It's that time of year again!

Yes. Here we go again. Everyone here has ideas for EV4. Let them all out. We want to hear them (I'll not elaborate on who "we" is; consider it the royal we if it helps you sleep at night). Let's start out with some ground rules:

- Nothing already supported. We don't want to hear requests for things that are possible to do with the current engine and don't require workarounds. Want a bright pink ship that shoots ninja stars? Sorry, already can do.
- No scenario requests. This one should be obvious. While games are better when the scenario is the model for the engine rather than the other way around (a la the original EV), we're looking for possible engine features for flexibility when making scenarios.
- Be serious. No absolutely off-the-wall requests.
- If you say multiplayer or 3D, I will eat you. I'm serious.

Now, here are some of the more popular ones:
- Support for on-the-fly rendering of 3D models (not 3D, just 3D models), i.e. no sprites.
- Scripting instead of (or in addition to) ncb's.
- Ships that act as planets.
- Ares-style zooming.

I can't think of any more off the top of my head. Fire away.

Better support for planet based stuff, a la not being limited to 'bar, MC, outfitter', etc and being able to ambulate on planets without having to hack a whole system.

I like the Ares-style zooming idea a lot. In fact this is now my number one request... The more I think about it the better that would be. Make modeling cap ships that much more of a bitch though.

Logical support for player run governments.

Scripting language along the veins of basic should not be hard to implement.

An engine that was not tailor made for a partucular scenereo.

More ship options- not just banks, unfolds, alt sets, etc.

One word: Collisions!!!

I'd like to see a much more practical and flexible jünk resource. Rather than having fields for spöbs in the jünk resource, I think it would be better to have it the other way around, with fields for jünks in the spöb resource. It would allow you to have more than just the six commodities at all the planets, not to mention allow you to customize those six commodities.

I think a rüle resource would be nice, to let you customize the game in ways previously thought impossible, like change the number of days in a month and in a year, how long hyperspace jumps take, what happens after you eject your escape pod (e.g. whether or not your legal record is reset with all governments, what percentage of your credits you keep, and so on).

rmx256, on Feb 2 2006, 08:50 PM, said:

I like the Ares-style zooming idea a lot. In fact this is now my number one request... The more I think about it the better that would be. Make modeling cap ships that much more of a bitch though.
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Presumably this will be easy if everything in the game was rendered in realtime 3D.

1. I'll jump on the engine made for everybody bandwagon. Too many of the features of the EV3 engine are broken or don't work as expected because Nova never used them.

2. Greatly greatly increase the numbers of every resource. 1000 missions, 256 weapons, ect are all too low. They need to go way way up. It should be at least 10x more than the EV4 scenario requires. Because who knows, someday something even bigger might come along.

3. Get away from the old resource fork format. Instead of distributing 33+ 16MBish files we could ship 1 300MB+ file. This would also make it much easier to use large ship sprites and stuff since you wouldn't have to keep the ship sprites below the ~16MB limit.

4. How about more interesting cloaking options? Different types of cloaks that can be seen by different types of outfits. Think of something similar to the 4 missile jamming types.

5. Take the key carried concept further so it can actually affect ship performance, weapons, everything. Sure this can be faked to an extent, but its not pretty.

6. Draw to the screen correctly. This would get rid of the bleed through and Exposé issues.

7. Millions of colors.

8. Better beam and other per frame stuff handling.

9. A better BBS system. Take it beyond a fairly boring single list of missions. Make it multifunction, more dynamic and so on.

10. Big planet scaling in com dialogs

11. Better handling of multiple objects of the same type. For example just have a single Hypergate spob, and allow it to be named different things in each system its in, instead of needing dozens and dozens of spobs. Want to change a stat of the hypergates now? Have fun doing it many many times. Ares did this and it was much better.

12. More ship animations options and more control over them.

13. Definitely more in flight scripting options. It was amazing what you could do with Ares and its limited scripting, a real scripting solution would be amazingly powerful.

14. Ares style zooming, and in system FTL engines. EV feels squished together where Ares had huge distance between planets to fight in but it didn't hinder getting from place to place.

15. More and better AI options. Perhaps a simple AI scripting language that can be used to vary a ship's behavior based on situation more than "standoff attacks"

16. Smarter dynamic mission destination choosing. Stop eliminating the important planets from random mission destinations. Surely there is another way to prevent bad destinations.

Ability to target planets, so guided weapons and turrets work against them.

Planets can have point-defence systems, fighter bays, and jamming systems.

