Taedrin
Gallente
Mercatoris Technologies
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Posted - 2007.02.07 15:49:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: Ilor Prophet
EVE may not be a flight sim, but it has all of the stuff built in to make it one. Ships have acceleration and deceleration characteristics, inertia-driven turning radii, and mass that makes bumping into objects more or less serious depending.
Why not have asteroids that you simply can't shoot through (or run a mining laser through, for that matter)? Why not require people to have line-of-sight when using rails/lasers/blasters/artillery? Let missiles track around objects but be aware that they may have longer flight times and thus run out of fuel before reaching their target. Allow area-effect weapons (webbers, scramblers, ECM bursts, smartbombs, etc) to function at full capacity. It's an area where drones excel, and where maneuverability and close-in weapons (blasters, autocannon, and appropriately fitted lasers) are more useful than long-range sniping weapons.
Why would someone go there? Because it's harder for you to chase him down or shoot him. Why might you go in there anyway? Because you are using weapons that are less affected by the environment. What might he do about it? Well, if he can keep objects between you long enough for him to open up the distance (i.e. he has a fast, maneuverable ship), he might be able to get outside your locking/weapons range and escape. What might you do to conteract this? Use good teamwork and good flying to approach from multiple directions such that someone always has a shot. Force him to choose the lesser of two (or more) evils.
Put some tension into it and make asteroid fields a dangerous place. Or give players a reason to mine those gigantic Veldspar asteroids hanging out in so many belts - it reduces the amount of large objects that enemies can easily hide behind.
And if you wanted to get really evil about it, I second the idea to make an entire environment filled with rocks, like a planetary ring. The entire grid is filled with rocks. It makes even simple tasks like aligning for warp difficult for bigger ships (making it hard to escape once you're in), but affords some measure of protection from massive blobs attacking a single ship. It would actually promote more "1-on-1" combat even in large fleet operations (as people attack only those ships that they can maneuver to get direct shots on).
Make fleet combat something other than "warp to zero, orbit at 7km, activate weapons, yawn, wait for tank to break."
Because all of this requires ray tracing, and other algorithms with horrible big oh complexity. Implementing such things would bring TQ to it's knees, and render the game unplayable. And performing all of these computations client-side is a horrendous security risk, and only encourages hacking the game to gain an unfair advantage.
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