or more. i have to be addicted to it, "next day" i might dislike my own work and trash it". at least, in general, i can stay long to a idea or even longer to a person, this is really important to me, love never changes (but hate as well). funny no? am i right when i assume that therefore a perfectionist finds it easy to split? simply because it's maybe not perfect enough anymore? isn't it a little bit a mirror of the character one has? "i'm sorry" for not believing in zodiacs, but beeing such a fine example of a sigitarius 😉

"aim at the heart", erm yes, could there be aimed somewhere else on? the guts? i don't know.

and yes WW2 type of dogfight, why not?

 

I think that one thing that is essential for Pioneer is Newtonian physics. If this game turns into another high speed submarine excursion like Elite 4, I'm out of here.

@marcel

and you win? ok, i will have to download me a recent release before i can judge.

but i never had a chance to stand them since a while, either i'm such a lousy pilot...

ok, shields, yeah i guess hmmm.... wait... i guess shields won't work on a 10t capacity fighterplane...

i mean the direction i would have liked to go with pioneer is complete different to what we have now.

 

I must make a confession regarding my kills. I've been playing Scout+ with a combat autopilot installed. I've learned a lot from it, and if I work with it, operating the thrusters while it aims, I can eat Eagles for breakfast, Centurions for lunch and Denebs for dinner. I've learned how to do OK without it too.

@Gernot

still there doesn't have to be one pioneer

 

But you need at least one Pioneer that is functioning.

@Gernot

even your statement could be interpreted different.

 

i hear in it something like: "what counts is a little bit of realism as far as sci-fi could be, story i write my own"

someone else might hear in it: "foremost it has to please and entertain the player, no matter if the behave is cheated"

 

zzz;

i remember, that s2oDan and i debated about this very early, didn't i said already?

yep, he came off with this idea to have more advanced weapons, it would be reasonable yes, i can't deny.

personally i can't say how many space games similar to pioneer exist, i haven't the time for (even when i'm unemployed) and due to the work on my models i can only concentrate on one.

if it's not pioneer and if i have seen enough of my models, well then i go and play something complete different, a racing game, a simulation or strategy game.

back to your comment,

what i told him back then, and actually i hope i haven't influenced to much with my thoughts and view to things, is;

it's settled in a future which is more to see like the days of exploration, trade & combat with windjammers.

even more, i see it in a future where the technology for spaceflight is cheap, but often unknown or not well known.

a little bit like star-wars, many different tribes, some tribes use this technology but they have no idea how it works for real.

something like medieval in sci-fi.

now, one could counter that i builded this around the existing conditions, but and i hope i don't get misunderstood, i saw already frontier settled in such a environment.

i like this star-wars idea much.

of course pioneer doesn't have to follow this path.

it's what you (resp. the recent dev team) get out of it.

to the dogfighting and that you have seen enough similar and would wish something different, i guess what marcel commented on my thread suits for many, they would leave if this changes.

further, as a "veteran" (i had to laugh when one called me this once, "a veteran", ok i'm playing games since the 80's) i feel this is most fun, true most work in this direction

and probably something new would be fascinating, or could be? or if i thought long enough about, maybe there is no other way?

lame, if i compare again to a racing game?

but have games in which you can drive a vehicle which works automatic (sorta future car races) ever had good reception?

or isn't it true that exactly things like "classic sports cars" (or however named) found the best reception?

you pilot the car with as less help as possible from the machine, that's the challenge.

like you said this counters to the sci-fi environment in which you could expect something quite more advanced, things we can only dream of now.

(mind controlled fighters and weaponery? reasonable, but where is the fun in such?

ok it could be fun if one would have the possibility to counter this with a simple battleaxe)

but to counter this, apart from being a "vetaran" in computer games, i like sci-fi stories and one thing is clear as the blue sky, the best stories of classic sci-fi

are those in which the technology isn't to advanced, it might remind of classic adventure stories and is truely nothing else, but as soon as these stories grew and have been settled in a more futuristic world with advanced technologies which allow near to everything i lost interest in them.

the classic gunfight drama gets lost. man fights man, face to face, everybody can identify himself with the hero.

lets roll it up from a different side, we have in SW nearly unbeatable machines, without the jedi and their supernatural powers it would be lame, no?

the man who wins against a in principles unbeatable machine.

with what sort of weapon?

a sword!

no super long range heat seeking missile, no, a simple sword.

this is fantastic (in the meaning of the word).

