I know he mentioned they need work and I am all for suspension of disbelief for the sake of visual appeal, but rocket engines and missiles should be restricted to a short exhaust area and never long trails. The beam weapons and explosions have to provide 90% of the fire works if the battle scenes are going to be anywhere near believable.
I know I will not get my way on this, but I hope the final product is nothing like what we saw today.
Franco, not to argue. The effects are there because it looks cool.
There is some evidence that if you had a pressurized ship get hit you would experience some 'venting' of gasses. Granted it would be quick and not last long.
Hell even in some of the Star Trek movies (Wrath of Khan, Undiscovered country) they show 'venting of gasses' mimicking smoke.
As far as contrails for ships I am ok, with it. We have only chemical rockets currently, so who knows what a hyperdrive exhaust would look like.
In any event I was giving an opposite view. I like em and they make the ships POP out at you.
Yeah, I know, and the yellow contrails didn't look that bad. It was the white ones that were awful and Paul said they would be fixed.
I remember reference to "the Star Wars effect" in one of the conversations. I love the movies, but George Lucas ruined space battles forever. We will never, as a public, really accept realistic space battles. Last dev stream, I heard they are putting in lens flares. It sounded like they were saying the battle viewer was too "clean" and not like popular movies. I leave you to draw your own conclusions.
Given the polishing that Brad stated quite clearly, I can only say that the battle viewer is shaping up to be, oh roughly, 100% fun. And here's the deal: Brad does stuff, if it looks cool he keeps it, if it doesn't he fixes it. The "trails" are unrealistic, sure, but they sure as heck make what is going on a lot easier to follow, which is a big point in watching them, i.e., seeing how different kinds of ships behave. I look at it this way --- it's not vapor trails, it's our combat computer showing the recent trajectories of ships. Whatever.
I see an insane game late in the play where a critical battle vs. the main opponent develops and the winner takes over....holy spacemaggedon, Batman! I just wonder in one of those battles how many BCs worth of ships were blown up.
Couple that with the clear indications that the developers are reading the forums and are keenly interested in our ticket submissions, and as always, very upfront about issues they are working on, well, what can I say.
Bamdorf->tester->fanboy->GC3 nutcase. Wonder what's next.
I hate the lens flare effects they used in the last two Star Trek movies. It made it look like the movie was being recorded with a camera (which it was, but who wants to be reminded of that while watching movies?).
Please, no lens flares. It is much too intrusive, annoying, and unrealistic.
There is also no sound in space either, but I doubt we want no sound effects anywhere in battle, etc.
I can see how a beam works, but if we ate going.to have rockets exploding in space then it would have to be made diffetent than regular missiles that explode in an oxygen environment where there is no oxygen environment in space.
Whati'm saying is technology would have to be different than today, so there is really no way to gage how battling would actually work. For the most part you are getting information from a source, your not there.
Agreed. Any claim for realistic space battle will fail right from the start because noone does know how the future will look like. And if we go on and take todays scientific knowledge to construct a realistic scenario then I'm afraid we got to scrap the entire game because things as faster than light travel or artificial gravity is nothing but fantasy.
A lot about space battles will never be realistic by today's standards. It's about gameplay over realism. They look good, so let's keep them.
If we really want to get into arguments about realism, a lot of what's going in the viewer will need to go, including much of the tech tree. For example, fire doesn't burn in space in the same way, or 'explode' outward. Without those explosions though, things wouldn't look half as cool.
http://www.space.com/13766-international-space-station-flex-fire-research.html
Or we'd have to remove FTL. Or make it violate causality. That wouldn't make for a very fun GalCiv (or game).
While we are at it, pls. someone also tell Stardock that there is no evidence of Drengin or other space aliens and that they better abandon the whole GC III thingie.
*ahh, no
Okay, I agree that visual appeal is more important than reality in a game, I just think the white contrails in the dev-stream were over the top, and distracting. Paul thought so too, so it will be fixed I guess. I just wanted them shortened, and not swirling around for miles behind the ships. I have no problem at all with the explosions or the tracers on the missiles.
Suspension of disbelief is important in enjoying almost all fiction. This is easier for some than for others. I like zombie fiction so I do get it. For those of us who find it neccessary to deal with disbelief the secret is finding a reasonable way to believe that "whatever" could be possible under any circumstances.
We are a long way from space warping (ftl) but it is based on existing theory, not fantasy. We may never be able to generate sufficient energy to make it reality but the possibility exists within the laws of Physics. Those laws will still exist in the 25th century and we are far more likely to have ftl than space contrails. As for the appearance of aliens, in a world that has produced the Platypus and thousands of extreme life forms, I have no problem believing that the GCIII lifeforms could exist.
Anyway, it's all good.
Am I the only one who is bored of space battles in the dev stream? For a capability that will likely turn out to be 5% of my gameplay experience with this game, and I'll probably fast forward to the end to view the results, they have been spending a lot of development and dev stream time, for the last few months, on it. I realize moving sliders around, queuing production, and talking to aliens doesn't sell the game very well, but that's what im going to be spending most of my time doing when I play this game.
Very brief explosions are possible in space as the air and other flammables internal to the craft burns assuming the mixture is right. split second for small craft, perhaps a couple seconds for large craft. Ion and plasma propulsion might leave some contrails because the matter left behind might glow from elementals state changes. Again, probably very brief. Particles (smoke) might be visible while venting and concentrated assuming there is adequate light source to reflect. Out in deep space, space battle will probably occur in near pitch blackness.
