The Trouble With Guns

[Zistack]

Hello everyone!  I've mostly enjoyed my time with the game so far, but I've definitely noticed where the game is made almost entirely of placeholders a little rough around the edges.  I understand the thrusters are the most broken thing right now, and they're being fixed, so I'd like to focus on another important part of the game that I think desperately needs attention: Turrets.  I have read several suggestions on improving this subsystem already, but I don't think that any of them really address all of the issues it suffers from, so I've taken the time to come up with a sketch of a solution that should cover all of the bases.

 

Now, before I go further, I'd like to note the way the turret system is currently set up is somewhat unique for a space game like this.  I have to wonder if there is a reason for this beyond `that's just what the dev came up with at the time'.  If there is, then my proposal is likely incompatible with such reasoning, as my proposal is for a system that is completely different than what is currently implemented.  I wouldn't mind an official statement on that.

 

 

What's Wrong With Turrets Now

 

More or less everything.  They do shoot, and you can destroy enemies with them, so there's that at least.

 

I don't particularly like trusting the RNG.  I wouldn't have a problem with it if I were just upgrading one weapon on one ship, but I'm not.  I, like some other players, like to have a little uniformity in my fleet.  In addition to that, some ship designs are good for some kinds of weapons and not others.  I don't really wanna go slapping a bunch of short range weapons on the quarter-scale Death Star I just built, simply because I don't have anything else.  (I haven't built this - this example is just to make a point.  Kudos if someone does this though.)  Neither do I want my support fleet of TIE fighters to have a random bag of weapons on them, like dumb little lasers on one, and a triple-chaingun on another.

 

I also don't want to have to go to turret factories to manufacture my uniform set of turrets - after all, shouldn't the turrets be part of the ship's design?  I mean, if we can build a hyperspace core, I think we can build a chaingun.  I'm still trusting an RNG to give me a decent factory, too, which isn't a safe bet. When I create a new vessel from a blueprint, it should really be armed already - that way, I don't have to go through each one and put turrets on it in all of the places.  This would become rather tedious for a fleet of any real size.

 

On top of that, it is frankly true that the disparity between turret factories and turret drops is a problem.  With that said, I don't think the answer is to somehow rebalance the stats so that they agree more.

 

In fact, I think the whole `turrets as an item that you slap on' thing is wrong to begin with.  This brings me to what I think is the most important flaw in this system.

 

I now direct your attention to exhibit A.

 

 

This is the Eye of Zorg - my primary space vessel.  Allow me to further direct your attention to the turrets on said craft.

 

 

The Eye of Zorg only reluctantly installs these ugly gray warts as the only means of conquering space defending itself.  These turrets do not at all match the desired aesthetic - and there's nothing I can do about it.  Ideally, I'd just have a mega-laser hiding behind that great big eyeball (for obvious reasons).

 

There is clearly only one solution to this problem.  We players need to be able to build our turrets block by block.

 

 

The Proposal

 

If you think about it, this approach stands to solve many of the problems that we see in the turret system right now.  For one thing, we no longer have to worry so much about using modules and module slots to limit how many turrets a ship can have.  I expect that the average turret will get quite a bit larger if players have to build them.  They'll also be heavy, and you won't want to load your ship down with expensive heavy guns that don't serve as very good armor.  With that said, we can really make them any size we want, since we get the same arbitrary scaling that we have for blocks.  It should also be easy to add projectile coloration, by basing the projectile color off of the color of some of the weapon blocks.

 

For another, I always thought it was odd that the guns could aim independently of your craft's orientation be default.  It seems to me that turrets that can turn would be a more advanced feature to be earned.  And then with this comes the turret lock block, so that you can add a little complexity to the system to take away that ability - because that makes sense.

 

This also gives players something they've always wanted - spinal mount weapons.  I mean, what's the point of being a giant battleship if you can't blast the thing you're facing with the energy of a moon crashing into a planet?  Sure, the recoil will shove you into the next sector (granted, still at sublight speeds), if not rip the gun assembly out of your vessel and shoot it out the new hole in the rear, but it'll have been worth it.  If you'd like a more down-to-earth example of this awesome technique, I point you to the Warthog.

 

Of course, what's an idea without a little discussion about implementation?

 

 

Shooting

 

So how would one build a turret?  Well, turrets shoot right?  So how do we build something that shoots?

 

 

Base Weapon Blocks

 

Basically, we've got projectile weapons (chainguns, railguns, missiles), energy weapons (lasers), and particle weapons (plasma), right?  Technically, there's also lightning weapons, but those actually aren't possible in space (no medium for the lightning arcs to form in, among other things).  Even if we included them anyways, the approach would be much the same.

 

How about we define some base blocks.  One for each kind of weapon.  We'd have firing chambers for the projectile weapons, energy emitters for the energy weapons, and particle emitters for the particle weapons.  The size of these blocks will determine the amount of mass/energy that can be fired per unit time.

 

 

Modifiers

 

I expect that these weapons will generate heat.  They'll also need to be fed energy/munitions.  We also probably want to put barrels on some of them, or some focusing lenses on others.