in times of childhood and our sandbox games and we do often played war, we had to give ourselfes rules, one rule was "no superpowers".

what game if i say "here is my super-duper grenade with this i blow you all off" (yes, compare it to a nuclear weapon) ok, game over, fun is lost.

in other terms i can't play chess with nuclear weapons, it works only if every figure has it's limited powers, even the queen can be beat by a peasant.

but these are only my thoughts, maybe it would be interesting to find out if it would be fun otherwise, even if it would be maybe only to make clear,

"ok, we knew it all the time, it isn't fun".

edit:

after a quick cigi,

something really serious now,

isn't it fact that the man who dropped "little boy" suicided?

while have you ever heard that one of the marines who survived the "d-day" suicided?

edit2:

you both get a "thumbs up" from me, why?

because i like marcels statement

as well as i like your critcs, without critics no advance.

bye, bye, for so long from Gernot and his battleaxe.

opinions are quite different, i remember this from the very start of the project.
once i would have said, "which direction you (we) like to go?"
personally i feel, games with all that advanced weapon systems exist far enough, examples have been posted here.

There are no games combining those advanced systems with kind of gameplay Pioneer has to offer - both in the sense of open, choose your own career world and in the sense of Newtonian flight mechanics.
The closest there is is I-War 2, but it's not quite there and it's a deeply flawed game in quite a few ways.
 

hmm... repetiveness, a racing game is as repetive as a game can only be, nonetheless it thrills me each time i play one, i start to sweat at my steering wheel and that's what i like.

Correct me if I'm wrong (I never particularly cared about racing games - the closest I played for any amount of time and enjoyed it was Interstate '76 - it had you drive a car and even had a racing mission or two), but serious racing games tend to give player the ability to customize their ride, often in a very in-depth manner, and customizing your ship seems to be a big part of Pioneer like it was a big part of Frontier - problem being that ship and equipment progression were very linear in Frontier but we can fix it in Pioneer, hindsight being 20/20, shoulders of giants and so on.
 

would any "driving aid" make the game better?

Strawman. We are not talking about any "driving aids" here, we are talking about customizability. We are also not talking about game with sharply defined rules of participation and victory/loss conditions, but an open world where anything goes. Customizing your ship is an important aspect here as deciding how to tackle challenges posed by your chosen career path goes hand in hand with the choice of the path itself.
Customizing weapon loadout is as much of a part of gameplay here as everything else.

Currently we have large, heavy and (so far) useless missiles that probably won't become very useful even if they get an effective AI, because you get very few shots that occupy a lot of space;
unguided rockets that won't become useful *ever* because they are just as large and heavy in addition to being unguided - pretty much the only way you can hit anything with such weapon is when you fire in salvoes, which you can't and won't with current setup;
and vaguely energy based pulse cannons that are essentially the same gun with different amount of plusses and minor variations (mining, rapid fire, dual).
Other than guns being projectile based and useless mines being replaced by useless unguided rockets Pioneer weapon system is a carbon copy of Frontier's, except Frontier's was never very good to begin with and haven't we established that Pioneer isn't going to be Frontier's remake after all?
 

@marcel
and you win? ok, i will have to download me a recent release before i can judge.
but i never had a chance to stand them since a while, either i'm such a lousy pilot...
ok, shields, yeah i guess hmmm.... wait... i guess shields won't work on a 10t capacity fighterplane...
i mean the direction i would have liked to go with pioneer is complete different to what we have now.

It was a question to Marcel, but I can say it's perfectly possible to win in Pioneer (even without exploiting the chicken bug).
The learning curve is admittedly steep and you are guaranteed to miss a lot unless you manage to approach very close, but all you basically have to do is dodging and hitting. Getting close might also require some practice because it's easy to enter a sort of self-enforced orbit around target and be unable to close despite thrusting towards it (that's Newtonian for you - not always intuitive if you don't have visual frame of reference).

As for the shields, they are pretty much required for combat - not because of survival, but because of repair bills. I hope this aspect of combat economy doesn't get "fixed" because I think combat should be heavily disincentivized unless there is something in it for you.
 
 

if you like to counter repetivity, then i have one hint, don't think to much about weapons, this will change as much as the type of tires i mount to a racing car,
not more and not less.

Actually, both me and reality respectfully disagree with you on that one.

