If There Was an EV4

What would you like to see on it. Weapons or ships.

I would like to see more 'Retro' weapons. Lasers, beams etc. as well as the Hawk from the origonal EV.

This post has been edited by IT 000 : 30 September 2008 - 06:58 PM

Oh, wow, a different take on the "If there were an EV4" wishlist (use the subjunctive)
I would like to see weapons actually fired from within a ship. Plug-in authors will complain about the requirement to specify coordinates in 3D, I think.

I can now compile the PPC binaries of Dawn of Infinity. i386 version to come soon. Unfortunately, due to legal issues regarded "free" content, openarena had to pull their data files, so I now have no data to test the engine with until they come out with the new version.

hmm.

perhaps better lighting. for instance, lens flare when flying around a sun, extreme flashes when in proximity to hyperjumping ships.
'spore'-like zooming and the ability to fly around a planets surface.
localised damage of ships. so you could disable weapons/engines/etc
my list goes on and on and on....
will keep updating as i think of them.

edit: ah cool! DoI is still active?

This post has been edited by Tycho : 30 September 2008 - 09:50 PM

I would like to see the AI act right with gravity, both positive and negative. I would like to see a 'Damage Variance' button, when you shoot the weapon it won't always do the base damage.

@tycho, on Sep 30 2008, 10:48 PM, said in If There Was an EV4:

hmm.

perhaps better lighting. for instance, lens flare when flying around a sun, extreme flashes when in proximity to hyperjumping ships.
'spore'-like zooming and the ability to fly around a planets surface.
localised damage of ships. so you could disable weapons/engines/etc
my list goes on and on and on....
will keep updating as i think of them.

edit: ah cool! DoI is still active?

Unofficially, yes.

I'd like to see that when you get hit by certain weapons, there is a slight static on the screen, and what I liked about EV is that some pirates appeared as shuttles to scoutships, just regular civie ships. The closest you can get in EV3 is Marauders, which never get anything weaker then a terrapen.

Things I'd like to see in EV4:

3-D flight, obviously. X and Y isn't enough; now we need Z, as well. Plus, it's easier to model in 3-D.

Cockpit view, where you fight or begin jumps.

Traveling around your ship would be interesting, but if you had an Auroran Carrier or some other big-@$$ ship™, it might get a little confusing/frustrating/tedious. For the smaller ships, though, it'd be kinda neat.

Landing at a spaceport really IS landing at a spaceport; you get to have a little figure of yourself move around and walk to the shipyard, armory, etc. Additionally, you can fight planetside as well (in fact, some missions may actually require it).

Building off the planet-side interaction, you can purchase weapons and armor for your crew, ranging from small blasters to miniguns that mow down people who attack. You could also master various abilities, ranging from psionics to just bein' handy with a wrench.

Better explosions. It's cool to see an enemy ship fly apart in sections, eventually being enveloped in an explosion that scatters the pieces far and wide.

A more realistic number of cannons/turrets/fighters available to each ship. ducks

That's all I can think of at this point, but it pretty much covers all the bases.

Search is your friend.

the dawn is my enemy

i'd like some elements of games like galactic empire, spore, etc in EV. so the planets/systems i take over are allied and you can declare war or peace on other governments.

another good game along those lines is starwars Empire at war

an the topic of EV4 i want a system to allow for multiple ships without selling any of them.
steak knives, non heavy system requirements.

By combining "non-heavy system requirements" with what people actually want, that means basically any machine with OpenGL that can stand the synchronization of frames.
Edit: I suppose I should clarify.
I haven't actually tested this, but the original two EV games were frame-rate dependent, which meant that they could be played on a very slow computer (although a certain amount of memory would be needed, and screen-resolution, etc.) and while perhaps unplayable from a player's perspective, it would at least run. Nova is frame-rate independent, which means it must be able to do a certain number of calculations in a certain amount of time. Although it would be possible to "slow down" the game for lower-end machines, it would cause jerky behavior. For EV4, the impact of the frame-rate canceling would be higher because the calculations will be more complex.

This post has been edited by Nonconventionally Creative : 02 October 2008 - 08:49 PM

If this game became a First Person Shooter, I wouldn't buy it.

Two things that I think would be great that won't happen (either because there won't be another game or because there would have to be an EV6 or 7 for them to happen) 1. The ever popular Garage to park all your ships, like Jay Leno. 2 Zooming, like Diablo 1.

@vast-deathmaster, on Oct 3 2008, 02:41 AM, said in If There Was an EV4:

If this game became a First Person Shooter, I wouldn't buy it.

me either

@vast-deathmaster, on Oct 3 2008, 02:41 AM, said in If There Was an EV4:

1. The ever popular Garage to park all your ships, like Jay Leno.

what would the logistics of the garage be? like, hire/buy a space for each ship at a particular spaceport/planet? or take over a planet and park them there. would you have to remember where each ship was parked? or more like pokeballs/capsules, carry them around in your luggage? would there be negatives like ships being stolen or damaged in raids?

i don't think making EV multiplayer is a good idea, but...
EVE Evolved: EVE Online's server model
http://www.massively.com/2008/09/28/eve-ev...s-server-model/

This post has been edited by Tycho : 03 October 2008 - 01:51 AM

I think that a limited multiplayer, in the style of Ares or Warcraft (not WoW) would not necessarily be detrimental. Letting a player set up a copy of the game to run as a server and invite his or her friends to play would be a little neat, I must admit. But I don't think that anyone really needs to have hundreds of people logged on at a time like that. A maximum of eight or ten would be ok in my opinion- a different style of gameplay. Special mission types could be created (simultaneous strikes, diversion raids, etc) and special plot-lines aside.

