Sarrian Calda
The Lost Legion
2
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Posted - 2011.11.18 16:50:00 -
[1] - Quote
I don't think missiles need to add any more effects on the victims as missiles simply do not miss.
They expire when they reach their maximum flight time and just extinguish themselves.
What I would like to see, is to have actual missile launcher models placed on the ships wherever the pilot decides to place the launcher bays at.
Some ships, probably Destroyer size and below, are probably too tiny to place actual launcher models on them. Some ships like the Caldari Crow actually does look like the model of the launchers are already included in the design of the ship, so there's no extra work there.
Then! We can have missiles actually firing from the launchers instead of spawning from the middle of the ship like some Zerg Queen.
There's probably zero additional data required for data transmission for this. You can fix the client code so that the launchers will always fire in a particular sequence if the pilot decides to launch the weapons one by one, but the launchers will always, for example, fire from left to right regardless of the order of placement of the launchers. Of course, you can build this ordering of the launchers into the client since the players can't re-assign physical launcher order in the space even if they changed the module icon placement in the HUD.
For the large ships, specifically capital-class ships, the placement of the launcher has no effect on its effective range. It doesn't mean that the launchers at the front can hit the target while the launchers at the back are missing the target due to them falling short of a few meters. Calculation of effective firing point and range is still the same.
When individual launchers run out of missiles, it would just stop firing. Again, this coding is client-based. If the server tells the client that "Launchers 1, 3 and 4 are out of ammo.", which is usually the case when the last cycle used up the last ammo, then the client will just base on that existing information and stop the animation of the empty launchers.
There should be little extra work on the client. This would be exactly the same as someone firing missiles one by one instead of firing them as a group, and this has been going on for as long as I started playing EVE.
If the camera is zoomed all the way out, all these little details of the launchers can be hidden to optimize rendering of large scale battles. No point rendering details when the ships are just brackets, right? If I'm not wrong, this is already built into the game, so no extra work there as well (at least not much).
Then, last but not least, if the individual weapon modules are actually destroyed or disabled, simply replace it with a static model of the corresponding state, or just replace them with the same model, just to show that your enemy is less painful to you now (or vice versa).
Ah, for something fanciful, it'll be nice to add optional trails for the missiles to show how fast they are and to see the enemies panic when multiple smoke trails are converging on them.
I should just say this:
I wish observing EVE fleet battles feel like observing gratuitous space battles. |