No Orbit?

from Sins Forums
While playing the Sins the other day, I thought of something.

The gravity wells are present. And I believe they have some effect on movement (faster to move towards the planet than away from it), but I'm just curious as to why orbital structures and ships don't do just that- orbit. I imagine it would be a tactical pain in the ass when you only need to defend on side of the system, but thats the only reason I could think why it wasn't included. Was it just overlooked or purposely left out? Any ideas?
13,532 views 7 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
This was a game meant for low system requirements, so that everyone could play. That seems like it might take up a sizable portion of requirements. =)
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
That brings up another question... why didnt the devs consider allowing ships to "sling shot" around planets to get out of the gravity wells quicker(or even quicker intercepts of enemy fleets)? that would have added a very interesting tactical element to the game.
Galactic Civilizations IV
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
Realistic orbital mechanics were tried in the early game stages and were agreed to be not so much fun, so they didn't make it :P
Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top
Well, while the objects in space don't orbit from our point of view, the planet IS still spinning on it's axis, so anyone on the planet (i.e. earth view) would see the objects in the sky orbiting. However, this brings up the concept of using some sort of universal reference frame, which fails since the planets do not orbit around their stars. I mean, building an empire is a time consuming activity and you'd think that the planets would move at least some distance around their orbits in that time, right?

It would also help if this game were actually realistic in terms of physics, but then it would be a boring game of waiting several decades for your .99c speed ships to move between star systems :P
Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top
Astraos, the earliest game of this general sort was released in 1962 and was known as Spacewar. It ran on a PDP-1 computer!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar%21

I bother to throw in this bit of geeky historical trivia because even in the old Spacewar game they had to decide what they could and could not do with the resources they had, balanced against what players (themselves mostly) wanted.

I thought it really amazing that even with the very primitive hardware by today's standards, the Spacewar Designers managed to put in a realistic star field. Real NASA deep sky backgrounds in Sins would please me more than orbital accuracy, but perhaps not you. Maybe we will both get what we want a year from now as an option switch.
Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top
Eh. Its not really my desire to have realistic orbits. It would be cool I suppose for about twenty minutes. After that it would just get really old. I can see why they left it out. It was just a curiosity of mine. Thanks for the answers everyone. :)