A tire is a device with narrowly defined purpose - there aren't exactly many different ways to roll along a stretch of a road - a weapon not so much. There far more different types of weapons than tires in the world.
A weapon that's great for long range combat may suck in close combat, a weapon designed against large, not very mobile target may fail to hit a small maneuverable one while a weapon designed against small, maneuvrable targets may fail to more than scratch the big, armoured one. Weapons may have different velocity, rate of fire, damage, accuracy, AoE or multiple projectile salvo capabilities, different ammo and heat economy, different guidance and targeting capabilities, and so on, and all of that factors matter in deciding what your ship will be able to deal with, how many and how.

Then there is deciding about the amounts of ammo carried. You have only so much space on your ship and any extra ammo will be cutting into your maneuverability, jump range and and delta-v budget. If flying a courier you might want to carry light self-defense armaments and minimal amount of ammo to give you necessary speed. but then you'll have to run from encounters if given a choice.
 

what counteracts to repetivity in a racing game (sorry for this lame comparison) are the tracks. that in example a "Barber Motorsports Park" is n-times more fascinating as a "Hockenheim Ring".

What counteracts repetitivity in any game is possibly large space of sequences of events that may happen during gameplay and doubling the number of dimensions squares this space - an awful lot of bang per buck. With ship configuration pretty much every dimension we add can be counted multiple times because both players and NPCs use ships to fight.

This means that adding a couple of another dimensions to ship configuration in form of having multiple different weapons, multiple combinations of those weapons (because of multiple hardpoints) and ammo on top of that will alone go a long way. So will adding a damage model and some directional defenses and indirect attack methods to saturate and bypass them (drones!).

Combinations rather than straight content.

It doesn't matter how you look at it combat isn't fun or challenging.
It is beyond my imagination how players here are able to defeat an enemy with near equal weaponry. No way!
The AI hits you because it has autopilot and you don't.

Combat is hard but doable, it just requires practice. It is challenging, but you're right that it isn't very fun - mainly because it's the same thing over and over.
 

So make weapons which you can hit easier or dumb the AI accuracy down or both.
(...)
A big problem with the AI is that it shots you from every angle.
If you try to get behind him it just turns and fires at you.

The problem here is symmetry. If the rules are the same for both you and the enemy, then weapon you will find easier to dodge is also a weapon you will find more difficult to hit with - you can't have it both ways.

And if you try to make rules different for player and the AI (for example by nerfing AI's damage, accuracy, or so on) then you have already failed at making any sort of believable world - you might as well make a sidescroller.
Enemy being able to "turret" is similarly just a consequence of Newtonian flight model, the best you can do is getting so close (while avoiding fire) that they won't be able to rotate fast enough, but this requires having more maneuverable ship.
 

@DraQ
No killing at first shot you still need many hits to destroy your target.

It doesn't matter. If you can't do anything to avoid getting hit or at least mitigate its effects, then you just have to look at ship configs plus initiative to determine who wins. No human factor involved, no gameplay involved.
 

And dodging projectiles reminds me of Galaga:). No serious there is no need for that. I don't have premium beta but what I see in videos, none of the weapons in Elite:Dangerous is dodgeable and it seems everybody have lots of fun.

From what I've seen most of the weapons in E4 aren't hitscan.
E4 also features "tweaked" physics where your velocity determines how fast you can turn around. Somehow.

We definitely don't want it in Pioneer, especially given:

For Pioneer I think it's more important to make a believable world and set the game in it rather than make a game and build a world around it.

Tweaking physics = bad.
 

So you end up accelerating, decelerating towards the enemy all the time and this finally ends in jousting.
Has anybody found a thrilling solution yet having dogfights without jousting and without WW2 style, or is this it?

I think there is a solution, but it isn't a simple one.

You can't really have conventional fighter dogfights in space because they depend on aerodynamics and gravity, but a lot can be done.

First thing first - currently there is no reason whatsoever to not face enemy, so the AI tries to do it at all times. There is also no reason to ever stop firing at your enemy, because at worst you'll need to cool down or fire at reduced rate. This means that the best thing AI can do is turret around facing you and firing - and it does.

Ammo management I proposed aims at making continuous long range fire undesirable (because you'll run out possibly without even scratching your target), so that the player and the AI (after implementing some hit probability assessment heuristics to stop it from wasting all the ammo from afar) will have to try and close distance to ensure that shots will count. This may also allow ships to reach angular velocities beyond their ability to keep up with the rotation so turreting will at worst become much harder.

