Well done, you are getting it, so if the Z axis is there, it is a control limitation on your ship that doesn't allow you to travel straight up.
Yeah, right like that wasn't my stance from the BEGINNING.
NOW, back to the point Semantics is fun.
IT IS A FLAW IN THE ENGINE. Whether it is intended, or not is MOOT. Thank you for trying to troll me, you did not succeed. And I suggest some classes in 3d development, it would help you greatly in this area of discussion
My first post in the thread:
This is assuming that the Z axis is "locked" and if "unlocked" could be used. Otherwise, the lack of a Z-axis is the biggest flaw with the engine.
(Free the Z)
FYI quotation marks, or " " around the words locked and unlocked mean that they are not what they say they mean. (High School English) Furthermore, locked implies imprisonment not nonexistence. (Nice try, really!)
Yeah, right like that wasn't my stance from the BEGINNING.
NOW, back to the point Semantics is fun.
IT IS A FLAW IN THE ENGINE. Whether it is intended, or not is MOOT. Thank you for trying to troll me, you did not succeed. And I suggest some classes in 3d development, it would help you greatly in this area of discussion
I hate to burst your bubble, but the only ship I've seen to move directly upwards or downwards was the shuttle in Enterprise and Voyager when landing on a planet. Both of these are not ingame in any form, so technically, the engine is fine.
Nothing, except the dev's laziness to rework and remodel the whole engine for STO. Too time- and moneyconsuming. They had to dish out another MMO fast and this is what we're up against now.
Sure, they can pull off another total engine rework/revamp, but why should they when the current one works more or less flawlessly in their opinion?
Until something drastic happen, like 2/3 or even 3/4 of the player base boycotting and not paying, something that hurt them, they won't do anything drastic. Money speaks volumes. As long as it is floating towards them, meh.
No, see a flaw in the engine would be "there is no Z axis"
A control system limitation is not anything to do with the engine. You have to realise that. Just like combat, crafting, dalies, These are not shaped by the engine but by what limits the Devs put on them, the engine is just the underpinning that renders what it put in to it.
I hate to burst your bubble, but the only ship I've seen to move directly upwards or downwards was the shuttle in Enterprise and Voyager when landing on a planet. Both of these are not ingame in any form, so technically, the engine is fine.
AHA! When all else fails... I sure wish I saved all those links I had to proof, anyway:
The L-4 maneuver is commonly referred to in Earth aerobatic maneuvers as an "inside loop", in which a starship pulls upward and moves in a complete circle along the z-axis, coming back to its original trajectory. In July of 2153, the Enterprise NX-01 used the L-4 maneuver inside the thermobaric clouds surrounding the Delphic Expanse to get behind Captain Duras' Bird-of-Prey, allowing them to destroy the enemy vessel. (ENT: "The Expanse")
The USS Defiant performed an L-4 to evade two Jem'Hadar attack ships during the Battle of Cardassia. (DS9: "What You Leave Behind")
No, there is no flaw. Since CO has it, STO can have it too. It's the dev's decision not to have it.
flaw
1 /flɔ/ Show Spelled[flaw] Show IPA
noun
1. a feature that mars the perfection of something; defect; fault: beauty without flaw; the flaws in our plan.
2.
a defect impairing legal soundness or validity.
3.
a crack, break, breach, or rent.
The current flight modell doesn't allow full aerobatics. You can't loop, you can't spin. A submarine has those limitations, but they don't compute on a spaceship.
The engine allows full aerobatics movement. It is restricted for some reason (disorienting to players?), so it is not an engine limitation.
3 Does it matter if it is possible to fully use the Z-axis? NO! (Because of 1 and 2)
(A lesson in semantics!)
of course it matters because then you know you can ask for change and is should not be a great deal of work to change it if it is a case of "well now the pitch limit on the ship is 90 degrees"
This brings us to my first post again, the only flaw with the engine is the lines of code restricting (or "locking" ) the Z-Axis.
this post is as flawed as the first, because it misses an important point, that you not liking something and it being flawed are not ever the same thing.