I get what you are saying; my take on this is perhaps because my glasses are tinted toward the red end the spectrum. I think showing the nuts and bolts of the underlying mechanics would be hard to follow and not likely very helpful. That is, except to those of us who want to take it apart piece by piece. But there's another point here. What part of the underlying engine does it make sense for them to reveal? There are such things as proprietary secrets, which is why I think their discussion of the AI is always rather vague (among other reasons, it is evolving as we go).
But here's the plus side. In the battle viewer they can show rather dramatically the progress is being made. Like I say, maybe I am being too optimistic, but I think that progress on the battle viewer is very likely similar to the progress made on the less flashy, but as you say, more critical, parts of the game. We shall see.
All that being said, I think the developer comments on their approach to different aspects of the game is definitely the best part of the live feed, followed closely by the open admission of the problems they are working on. The game crashes, well ok, we'll work on that. Very refreshing and gives me a good feeling about the results.
There is a part of me that is a little kid though, that loves watching those ships flying around like crazy blasting away. I think it will work well in the game --- you sweat blood for a long time with the strategy and then you sit back and watch how it worked out. Sort of like comic relief in a way. And a reason for not having the battles end too quickly.
Just my 2c, like I say, I do see your point.
Well it gives something visual to balance the stream a bit , and it's good they getting things right by taking their time on it. Maybe it's as simple as the fleet combat (and some diplomacy screen work) was their focus, so that's what they are showing right now. When something else becomes their focus, we'll see that.
As to how much of my gameplay it will be, it depends how the things like ship roles work out, and if they add any more with expansions. I will certainly be watching battles where I lose ships to work out why. They could add roles like long range support fire ships for example, mega capitals (dreadnoughts), snub fighters (drones), or cloaking technology, as some examples. It really depends how involved they want to make it.
You've got to balance your designs vs the enemies, as always, only now thankfully there is more than just do you have more stats in that type of weapon than me, there are a few more variables taking place.
Well that's the theory anyway. So far they've shown how various ship types behave in battle. They have not shown that you can craft a fleet to counter another fleet tacticly, assuming you know the enemy fleet's makeup beforehand and have enough time to properly assemble your counter fleet. So far we've seen numbers be the deciding factor. Sorry for getting us further off topic.
Maybe not the only one, but seeing the level of battles they can get to is interesting to me since I can't get that in my games yet. Also, I notice a lot of new names in the chat associated with the stream. New people are most likely going to want to see the bangs and flashes. After all, it is pretty.
I think the economy stuff is still in balance and tweaking, but it would be nice to see which directions they were tweaking towards. I would like to see a stream session dedicated to the topic a little later in the development schedule.
I don't quite yet follow all the stuff about ship roles and fleet battles. I'm afraid I am one of those who builds lots of the biggest ship I can field and just throw those at people. I get the impression I will be encouraged by the new mechanics to branch out a bit in ship diversity, make a few more ship types in some comfortable ratios, throw those fleets at baddies, and let the battle viewer sort it out. It will be an interesting learning curve for me.
I would really like to see more evidence of UI work for empire management. The big colony list they gave a glimpse of was a good step in that direction, but only a start. I am looking forward to having the very best tools possible for making my empire sprawl across the galaxy. That's the part I am most hopeful/insistent about.
I was about to write a long response to topic of realistic vs fantasy space battles but it seems all facts have been stated already So I will add my little bit by providing another angle of view. Various players are pulled to this game and not everyone is strategy master mind who will micro manage every planet to its maximal output, get rid of everything that doesn't spell economic value to their ears. Some people are just casual gamers and more graphics and special effects appeal to them more of them will come. More players, more profit, more money for developers to play around with every little detail we "hardcore players" like and adore. So add as many special effects and "boom boom" sounds as you like so long it looks good and brings people in
There are also no Terran space ships in reality But seriously it's looking great and on their latest video Paul mentioned they were going to real in the trails to make them smaller.
I think the main reason is actually see where your missiles are going. If player is zoomed out in battle viewer there is no way to see missiles or where they are going without some indication such as smoke contrails.
Saying that a missile's contrail can only happen in atmosphere is like saying that the only component in a contrail is the reaction between the heat generated by the propellent and the air it is traveling through. Forgotten is the result of the chemical reaction that produces the missile's thrust which will also show in the path the missile took. If oxygen is one of the components used to produce that chemical reaction, the oxygen must come from somewhere. Even in atmospheric missiles, it is more effective for the missiles to carry that oxygen on board than to attempt to gather it from the air it is traveling through. Missiles in space would also have to carry all of the chemicals used in its thrust producing reaction, and there would be resultant residue that would act like a contrail, even though it would dissipate quickly, but then, contrails in atmosphere also dissipate.
Very good point Sir, but I'd ike to add that
actually matter in a vacuum has a tedency to clump together, it would cool down but probably be visible for a lengthy time
Excellent point. I stand corrected.
Let's look at a comet. A comet has a comtrail. In truth the actual amount of matter being released is alnost none. let's take a comet 10 kilometers starts making a tail somewhere between mars and jupiter, and doesn't loose it tail untill it is somewhere between mars snd jupiter. This will last for about 300 passes before it dissipate.
Any particulate matter involved in an explosive event is going to scatter and scatter rapidly. All the energy levels involved will be very high and there will be very little left around to drift aimlessly or share orbits like a comet tail. Things would tend to go poof silently and disappear instantly, maybe with a moment's worth of fireball if you're lucky. Even large chunks of hull will disappear quick into the distance with the velocities involved. Visually, it would be short and deeply unsatisfying, no matter how much you hated those bad guys.
I would love it, for a while. It would be like watching 2001, A Space Odyssey with shoot-em ups, and I love that movie! Then I would want to go back to playing a fun and flashy game along with my empire conniving. I wouldn't be able to resist. After all, we are talking about trading different levels of disbelief for different levels of entertainment. I can make that trade!
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