Combat musings

[Brianetta]

robn wrote:


Ron wrote:
Stderr.txt reads: unknown token 'SOMEWHERE_SPACEPORT' at line 947 of 'data/lang/English.txt'
That's you trying a new build against Alpha 18 data. And this is exactly why replacement binaries don't work - the data versioning is intimately tied to the binary. The game will abort on startup with unknown tokens in English.txt, so you may very well have found your problem.
Ron.
Ron wrote:
Compile it for yourself, and test it. Upload it so more people can test it (myself included, thanks to the now much discussed technical issues).
It's not just the executable. Rob's already flat-out told you why yours isn't working - you're using a different version of the data files. If we upload an executable especially for you, it still won't work unless you're also prepared to update your data files.You have everything you need, in terms of compiler and build environment. You just need to make sure that everything you have from Pioneer is from the same version.[/hr]Oh, and I've been resisting until now, but for the record: The future of real life space combat almost certainly lies in missiles, because they're the only weapon which won't exert a reactive force on the vehicle that launches it (it uses its own reactive motor), and because a half-decent missile can correct its course en route over the thousands of kilometres that routinely separate vehicles in space. Don't play the realism card while looking for a dogfight. You need to put your case forward on the grounds of playability, rather than realism.

[WaveMotion]

Brianetta wrote:
Don't play the realism card while looking for a dogfight.
Quoted in agreement.As I've stated before in IRC, people who say they want a fighter plane-style dogfight in space don't really understand the fact that aircraft dogfights in atmosphere are the way they are because the direction you're moving, the direction you're facing, and the direction you can fire bullets are all the same. This is why it's useful to do maneuvers like getting a line of fire on your enemy from behind. In space this is pointless because your enemy can just turn around on the spot without having to change their velocity, or better yet just keep their gun pointed at you at all times. If you really want to play laser dogfights in space, you are looking for games with simplified, non-Newtonian ship physics, such as Oolite.

[fluffyfreak]

Ron wrote:
Stderr.txt reads: unknown token 'SOMEWHERE_SPACEPORT' at line 947 of 'data/lang/English.txt' That's the only thing in the file. Stdout.txt is blank. Opengl.txt is just a description of my video card driver. I believe these files were generated by Alpha 18, not the newly compiled but not running versions.
[url]https://github.com/fluffyfreak/pioneer/downloads[/url] the downloads, the two with your name on are the full repository, or alternatively just the exe and dlls... the filenames and sizes are a dead give away as to which is which. You'll just need the exe one and extract it into the same folder as the "/data/" directory.Now then, when you run that and it fails please - find the folder with those stdout.txt and stderr.txt files in it - there should be another folder called "model_cache", delete the folder "model_cache", not one like it, but that exact name only.If you've got old data, and it looks like you do, then you need to get rid of that old data before anything is going to work. Pioneer is "Alpha" stage software, it's only available for people to use at all because it's open source and both the content and format of the data changes regularly so old/newer data won't work with different versions.That appears to be the cause of your issues.Andy

[Ron]