Planets can have multiple weapons. For example, one planet could have a nuke launcher and a point-defense turret. Up to three would be preferable.

Give planets an ammo field, so when you give one a fighter bay as a weapon it won't launch an unending stream of fighters.

Guided missile turrets and point-defence turrets. (Of course there is a way to do the first one with submunitions, but it doesn't work with the PD turrets.)

Sometimes I wish I could make beams even smaller.

The thing top on my list would definitely be some simple scripting. I could see a new cöde resource, where you have scripts that are called by an operation in a set/test field. That way you could do if/then statements, loops, and access data about much more then you can right now.

Nova already has the functionality to play shockwave and flash files through quicktime. I'd like to see support for interactive flash games-within-the-game. This would make planets so much more interesting, and is an easy way to grant rmx256 his wish for ambulation.

Edit: 333rd post, whaddaya know

This post has been edited by darth_vader : 02 February 2006 - 10:59 PM

darth_vader, on Feb 2 2006, 09:59 PM, said:

Nova already has the functionality to play shockwave and flash files through quicktime. I'd like to see support for interactive flash games-within-the-game. This would make planets so much more interesting, and is an easy way to grant rmx256 his wish for ambulation.

Edit: 333rd post, whaddaya know
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Yeah, I think we looked into that at one point too. I can't remember exactly what happened but I do know we don't have any flash mini games planned.

You know... we could just build one. I have the time and skill to do coding, i just lack experience with any sort of openGl whatnot. And sound, i can't touch sound.

I can only think of one thing: turrets on the shipe sprite that actually trace the enemy targeted ship. Instead of being stuck one direction, it would face the ship. If the ship was above you, the turret would be pointing up.

Now I thought of another, though graphic designers for plugs would hate it. Outfits actually affect ship apperance. Say if your fighter can mount two cannons, one each wing. If you mount Light Blasters, it shows them on the wings. Mount Chainguns, and thats what you see.

JoshTigerheart, on Feb 2 2006, 10:50 PM, said:

I can only think of one thing: turrets on the shipe sprite that actually trace the enemy targeted ship. Instead of being stuck one direction, it would face the ship. If the ship was above you, the turret would be pointing up.

Now I thought of another, though graphic designers for plugs would hate it. Outfits actually affect ship apperance. Say if your fighter can mount two cannons, one each wing. If you mount Light Blasters, it shows them on the wings. Mount Chainguns, and thats what you see.
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That doesn't sound too bad. Just give us a way to specify where types and sizes of weapon graphics go and it could work.

perhaps not multiplayer as in the popluar online definition, but perhaps something along the line of multiple inputs=more detailed controlls. say plug in 3 extra keybords so one handles all navigation features, and some extra ones like waypoints and crap. one controlls weaponry a bit more (more controlls than primary and secondary) and one controlls commo (escorts, ship-to-ship interractions beyond "hello, help me, DON'T KILL ME! PLEASE!")

something along those lines.

In addition to what many others have said:

0. Realtime-3D "sprites" I could take or leave. Prerendered sprites will always be more limited in actions but less limited in appearance.

1. Engine that is not at all affected by framerate in terms of speed of game events.

2. More graphical options, such as:
a. particle effects with transparency for explosions, smoke trails, burning ships/venting gasses, vapor clouds, pretty sparkly things...whatever.
b. cleaner additive effects (would probably come with a 32-bit engine) and mixed additive/transparency effects, more blending options, and distortion/refraction effects (for fake crystal or shockwave effects, space-time distortions, as well as whatever else.)
c. antialiased beams with smoother falloff curve, as well as image-based rendering with start, repeated midsection, and end sprites. Also, potentially, smoothly-interpolated curving or expanding (triangular) beam patterns of both the rendered and image-defined types.

3. Wizards/helpers for setting up the most common applications of the scripting language, since some of us would rather easily utilize a powerful system than have to learn every cranny of its detailed in's and out's in order to realize their vision.

4. Some implementation of fleet actions that make it so that it isn't a "your ship blows up, you lose" scenario. I mean really, if there's an epic battle going on, it might be realistic for the game to end if the player's ship is destroyed, but that's no fun. The most basic implementation would be for the mission to be able to play out and end itself with success or failure even if the player ejects to an escape pod. As it stands now the player can barely be part of the action because of the complete need for self-preservation in order to keep playing. An Ares-like implementation would be too impersonal, though, unless the player is actually acting as a commander, not a part of the fleet.

