A few more ideas

LOL

Maybe, I could say I am just greedy . But that would be a lame excuse, since I would be more than happy with a hanger containing 1 ship, if I am capable of trading it in for any other ship in the universe providing I have the money and or the skills to upgrade it and fly it.

In the old days, when the 486 dx2 was a top notch machine, I spend hours and hours playing Frontier Elite and First Encounters after that. If you consider that any ship can be created with Lightwave (which I have the pleasure and priviledge of owning, and which I am starting to explore with the help of Second_Chance) EOC will stay popular.Hell, I like creating and testing new things for a game more than playing it.

The balancing of ships would be a much lesser burden if we were to analyse different games and using those figures to get us started and then making up figures of our own and try to balance them ourselves according to the different ships and loadouts we have. We didn't even take into account that 4 AI pirates maybe better pilots than 10 AI rookie Police ships, which would make the whole balancing issue even more difficult.
Furthermore, I have read the goals of Epic on G-trout's site, which is following the same road as ELITE, but provides more tweaking and realism than the unmoddable Elite frontier and his newer sibling.

Why would this benefit Epic ?

well IMHO different missions need different ships, different skills, etc... It would make the overall gameplay a richer experience.
Say I need to fly a mission or buy a new ship to upgrade my standing, for that mission I need a permit to visit the system I need to do the mission in, furthermore the ship I need to buy to do that mission is in a system, where I do not have the benefit of political or factional alliance. I let you imagine the rest for yourself, since I could write bout 4 pages here for a scenario.

Different factions, politics,generated missions etc is all a part of the planned Epic 'final' release, things that can all be found in the ELITE series.

But like I said earlier in this post, from the moment that I am proficient at making models for Epic, not only ships, but asteroids, stations and so forth, Gtrout can send me his list of to do's and I will start modeling, to make Epic progress a little faster, and take a little workload off Second Chance who has his hands full already.

There's furthermore a lot of people waiting (including myself) for Elite 4 which has the same space physics realism as EOC. Elite goes even a little further, since the universe the game uses is absolutely correct and a virtual model of the real thing!

I dunno however how far you can go with a TC, without treading on the Copyright Laws.I am not too worried about that since there is a total conversion going on for Freelancer which can be found here: www.free-worlds.com/ and is a good free competitor for the latest Lucasarts expansion of their MMPROG Star Wars Galaxies.
However, I find that freelancer is a lame excuse for a sim, and more a quake in space type of thing.

a)I agree with you that it is indeed important to balance the ships in a game, but it will anyway always become exponentially more difficult, whether you allow player control of those extra ships or not. Furthermore EOC has a lot of loadouts, which makes balancing even a bigger issue. Fortunately, we are not working on a deadline schedule here, but just making a good game get better and eventually we will get there and be satisfied playing it for hours and hours:p.

b) from the pilots perspective, everything is indeed the same, I would'nt fly a ship for hours, just because it has a nice hud. This would however be a different ball-game where it would definitely matter for the sake of realism and gameplay where you were to develop a Tie-fighter cockpit, a Mil-Falcon and a X-wing cockpit all with their own little advantages and disadvantages. If there is a way of using Tiff files to change the hud, I would be happy to provide Second Chance with cockpits for his SW models.
The outside model however, Is eye candy + different ship loadout configurations, and I don't think that I am the only one who likes to fly a nice ship instead of a brick.Look at the drooling-on-the-keyboard replies that Second Chance got on the forum when he showed off his SW models ingame.
Variety, increasing difficulty and enhancements is what keeps a corker of a game going together with gameplay, at least for the hardcase sim community. Personally, I am not that of a purist that would mind having a TIE-Fighter, A buda ship, and a VIPER from battlestar galactica flying in the same universe, as long as it benefits gameplay and realism. I mean, for every type of ship there is a faction that corresponds with it and usually flies and sells it at their markets, and it should't become a brew of as much ships as possible that you can buy everywhere just for the sake of having tons of 'em.

It's just like a lego box you got for your birthday, and you start to explore the vast building possibilities to go from a basic shape, to a fully functional model with realistic behaviour.

c)What I fleet is concerned, and the flying of captured ships that is an issue which I havent fully put my attention to at the moment, but I will look into it.

For anyone who is nostalgic about Elite here's the site where you can download the game for free: Please be sure to fly in windows 95/98 and check out the site if you wanna use XP or 2000.

sharoma.com/frontierverse/

And last but not least, I can tell you from the experience I have working as a webdesigner: nothing is ever complete. You can always make a line a little thinner, or make a button a different colour but there comes a moment when you have to say: Ok guys this is version 1, its fully playable so it has passed the beta stage, and everything that will come next will be an enhancement, and something for the next version.

voila!

Peace out!

Gute Leute muss man haben, Gute Leute !

Originally posted by dertien

a)I agree with you that it is indeed important to balance the ships in a game, but it will anyway always become exponentially more difficult, whether you allow player control of those extra ships or not. Furthermore EOC has a lot of loadouts, which makes balancing even a bigger issue.

Yes, If you give some deep thought to the subject and try to devise a good blancing scheme/concept you'll see how unbelievably complicated it can get.

b) from the pilots perspective, everything is indeed the same, I would'nt fly a ship for hours, just because it has a nice hud. This would however be a different ball-game where it would definitely matter for the sake of realism and gameplay where you were to develop a Tie-fighter cockpit, a Mil-Falcon and a X-wing cockpit all with their own little advantages and disadvantages. If there is a way of using Tiff files to change the hud, I would be happy to provide Second Chance with cockpits for his SW models.

Unfortunately you can't use a tiff. You need a textured lightwave model. Mounting different cockpits is no problem: Once you have the model you can put it on any ship specifically (per .ini file) or even switch cockpits (using pog) in mid flight at the bat of an eye.

Iwar2 Multiplayer Fan Site

I should remind you that I wrote one for Gold Rush.

Thank you! And your code works great. It is really a matter of priority. Right now using the off the shelf EoC loadout system is what I have budgeted. Hopefully the missions and conflict will keep the player entertained enough without it.

When enough other features are working (and I am not burned out) I expect you will find me asking for permission to mod in your loadout system.

-Gtrout