Andy: Thanks. Good one - it runs perfectly on my system.OK, my immediate take ... I got them just a little too fast. Probably realistic for any such future weapon that might utilize such technology (assuming anyone develops high-energy particle weapons, instead of concentrating on focused beams as all modern indications would direct), but faster than what classic sci-fi portrays, and so a little faster than what most people will expect. Still, it at least looks like weapons fire now ... so I figure I got them a little too fast, not a whole lot. Changes to rate of fire, also ... it needed to be a little faster, but I might have overdone it by just a bit. I'm not surprised by this ... it was a first guess, after all.As for the AI, I was having little trouble maneuvering against it. It's not like the AI never misses, as we feared. I lost, but I lost before too, so that doesn't prove anything (except that I'm not 100% familiar with the controls). The fight kind of felt to be at long range ... not sure if this is a product of the weapons code, or just how the display is configured. (While that might be reasonable, it cuts into "playable" by a bit.) Might want to shorten the range on the guns by a bit, just so you can see your enemy better, for no other reason than just because people think you should. (Which number in those settings is the range? I'll try dropping it by a bit just to see how that feels.) Still, indications are that the combat AI is working just fine, and the fears of it going haywire with the new data seem totally ungrounded. That's good news ... one hypothetical problem nullified by just testing it.Damage? I have no real opinion at this point. Think I would have to play the game for a while to really have much data on weapon balance, i.e. see how different weapons hold up against various ship types and shield levels. The little fighter took quite a few hits, but it was from a small weapon, so not a surprise.As for "realism" ... considering the results of modern prototype systems at destroying aircraft, missiles, and even incoming shells with focused lasers controlled entirely by radar, I would really expect completely automated beam-weapon systems to be key to actual space combat. For 20 or 30 kilowatts and 500 pounds of hardware (and effectively zero recoil), you can render missiles or any other solid object a zero threat ... and that's with today's technology, and inside Earth's atmosphere. A couple of megawatts more, you can tear up ships with pretty much the same hardware. That doesn't make a game - there's nothing to play. So we don't want "realism" - we want "reasonable expectations". We want everybody to think "space dogfight", not "what the heck?" So it has to be realistic enough to create suspension of disbelief, but not so real as to take the "WW1 flying ace" feel out of piloting the ship. That's not like a major decision about the creative process - that's just good old-fashioned literary analysis of a work of science-fiction. How exactly to go about doing that, well, that's what this is about.That's my first take on the results. (Needless to say, I have no problem being critical of my own work, so I don't mind if you all are nit-picky as well. As long as you're critical of the work, and not just complaining that I'm a whining misfit. I know I'm a whining misfit - but I'm a misfit that does something, instead of just talking about it.) What does everybody else think? Agree with my assessment, or disagree? Any points I missed?

[Brianetta]

Ron wrote:
As for "realism" ... considering the results of modern prototype systems at destroying aircraft, missiles, and even incoming shells with focused lasers controlled entirely by radar, I would really expect completely automated beam-weapon systems to be key to actual space combat. For 20 or 30 kilowatts and 500 pounds of hardware (and effectively zero recoil), you can render missiles or any other solid object a zero threat ... and that's with today's technology, and inside Earth's atmosphere. A couple of megawatts more, you can tear up ships with pretty much the same hardware.
If you get me started on space realism, I'll bite... and I'll bite hard, and eat holes in your arguments. It's one of my favourite hobbies.Lasers are great, but ineffective over hundreds of kilometres. Diffusion is going to be an issue; the inverse square law is going to hurt you hard, because you can't get a perfectly parallel beam. A target twice as far away has your beam spread over four times the hull area. Three times further, and it's spread over nine times the area. Distance is the enemy of beam weapons.You can't just ramp up the energy levels, either. If you're using megawatts of energy, that means you're converting megawatts of stored energy into megawatts of heat - and don't pretend that your perfectly efficient laser will discharge all of that into a beam, because lasers can't work at 100% efficiency. Your weapon platform is going to get hot. Very hot. Losing heat is the biggest engineering challenge in space. An atmosphere can provide very efficient convective cooling. In space, you're going to have to either radiate your heat away, or heat some mass up and discard it. The latter isn't easy, because you don't have unlimited mass to throw away; normally, we call that stuff propellant, and like to use it for manoeuvring, and it's precious.So, you're going to have to radiate megawatts of heat into space. You're going to glow. You're going to have a fairly hard time not melting.Like I said, don't play the realism card. Present your arguments as benefits to gameplay. That way, you won't distract me and derail the thread. (-:

[Marcel]

Quote:
Uruboros said'Gentlemen! I shot the eagle!'
Right on, Commander! Realistic or not, this thing's gonna fly!