 

Long barrels help with accuracy and a bit with bullet speed in the case of projectile weapons (not just railguns).  Many barrels might just help with firing speed - or maybe just redundancy in case one gets shot off.  For lasers and particle weapons, you'd add a base emitter (or several), and the area of the emitters would determine how much energy could be discharged per unit time without melting something important on the firing end.  You could add a focusing lens on a laser to get some armor penetration, or a particle accelerator to a particle weapon to add some range/damage.

 

You could also add more interesting modifiers, like a block that arms the munitions with charges that explode on impact, or something that replaces the usual slug with a package of pellets (shotgun adapter).  Perhaps a block that installs seeker modules on the missiles?

 

Cooling is a fascinating issue in its own right.  Something that many of you may not realize is that it is actually really hard to cool things effectively in space.  This is because you can't dissipate heat into the atmosphere.  There is no atmosphere.  You basically have to rely on blackbody radiation.  The more heat you can dump into what you're ejecting at the enemy, the better.  With that said, you're probably still gonna have some heat to take care of.  One option is to eject gasses that run past the hot parts and into space, but the gasses need restocked periodically (I note that ammo seems to be infinite here, so this might not really matter).  Another option is to put radiator panels on your ship somewhere, and have a cooling system pump heat to them.  Depending on how detailed you wanna get, you could either have an entire heating/cooling subsystem to the ship, or just add some kind of cooling blocks as weapon modifiers.  I note that requiring that your ship has sufficient surface area to cool itself would discourage the cubeship designs, so this may be a desirable design constraint to add.

 

I am thinking that this is the way to get your weapon variety, without having to come up with a bunch of different weapons with different stat tradeoffs.  Let the players choose.  It should also be nice and extensible, due to the separation of functions into separate blocks.  It should be easy enough to add a block to either add a new base weapon type, or add a modifier to some of the existing weapons.

 

This will probably require some reworking in the way the game thinks about ship designs, as adjacency matters here.

 

 

Aiming

 

Of course, having all these blocks is great, but since we aren't dealing with magic turret entities that we slap on the outsides of our vessels, we now have to worry about making the turrets point at the enemies.  I suggest two primitives here - Rotors and Rails.

 

 

Rotors

 

These are what you expect.  You place it, and it allows you to build blocks off of it that can rotate.  I do wonder about the most reasonable implementation of this, as it seems that putting a little rotor block to one side of something that aims up and down isn't right, and I doubt that it would be easy to have the game detect when multiple rotors are aligned correctly.  My thinking is that you'll want to additonally have something like a rod/sleeve block, where the ends are one part, and the sleeve around the center is the other part.  Which you attach to the ship and which you attach to the moving part shouldn't matter too much.

 

Figuring out the acceptable range of motion on a rotor is probably impossible to automate.  There will need to be some way of letting players configure this.  I don't know what should happen if the players lie get it wrong and the moving piece collides with something.  Possibly explosions and death.

 

I would expect that the rotor's ability to rotate mass would be proportional to its size somehow.  This could limit the speed at which a turret may rotate into position, especially if it is large and heavy.

 

I note that rotors might not be useful for only turrets, although a way of figuring out what position they should be in and when would be necessary.  I've ideas for this, but those are suggestions for another time.

 

 

Rails

 

I know it seems like rails would be inferior to rotors, but I think for some designs, it would make a lot of sense.  Think broadside cannons.

 

The trick with rails is making them flexible enough that you can do neat things, without making them so flexible that it becomes an implementation nightmare.

 

The most obvious constraint would be to enforce that a rail can only be built such that it specifies a path within a plane.  Let's look at that another way.  Imagine a ship.  Now imagine a plane intersecting the ship.  Suppose you want turrets to move about the surface of the ship, but only so long as they're on that plane that intersects the ship.  That's what rails should let you do.

 

Now, arbitrary planes might be a little much (although, not necessarily impossible).  In all likelihood, you'll want to stick to planes aligned with the axes.  Basically, adjacent rail blocks (of possibly a variety of shapes) will form a rail, but all blocks have to intersect this common plane.  Only one thing may be on a given rail.  This rail might use slopes to wrap around the ship, totally, or maybe just partially.  The outer surface of the rail blocks must be exposed (of course).  Things may slide along the rail blocks on the outside surface.

 

 

Control Blocks

 

Even for such aimable turrets that one would want to be in direct control of, the game needs to know that there's an aimable turret.  I think the easy way is to use some kind of 'turret control block'.  This can be thought of as a block that contains targeting and firing control for the turret, but for the implementation, this really just marks which bits are turrets, and can aid in figuring out which rotors/rails are involved in aiming it.

 

It makes no sense for a turret to have more than 2 degrees of freedom.  Since the projectiles move away from the ship, that effectively allows you to target any point in space (assuming that the 2 degrees allow for arbitrary rotation).  Unfortunately, just having 2 rotors between the turret control block and the ship it is attached to does not guarantee that there are 2 degrees of freedom.  If the rotors are both aligned to the same axis, indeed, there will only be one degree of freedom.  I would expect that the control block will only take control of 2 rotors/rails if they grant independent axes of motion.  If not, then stop at one.  This should be something that can be done automatically.  I note that this scheme will prevent players from stacking many weak rotors to gain rotational speed from cheap parts (although that shouldn't be a problem anyways as long as the stats make sense - take a lesson from thrusters).

