Pandora

/unlurk Nope, I never even GOT that far in the TODs, much less in any short time. All my profiles had a life expectancy of 2-3 days tops. That's when I found a new gadget / AI state / system / command to bre... err play with. I think the closest I got to the complete TODs was when I got hold of the GBS - only that I didn't play as intended but rather checked if that language worked in the first place. And nope, Derek didn't want to believe that not QUITE every command and (insert propellerhead term) worked as intended. But I digress. Kudos on actually playing that thing! Pan, Lead Tester BC3000AD writing at 00:36 Bavarian Time (GMT+2) on 17 Aug 00

On a related matter... http://www.3000ad.com/ubb/Forum9/HTML/000091.html Pan, Lead Tester BC3000AD writing at 21:06 Bavarian Time (GMT+2) on 7 Jun 00

Re: Marine squads If a squad does not get benefits from having a 'leader' then the whole idea is just eye candy and superfluous. But what kind of bonus would that be? AI? I have no idea of what this would do or if it would actually help. Movement speed? Quite possible. The MOVE IT effect. Acquisition/radar range? Might be a subtle way to increase 'organized effort'. Hard to tell. Projectile Lifetime? Minor effect, except against stationary objects. Weapon recharge time? Possible, but would be hard to explain, IMO... Promotions could be automatical (preferred) and the assigning business could be as simple as automatically making the highest ranking member of a deployed group the leader. TRANS deployment means a 1-10 man squad and SH deployment a 1-20 man squad. No need to have 'fixed' squads or a command structure in the roster... Pan, Lead Tester BC3000AD writing at 17:37 Bavarian Time (GMT+2) on 28 Mar 99

Blayne, your HK is... different... but I'd rather stay closer to the current system. If you want a system with more firepower then I'd suggest that READY marines have higher combat stats. They're packing the heavy guns and maybe some HUD targeting aid in their combat gear... whatever. Drawback: marines must be on-station all the time (and tire) and their heavy guns have a slight chance to damage the ship location they are fighting at. This can be fleshed out depending on what weaponry/equipment will be available in Strike Pack but it should not create new elements that won't exist in SP. Jeff, ordering men to 'capture' enemies won't make you popular with them because that's a proven recipe to lose men. As I understand it, they will capture intruders *if* situation permits and the operator on site makes the decision. This makes ship security the #1 objective and capturing intruders is #2. Ordering marines to specific locations would be nice but NOT with the current menu system. That would be a lot of locations to scroll through... Pan, Lead Tester BC3000AD writing at 09:53 Bavarian Time (GMT+1) on 14 Mar 99

> Cooooool. Customisable voices. I can barely wait. Err... why do you wait? DL the GBS and read SOUNDFX.TXT. Create some WAV files of your own and place them in the SFX directory. (Use main dir if that doesn't work) Good luck in figuring out file formats and somesuch but that's the beauty of 'unsupported'. Pan, Lead Tester BC3000AD writing at 17:15 Bavarian Time (GMT+1) on 7 Mar 99

quote:(To know your crew's individual personalities and such, means you'll want to protect or neglect them that much more!) What's next? The Mike Resnig Tamagochi? <g> quote:Pan, where the heck did you dig that up from? Yep, I remember that one quite well. That was easy. I knew it was a CIS post with the thread title 'BC3k design flaws'. Did a forum search on FSFORUM and FSCOMBAT and there you go. Of course, I'm using OzWin (offline reader) for CIS so I can decide what posts to keep. Normally they scroll into limbo after a few days/weeks. Pan, Lead Tester BC3000AD writing at 17:41 Bavarian Time (GMT+1) on 4 Mar 99

