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A few suggestions for the future.


Guest David Sanftenberg
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Guest Coolhead

You know what came to my mind when i spoted the Sea cariers the first time? "How do i request landing clearance, i need to rearm."

Wow, i thoung how come i cant land what am i doinf wroung? i used the score 3 on the landing in Fleet defener and Hornet. Anyone know? this would be really neat thing. And perhaps you could jump into somekinda bomber craft or something, designed for atmospheric flight. Now there is an idea.

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Hello folks,

basically before we take off making this game the ultimate universe simulater (including FP everywhere, rping all and everything, building anything anywhere, with complete and total interaction between everyone, basically a fully detailed vr universe... um, anyone got that 500GHz 800 Tbytes ram machine mentioned earlier here?) I would suggest, to improve what the game already has and to try to make it generally more playable.

That would include a more intuitive control of the entire thing (perhaps better structured, like I dont have 5 or so computer systems to handle whatever is going on aboard my ship, but just one with several submenus (also pulldown menues for crew orders, perhaps the possibility to form groups of crew members with assignable orders so I dont have to hit the mouse like 100 times to have 8 marines get those damn intruders off my ship, even better there could be a map of the decks on the BC with clickable icons or whatsoever for crew members, instead of perscan, would also totally be enough for me, if I can see my men hunting others from overhead (so no FPmode needed from my pov)).

Things like an online database (or just online manual) would be neat, including goods prices on last few visited space stations etc. .

What would add to the game a lot as well is a bit more graphics and sound. When I say graphics I dont expect this to become a space shooter like freespace or wc with tons of new light sourcing effects etc..., but some details such as some sort of flame from engines and better transition graphics as well as some sort of hit indicator other than the target just bounces around would help as well. When asking for graphical detail. Even more I would like to see some neat things, such as interceptors actually entering the BC trough the fighter bay,taking of with vertical flames, several starships working as formation (probably leads too far), docking at starstations (e.g. bc closing, asking for docking clearance and then being guided by autopilot to some place with a docking tunnel which then connects to the bc and then being connected to the station terminal). Minor things such as my turret laser shots looking like the IOD and not like the lasers as fired by fighters should be changed.

When saying sound I would generally like to have more to listen too, other then my team saying what they are doing as well as some rather incomplete battle sounds, including me getting hit but not hearing my lasers fire and stuff. What would be cool is a cd player usable after the game started so u can listen to ur own audio cds or an mp3 decoder (which takes processer speed so perhaps never mind this) or just in general some better background noise)

I would also appreciate a more detailed flight model (perhaps with relative speed, such as in Elite2 and 3).

As for gameplay Id love a bit more interaction with other ships and races other than shooting or towing them (eg being called to tow someone else, or being called to protect some galcom trader from pirates) as well as some story plot evolving (I understant that one of bc3ks great strengths is that it allows u to fly around this openly without story limits but a little story would truly add... like looking for some ship that has been missing, artifact quests etc. . This is a part where we players should be asked as well so we can create some missions using a script generator or some mission building tool (by gamers for games, quote from interplay they dont seem to follow too much lately). I understand that to put heavy interaction into a game of bc3ks complexity is very hard (I played Daggerfall which was as buggy as bc3k on the first release, but other then the bc never was fully fixed.).

A little newflash appearing from time to time about what is going on in the galaxy (script based perhaps) could help there.

A good tutorial to this game would greatly decrease the sometimes frustrating steepness of the learning curve and if done perhaps as a scripted flight school with some old space bear of captain telling you what to do or some first mission with him taking u as the green commander under his wings could do the job.

Well, its getting late here so I better stop for now. What Im trying to say is that I believe that if more finetuning and adding few but useful and helpful features is done on the game together with some things to make the "be there" feeling stronger, would greatly increase playability and enjoyability of this very complex and ambitious game project (also you would not need to reinvent the wheel over and over again... once in 3 years should be enough smile.gif ).

Note that all of this is just the opinion of one gamer and that due to time and PC performance restricions I have not played that much, but I read about bc3k first time in 94 in some cgw article and thought that this would be "The Game", which after grabbing the imported take2 version in 96 it finally promises to become now.

Finally I would like to thank you, Derek Smart and your team for sticking with this game and supporting the gamers and doing all the effort to keep this to evolve further.

Sincerely (and now comes the dotted line :-)

------------------

Cmdr. Carter

GCV-Discovery

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Guest Coolhead

... say that multiplae computer aint a bad idea man.

What if the came had an open end design with some sorta editors,. like the Quake2 or MS FLightsim? Write a few editors for making add on muduals to the game. If there is any game out there capabel of doing this type of thing. this is certainly it. did anyone ever designed a cocpit for FLightsim? i didnt but was considering it very closlly, however the attraction got lame. the software just isnt versitile enough. But here is a game that thouched on something only Profetional simulator companies that design sims for Airline industry could pull off. Even ms flightsim suports multiple screens, but it rather sucks. This would be kinda neat to have each station set up on one monitor, like the bridge, as a one large Video projector screen. then several monitors for radars and other subsystems. This all could be modeld into a room resembling a Uss enterprise bridge. And sevelral ppl could be playing the game at once, hey bc3020 is supost to have multiplayer eh? well think about this if there is 4 ppl pling one game, and there is 16 groups playing on the net, how many ppl is that? like captain, weapons of. systems off. and so on. Hmm lets see i think p2 750 with 256 ram an a 16 gig hdd nad perhas with couple of 3dfx woodoo3's would do the job.

It would be a club or some kind, a hobby club resempling those who build a Model trains. Perhaps Some amusment park with video games would like the idea of such entertainmet. Milking customers for ever minute. hehehe Who would like to be the captain of the Eventhorizon? anyone seen that one?

