A few more ideas

Ok, been little busy lately with second chance and ship creation.

Maybe we could get a few more ideas in for epic.

The possibility to insure your ship against destruction, and not losing everything. So basically this: You take up an insurance of for ex 50% 80% or 100% of the ship value, and if u get blasted to smithereens the insurance company pays u back the percentage of value u insured your craft for. Dunno if this is possible.

A kind of learing curve. you're part of a certain race, but lets call it faction for the sake of simplicity. Now, you choose to be with faction A or B. if you chose for faction A u automatically get a rookie ship whith which u can start off in the world, and a set of basic skills.

-Engineering
-Gunnery
-Mechanic
-Industry
-Spaceship command

now the nice thing about this is: you have to make money by doing missions, mining or trading. Some ships are crap for mining, they cant install the mining laser, but are good for cargo running. some have a low crossection on radar, fast and agile. Good for interception.

The problem is, that if you want to upgrade your ships with new weapons, systems, etc... or for that matter buy a new ship to fly with,having the money just won't do it. you need to upgrade your skills needed as well (which just takes time) and start studying to upgrade to the next level. Basically this is a timer function that starts to count down as soon as you activate it. Needless to say: higher levels take more time.

To fly another corporations ship, you need to go to that corporations space, buy the basic flight guide and start studying over again from scratch. This is only necessary if you want to fly different race ships, and you have a collector disease (like me). Some ships, like different types of shuttles for example, are accessible to all corporations.

Now through the market interface you can buy everything at the blink of an eye. The problem is that if the item is not at your location (amazon was probably bankrupt, and downloads were forbidden)you will need to go there in person and grab your goodie, whether it's a book to acquire a skill, a gun, an upgrade or a new ship.

For example: you want to fly a diff. corporation ship. You have a search function that shows you the location of that flight guide in the whole system u are in. You find a copy of it at your station ? great, you can just drag and drop it from the items list in the station to your item list, and start practising your skill. Mind however (one skill at a time can be learned).
If its not there, it will show up on a kind of reminder list, where u have left it, and thus where to pick it up when u need it (station, constellation, region, starsystem). You can also contact a courier (human player/ ai player) to have it delivered to your place. The courier option is good of course if you have to get across hazardous space to pick up ur goodie and you don't have the necessary hardware.

The reminder list (or assets list), tells you what you ever bought, so you won't forget you have bought a nice destroyer in Bujumbura, that cost a fortune, but because of the vastness of space u've forgotten the correct spelling of the place and all that money just washed down the drain because of sheer bad memory.

So if you bought a new ship in paris, you can't just fly your old ship to new york, and use your new ship there. You will either need a courier to fly the ship for you (human players/ai players), or you will need to take a shuttle (which are non combatant) from your old base, fly to your new ships location and sell the shuttle.

Now here's another thought:
If it is possible to start a corporation (this takes a monthly fee of virtual credits out of your wallet) and you can hire a hangar bay and an office at a space station heres another solution: The CEO has the key to the hangar. So if you have access to a hangar in the station where you bought ur new ship, you don't need to sell your old one, u can just leave it at the corp. hangar, and then fly back to your HQ and have a chat with the ceo, so he will reimburse you your shuttle with no loss of profit.

The possibility to start a factory, and create everything: from weapons systems, to ship upgrades, to ships.

Another idea. There are human player corporations. Dunno how far we can go with AI into this (probably Grandpatrout has got a huge headache by now).
You can join a corporation, and get a new ship if you don't want to scavenge asteroids on your own in the beginning. Now heres where it gets interesting:

Situation A: You are in safe space (no pirates or thieves)

Lets say your cargo hold (depending on the ship) has 100 units. You go out to an asteroid field on your own, and start mining. If your hold is full, you need to go back to the station, sell it or refine the goodies and sell them, and go back to your mining operation.

If you do this with a buddy (human or rented AI), it becomes interesting. You start mining and as soon as your cargo hold is full you jettison the contents in space. A container is created which has a far bigger capacity than your ships cargo. You continue to mine and this container gets filled with so much ore that you could buy a whole garage of Ferrari's instead of doing boring milk runs from Asteroid to station, every time your tiny cargo is full. Your buddy, or yourself, (if you have the necessary skill of course) gets a biiig ship, to pick up the huuuge cargo and divide the profits. Now you can go far with this, even consider the fact you have a whole bunch of Human of AI players mining for you, if you can afford it.

With these minerals you can do 2 things:

either you take them to YOUR factory, and recycle them to create new ships, weapons etc (if you have the necessary expensively acquired blueprints), or you can sell the raw ore. Good if your factory/refining skill is crap and you only get 50% of the value after processing.
Or you refine the ore and sell the refined goods.
Or you get yourself a ship/gun construction license from a mega corporation, buy the blueprints and sell the ships on the (black)market, or start a whole new sister corporation which sells ships in another system.