The engine supports full X/Y/Z axis movement by default. It was a dev decision to apply restrictions. The restrictions may be lifted quickly if the dev decide to do so.
So the engine allows total Z movement including vertical loops, but the decisions makers don't.
All the Z axis arguments, play champions online, pick up flying, hold spacebar, you can shoot up directly in the air, so there isnt a Z axis limit in that regard.
Now what we do NOT know is if the game would know how to handle doing a half loop (ending upside down) granted it wouldn't actually matter as all the weapons have exactly the same firing arc in x/y/z orientations.
On to my complaints about the engine.
1. Hair - this has just been updated with the caitans so good on them, the champions style super-cartoony hair felt really out of place in Trek universe.
2. Zone Size - Sector space, I have no problem with sector space concept, I DO have a problem with the implementation of "space in a box" with a loading scrren every so often, sure have a loading screen for the transwarp, but others it doesn't make sense for. Maybe one day they will redesign it to all be a large seamless space without the need of dialog pop-ups every so often.
3. Item Generation - By all observations they use a similar item system as WoW, that is to say every item in the game has to be manually created (or nonprocedurally as 95%+ of them follow a given pattern) Meaning that whatever item you have, there is another duplicate of it somewhere, likely at tons of places. There is no chance for a SWG-style unique or even really rare item. Not to say SWG was end all, I think some combination of SWG + Diabloesque allowing varying qualities and random properties would be coolest and most likely to yield unique items.
4. Lighting - Many parts of the game have horrendous lighting, this could be an effect of bad map design, but the frequency leads me to think the lighting engine itself could use work.
At any rate, most of the other issues I have are design decisions not engine limitations (such as not being able to fully tilt up as the previous poster feels so zealous about)
Um, did you read the questions? You missed the word "fully". You seem to do that alot, only read what you want into my posts.
Also, shifting the X plane to a 45 degree angle is NOT using the Z plane. Sorry.
All you do is put the object you are trying to fly toward onto the ships X plane, do you not see this? You have to fly AT something Fore first! That is not Z axis!!!!!!!!
You are confusing the z axis of the map with the z axis of the ship. Like I said, 3d Development would come in handy in this discussion
All the Z axis arguments, play champions online, pick up flying, hold spacebar, you can shoot up directly in the air, so there isnt a Z axis limit in that regard.
True, for CO. Can I do that in STO? No? That is where the flaw comes into play.
Like I have said, even if it is intentional, it is still a flaw.
True, for CO. Can I do that in STO? No? That is where the flaw comes into play.
Like I have said, even if it is intentional, it is still a flaw.
Yes, but in your OP you make it clear that you think this "flaw" has something to do with the engine - which it doesn't. This was proven by several people who pointed out dedicated use of the Z-axis in CO (read: the option to move only vertically). You don't seem to understand what a Z-axis is however, and think it somehow only relates to the ship's POV - which is incorrect. The axises represent the wholeness of space (the front, back, left, right, up, and down of an area). STO does allow us to go up and down relative to the X-axis of every space in the game, and therefore represents a "flaw" in your argument that we cannot (due to your misunderstanding of what the Z-axis actually is).
Let me try and put it a different way for you: When a ship is moving forward it is moving in relation to the X-axis. If the ship pitches up, say at 45 degrees, it is now moving up for every unit of movement that it is moving forward (thus moving in relation to both the X and Z-axises).
If that explanation fails, then try to imagine a plane on take-off.
...I fail to see how it's ill-suited to a Star Trek game or how anything I've ever seen as a complaint about this game is due to the engine's limitations...
I look at it this way...
The interior spaces are WAY too large. The Devs said they were forced to make spaces too large due to the engine/camera system. This leads to two conclusions;
A - Someone made the call to overscale everything for arbitrary reasons and they're blaming the engine to cover themselves.
B - The camera system (an extension of the engine) is genuinely limited.
I've chosen to give Cryptic the benefit of the doubt and have concluded that the engine is sub-stantard.