quote: Perhaps if full speed was reached in about the same amount of time that it takes the BC's hyperjump engines to recharge. What is that? About 45 seconds to a minute. There's your minute. Using the current hyperspace recharge time for an 'acceleration' time sounds like a VERY good rule of thumb to me! Feels about right. Some recharge times: BC 45s, IC and SH 15s, with cap ships ranging from 32 to 70s, and fighters from 12 to 28s. Note that the jump transit time is configurable, too, but doesn't vary much between BC (6.5s) and IC/SH (5s). A Stormcarrier takes a noticable 10s, though. <g> I did some tests with craft, accelerating them to 50% of their top speed, conventional and A/B, and calling this the acceleration rate. Going up to 100% is useless in practically every tactical situation because of the 'friction induced' slowdown. You'll never fly in a straight line for that long... For the record: top speed is 1500km/h conv and 2250 km/h on A/B. Formula: Constant acceleration in g = Speed in km/h / ( (Time in s) * 35.3) Both BC and IC accelerate to 50% in 5 (conv) or 1.15 (A/B) sec. These are accelerations of 4g conventional and 28g military. Yup, the BC pulls 28g's - forward! Using half the hyperspace recharge time to get up to 50% of top speed, we'd end up with a more believable 2.8g for ICs and 0.9g for the BC under conventional power. If A/B about doubles that acceleration then we'd still be in MUCH more reasonable ranges. Accelerating a whole Battlecruiser at 1.8g would require SOME engine already! (If I assumed a mass, I could calc some mind boggling power figure. <g> ) BTW: I DO hope that in BC3020 the game will use the (configurable) values from OBJECTS.SCR instead of coded defaults to determine craft speeds. Currently all player craft use the 1500/2250 speeds. Pan, Lead Tester BC3000AD writing at 00:11 Bavarian Time (GMT+1) on 3 Mar 99

I see that the fuzzy dice subject has surfaced again. <g> This thread must have gotten lost in the forum conversion so here is the original Compuserve post. quote: #: 21390 S18/*HOT*: BC3KAD (CIS:FSCOMBAT) 21-Mar-97 20:30:04 Sb: BC3k design flaws Fm: Pandora 101617,3425 To: Derek Smart 71334,2207 Replies: 0 TID: 3054 Par: 0 Chd: 0 Sib: 0 Sorry, but with release C4 out and C5 in the barrel, I didn't have any new bugs to report lately. This didn't keep me from investigating the gameplay issues, though. - Both the BC's bridge and the IC's cockpit don't have a rear window. The BC has all virtual reality displays which don't count and the IC has nothing at all. There is no good place to put the gun rack. - I can not blow up a jump point or flux field. - I can not see my BC when it is cloaked. - Even is the commander is female, there is no option to assign a marine to captain's quarters. It doesn't work, even if the marine is 'prepped for combat'. - I want to have a personalized registration plate for the BC, like NO-BRAKE. - The BC can not perform a bootlegger reverse. - I want a Fireball and Heal spell. - The tractor beams do not work on planets. - The commander's seat doesn't have a glove compartment for the sidearm. - There is no 'airlock' location which I can assign personnel to, so I cannot make prisoners 'walk the airlock'. - I cannot paint the BC the way I used to in Red Baron. - Both the BC's bridge and the IC's cockpit don't have a rear view mirror. I put my fluffy dice on the command console, but it kept falling off during tight turns. - I looked through the BC's floor plans, but I couldn't find any bathrooms. - The ships that show up in red on the Tacscan keep shooting and killing me. I didn't find an option to turn this off on the config screen. - I have all sorts of stuff on this BC, but not a *single* Battlemech! Please let us use Battlemechs on the planet surface. (Even ATATs or ATSTs will do, since there are no trees on the planets.) - If this BC is such a hot piece of equipment, then *where* is the CD player??? It is even more important for the IC's, because I want to play the Top-Gun or Iron Eagle soundtrack there. - The Nurse Grope Module (NGM) seems to be disabled in the GA version, even if the *commander* is in Medibay. - I can not blow up planets even with a full cargo hold of OTS weapons. They are by far to weak. - If I taxi an IC and run over a marine (or land a SH on one), there is no blood spraying on the windshield. Very unrealistic. It is completely out of my comprehension how such an incomplete program could have ever shipped. <gd&rvvvvvf> Pandora writing at 19:57 Bavarian Time on 21-Mar-97 Alas, this post caused another development delay... quote: (Derek) I laughed so hard, I _really_ fell off my chair and accidentally hit the keyboard on my other machine causing a 15 min compile+link to end! ...but such is life! <g>

