entering stations on foot.

Macgeoghagen · Thu Mar 17, 2011 6:43 pm

I have an idea: what if you could go walk around in stations and things rather than just do the menu? For commonwealth stations you could make your player character walk around and interact with stuff, and for wrecked stations you would be in a spacesuit floating around collecting loot and dodging burning rubble, electrical arcs, and other such hazards common to wrecked space stations. I imagine the view would be top down just like the current in-ship view.

Thu Mar 17, 2011 6:50 pm

The collision detection system would be really hard to do, not to mention making the environments, the vast number of resources it would take, and the lack of script-control that we have over animations, it would be nigh-impossible. However, with things like ship changing that we have today, its getting bit by bit more feasible of a suggestion (there have been several times that the idea has been posed, but its never been technically feasible)

Drako Slyith · Thu Mar 17, 2011 9:49 pm

You could use shipchange, animate the playership (which I think is possible) use overlays, maybe even static projectiles which last forever, and the codes for walls in the Battle Arena, which could be scripted to kill the player, make the player bounce off, or enter the store/loot screen. It would take a ton of work, but it could work.

Macgeoghagen · Thu Mar 17, 2011 9:50 pm

A worthy challenge for a modder willing to push beyond the limits of feasibility.

Thu Mar 17, 2011 11:06 pm

Projectiles have to expire (though you can make the lifetime really long or spawn a new one), and will be removed once they hit something unless they are programmed to reflect and in which case they would be turned in direction
The arena walls are horribly gimmicky & its easy to get stuck in them (as I said, collision detection was bad)
We don't have an effective way to tell when the player is moving or not, in which case the walking animation would simply look.

Drako Slyith · Thu Mar 17, 2011 11:45 pm

I agree the arena walls would be difficult. But you could have a station with a recurring timer of 1 that fires a projectile that has a short lifetime and a speed of 0. A bit difficult to program a whole environment of them, but doable. Also, with the walls would it be able to create an effect of when the player hits them they fire an invisible shot with a high recoil? That would bounce him back away from the wall.

Fri Mar 18, 2011 12:04 am

That would lag so badly...

The engine simply wasn't designed to do things like this.

Drako Slyith · Fri Mar 18, 2011 12:11 am

It might not lag so badly if say the obstacles had range on them, being to the end of the strait they are on. The recurring timer would be set to 1, so it is a constant stream of shots. Horrible lag, but not as bad as, say 2542624525462456 shots on one stage. Lagging is quite fun (not)

ThePrivateer · Fri Mar 18, 2011 12:16 am

It sounds insanely difficult, but somewhat possible...oddly enough, not alot of space games let you walk around stations -- Freelancer comes to mind, but the X-Series, EVE, Riftspace etc, don't let you do that -- I mentioned in another thread about a space-based Roguelike called Ascii Sector that allows the player to walk around planets and stations.

Fri Mar 18, 2011 3:26 am

What about doing something more retro in a dockscreen canvas element?

Hatsuya Kanzaki · Fri Mar 18, 2011 6:28 am

I'd rather do such thing like how the Huari Dream sequence is coded, though I'll be supplying moar visuals from there.

((inserts a group of loli soldiers firing disintegrators on an Iocrym infantry pic))

Macgeoghagen · Sun Mar 20, 2011 7:34 pm

Atarlost wrote:What about doing something more retro in a dockscreen canvas element?

how big is a dockscreen allowed to be?

Sun Mar 20, 2011 7:37 pm

about 600x400 px

Mon Mar 21, 2011 5:14 pm

How about a text adventure mini-game like Zork? This is not something I want to do at every station, but maybe something as a one-shot plot critical point, or as the point of a mod.

Hatsuya Kanzaki · Tue Mar 22, 2011 3:48 am

For me, it'll be partially done this way!

Given the fact that a dockscreen image can be 600 x 400 px, the texts of course will be on the right, and the character/object/event concerned will be on the left, like you're playing a visual novel x SHMUP.

Actually, there's a Japanese visual novel that pulled off both a mecha SHMUP and being a sci-fi ecchi visual novel, and goes by the title Baldr Force