(sorry, wos on a roll here.)

If you are in an unsafe system, where police can not help you, you must mind the fact that your container can be destroyed, stolen (if you're mining on your own and need to get back to your mining spot where the container is just waiting to be picked up) or hijacked so you will need to hire wingmen to protect your mining operation or use mining droids to do the job faster than with the laser, and keep your operation as small as possible as not to attract attention. Or you come in with a big ship (necessary skills and money), with loads of guns to protect your industrial ship which doesn't need the containers, but puts everything in a big cargohold safe from pirates.

If you found a rich ore deposit, you can put a beeper in an asteroid, where u can hyperspace to later with your buddies, and claim the area. (mining rights) so if anyone with another ship comes there with the intent to start digging, the spy sattlite beeper, sends a signal that someone is snooping around your newly discovered area, and its time to send an investigation of interceptors.

The possiblity for human players to put bounty hunting missions on the billboard, and have them accomplished by fellow ai/human players.

Ok so far for the ideas, will be back for more if something comes up.

Greetz

XIII

Gute Leute muss man haben, Gute Leute !

Hi Dertien, Have you played EvE yet? Your requests are like reading thier feature list. Skills, training, ships, cooperative play, mining, industrial ships. You should give EvE a try, I think you would really enjoy it.

What is missing from EvE, IMHO, is factions doing anything other than trying to make money. No religions, no governments. But it is still a very cool game. I think several people on the Atari forum CEO corporations.

-Gtrout

Bingo! I was wondering who would win the great prize.

I have indeed played EVE as a trial account, and signed up.What u say is true though:

In eve theres only one drive; thats get more money to upgrade your ship and ur skills and at the end up losing interest, because u cannot modify the game in any way, like adding new ships, etc...

What also lacks there, and a feature you guys are implementing in Epic is the fact that you can do spying missions (u can not change ur character in EVE) u can fly a different ship, but the person flying it is immediately identifyable after clicking the ship info button. (no IFF code change here). Or you'll need to upgrade your skills and buy a cloaking device which is not fittable on all ships and which costs a fortune. Gameplay wise eve is fun, you have loads of skills to choose from, and loads of upgrades that are too numerous to count. But eve lacks the dark aspect reality u can accomplish with EOC.

So I am not claiming that these are all my ideas, they basically come from eve, and I'm trying to enhance them to make them more realistic.

The idea about the IFF was original, and the one in this post about the Insurance also, I was surprised to find it in eve. I also had an Idea about getting a market system in with shares, but then were drifting away from the 'space simulation' idea, and I think too many people would just not use the shares feature and I think it is a little overkill to script something that gamers will not use just for the sake of game complexity. Dunno what you think about it Gtrout ?
In eve they have a share system.

Different ship types were allready a fact in Elite frontier and first encounters, a game I played for eons on my old 486 dx 2, so thats not really eve 'copyright' either.

Starting corporations is also someting eve took from another game: X the frontier. There (it took a while before you could do it) You had a number of different factories that you could deploy yourself, and add your own spinning logo (made with photoshop) at the top of it. In eve you rent a slot in a spacestation for an office and a factory.
The blueprint stuff comes from EOC.
I don't know if it is just possible to 'spawn' stations in EOC and how far the engine can be adapted to do that.


The thing I like about EOC, and what you, Major Tom and second chance are doing is that u can tweak and add as much as you like, make new ships if the existing ones get too boring, add new stations etc...

The mining rights idea is also new, because if in EVE you would fight a different faction in a safe system where you claimed the mining rights, the concord police beams down in a sec at the spot and kills you. This doesn't happen if you declare war on a faction though, but wheres the element of surprise then ???

The email system is allready a part of epic, but the feature to add human player missions yourself, would be cool. Thats a nice thing if you have powerful connections, but neither the skills, nor the ships to do the job and you act as a kind of middle man towards the human or AI bounty hunter that will do the job for you. When u choose an AI bounty hunter you could choose a crappy cheap one or a good one (regarding the difficulty of the mission of course) [cfr. wingmen hire in Privateer 2 - the darkening] and speculate on the chance of success. This way we're coming into your domain, where you are either a politician, a consultant, a cleric, a bounty hunter, a pirate, a tradesman, a miner, a police officer, a military etc... which all have different skills they excell at. This gives the possiblity to give different human players with different personalities to choose the lifestyle they want, and train some skills to a certain level and already posess character-specific skills that others need to train and will never accomplish to that level. phew that was a long sentence.
I would be delighted; if you would be planning to put this into Epic; to work out details of every different character, and work together about the feasablitiy of this.