quote: Firing more shots at one time allows the PTA to sample the ship's trajectory more often, keeping a tighter bead on it (and possibly forcing the interceptor to re-steer back into the path of another laser bolt!). Overall this leads to more cumulative damage than a magnum shot every few seconds. Using your own argument, I would say that the magnum bolt would have better chances to hit because the ship is not changing course (because of being 'under attack') as often. <g> quote: The side-effect to the rapid-fire PTA is that it forces interceptors to steer out of the way of incoming laser bolts, hampering their ability to maintain a good aim/lock on their target. If you're shooting one bolt every few seconds, pilots can easily do a short burst to move out of harm's way and get a few shots in before having to jink again. BC3k pilots do not evade incoming shots. This would require the AI of every fighter to calculate an impact probability for all nearby gunshots and constantly alter the course, dancing between the shots. This may be possible in code but won't fly on my PII/400. <g> Fighters do, however, start to jinx when being hit so you don't want to hit them as often but make every hit hurt because the followup shots are more likely to punch holes into vacuum. Moreso, fighters are typically thrown off-course by a penetrating hit which invalidates the aim of all 'in flight' shots. You can watch that just fine in the target lead indicator. There's a violent jump and a slow re-alignment after a hit. If you have a lower ROF then you're allowing the fighter more time to re-align on a more predictable course which at least partially eliminates these 'statistical errors' from the lead calculation. Actually, PTA is not a very good example of this (unless the target is very close) because it already fires way too fast to allow for a re-alignment between shots at 100% setting. This effect is more noticable with cap ship guns, which have recharge times in the 0.5 - 1.0 second range. quote: Take a ship who is discharging all three PTA's at 100 (to say nothing about the IOD). That's devoting quite a load to the weapons systems. If that ship gets peppered, the shields will go down much quicker because the energy just isn't there to replenish it. With this you are guessing at the energy management specifics of BC3020 and your guess is as good as anyones. <g> In BC v2.0 it is largely not modeled. quote: Pandora, as you know, I have great respect for you and your status as an exalted tester *cheeky grin*, but upon what do you base your claim that the PTA is a pinpoint accurate beam weapon? To my knowledge, it fires very clearly defined projectiles, balls of ionising radiation and ions, which erode whatever they hit before bursting. I meant that the PTA gun fires like a theoretical and recoilless 'laser' gun at a mathematical point in space and will hit exactly that point. The only limit is the resolution of the universe. OTOH, any real gun is subject to the whims of Murphy. Add microscopic manufacturing faults and the necessary evil of mechanical clearance in gun/barrel/projectile and you'll always have trouble hitting anything smaller than a barn door at 10 klicks. (may be slightly exaggerated <g> ) Real guns always 'spray' more or less and I guess that's where the common notion of high ROF = high chances to hit something comes from. The end result is that the PTA hits or misses the same % of shots, regardless of the ROF. If the target jinxes, all shots (no matter how many) will miss. If the calculation is valid and the target doesn't evade too hard then all shots fired at it will hit. In that case I prefer one shot doing 100% damage to 2 shots doing 25% damage each. Better range is a bonus, too. Actually I'd appreciate any change resulting in a lower ROF but higher total damage/second. I want nothing less than a 200% setting!!! (The range doesn't need to go up to 45k, tho. <g> ) Pan, Lead Tester BC3000AD writing at 22:13 Bavarian Time (GMT+1) on 2 Mar 99

Persons are killed when you tractor them. (It's a tad too rough for a human <g> ) This was incorporated when... someone... tried to 'recover' a person with the BC tractor beam like a disabled craft. (which crashed the game <g> ) There might be a different mechanism for personnel transfer in BC3020, when the BC actually has an 'airlock'. (for marine/SE deployment in space?) Pan, Lead Tester BC3000AD writing at 20:18 Bavarian Time (GMT+1) on 2 Mar 99