[Ron]

As for modern laser technology, the new systems are not a single laser - they're using mirrors that can be re-shaped on-the-fly, so that the beam is focused exactly at the target point. Like killing ants with a magnifying glass, if you could control the focus angle and put the hot spot at whatever range you want it. That way, the thing is only moderately warm at the source (i.e. not burning up the weapon itself, even running huge volumes of power through it), but where it hits the target, it can be focused as tight as desired (even a hundred miles or more out, and through atmosphere). U.S. military has been testing these things significantly, including a few field tests now - they're deploy-able, today - and most other major countries have at least been suspected of developing similar systems (although most of them have done a better job of keeping their secret weapons projects a secret). This has been a game-changer in terms of weaponizing directed-energy weapons ... just a few years ago, lasers were fine as industrial cutting torches or pointing devices, but the thought was that they could never really be weaponized (and I certainly thought so too) ... now it's looking like they're going to make long-range projectile weapons and missiles obsolete (by simply shooting down the projectiles and/or launching platform before they reach the target). This has been a pretty big rhetorical change among those who try to predict the future of technology - nobody really saw this one coming (probably because the current systems that re-shape the reflecting mirrors are so darn complicated - just a few years ago, they didn't even have a computer that could handle the job).One thing history teaches us is that predictions based on what we know now are usually thrown off by some major change that we didn't see coming. Lasers that focus wherever you want them to - that's just one example. If, say, somebody develops a superconductor that can be used as armor, and all energy-based weapons would be immediately obsolete and we would be 100% back to bullets. An energy field that will bend light efficiently, and space war suddenly would be all about stealth. (This too has been tested but is currently not efficient.) Which thing like this will happen first is just anybody's guess. (Fiction writers generally just make a guess on this, and then see where it leads them.)But back to the point ... realistically, future tech tends to be going toward more automated systems (apparently combined with speed-of-light directed energy weapons). That's no good for a game - my ship computer engages his ship computer, to see who has the most laser power and/or the thickest hull. So we can't use actual realism as it is anticipated to develop over the next few years ... it's what you would call "unplayable". What we want, from the perspective of science-fiction, is "suspension of disbelief" ... it has to look reasonable enough that people will think "space dogfight", not "what the heck is this?" For that, we need not "realism", but the perception of realism ... that is, weapons fire needs to look like what people think weapons fire should look like, based on their knowledge of bullets here on earth plus what they have seen in other works of fiction. Same way space ships need to look like sleek fighters (while it would be more efficient to use a lot of bulk freighters that were never intended to enter an atmosphere - re-entry and atmospheric flight are probably unnecessary luxuries for most commercial activities), because that's what people expect.Now, dropping that point, getting back to the job. What does everyone think of the changes? And my initial analysis of them? Agree? Disagree? Did I miss an important point?

[Brianetta]

I, too, look forward to a future where the laws of thermodynamics have been repealed.As to your game changes, I have to say that I'm indifferent (sorry).

[Ron]

The laws of thermodynamics are not being replaced ... just messed with in ways that make those of us (I include myself in this group) who learned physics back when it was comprehensible want to cringe, pull out our hair, and move to a log cabin in the forest. It started with microwave ovens ... making sane, analytical people want to scream "how in heck does this thing work? Space magic?" Then it was magnetic resonance induction - common in wall heaters (often termed a "heat pump") and some cooking appliances these days, but when you see it rigged up in a lab experiment, it messes with your head ("wait ... temperature is magnetic?") . Fact is, any sufficiently advanced technology (relative to your current level of understanding) is indistinguishable from magic anyway. Science fiction generally tries to set just at the edge of that, trying to play off what is already understood against what could, for all the viewer can tell, be magic.But I'm not kidding about those new laser weapons. The U.S.-made suckers look like a big search light, generally paired with a phased-array air defense radar (the same ones used for the Patriot air-defense missiles). They're freaky ... they turn the inverse square law on its head - a variable parabolic mirror that focuses the beam at whatever point and range they choose, so that it is relatively easy to dissipate the heat at the firing point but the impact point gets a LOT of heat at a VERY confined point (i.e. making holes in it... in a hurry). Nobody has ever seen anything like it before ... except for kids killing ants with a magnifying glass, who have always understood the concept. Just that now they have one big enough that people and missiles and planes and ships are now the ants. (cringe)Now back to the point ... indifferent? Yeah, me too, right at the moment ... again, I got them a little too fast, so it still doesn't feel right. A little less strange than before, maybe, but still not right. Question was, agree with my analysis that I got them a little too fast? Are there other critical issues that I failed to mention? Just want to see round two, to find out if my "little too fast that last time" assessment is correct?And what code controls range on the weapons (or time shot spends in flight, or however it is calculated)? The faster shot speed means that range is critical to the game play model ... just because humans need to be able to see their target to shoot at it. A simple enough thing to modify, surely, but I need to know what number measures that and what units it is measured in.