Ah. Thought of a few more.

Missiles that sort of "roll" out of the sides of the ship before the thrusters kick in, causing them to speed forward (like in Mars Rising). This could be a new exit type, a modified accuracy field, a new flag, or a new guidance type. Might require a new frame flag (i.e., "stay on frame 1 until thrusters kick in", so that the thruster glow doesn't show before the they are fired. There is a "stay on frame 1 until X happens" flag in the weäp resource, but I'm too lazy to look up exactly what it does.)

A larger variety of exit points. (Gives a grater variety to where weapons can come out. Eye candy, mostly.)

Other max weapon slots, besides turrets and guns. Max fighter bays, max reactors (only big ships get big reactors), and max point-defence systems come to mind (unless if you count point-defence systems as turrets).

I'd like it if the player could choose which of a ship's weapons fire in each of the three modes:

1. primary weapons -- all fire together when primary key pressed.
2. secondary -- fire one (type) at a time, as selected by either a weapon-switching key or a set of shortcut keys.
3. point defense -- fire automatically when a hostile comes into range.

I also still wish there were more ways for sellable cargos to interact with missions, ncbs, and/or crons -- mission strings for traders could be much more interesting, for instance, if misn availability could depend on what you were carrying, or if a misn reward could be in the form of a quantity of a junk. Misns (tied to perses, for instance) could also consist of special purchase opportunities. ("Psst -- wanna buy 14 tons of Neoswiss watches?")

Along similar lines, how about a "market size" attribute for spobs, so a player who dropped a leviathan-sized load of some commodity on a frontier outpost might find that the price there would drop for a while. There wouldn't have to be sophisticated economic tracking behind the scenes -- just something to give the tiniest semblence of realism while making insane bulk trading a little trickier. At the minimum, there could just be a single cut-off number for each spob. For each commodity, if the player sold that number of units on a single visit the price of that commodity would be decreased. The duration and degree of the discount could be the same regardless of the planet or the good -- the drop could always be 15% for 3 months, or whatever.

And "growing" and "evaporating" junks that change quantity based on the game's calendar instead of the real-time clock!

And more resource slots for all sorts of things! Just 16 asteroid types? I need more! More! :laugh:

The CrimpMaster, on Feb 2 2006, 09:28 PM, said:

Missiles that sort of "roll" out of the sides of the ship before the thrusters kick in, causing them to speed forward (like in Mars Rising). This could be a new exit type, a modified accuracy field, a new flag, or a new guidance type. Might require a new frame flag (i.e., "stay on frame 1 until thrusters kick in", so that the thruster glow doesn't show before the they are fired. There is a "stay on frame 1 until X happens" flag in the weäp resource, but I'm too lazy to look up exactly what it does.)View Post

This is very-nearly possible in EVN already: an accelerating-rocket-type weapon with negative inaccuracy which submunitions into a guided missile would theoretically do this, but not 100% smoothly. I have not actually tested this though.

A complete Ship/Mission/Scenerio/Plug editor, included as standard. No more dependence on the archaic ResEdit or flakey 3rd party tools. Aries' Hera tool was pretty good.

This post has been edited by tycho61uk : 03 February 2006 - 07:49 AM

I'd really like to see some kind of implementation that can sense when a user is having thoughts about EV5. It could then reach out of the screen and cheerfully throttle them to the point of passing out. With any luck, and after a few repetitions, threads like this one will die out.

This post has been edited by Hudson : 03 February 2006 - 08:51 AM

Hudson, on Feb 3 2006, 07:49 AM, said:

I'd really like to see some kind of implementation that can sense when a user is having thoughts about EV5. It could then reach out of the screen and cheerfully throttle them to the point of passing out. With any luck, and after a few instances of that, topics like this one will die out.
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Meh. thats a bad feature.

For you I'd suggest a feature that looks at where you live and misspells words as appropriate. (You know, like tires to tyres)

darth_vader, on Feb 3 2006, 02:59 AM, said:

Nova already has the functionality to play shockwave and flash files through quicktime. I'd like to see support for interactive flash games-within-the-game. This would make planets so much more interesting, and is an easy way to grant rmx256 his wish for ambulation.
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Raga's correct; I experimented with this a year or so back; limited, jerky, and while QT is supported through the engine, pointer feed-back isn't, which means you can't send data back to QT - ie, no interaction. Plus, as I recall, I think you had to include the swf as a layer in a QT movie, rather than a stand-alone swf, and that's just plane poopy.