DeSylva, (started new thread because of the heavy drifting <g> ) >For some real fighter-bashing fun, in the latest version, set your PTA to 20% and target any nearby fighters. That gets you the best visual effects, alright. PTA is most EFFECTIVE at 100% - against fighters as well as cap ships. It has the best range and firepower and the higher rate of fire does not in the least increase the chances to hit. Higher rate of fire --> higher chance to hit... is what you get with _machine_guns_! They spray an area with equally deadly shots (a human target doesn't need more than one 7.62x51 round <g> ) so a higher ROF means more or a denser coverage. The PTA laser is a pinpoint accurate 'beam' gun and does *not* spray, neither is every round lethal. If a turret is calculating the target lead and fires one shot (miss) then firing two shots in the same time and at the same point would only result in missing twice as hard. Hit/miss chances should not be confused with the ROF. (They often are...) It depends on target/lead vectors, projectile speed, and distance - nothing else. Now if you're evaluating effectivity, you'll have to start with the chances of hitting. If the turret's AI is on target, you may hit 90%. Now you look at the PTA settings and determine damage or the range at which the turret operates. PTA at 100% has the best damage/sec and best range so there is absolutely no reason to use any setting below 100%. Period. (IMnsHO) Frankly, I never saw the reasoning behind the new PTA damage/range/ROF system. It only offers one 'good' choice instead of two. If you buy a faster ROF with much lower damage/sec (I did the math) then you're compromising your goal of actually destroying something. I'd suggest to go with a fixed damage, independent of the power setting. This way (PTA at 20%) you could have a lot of short lived projectiles to truly devastate anything that gets really close but no defense at mid-long range. There you have a lone wolf setting for when you're operating in a target rich environment. <g> Alternatively (PTA at 100%) you'd have mediocre firepower but a lot more potential targets because more are within the (higher) acquisition range. You'd be defending a larger area but with less concentrated firepower. That would be the setting of choice when flying cap ships in formation or to cover an escortee with your 'AAA umbrella'. I rest mi casa. <g> Pan, Lead Tester BC3000AD writing at 20:34 Bavarian Time (GMT+1) on 1 Mar 99

> Say you are in point blank range of a starstation, those PTA sure help a lot in cutting those shields open!! The BC's 2 main guns combined do just as much damage as the 3 turrets combined. (600/sec) Starstations are way up in 14000+/sec damage area... (many ++++ in some cases <g> ) That's not counting missiles, of course. Pan, Lead Tester BC3000AD writing at 13:18 Bavarian Time (GMT+1) on 14 Feb 99

> in-game, on screen, real time, step by step instruction for all basic skills This CAN be a script, of course, but there are precious litte ways in the scripting language to react to a certain *key* pressed. BC3k assumes that you know how to get around and only judges events like a ship successful ly protected, a SS captured.... stuff like that. If there were a 'training' script then it would run automatically and simply assume that you do everything right. If not, then you're lost and will have to try again... Maybe the newbies can come up with a list of WHAT the script should do or say. Any tester would probably be a very bad choice in identifying the 'hard' stuff. Pan, Lead Tester BC3000AD writing at 23:34 Bavarian Time (GMT+1) on 9 Feb 99

Why not RENAME the forum to BC3020 Development Wish List ? A wishlist for a released title is a BIT odd, after all! <g>

Having a player control specific officers/marines sounds very interesting - and extremely boring. Counter suggestion with much less of that 'rules' stuff! <g> Something that could work is a no-holds-barred co-op game. The maximum reasonable number for this might be 2 players per BC but the coded limit could go up to as many as 4 or 5. All of these players would have full access to all BC systems and support craft. That's the basic premise. First you always want a human at the BC's controls (weapons, shield, flight, cloak) because the FO/TO combo just plain sux at keeping it alive for extended periods. (Nothing personal, you know <g> ) Player #2 could then rummange through the frontends as needed, keep an eye on TacOps and probes and generally be a busy bee. The only clash you get is when 2 persons want manual control of a craft and that should be a no-brainer, code-wise. One can only take over by turning off the A/P and that can't be done if it is already off. No problem. If Player #1 doesn't want to fly the big momma any more (or loses connection), he turns the BC over to A/P and Player #2 can now sit in the big armchair or let the BC go about it's business under full AI control. I also see no problem with 2 players operating Tacops simultaneously. They only give orders to the 'responsive' craft, after all. If they can't organize this (split tasks) then it's their fault. <shrugs> Their client does all the work (like displaying a planet's surface) and all they do is giving orders to the actors under this BC's control. Yes, you could then wage war in 3 different regions simultaneously if this is a Ter/Mil BC with Fleet Control enabled and enough players on board. (...and all players having HexiumII/800 systems and cable modems. <g> ) You'd only need one organizational rule. Player 1 is Host, Der Boss, Big Cheese. He can kick other players if he doesn't like their style/performance/deodorant. We'll need something to keep those Derek Smart style players under control. <g> Everything else is 100% redundant and everyone can do everything. Limit players to a specific position/task and this thing becomes a lesson in boredom for most of the involved players and nobody is gonna use that 'cool' feature. Players should be able to do whatever is the most fun/productive at the time, manning the turrets to help take out that cap ship or SS, jumping in an IC to take out some fighter escorts or clear mines, keep overwatch on Tacops, heck, maybe even drive a SH back to a SS to grab some missile reloads... you get the idea. The AI officers can do all the chores like assign FE to ready an IC or take the garbage out. They do that quite well and only need the occasional whack over the head. <g> All organization should be left to the players. Controlling the use of resources or cash is not the programmer's job. BC3k is for players with a few brain cells of their own, after all. <g> If you have a heli sim and your CP/Gunner fires 5 Hellfires at a truck - yeah, so? Get a smarter CP next time, buddy. Pan, Lead Tester BC3000AD writing at 22:03 Bavarian Time (GMT+1) on 5 Feb 99