Have you ever played 'Uplink, trust is weakness ?' I was thinking about your hacking system in Epic. If you want to give Uplink a spin I still have a demo of it somewhere. Its a very cool hacking game. No fancy graphic stuff wotsoever, but supaa-doopaa game.

These ideas IMHO would benefit epic enormously, if they were not already on your to do list. But hey, I 'm just the guy who has the easy job of throwing balloons in the air and see if they get shot or hopefully take off. Someone else for now has got the skills to implement this in Epic and has the power to turn them down.

Please, tell me what you think about all this. I am working on ship creation with Guru Second_Chance now and If I get the opportunity, and foremost the time to get my head into Pogging and scripting, I will do that and try to assist you guys with my humble skills. But back to my Lightwave. First focus on one task then go to the next right ?

Peace out and hear you laterz Gtrout !

XIII

Gute Leute muss man haben, Gute Leute !

Originally posted by dertien


The thing I like about EOC, and what you, Major Tom and second chance are doing is that u can tweak and add as much as you like, make new ships if the existing ones get too boring, add new stations etc...

From the EOC Mulitplayer perspective:
I would love to have the MP game more adaptable and tweakable but the problem is simply: how to balance it for that?

If one could change his ship and/or weapon loadout at will, you can be sure that everyone will have the max-mega-gun loadout asap.
If you could do it with modding skills only, that would be unfair for other players. Thats why the MP mods cannot be changed after they are released (anti-cheat and anti-Mod functions are activated).

If it was skill based, you need a database interface to store skill levels, inventory and loadouts ect.. EOC doesn't have a database interface. It would be possible to set up a 'kinda-like' database using flux.ini. Even though the game wasn't really designed for that it would work. But, for the life of me, I can't figure out how to balance a skill-level based Multiplayer game to be really fair if you only have a (due to net code) limited number of players like around 6-8 per server.

Equally, I like the idea about putting up a bounty on someone. That could be fun (if you like getting your but kicked) but wouldn't that just turn the game back into a more deathmatch type game?



Iwar2 Multiplayer Fan Site

Hello Major Tom

I have been a webdesigner for 5 years and had the opportunity to play with Database driven websites. I know this is no easy task to get a normalized database to work correctly where everything interacts upon everyting.

I don't know the in-depth multiplayer solution you guys used to make What rocks and Epic, I haven't installed what rocks yet, let alone played it. I was just getting ideas out of different games I 've played, and added some of mine.
So, when I get the opportunity, I will play what rocks, I had a little go at Epic but its been a while.

I understand that the tweaking of Multiplayer accounts can not be tolerated as you would indeed give the opportunity to people to max out their loadouts, ships and weapons. The gamedata should indeed be stored on a server, where the no players can tweak them.

Don't shoot me for the noob solutions and what I'm about to say next.

How is the news and e-mail system running in Epic? is it via a .txt file that loads random missions that are delivered to ur mail ?

Can you use UNIGUI to 'talk' to the database ? I mean the thing that could solve the problem is write the info from your flux.ini to a sort of .asp page that would parse everything to the database when the player is interacting with certain options in UNIGUI and send it to a server when its running. EVE' server(s) are running 23 H/ day Or am I looking at this in a much too simple way ? UNIGUI alters the flux.ini if I understand correctly. So if you buy stuff, it is stored somewhere, so next time you start your game you still have the goods you bought, the ship u fly etc...

Then we still have the problem that people have the possibility to alter their flux.ini.
Can the multiplayer flux.ini info be garbled, to the point that its not editable with the txt editor?

If you have a system like that, it is IMHO a matter of coding to get the database to know what skills you have, how much money u have, what ship u fly etc...

When I tried out Epic it seemed to me that you were planning on a MMPROG type of game for eoc. I'm sorry if I understood this the wrong way. How many players can EOC handle in Multiplayer at one time, without the MMPROG features.

Then if it is not possible to put this into a multiplayer game, can these ideas like the skill system for example still be used in a single player mod ?

Next time u guys play online, please let me know and I will be delighted to join you.

mailto:xiii@chefsonblades.com

Peace out

XIII






Gute Leute muss man haben, Gute Leute !

I've never seen "CEO" used as a verb before. Cool!

Just a word to the wise, having been involved in too many mods that ended up going nowhere (after many hours of work from a few dedicated people): I'd MUCH rather see a mod that is currently in production, such as Epic or Star Wars MP make it to completion and get released, even with a modest amount of the originally proposed features, than see folks embarking on new projects with umpteen features. If you have ideas, time, energy and skills, which you seem to have in abundance, dertien, I suggest you team up with some of the people working on existing mod projects, learn a bunch of cool tricks, help them get to completion, and THEN make the game of your dreams.

Just my 2 cents.

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Hot4Darmat