Not true and if it were, there would be some liability there as Cryptic doesn't own the CoH engine.
False. Cryptic no longer owns the CoH IP, but they do in fact still own the engine, which NCSoft leases from them (AFAIK). In fact, this is the reason Cryptic's logo still appears on many of the CoH assets becuase, legally, it must. Just check out the bottom of CoH's web page, for example.
Technically, STO uses an updated version of the same engine that powers City of Heroes.
That's how many years old now?
But the STO engine has a lot of new shiny bits.
-np
Mostly true. The CO engine is an updated CoH engine, but extremely updated. For example, in CoH, animating the upper and lower torso separately on a characterize cannot be done. This means that a character cannot run and shoot at the same time, for example; instead, he must stop and pose for a shot, in which case animators root the character in place (otherwise he'd slide around while firing).
In CO and STO, the upper and lower torso can be animated at the same time, meaning characters can run and shoot simultaneously.
Obviously, this may not be the biggest change, but it's one of the most obvious. For example, I don't know how the engine calculates distances, line of site, and so forth. But there are some differences between the CoH engine and the newer Cryptic engine.
Man, I forgot how fun and/or hilarious it is to watch players trying to guess/assume the caveats of "an engine."
As for the Z-Axis issue, it's called a constraint. And both parties fighting that issue are absolutely correct.
The engine allows the constraint, so you could blame "the engine." Though that'd be like blaming your car engine for not running with no gas in the fuel lines/tank. You're the dope who didn't fill it up
So the vertical-axis stuff has nothing to do with the engine itself, though we would need a new input and motion control mode if we wanted to do handle dogfighter-style controls, but neither is too terribly hard. Most of that "restriction" is by choice and has been explained a thousand times over. The internals can all handle whatever you throw at them, give or take the accuracy limitations of IEEE 754.
Whats the biggest limitation that is coming back to bite us? Probably that the whole engine assumes each player is in exactly one place and on exactly one map. This sounds like a pretty sane assumption when making a game, but alas, once a player is both a ship and a person it becomes inconvenient. Hmm, what else. It would be really nice to have a more complete HTML parser/renderer in the engine. Our custom UI language works really nicely for building stuff like a game HUD, but for a simple dialog HTML would be far easier.
So the vertical-axis stuff has nothing to do with the engine itself, though we would need a new input and motion control mode if we wanted to do handle dogfighter-style controls, but neither is too terribly hard. Most of that "restriction" is by choice and has been explained a thousand times over. The internals can all handle whatever you throw at them, give or take the accuracy limitations of IEEE 754.
Whats the biggest limitation that is coming back to bite us? Probably that the whole engine assumes each player is in exactly one place and on exactly one map. This sounds like a pretty sane assumption when making a game, but alas, once a player is both a ship and a person it becomes inconvenient. Hmm, what else. It would be really nice to have a more complete HTML parser/renderer in the engine. Our custom UI language works really nicely for building stuff like a game HUD, but for a simple dialog HTML would be far easier.
And this is why, even for my issues with STO, I will swear by you guys. I have never come across a more communicative set of developers or community reps than I have at Cryptic. Love you guys!
Are you referring, for example, to the notion that we couldn't exist inside our ship and travel through sector space at the same time?
And this is why, even for my issues with STO, I will swear by you guys. I have never come across a more communicative set of developers or community reps than I have at Cryptic. Love you guys!
Are you referring, for example, to the notion that we couldn't exist inside our ship and travel through sector space at the same time?
I would assume that's the main thing. It's hard to navigate from a bridge since your bridge captain and the ship itself are essentially the same player (using two different, interchangeable avatars). You can't have two player instances happening simultaneously with this engine.
And this is why, even for my issues with STO, I will swear by you guys. I have never come across a more communicative set of developers or community reps than I have at Cryptic. Love you guys!
Are you referring, for example, to the notion that we couldn't exist inside our ship and travel through sector space at the same time?
