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Author Topic: Reduce amount and hp of debris  (Read 2692 times)

rashiakas

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Reduce amount and hp of debris
« on: July 09, 2019, 10:47:49 PM »

While it is a cool feature to have floating husks of destroyed ships and parts of it on the battlefield, the ai cant handle them. If there is debris between a target and the ai, ai fires and charges recklessly into the debris pushing it into the enemy. This often results in a lot of wasted damage, torpedos etc. Even bombers fire their rockets into debris, as if it isnt even there. It also seems that debris leads to way more ships taking damage from ship explosions, wich is another thing I dont like. There should never be a reason for any ship to be so close to a target to eat explosion damage, also fighters are somehow immune to it.
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Schwartz

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Re: Reduce amount and hp of debris
« Reply #1 on: July 13, 2019, 08:15:25 PM »

I regretfully have to agree with this. In large battles and especially battles where one side manages to overpower the other, there is so much debris that it becomes a real obstacle course of ship husk walls. Which is interesting from a gameplay perspective but a ridiculous notion in 3D space, which we're at least trying to emulate.

I made a suggestion about bombers and how trigger-happy they are to fire into debris, killing friendly adjacent ships. It became a real problem in my Doom flagship run, accounting for most of the armor-breaking damage I actually took. I don't think the problem is how Atropos work but that AI doesn't account for debris in targeting at all. Removing AoE FF is the cheap option, reducing debris is another 'fix a symptom' option but really the AI needs to learn what debris is.

Suggestion to augment this one: Have dead fighters 'dissolve' much sooner, after a second or two. They're only getting in the way and having your shots interrupted by tiny lil' things is only cute once.

As for the actual ships... I would be in favor of a higher percentage of ships being 'destroyed', as in broken up, and to have low-ish 'dissolve' timers for these fragments. And a higher chance of 'destroyed' ships being outright pulverized with the explosion.
« Last Edit: July 13, 2019, 08:24:45 PM by Schwartz »
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xenoargh

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Re: Reduce amount and hp of debris
« Reply #2 on: July 14, 2019, 12:29:14 AM »

This is a real problem. 

But wrecked hulls are super-cool.  How to fix?

In my still-private build of Rebal, I initially set the collision masks of the dead stuff to NONE.  Performance problem: solved!  But not so pretty.

So I went one further, and wrote some code to randomly blow them up over time, with kewl particle effects when they blew.  So now they're really performant and pretty and quit using resources after a while.

To make them super-elegant, I'd recommend just having them shrink over time, fading out when they get 50%-sized.  Then it's obvious that they're "floating away through space" and you could, say, trigger them to use the collision-mask of NONE after they hit 75% or less (i.e., it's pretty obvious they're "beneath" everything else).
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rashiakas

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Re: Reduce amount and hp of debris
« Reply #3 on: July 18, 2019, 01:46:52 PM »

It also doesnt make any sense, aside from the 3d point of view, exploding ships deal enough damage to adjacent ships that the blast can kill a full health ship (was number one reason I lost ships in last tournament per example). If the explosion is so powerful to achieve that, surely an allready severly damaged ship would just pulverize into nothingness.
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TaLaR

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Re: Reduce amount and hp of debris
« Reply #4 on: July 18, 2019, 02:09:05 PM »

I like how husks form a dynamic terrain to play around. The only problem is AI not being particularly aware of it.
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errorgance

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Re: Reduce amount and hp of debris
« Reply #5 on: July 19, 2019, 10:46:39 AM »

How about moving debris to the foreground/background where it is still visible but under/above where everyone else is slugging it out.
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MesoTroniK

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Re: Reduce amount and hp of debris
« Reply #6 on: July 20, 2019, 11:17:58 PM »

The last thing SS needs is *less* battle terrain.

It desperately needs *more* to make each arena less samey.

xenoargh

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Re: Reduce amount and hp of debris
« Reply #7 on: July 21, 2019, 12:05:23 AM »

I agree that the battle-space could use more variation in obstacles.  If nothing else, some variant AsteroidAPIs.  If that was moddable at all, I'd have made a bunch of new asteroids, lol.

The issue with the dead ships has always been straightforward; the collision checks and other things going on with the ship chunks eat CPU like there's no tomorrow.  It was bad enough with Hulks; it's worse with the broken-up bits.  Sure, it looks cool, but in massive battles, it's a serious problem.

It's just not very cheap to do collision checks with these things (although there are probably some speedups possible here and there).  If they take damage, it's a big deal to update them (this could probably get cheaper, but IDK; they appear to be conventional ShipAPIs, basically, which suggests yes).

Honestly, for anything but the largest ships, it might work better to use generic bitz; asteroids aren't "free", but they're quite cheap, comparatively, because they can use a simpler collision system and damage system.
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Megas

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Re: Reduce amount and hp of debris
« Reply #8 on: July 21, 2019, 06:30:39 AM »

This is a space game.  Space should ideally have no (or very little) terrain.  Minimum junk here and there may be fine, but space sand, space trees, and space mountains are too much.  I do not play space games to play land battles in space, not if I want that '80s retro-gaming experience like Asteroids or Star Castle.  Starsector should have been LandSector, TankSector, or MechSector if terrain would be a big deal.

Edge camping is silly, although few classic games (like Omega Race) have edges.
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xenoargh

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Re: Reduce amount and hp of debris
« Reply #9 on: July 21, 2019, 09:43:25 AM »

I completely agree about edge-camping and corner-cheese, etc.  I really don't think that works at all.  I've been working on a fix over here, both to prevent endless kiting and those tactics.

On obstacles; I think it's a matter of type / degree.  For example, having a "dirty" map, where we have obstacles all over the place, near an inhabited planet, might be fun.  Having a "dead ship junkyard" map, where chunks of ships are generated at the start of play (like the way I once put things like that on Vacuum's battle-maps) is fun.

Fun always?  No; you're right, it's a space combat game, it shouldn't always be a messy, land-like place.  But sometimes, when it feels appropriate-ish?  Definitely, at least for me. 
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Reduce amount and hp of debris
« Reply #10 on: July 21, 2019, 10:59:17 AM »

I always thought the debris from destroyed ships felt like that scene from one of the the recent startrek movies where they jump into the debris of the recently destroyed fleet. https://youtu.be/8wpLe91qsNg at like 2:06

I like the effect, and it makes fighting stations quite a bit easier sometimes.

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Schwartz

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Re: Reduce amount and hp of debris
« Reply #11 on: July 22, 2019, 09:12:34 AM »

I'm not against some debris for tactical variety. I'm saying it needs some serious AI attention not to be a headache for the player - and to make AI stronger against it. And the number of debris needs to be adjusted downward. Terrain is nice, but if there's wreck after wreck filling the screen then we're just playing bumper cars. This is supposed to be 3D space, folks.

Thought: Less big chunks and more shrapnel. Shrapnel may hit shield or armor and cause some extra flux / damage.
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xenoargh

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Re: Reduce amount and hp of debris
« Reply #12 on: July 22, 2019, 03:18:42 PM »

Agreed on both points.  It's hard, though; current debris has so many hitpoints and it absorbs so much fire.  Maybe I'll go nuts and lower the hitpoints a lot by fiat, try that out; right now I'm just forcing them to explode after X random seconds; it's not the best system ever, but it does clear the clutter and free up CPU.
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SonnaBanana

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Re: Reduce amount and hp of debris
« Reply #13 on: August 12, 2019, 06:41:10 AM »

Alternate idea: Weapons fire and fighters can pass through debris, but with reduced damage (ballistic and energy) and speed (missiles and fighters).
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