 

A note to the implementer - you would want to work from the control block in.  There may be other reasons to use rotors and rails that don't directly involve aiming guns.  If they become part of the game too, then you cannot guarantee that there will be at most 2 of these things between the ship and the control block.

 

The control block would have an orientation, which would allow the player to effectively specify which way the guns are pointing.  Alternately, one could require that the control block be touching the base blocks for the guns.  This could allow the game to automatically determine the correct orientation for the player.  It could also make it easier for the game to enumerate the weapons that a given control block is actually controlling.

 

Once a control block knows which weapons it can fire, and which motion blocks it controls, all you need is an algorithm for aiming the turret at the target.  For rotors, this is easy.  For rails, it's less easy, but still not too difficult.

 

 

What d'y'all think?

[Shademage]

Im not sure about every detail but your aesthetics problem is easy

 

Start by making your own mega lazers with magnified damage and range

 

Then place them in a ring inside the outer limit of the "eye" to hide them

About 16 so placed lazers would create the effect you want

 

It will be a single melting shot from 7km that absolutely nothing except stations and super ships will survive for more than a second

 

[Ohm is Futile]

Concerning overpowered shields:

That's on the radar and I agree that this is the point that's problematic. As I stated here in the "Further down the road" paragraph, I'm working on solutions to this.

 

Concerning customizable turrets:

Please everybody who has a strong opinion on this answer me the following questions. Don't take them too literally, it's about the principle of why you want something. I'm looking to fix the problem and not treat the symptoms. Please also tell me which of those is the most important for you.

 

1. Do you want to configure a turret's stats (as in Damage, Range, etc.)?

2. Do you want to create more of the same turret (so your ships look less random)?

3. Do you want to adjust the size of turrets?

4. Do you want to change the appearance of turrets?

 

1. is already possible at a turret factory, and the rest will be coming later on. If you don't like the turret factory then please tell me why (and don't just say "it's buggy" because I know very well that there are some issues).

 

Wow, I'm off for a while with university and this topic is still going!?

 

Anyways, here is what's still my opinion:

1. Yes and no. The turret factory concept is all well and good, but it needs tweaking. I want more options. Specifically, something I think would be fun would be both/either turret reverse engineering (kinda goes with #2) to allow us to make copies of existing turrets and/or disassemble and reassemble. For example, you break it down (lose it) but get a blueprint and then you can make more of that turret at any factory provided you have the materials.

 

Assembling/disassembling could allow two things, one would be to get turret materials(trade the turret for turret components) to build other turrets and/or reassembling with tweaks to stats within certain limits(rebuild a very similar turret but tweak, say upfront damage for a slower fire rate or range for lower energy consumption, etc.) For example, each stat could be worth a certain number of points and we would essentially move stats around at the cost of others so that the weapon retains roughly the same potential but with slightly different specs (like maybe no more than 25% change from the base stats).

 

2. Yes, see my bit about reverse engineering.

 

3. Meh, don't really care.

 

4. Well, as someone else pointed out, lasers look like lasers and railguns like railguns and that's fine that way. More variety could be nice, but that might be mod territory.

 

Also, can we please please please get something along the lines of a hardpoint block? Something we can put on our ships that creates a slot in the ship menu so we can swap turrets much faster by just sliding them into a slot instead of having to go into building mode and placing them manually into specific locations every time we want to switch? Colour coding the block with regards to the slot could be cool so we can tell what "kind" of hardpoint it is from the menu (aka players could code them both by size and or location/firing angles depending on a self-imposed colour code).

[dyze]

1. It would make the entire current looting system obsolete. This loot system is a very important aspect of Avorion that makes it fun, you can always find a better weapon.

...

That being said, there are plans to make weapons (and fighters) more customizable. I'm planning:

- Custom models for weapons (and fighters on that matter)

- Custom models for turrets

- Better scaling for turret sizes (the current turrets-not-scaling-issue is actually a bug, but I want to address it at the right time so I don't have to change it twice)

- Turret templates so you can copy turrets you've built or looted

 

Totally agree, I fully enjoy the looting aspect of this game, please do not remove that. All for customizing what you find, but please don't replace looting with crafting.

[LordMaddog]

I believe the best salutation is a mix of everything.

 

Players make their own or use premade Turret model, attach it to their ship and the scale/size determines the damage + energy usages. (the larger the turret the more damaging but also more energy consumption and slower tracking.)

 

Then turn Turret loots into 'WEAPON SYSTEMS' that are added to preplaced Turrets or weapon blocks by equipping them to one of their placed weapons. Just like you equip armor or  sword in most fantasy games.

 

Thees weapon systme would control the weapon 'type' and have cool modifiers like, burst fire, Overheat, energy use, corrosive, explosives, as well as have some basic stat modifiers so weapons would be mostly useless without them.

 

This  idea would achieve what both 'You' and the builder type players really want. While leaving the balance and full control still in your hands.