First you need a hotkey to enable the menu in the first place. That is, the BC, IC1-4, ATV1-4, probes, current target, systems, etc., etc... And what about Tacops? You need to select a target *before* you can do any menu ops so you'll need a menu system for that, too. In short: don't hold your breath. Maybe something will happen in BC3020 but I can't even *guess* at what would be a good system because I don't have the feature list, much less a running version. I do agree that keyboard operation would be a cool thing - especially for the frontend modules. I could at last write a keyboard macro for the dummy stuff like assigning 10 marines to search duty or switching half the crew on/off duty. No need to code fancy shift procedures and the hotkeys aren't used in the frontends anyway so I could fill up the whole keyboard with special assignments, loadouts and whatnot. <g> Pan, Lead Tester BC3000AD writing at 20:00 Bavarian Time (GMT+1) on 5 Feb 99

> Well, I have an easy solution for the proxy issue. Don't play at work. Why is that a solution? The ISP that I am using from home has a proxy, so... Pan, Lead Tester BC3000AD writing at 19:11 Bavarian Time (GMT+1) on 2 Feb 99

> I took Pixan and the station went operational almost inmediately under Terran/Military and it started shooting at ME! Best guess (insufficient info) on what happened: In TacOps you ordered your BC to attack the SS. You didn't tell it to stop so the BC just kept attacking the SS - after it was captured. If you order an AI ship (the BC qualifies for 'AI ship', in Tacops) to attack *something* then the 2 craft become hostile towards each other. Launch an IC and tell it to attack GHQ. Then switch to the IC. See? Pan, Lead Tester BC3000AD writing at 17:23 Bavarian Time (GMT+1) on 29 Jan 99

No, Linguini! <g>

Errr, Mojo? Did you translate this with a program? Not even a *willing* american could produce that kind of gibberish. <g>

And what exactly should this in-game help say...? Specific wishes, please. <g>

I can't say anything definite about BC Online (BC3020 isn't you, yet! <g> ) but here's an educated guess on what will happen re logoff: You logoff when your BC is docked at a SS. If you're one of those 'accidential connection losers' then you won't be docked at a SS and will stick around for a while with the BC under AI control. (= sudden death, if under attack) The BC is completely taken off the game as long as you are logged off. Maybe a small 'core fleet' of AI ships could be taken with you into limbo. Dunno. *Assuming* that player built items are allowed in a multiplayer universe: All persistent kinda actors (SS, ODS, maybe planetary stuff) will remain in the game under AI control. We have seen that any SS can be destroyed by a lone IC so I give 'em about 30 minutes before some bad man in search of a cargo pod comes around and snuffs it out. Instant urban renewal, unless the player SS rebuild, which in turn would soon choke the universe with SS all over the place. See house situation in UO, although I'm not current on that. Pan, Lead Tester BC3000AD writing at 15:02 Bavarian Time (GMT+1) on 26 Jan 99

As it was said so many times before: The BC has NO landing gear and will therefore crash upon touchdown. No matter what. But have you tried a water landing, yet...?

I wonder if there is a Quake mod that makes you invulnerable for 10 minutes once your health goes way down. You could grab some patch-me-ups and wouldn't die so often... OTOH - nobody would WANT to play it in the first place. Pan, Lead Tester BC3000AD writing at 13:26 Bavarian Time (GMT+1) on 23 Jan 99

Marshmellows are practically unknown in Europe. It's an american thing.