Then there is damage model. Currently there is basically none. If there will be some proper damage model, the player will not just have to try to hit the target, but potentially try to score hits to different subsystems, trying to cripple enemy ship the most, and compensate for the damage he takes. This may mean trying to reposition yourself to hit juicy targets on enemy ships and reorienting yourself so that enemy can't hit yours - ships will no longer face each other all the time.

If there are any directional defenses (like in I-War 2), then orientation will play a role in bypassing them, directional defenses also make multi-ship combat more interesting because splitting attacking force can make them much less effective.

Then we have weapon systems. Multiple different weapons may take different tactics to use and counter effectively, and have different strengths and weaknesses. Different ship configurations may also have varied reliance on different subsystem's in combat - for example ship using fixed armaments will be crippled if you shoot its RCS blocks, ship with turrets will not, OTOH turrets can be incapacitated if you take out targeting sensors (basically taking out ability to select combat targets and de-selecting any selected ones), while the enemy relying on unguided rocket salvos will probably just shrug and pump salvos in your general direction hoping for one of the rockets to get you (especially if proximity fused). A ship with multiple different weapon systems can also require an NPC crew to use all weapon systems concurrently - for example one of you can pilot the ship and fire fixed armaments, someone else will fire turrets, someone will pilot drones and so on.
Speaking of drones, they make a good stowable robotic or remote controlled wingmen allowing one to use multi-ship tactics (like attacking from different directions to bypass directional defenses) even when alone.

Lastly, if you have remote control, why not have hacking allowing you to try and remotely control an enemy ship or drone?
 

There's another approach of combat with only automated long range weapons(laser beams,drones,missiles...), but for sure nobody would like that.

Yeah, I don't think it will work out in a game where you're pretty much a lone pilot in the hostile space - with enemies, possibly multiple ones trying to zap you across system you'd be instascrewed. Still I think what makes a good justification for close combat is piracy. We aren't really having all out military actions in Pioneer, we have a ship trying to gank another and run away with its cargo - you can't do it across system and you can't defend against it across system, because you don't know which ships are the enemy. It's more like carrying a handgun for self defense than military powers firing ICBMs at each other - sure the armaments are way beyond a handgun, but that's because you're flying a spaceship rather than walking in a dark alley. Of course this should shift pirate encounters from in system intercepts to attacks near celestial bodies and inhabited space, because that's where you won't be seeing a suspicious ship on intercept course from AUs away.

Of course there should still be some sort of HUD zoom functionality, because even current close range combat often happens at uncomfortably long ranges.

Oh, one more thing, reaction when taking fire. Projectiles may not carry much momentum but they carry a lot of energy. When hitting hull or getting vaporized by shields they should act as powerful, momentary maneuvering thruster trying to spin the hit ship around.

but i know not everybody is totally addicted to FE2

I am. but you know what?
FE2 already exists.
It isn't going anywhere.
There is no need to make it again.

And it isn't perfect.

More importantly now, that it's been made and played extensively we can make it better even without being exceptional game designers or some code gurus. Because we have the benefit of hindsight and much more powerful machines to run our code on, and don't have to write everything in bare assembler.

Sure it's difficult to deny that Pioneer will always be a sort of spiritual successor to Frontier, if only because "huge galaxy, realistic planetary systems, 1:1 scale and Newtonian spaceflight" leave very few possible role models, but the important part is that it won't be a remake and shouldn't be a remake. If there is something in game for no other reason than "it's how Frontier did it" then it should probably be dropped.

P.S.
Could you link that combat video?

P.P.S.
Sorry about triple post - quote limits.

And if you try to make rules different for player and the AI (for example by nerfing AI's damage, accuracy, or so on) then you have already failed at making any sort of believable world

zzz, on 29 Jun 2014 - 2:17 PM, said:

But first of all:

The combat should at least be playable.

Later you can finetune all the realistic aspects.

There is nothing to fine-tune if you have hacked it away.

Perfect accuracy isn't much of a game-breaker with projectiles at long range, though it would be nice to simply code a little bit of spread into the weapons.

Quick question on combat in Genesia, I tried my first assassination yesterday and it was a complete failure. I was around 2000 meters behind my target and was firing a dual 1mw pulse cannon at a planetary express (the old school flash gordon looking ship) and i might as well have been using a water pistol. Can anybody tell me why this is please? 😡

Quick question on combat in Genesia, I tried my first assassination yesterday and it was a complete failure. I was around 2000 meters behind my target and was firing a dual 1mw pulse cannon at a planetary express (the old school flash gordon looking ship) and i might as well have been using a water pistol. Can anybody tell me why this is please? 😡