[Uruboros]

Consideration ...Always been the control of the territory is a specific human. So in future, the space will be a territory for the man. the question arises of how to do. Given the enormous distances, and limited acceleration to which we are forced, the electronic control will be crucial. (It is already at sea). So we're used to fighting in the frontier, in my opinion, should not be eliminated, but should serve where the "hypothetical future weapons" were not valid and enforceable.in a collision in Earth orbit, just a stray bolt of a few grams, to destroy a satellite or a shuttle. let alone a laser weapon!Yesterday to defend myself from an imperial courier without shields, I had to put in the middle of too many hits to bring it down. This is fun to play, but unrealistic. I think you correct1 Recalibrate the points attack / damage.2 Reduce the diameter of "pipes" lasers.3 graphics board if I can .... fade toward the tail pipe, or give the elongated teardrop. more pleasant ..Thank you! I admire youexcuse the strange translation

[ThornEel]

A missile vs laser confrontation! It's been so long I saw one...Lasers can have a tremendous range. The theoretical minimum for a the dispersion (because of diffraction) of a laser is a function of its wavelength and its diameter. (The formula is FinalRadius = 0.61 x Distance x Wavelength / LaserRadius)Which means that with a 10m UV-laser, you can strike more or less anywhere in the system. With a big enough gamma laser, you can attack nearby star systems. Even by being more reasonable with a 1m orange laser, you loose half your power at 40 million km. Of course, you may not have a perfect laser, but even half this distance is quite big.It seems to be very difficult to make efficient lasers. Which means that more than half the energy of your 100MW-powered laser will probably turn into heat. Disposing of this heat may be the biggest problem, particularly in space where there is no convection/conduction.Also, if the target is aware of you and with an agile enough ship, they can move at random and you will miss most of the time.Missiles don't have the same range limitations than lasers, but they can be detected, which means that they can be countered. However, you can shield your missiles so they will survive long enough to overwhelm the opponent's defence. You may not even need a warhead, as kinetic energy alone can turn a fluffy pillow into a weapon of mass destruction, or even a planet buster, close enough to the speed of light.The problem of missiles is also a big problem for ships : it's hard to make efficient engines. This kinetic energy causing so much damage, you have to put it into the missile in the first place by accelerating it. So if you want effective (basically, fast) missiles, you will need an oversized fuel tank, diminishing the final mass and its survival/damage potential.So you can have giant interstellar superlasers, or planet-buster relativistic missiles. Which one will be the more effective will depend on what technologies will progress faster. Or we may see both. Like beam-powered missiles. Or bomb-pulsed laser missiles.And I wouldn't rule out good old mass drivers too fast. Railguns have lots of practical problems, but they are still being developed, with more and more successful prototypes. Coilguns are still slightly out of our reach, but they may have less problems than railguns. And that's just about conventional mass drivers studied today, we may build funnier things later.Even if they can't put the same kinetic energy than a missile into each projectile (because of recoil)(unless you use expendable cannons) and 'dumb' projectile can be avoided more easily than missiles, let alone lasers, they can still cause damage, particularly if used en masse, like against incoming missiles. They don't have the same potential of evolution than lasers or missiles (they would tend to become missiles themselves, IMO), but they may still be used for quite some time. And a passive dumb projectile would be more difficult to detect in time.So, to the realism cracks here, what did I forget? I like to learn more, so please feel free to point out mistakes or missing things there.About combat in-game. After some time fighting against police ships, here are some ideas for improving combat :When fighting, you have to use mouse movement to have a chance. But to use it, you have to keep the right button pressed. It would be easier if the right button toggled mouse movement instead, or if there was another button to toggle it (then, right-click may temporarily deactivate it).Even the most nimble fighter take some time to follow mouse movement. While it is understandable for heavier ships, at least some dedicated interceptors should have more powerful side/vertical thrusters, to follow almost immediately cursor movement. It would make combats more dynamic with