Perhaps in an expansion the animations could be added, but for right now i think this is the right way to go. In most battles i play i am zoomed out to see all of the action, and turret rotations are the last thing i am thinking about. The only time i really zoom in is when i am watching the replays of past games. Even then the lack of turret rotations dont bother me.

Hups. My bad.

Nevertheless, it should be possible to do it client side, since no feature of Sins demands the sharing of so detailed model info between clients. (At least, I see no reason why it should.)



This I understand quite well. And it's imho a good argument against it.



On the other hand, this is a very bad argument. Graphical fluff is always just there for graphical fluff. Or to rephrase it, why add so nice explosion effects, fighter trails, planet textures , etc. when it just adds more calculations?

Because it looks nice.

Why did you add fighter/bomber models and engine trails for them, when in your normal game mode you won't see them anyway? (The level at which you see the models instead of the symbol is about the same at which you see turrets on the Kol Battleship. )

Because it's graphical fluff and it's pleasing for the eyes (ok, not really for the eyes but for my overbloated primary visual cortex, but still).

So making the argument that it uses too much computational resources is a bad one, since computers are always evolving (compared to consoles) and in half a year (or one year, whatever) there are players with the cpu/graphic power to make it easily.

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But anyway, it looks like it wont be added. So another loss for my crusade to overload the Sins' devs with an abundance of graphical fluff.

you're arguing mostly video card memory over CPU Usage, very different things.

This makes me think about dual/multi core support.
Its been said IC is looking into it, but that was a few month ago, so i wonder if we will see it.

I think they said that multicores are still not common enough on the market to use.

Well "multicore" has been around for quite some time.

Hyper-Threading which is a "fake" extra core, but it gains about 10% extra in games that supports multicore or Hyper-Threading.
Not too sure about the specs on AMD, but they have had it for a longer then intel.

If sins is more or less optimized what i can be, i think it would be good for this kind of option.

Rotating torrents would need alot of extra cpu power. You have to choose what target you're shooting at, if the torrent can 'reach/aim' at the target correctly, and track it. And I doubt you could have a animation for that moving torrent.

in the end, anyone can multiply 2x2x100, but very few people can multiply 2x2 a hundred times at the same time (without taking the afformentioned shortcut, or knowing the answer ahead of time)

I'd have to disagree, given that (virtually) all CPU's now sold are dual core or better, and true quad cores are coming onto the market.



... Do you mean "turret"? A "torrent" is a part of a peer-to-peer file sharing network to handle the distribution of files.

Sins won't support multi-cores in any special way.  At this point, that kind of support would need to be added in an expansion.

Thats a shame, as i see a need for it in later games.

Oh well, im comfortable IC will make it smooth

Well, that's enough to make me happy as long as IC give it consideration.  

Then add the feature into the game engine to be used later by modder. A year from now computing power won't be a problem, and people will want ot make ships with tracking turrets. But if they don't add this feature now, it won't be posible later.

And the reason why to add it now and even spend time changing the ship models: Because it's realistic.
And if you're woried by performance issues, play a Homeworld1 skirmish without unit caps, build 8 capital ships, 40 destroyers and 400 frigates and see how it will run.
I have played that game on a 166 MMX with 32 MB of ram, a 8 MB graphics card, and it would start to lag only after I built about 200 ships.
And that was 8 years ago, and the game didn't have turrets only on the big ships, it had turrets on every ship class down to the corvettes (the multi-gun corvettes had 6), they even had a fighter with articulated weapons (the defender fighter 3 articulated MGs)

And there are a multitude of mechanisms to go around this problem, for instance, using level of detail (or LOD). Basicly, it replaces the model of the ship with a low poly one when you are zoomed out.

Models in this don't have more details than the ones in Homeworld 1, and if a 166 MMX could run a game with 200 ships (only counting mine), then more tham likely a core 2 duo from today with 1GB of RAM is up to the challenge.
The problem with the games today is that everyone rushes to release them. Nobody takes the time to optimize them properly anymore. That's what happend to Homeworld2, a good game that could have been great, and Imperium Galactica III, rushed and released as Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, another of the "could have been" ones

By the way, Nexus has the option to turn off animated turrets.

Ok sorry about this

I kinda think if your pc has a dual core in it , then one of its cores is good enough to play Sins alone at full detail on large maps anyway so the game is better off being optimised for single core to get a broader spectrum of players.

Also back on topic , im totally over the "i want turrets" thing , but its because im already past inspecting graphics and onto appreciating the finer aspects of gameplay only.

It really comes down to quality of the simulation for me. I don't want to see guns firing through their own hull, I don't want to see shots zooming away 90 degrees from the direction the turret is facing. I want to see ships and their respective turrets moving in response to targets' movements, and I want to see shots fired straight outward from the way the turret is facing.

It's not childish to want to see a polished and quality game, and it really takes away from the experience for me to see where corners were cut in building the simulation aspect of a game.

Moving turrets will not be in the February release of Sins but they maybe in the future. Details below:

It was a tough choice and wasn't done to "cut corners" on quality, but to make it a game that can be run on a wide range of machines and to free up resources to improve the quality of other areas of the game. Sure lots of games do have perfectly simulated turrets but these games aren't MASSIVE real-time empire games like ours. Infact one of our previous games had incredibly detailed turret and weapon physics but it made sense within the scope of that game. With Sins is as big as it is, I still find it incredible just how much you can zoom in and see - sure it isn't all a perfect simulation if you look really closely (most people haven't even noticed) but it blows away any game I've ever seen. We were *this* close to just making fighters a more simulated system so it's no surprise we cut things like turrets. A typical counter-arguement is "why not just make it an option"? Well, if something is only going to be used by a small minority of our customers and it's going to take a whole lot of work, those resources are better spent on other features and improving other areas of the game that are going to be used by the majority.

Nonetheless, we are fanatic about detail and we all love turrets. When Sins is done, one of our personal top wishlist items is to add turret support. Perhaps in a patch or expansion

Good thing ships don't do that

cool turrets for future releases
what about missing though? They can never miss? Whats the point of maneover?

The short explanation of it (I've given much longer explanations multiple times in other threads) is that the engine supports missing but the data is setup such that frigates and capitalships never miss each other but there is a miss factor on hitting strikecraft. This is desired to suit the lore and gameplay. Even today, our technology and knowledge of Newtonian Mechanics is such that missing large, slow moving objects with fast moving projectiles is virtually impossible. In the Sins Universe it is even less likely. Feel free to edit the hit percentages in gameplayconstants.constants.

Making a wishlist for the future sounds like a good idea.

Please be sure to add to that list the ability to have multiple, fully functional planets within the same gravity well.