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Wanted Features
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Empty Sectors
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7/11/2012 2:35:50 PM,
Old PRE-ALPHA topic
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109 months ago by
Xephelium
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Because you can see Earth and the moon, and it would take years to reach the asteroid belt by conventional means, I assume that Miner Wars isn't set in the asteroid belt, but rather in the space nearby Earth. There are sparse asteroids floating around out there, however not nearly so many as the game has right now. Space is BIG, so there shouldn't be very much out there.
Furthermore, since the sectors mainly consist of a small clump of asteroids in the middle of the sector, if this were plotted out among all the sectors, it would result in a grid of asteroid concentrations. This is not natural.
Additionally, if people are supposed to fight over resources, why fight someone when you can just float 2 minutes to another clump?
Because of all this, the majority of the sectors need to be completely empty- at most a little bit of debris floating around.
The sky box also needs to be changed to one with much less going on in it. If there are three mother ships flying around in the sky box for each sector, and there are infinite sectors, that's a lot of mother ships. Ditto with the blinking lights and asteroids.
An added benefit of empty sectors is that you can have larger battles with less lag in empty sectors (huge plus for people with crappy computers like me). This is also less memory intensive for the servers.
It also makes getting lost in space a real threat.
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109 months ago by
muggsbud
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miner wars is set in the asteroid belt, however you can see earth because players need something to gound themselves with; that is, to see familiar things and get an idea of where they are without explicitly asking someone. I'm assuming there will be empty sectors, but that depends on how the voxel generator turns out when the game is done.
people fight over resources because fifty- or even a thousand 50 cent bullets are cheaper than a $50,000 drill and you may get a million dollar ship out of it with repairs being relatively cheap.
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109 months ago by
Xephelium
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Still, the asteroids in the asteroid belt are immensely far apart (100,000 miles between 1km asteroids).
http://www.astronomycafe.net/qadir/ask/a10537.html
That's about 1,610 sectors between 1km asteroids!
Obviously Miner Wars shouldn't put this much distance between them, but the distance should be considerable, like 1-3 sectors.
I won't contest that cost is a factor for killing over mining, but the scarcity of resources should be the driving factor. I also don't understand why you would have the majority of people fly around without drills.
I disagree with having Earth and the moon being visible, but that's discussed in another thread.
http://www.minerwars.com/ForumTopic.aspx?id=512
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109 months ago by
muggsbud
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that was an irl comparison. in the game drills would be dirt cheap -if not standard. again, its video game magic that makes planets visible. It makes play more acessible, and fun if you see something you know irl and can use it as a point of referance. -easier in the same way you can single handedly flip a car back up right in other games- or a tank or in halo's case- an elephant.
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109 months ago by
Xephelium
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At least make it (the earth) possible to switch off, because it will bother some people.
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109 months ago by
JoseyWales
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LOL
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109 months ago by
AlterFox
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I think it really is a balance between realism and fun. Completely realistic gameplay would not be fun at all. Empty sectors are definitely not fun.
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109 months ago by
TiberiuS
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This is true. Completely empty sectors are not fun at all.
@ Xephelium:
As long as there is some balance in 'max. speed' <--> 'distance of asteroids' I see no problem in as it is now. You can only fly 1000 m/s atm and asteroids are like 200km (= 1 sector) from each other. this gives you almost 3 minutes from one asteroid to another, which is okay if not a bit too much to be fun...
And one of the devs posted somewhere that there will be a system, that you can travel instantly between motherships to other sectors. I don't like this (at least not for MMO!). If you want to go from one end of the solar system to the other end it has to take time and may be dangerous if you have to go through enemy sectors! So instant travel should not be possible. A nice autopilot would be a better thing. :)
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109 months ago by
Xephelium
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What I don't like is that the arrangement of the asteroid clusters (if you mapped them out) would be a grid work. This is unnatural, and if you had a map of all the sectors, this fact would be painfully obvious. I'm not saying that the distance should be great, at most three sectors between asteroids. I do think there shouldn't be such a low max speed (if any), because it is frictionless space after all.
In addition, if you had a map of the asteroids, it would serve more purpose to guide you to the known asteroids. Of course, if you have a map, you won't be drifting randomly looking for asteroids. Maybe you could plug sector coordinates into your ship's computer and it would put a dot or arrow on your radar for you to follow.
For the exploratory miner, however, empty sectors are much more fun because you are flying into uncharted territory. Exploring it should be dangerous, for example, you might drift through eight sectors and just miss the asteroids and run out of oxygen, or the solar wind might get you while you don't have anywhere to hide.
@ AlterFox & TiberiuS: I do know that empty sectors aren't any fun in themselves, but they would enhance the fun of the game as a whole.
Think about it. If there is supposed to be fighting over resources, resources have to be scarce. Resources won't be scarce if you can float 2 minutes to another sector and find plenty. This would ruin the game.
You can argue that only the rare materials will be scarce, but the realism takes hold here. Again, a grid of asteroids is not natural, and the spacing is not realistic.
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LOCKED
7/11/2012 2:35:50 PM,
Old PRE-ALPHA topic
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