Thx Multianna...I drop my complaint about non-tracking turrets.   

The next great leap for empire space games would be a Nexus strategy game. The feel, look, and interface was exceptional. Not only did the ships have turrets, each turret could be assigned to different targets.

Maybe I'm behind the times, but the War Craft/laser tag look displeases me considering what was done before. Simulation adds depth and maturity to a game. Ships ought maneuver more like beached whales--no gliding into formation. Ships should accelerate slowly, but have higher top speeds. But all this isn't Stardock's style, so I'll take whatever I can get.

moving turrets would be great! and add alot to anyone that makes gameplay videos, but in real gameplay terms, how much time does everyone spend zoomed in to a point where you can SEE the turrets? i know i hardly do.
even so id still like to seem them implemented, and for those talking about the performance hit, there could be an option to turn it off!

Kenetor

In every battle at least once. Well, when playing against the AI of course.

I think the dev's said that if they added turret animations it would slow down the games performance tremendously. I dont want that.. do you? Understandably tracking turrets would be cool, but preformance, and good framerate is also cool. I can live without the moving turrets if it will mean a better game.

Which is why you could switch it off in the options menu.

High cpu usage is really no argument against it.

It don't work that way. You can't just turn off animation. If one person turns it off, it'll create sync issues within multiplayer games. I believe that's a valid reason. Plus. It serves no purpose other than esthetic. I'd rather have performance

They could use tracking animation for only the biggest turrets, like those monster turrets on some of the capital ships.

on a small tangent: does the marza barrel rotate?

then implement the switch to turn it off in the game lobby then for multi games! so if everyone has a high end pc then they can turn it on, if not then off, have a seperate option for skirmish.

i think it really deserves to be in there, cmon homeworld had it! to match up its gotta be in there!

Kenetor

let me point out that I doubt even high end computers could handle it (on a larger scale) and asking everyone "whats your comp" doesnt always work either.


besides, if you're spending all your time on that small scale caring you arent going to have your ships very long anyhow.

well its still nice to watch, if it were all about performance we would be watching triangles flying around shooting dots!

as for say about what pc you have dont always work, you could have an ingame performance test where you get a number (they do this in supcom) which gives a good base to decide if you comp can run with moving turrets or not

esthetics is all down to personal preferance, and i would like to have a choice

Kenetor

except that most computers can handle the two to the same degree. if my compture chugged on wireframe moddels, give me triangles and squares.

what? run a test on someone elses computer to check for their video capacity??? that would consume bandwidth to the extreme, and would be a pain in the ass in countless other ways.
not to mention I dont see that getting by a firewall.

let me point out that if you had a hundred ships you could easily end up with 300-400 rotating turrets. that would be a huge pain to deal with, and if you simply double that it could probably fry your average computer.

no i mean that each person runs the performance test after they install and the result is then logged can can be brought up in the lobby either next to there name or via a hotkey



well supcom seems to do it fine and also has walking animations to do with hundreds of units, although supcom is far from perfect.

i just dont think it will take much to point a turret in the direction its firing, it has to work out the direction for the projectile so why not pass the info on to the turret?

Kenetor

And has much higher system requirements than this game is aiming for

and supcom runs on what type of computers now?

Ironclad cannot run the risk of limiting themselves to the rich elite.
so they include a flawless, unhackable self-tester into sins that displays your game capacity. I doubt thats what they want to do.

it can take a lot, the great wall of china is built not upon a few big stones, but many smaller ones.

the point being: games get bogged down because they do a few really tiny things that consume video and processing power, in a game with so many units thats dangerous.

i feel that having no moving animations for the sake of preformance isues is a bit off i dont see how it would slow down computers much i agree that frigate sized ships dont realy need moving turrets but the capital ships should have theirs moving or atleast some more animations(i cant see many more than moving and such but they look like FX rather than anims)

on the numbe of moving turrets that would be going on at once realy if it was only put on cap ships then in a 10 player game the max cap ships you can have is 160 isnt it? even then not all of those ships would be in combat and of the ones that are your computer wouldent slow down for animations and stuf that wernt on screen would it? so you would end up with only a few turrets moving at once meaning the preformance hit wouldent be very big

anyway i feel that the game needs more movement in its big ships (they are the centerpeice of a fleet after all) like the nose guns on a dready for instance it would make the game look so much better for me

So turning off planet elevators in the options menu creates sync issues with multiplayer games?

No it doesn't of course. Since both, the moving turrets and the space elevators are graphic fluff with no consequence on gameplay, it wouldn't be a problem for multiplayer at all.

Edit: To elaborate a bit more.

I dunno about the inner working of the sins engine, but I imagine that it works something like this:

Each ships weapons check if an enemy is inside its range. If the enemy is it checks if it inside its firing arc (since Sins only has 4 firing arc possibilities (front, back, left and right) with full 180° this check is quite simple). If the enemy is in, the weapons shoot and damage is applied. Now the weapon waits the WeaponCoolDown time and shoots again at the same target if the target is still in range and not already destroyed.

Now to add turret moving, it would just need another action before/after damage is applied, the turret would move to align in the direction the weapon has shot. It continues to track the enemy until the enemy is out of weapon range or angle (which would be the same check the weapon already does to see if it can hit an enemy).

Of course, with this system the turret tracking would lag a bit behind the first shot of the weapon. But it's a very easy and also fast system (it doesn't need that much more calculations).

Now this sort of action doesn't need to be send to other clients. It can be easily calculated clientside and is of no interest to other clients. I imagine damage and when shot will be shared info between clients, but why would you want to share turret tracking info?

Now, someone tells me why this isn't possible?

I assume they're not doing tracking turrets because they want to keep system requirements down.

Further, tracking turrets don't really add anything to the tactics or strategy of the game which is my primary focus.


That said, it would be nice to have at the very least as an optional feature.

Well, given that most people would expect the turrets to be facing the target before the ship could open fire, yes. The system you describe is all too likely to end up confusing people! They see their weapons fire in directions their turrets aren't facing, yet the turrets do move so... "WTF is going on! Buggy poorly coded game!!!!111!!!oneoneone!!!"

besides you cant even see the small turrets, im talking about the big one at least all cap ships should have moving turrets,

as for supcom i think i have a pretty average computer and it runs fine, amd X2 4200 dual core processor (core 2 duos are better and cheap these days too) 1 gig of ram and a X800 graphic card which i got when it came out, i hate that my machine USED to be top end now its average.

so its not the rich elite but everyone that can play it, come feb there will will be further engine improvements with the add on.
so if they didn't include it now id definatly wanna see it in a patch st some point when the optimise the engine more.

Kenetor

Thats the way it is with computers.

That said, while the devs have stated that it won't happen because of performance reasons, let me just add in that I'd really like the option too

Planet elevators are a particle effect, not a model.

It's not as easy as a coding thing. It's a rigging and model thing to. would require a lot of the models to be reworked, as well as coding hours. All of which can be spent on new assets and game features... Remember guy. You only have one race, there are 2 other races and assets. most of your computers already bog down with just the one on a large game. Why add more calculations?