those ships.Default bindings are not exactly handy. First, we should use the left hand for thrust and right hand for orientation in default mode. Then, when switching to mouse movement, the left hand wouldn't have to move to control the thrust. Be it with keyboard or mouse, the right hand would always control ship roll, the left hand always thrust.When in mouse movement, keyboard orientation is deactivated. This is a problem, because there is no way to correct ship roll, which is a problem in atmospheric combat at the first turn. Having to stop using mouse movement long enough to correct inclination can easily be killingly long.As I now use almost exclusively mouse movement, I changed my bindings to control all six thrusters and rolling with the left hand, (with space and shift for vertical thrusters), but it is taking too many keys to be really handy, and there may be better ways to map it.Last games I played dealing with that (IIRC, Shattered Horizon and the combat prototype of Infinity) used the mouse right-button to change how the mouse affected inclination. Instead of changing where you pointed at, x-axis changed your roll instead of your yaw, which allowed for very instinctive roll corrections. This freed two keys, which made things more manageable, but here left-button is already used...Varied keys to target hostile (and other) ships like in most if not all Freespace-like games would also be quite useful. The seconds lost targeting a ship in battle can be deadly, be it with tab or by clicking the moving ship.Changing set speed with the mouse wheel would also be far handier than having to reach for the keys in the middle of a battle as well.Another interesting feature of Shattered Horizon is the fisheye radar. Almost any space shooter use the same 3d radar, which is horribly ill-adapted. Fisheye radar is a circle where relative positions are projected as if it was a 180° view. For example, someone right in front of you is at the centre, someone at the edge of your screen is half-way to the border, someone right above you is at the top of the circle. They use big or small circles depending on the distance, and plain circles when they are in front of you/hollow circles when they are behind you.Contrary to the 3d radar, this allows for a fast reading of the radar in 0g.Examples here and hereI think it was in the Infinity combat prototype, but I remember a function where the mouse middle-button zooms view, making targeting middle distance enemies far easier. As (dedicated dogfighting) ships should be more nimble, and probably projectiles faster, this could also be an interesting feature.

[Uruboros]

noooooooooo my viper armed to the teeth, can not fight a threesome with EYE ASP and shields. I need to improve!

[Uruboros]

These days it is done by testing the fighting ..... there is one thing that confuses me ..... change the color of the digits during the pursuit.The red color is great, but the purple and blue are lost in the cosmos.

[Ron]

Well, since I did not get a response on the question about weapon range, I guess we'll deal with that later.I've been having some trouble getting on this forum ... suspect my shoddy internet connection ... Anyway, same story as before ... somebody else has to compile it:https://github.com/RonLosey/pioneerShot speed now only 6 times what it was in Alpha 18, instead of 9x like in the previous test (which was difficult to play). Also minor adjustments on rate of fire. Using the previous test as a base, this should be very close to the desired look and feel (i.e. classic sci-fi movies, what people expect).This should put us in the ballpark of "playable" on shot speed and rate of fire. "Playable" not defined as "finished", but at least done in a way that gives the desired feeling (weapons fire, not chunks of neon signs, but also slow enough to not feel speed-of-light) and allows the game to be play-tested without every combat incident immediately ending the game in a fit of strangeness. May need a little fine-tuning after other things are set, but one variable should be ballpark of what is wanted.If the AI continues to perform as it has (i.e. at least adequate for testing purposes), then range is the next variable to discuss and work out. I suspect it will still be too long (i.e. hard to see your target) ... but that's the way this goes, fix one variable at a time until it's close to what is desired, then go back and fine-tune it and/or add in the more complex bits.Somebody please compile and post this ... everyone else, please try it and comment. This development process heavily depends on people trying it and reporting back on what they think. (I have a process for doing this - the creative vision on where you all want it to go, that I largely prefer to leave to others... just as soon as we get it somewhere close enough that it can be tested and commented upon.)