I have found my impression of multiplayer games changed recently. I'm a big fan of Super Swing Golf on the Wii, which is based on a multiplayer golf game on PCs. I recently had the opportunity to acquire a little POS windows machine and I put PangYa on it (being the game that SSG is based on). I hate to admit it but it's a lot of fun to play against other players. I think that the EV look-and-feel would be ruined if it were a massively-multiplayer-online RPG, but with a limited multiplayer capacity it could still allow for plot writing and other hallmarks of the EV series.

I would be in favor- I cannot express how much so- of leaving it a top-down game. Yeah, there's lots of eye candy to be had, but by limiting camera angle there is a lot of overhead that wouldn't need to happen. I know a lot of people out there may not be aware of it or care to admit it, but not everyone has 3.whatever gigahertz processors with uber 1337 graphics cards, nor has the means to get them. Nova runs well on my stock PM 8500, my upgraded PM 9500 and my 1 ghz G4, primarily because it does not have insane graphics requirements. People will still play this game even if it is not some kind of asinine first-person-shooter with spaceships attached. Plus, since someone has cited EVE Online, if we went in the direction of unlimited camera angles and whatnot we'd start infringing on their look and feel and be liable to lawsuit.

haha, i doubt you can be sued for making a 3D multiplayer space game. that'd just be ridiculous. if you could, then blizzard would sue the pants off warhammer online, and every other mmorpg would sue the pants off blizzard.

i agree that an EV game needs a 2D view. what would be the real point of going 3D other than "looks pretty"? it'd be a completely different game due to things like ship collisions, etc.

how would a LAN version of EV work? would games last minutes/hours/days/years? i don't see how it would work. game of golf, sure. but not EV.

in spore, there is user submitted content. it gets stored on a server and the game downloads them so you can see them while playing. i know a lot of you guys have made great ships and it'd be cool to have the look of ships change dynamically.
(note to self. online shipyard, defined in xml. accessible by EV editor apps....)

This post has been edited by Tycho : 03 October 2008 - 08:18 AM

From a technical perspective, LAN EV4 would mean translating the player's keystrokes into commands and transmitting them to the server, which replies with player-position stati and any other updates such as new ships entering the system. Any sort of MP necessitates some kind of "fair" pausing system, since other players neither want to wait while someone else is paused nor will be able to react quickly when that other unpauses, yet people would probably complain if there was no pause functionality. And if you end up allowing the player to jump between systems, that adds another bucket of unknowns. Chat, on the other hand, would be ridiculously simple.
Edit: also in response to "user-submitted content," my thought is to simply sync with the ftp server and display by category, with various sorting options. The plugin would contain meta-data that informed the game or editor of any dependencies as well as containing a description of the file.

This post has been edited by Nonconventionally Creative : 03 October 2008 - 08:50 AM

A LAN version would no doubt be very similar to a large game of Warcraft II, with the addional complexities of multiple systems. Not every system would be occupied at once, and by limiting player numbers system overhead is limited. I think if as much as possible is farmed out for the client software to handle, as opposed to the server handling everything, the game would run more smoothly. It does not take a server to calculate turn rates, speeds, unguided weap direction, etc. If the player is going in one direction, the client would inform the server and both the client and the server would work things out, with the server interfering only if there is another player involved. If the player fires a beam weapon there is no need for the server to be involved unless the client calculates that the beam will hit a target. In my opinion all a server would need to handle is the location and status of NPC and player ships and time-dependant or random things such as NPC ship placement, cron firings, chance events and the like that would need to be consistant across clients- leave the client software to sort out the details. If each client in such an environment sent out a package for each time a key is pressed- therefore each time a command is entered- it would be just as easy for other clients to pick up on them as well as the server. It could be prefixed with the system that the player is in- so players in other systems' clients aren't bogged down in their processing. Clients that are in that system would all return the same results and update their screens thusly, leaving the server to handle damages, dice rolls or whatnot in an analogy, and other must-be-consistant things. It does not need to feed all of the clients what they could come up with by themselves.

Hence why I am using Quake 3 as my engine for Dawn of Infinity. It already has a 60-70-player hardened, battle-tested, very stable multiplayer capability. It removes the need for me to write (presumably incomparably worse than quake's) multiplayer/network code, and from my experience playing other Quake3-based games, it works very well.

Personally I think the coolest thing you could do is;

A) Make it so when you capture a planet you get asked to create your own government and then you get asked what you want the planet and ships of the system to do. All of this you should be able to change too!

Make it so Planets have weapon firing locations like ships. As it doesn't move I think this could probably pretty easily be attained... I just imagine the anti aircraft fire from the planet's surface entering space from many different locations on the planet. Just having a lot of quad light blaster turrets taking out incoming missiles around the planet would be sick!