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Hmm, for that one we would have to wait for the touchscreen computers.

I saw on Discovery that some kamikaze nerds were trying to develop a touchscreen interface... man that would be so cool! a 20 inch flatscreen..err touchscreen! :-). Sigh, I was born too early in this modern world! Do you people ever think what kids 30 years from now will ask for? "Dad can we buy that 300 ghz,100 gigabyte RAM, 800 terabyte HD computer???" (<---Touchscreen..or holo-interface who knows!!).

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  • 3 weeks later...
Guest some guy

If we're gonna have characters wandering the halls of the battlecruiser (hopefully! drool!) then how about taking it a step further and creating npc's wandering around in their own bases, etc. That way you don't just have a 2d image of the bad guy, he has an actual location and body. Further, some of the npc's could have specialty abilities, having one or two speciality npc ships that wander around the galaxy and occasionally, "coincidentally" cross swords with the player won't take up too much processor time would it?

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Hi. I just have a simple quesiton. Will tactial combat between ships be altered in anyway?

For example:

Having radar detection play a bigger role in combat. I think right now all ships have just about the same radar limits, maybe varying the radar limits a bit and even having different heavenly bodies sheild or obstruct a ship radar system or obsure a ship signature heavenly bodies like planets, moons, comets, and astroids.

Maybe giving the P.T.A system a sub-menu where you can assign it to work in different capacities such as 1)point defense (shooting incoming missiles) 2)Interceptor Defense (shooting at incoming enemy interceptors)and 3)IOD target acquition (assigning it shoot at what every the IOD has targeted.

I have a few other ideals about helping to improve tatical combat. I love the huge complex universe you have create but I love having as many combat options as possible over the ship.

If you have already addressed this in another post, let me know.

Thanks.

Karl Wolf

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Carter I like the ideal of a tutorial for the game for newbie commanders but I think that players can script a tutorial mission or series of missions for newbies.

With the release of game editing system I think that a good ideal would be for a bunch of commanders to get togather and script a bunch of missions a newbie can play, having each new mission introducing more and more of the games complicated funcitons and aspects.

Under taking a project like this could serve two purposes 1)It would help newbie commanders get there feet wet gradually.

2)It would give would-be mission scriptors a chance to get their feet wet with using the game editor by starting out scripting simple missions for newbie commanders.

If anyone else likes this ideal give me a yell maybe we can start developing the missions to be scripted. Email me or use my email address to find me on ICQ.

Karl Wolf

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Radar ranging is fully modeled in BC:3020AD. In fact, the code is in BC3K v2.0 but disabled for simplicity. Its a bitch when you are being shot at by some guy who is BVR (beyond visual range). With the complexity of BC3K, its one of many features that are suppressed in the interest of playability.

I suspect that by BC:3020AD, you will all be experts and want more, more, more. God help the newbies to BC:3020AD who never played any prior versions. They'll be bleeding for a long time to come. smile.gif

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Hi.

I remembered in the forum somewhere that there was some talk about a persistant universe for BC and Derek said that was out of the question at least for now, because of the budget to make such a game but he also said something about it would be ashame to have the game universe end when the players disconnected.

Well what I was thinking of was maybe giving players the option of saving the game universe when a gaming session was over. For example, lets say I host a game and players join in that game,we play for awhile then we decide to end that session. So lets say everyone docks their ships at space stations and since I'm hosting it I would simply save/backup game and end it. Then the next time we get together for another session I could restart that same game having everything as it was when we left it and if one or two players aren't able to make it to this particular gaming session then their ships would remain docked at the stations until they was able to join in.

I'm no programmer and thus have no ideal how hard it would be to implement a save function for a multi-player game, but such a feature would be nice, if not for 3020 then prehaps 3030. smile.gif

Well hope you like the ideal.

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Guest JustAName

A suggesstion that is both practical and free from worry of burdening thy current technological constraints...

The trade screen at bases could be substantially streamlined for the prospective and (disgustingly) peaceful trader by doing one or both of the following:

1) Color code all items according to their percentage above or below the base price; or

2) Include the base price of all items next to its current local selling price in the display. It would facilitate ones ability to do the math while looking for the best deals.

Please bear in mind that I am as yet an unitiated brother (ie. I only played the free version). Hope this was of some utility.

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  • 5 years later...

Wow SC, ambition... it must be a gift and a curse sometimes. Good stuff!

I have this little idea... remember space cowboys how they got into the sattelite? well, um... i was hoping to be able to open up and climb inside ODS systems someday... why? not sure.. perhaps to look at the blinking lights or to place an explosive charge in the middle, where it's most vulnerable. We all know how annoying it is to actually hit the ODS's

It wouldnt be much, just a small hollow tube in the middle with a few systems inside... speaking of systems, hacking into it and firing its missles at anything you want now wouldnt THAT be fun in multiplayer!!!

Salute!

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Super compliments to our UC/BCMG friends in Australia (Mate!)

BTY ,probably a stupid question,but what kind of ping time can you get to MP servers here in the US (UC servers) or Europe (HOXDNA.ORG )server.

Just hoping for the best.

(Assuming no sunspots!).

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sunspots or no sunspots the ping is never shall we say, optimal. Likewise its nice to know people in the US. Well im on a dsl 256k and thats about the best you can get here for a pc. umm... i have tried joining servers for bcmg but all i ever get is one called scarlet vaccum. Nobody ever seems to go on it, pings spike a lot and the ships get stuck. but on average i get about 280ms. Distance, most probably. for some reason pings in america are better than pings from the UK. go figure. busy communications? some dodgy fiber-optic in the indian ocean?

"a blast from the past" ?? something i said or the mention of space cowboys?

[ 04-03-2004, 06:54 PM: Message edited by: Littlealx ]

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