[s2odan]

You should actually be able to compile your own build now, the msvc 2008 project was updated so that it can actually build now

[Ron]

s2odan wrote:
You should actually be able to compile your own build now, the msvc 2008 project was updated so that it can actually build now
Roger that ... I tried to get the newest version to cooperate ... tragically, the outcome was not good. I'll try a few more things to see what I can do, but I'm not optimistic.Meanwhile ... as I said, "same story as before" ... somebody else compile and post this thing, so we can test it. (This should be close to right, this time.)And somebody tell me how the weapon range is calculated, since that's probably the next issue.

[Ziusudra]

The projectiles have a livespan which is the first number. So, they move forward at their speed for that long and then are destroyed.So, to have about the same range as they had before, but with 6 times the speed, the first number would be 1.3fThey also do less damage the older they are. This is not linear: at 50% of lifespan they do about 70% of their listed damage, when they've gone 99% they do 10%.

[Uruboros]

Ziusudra wrote:
The projectiles have a livespan which is the first number. So, they move forward at their speed for that long and then are destroyed.So, to have about the same range as they had before, but with 6 times the speed, the first number would be 1.3fThey also do less damage the older they are. This is not linear: at 50% of lifespan they do about 70% of their listed damage, when they've gone 99% they do 10%.
I missili a disposizione sono pochi e fanno poco danno in alpha 18.come può essere l'asp explorer con un missile solo? per un viper almeno 6, le navi più grandi probabilmente hanno bisogno di meno missili, in quanto hanno spazio per hull auto repair, shield, ecc... A me piacerebbe vedere in pioneeranche campi minati planetari .... mine che sparano laser,magari per difendere un giacimento di minerali o metalli preziosi. allora i missili servirebbero a qualcosa. per esempio meno monotonia nell'esplorazione, e un incentivo di armarsi per esplorare la galassia.sarebbe interessante, lo sò, molto fantasioso, dover difendere i propri siti di estrazione mineraria. Arrrg..... non sono programmatore

[Ron]

Ziusudra wrote:
The projectiles have a livespan which is the first number. So, they move forward at their speed for that long and then are destroyed.So, to have about the same range as they had before, but with 6 times the speed, the first number would be 1.3fThey also do less damage the older they are. This is not linear: at 50% of lifespan they do about 70% of their listed damage, when they've gone 99% they do 10%.
The first number ... the 8.0 in Alpha 18 ... got it. (I expected it to be a time value ... was not expecting the non-linear degrade, but OK, can work with that.) What is it calibrated in? Tenths of seconds? Some imaginary unit that only matters to this particular code? Just wondering, as that little detail could matter.Meanwhile ... I'll update the code so it comes out about the same range as it was in Alpha 18, and we'll go from there.(Somebody else still has to compile it, so it seems. Sorry about that, but I'm trying, guys, really....)

[Ron]

Guys ... I can't always get this forum to display, but when I can, I'm still alive ...Tragically, I've still been unable to sort out the problems with the code refusing to compile and run on my machine.Is somebody going to compile and post that latest batch of changes? I would really like to know both how it looks and what everybody else thinks about it ... it should be close to the look everybody would expect, and if I'm right about the problem, it should translate to the combat sequence being playable enough to play-test for further tweaks (instead of just being a "placeholder", as it was previously described).