In Open Beta there was a server lag bug where, for example, entering Spacedock from the space around it you'd beam in... and be your ship. The reverse also happened, where you'd be your Captain avatar at ship-scale. Since you'd still be on "Ground Controls", then that happened to me once my Captain fell to the very bottom of the Spacedock map before she transformed into her ship.
You can either be your captain, or their ship. You can't be both. This is why you can't control your ship from the bridge.
So the vertical-axis stuff has nothing to do with the engine itself, though we would need a new input and motion control mode if we wanted to do handle dogfighter-style controls, but neither is too terribly hard. Most of that "restriction" is by choice and has been explained a thousand times over. The internals can all handle whatever you throw at them, give or take the accuracy limitations of IEEE 754.
Whats the biggest limitation that is coming back to bite us? Probably that the whole engine assumes each player is in exactly one place and on exactly one map. This sounds like a pretty sane assumption when making a game, but alas, once a player is both a ship and a person it becomes inconvenient. Hmm, what else. It would be really nice to have a more complete HTML parser/renderer in the engine. Our custom UI language works really nicely for building stuff like a game HUD, but for a simple dialog HTML would be far easier.
The engine doesn't like dealing with a ship here and a person.......cheat.
1. The micro second your in combat, you are turned into the standard 'ship'
2. If you want to manually fly your ship...you are a standard ship...still
3. If you have your navigator set course.....now here is the cheat.
you go to your 'ship internals' area and the engine spawns a drone camera ( that happens
to look like your ship) to travel the route...it is not you, it is an NPC.
However, the drone 'camera' feeds the front view 'video' to your main viewer.
you can give the 'drone camera' new instructions...like change destination to 'fill in the blank'
or enter so and so system [if it is a combat area, you zone back as normal] if it is a non-combat
area...you can stay drone.
The trick is, you are always in that 'internal ship' area..as far as the engine knows, it is just you
are giving instructions to an NPC 'your ship drone'
yes it is a cheat......work around or whatever....but if it works?
PS. IF it works, you owe me a STO T-Shirt signed by the developers
...Whats the biggest limitation that is coming back to bite us?
How about branching missions, mutually exclusive triggers and other bits and pieces that allow players to make choices in how they tackle different goals to complete their missions? Does the current engine support anything like that?
The engine doesn't like dealing with a ship here and a person.......cheat.
1. The micro second your in combat, you are turned into the standard 'ship'
2. If you want to manually fly your ship...you are a standard ship...still
3. If you have your navigator set course.....now here is the cheat.
you go to your 'ship internals' area and the engine spawns a drone camera ( that happens
to look like your ship) to travel the route...it is not you, it is an NPC.
However, the drone 'camera' feeds the front view 'video' to your main viewer.
you can give the 'drone camera' new instructions...like change destination to 'fill in the blank'
or enter so and so system [if it is a combat area, you zone back as normal] if it is a non-combat
area...you can stay drone.
The trick is, you are always in that 'internal ship' area..as far as the engine knows, it is just you
are giving instructions to an NPC 'your ship drone'
yes it is a cheat......work around or whatever....but if it works?
PS. IF it works, you owe me a STO T-Shirt signed by the developers
The is actually pretty close to how it works already. The ship and captain are both "puppets" and we swap which is active depending on the map type. Unforunately there is some level of delay running the puppet swap (that was the cause of the issues in OB where you would beam down as a ship, the transaction for the swap was delayed). As for your suggestion, that goes back to the "on exactly one map" bit. The map for your ship isn't running on the same server process as a sector space, so you can't control anything in sector space. Doing that level of inter-map communication would turn into an IPC nightmare really fast.
Comments
Yeah, right like that wasn't my stance from the BEGINNING.
NOW, back to the point Semantics is fun.
IT IS A FLAW IN THE ENGINE. Whether it is intended, or not is MOOT. Thank you for trying to troll me, you did not succeed. And I suggest some classes in 3d development, it would help you greatly in this area of discussion
My first post in the thread:
FYI quotation marks, or " " around the words locked and unlocked mean that they are not what they say they mean. (High School English) Furthermore, locked implies imprisonment not nonexistence. (Nice try, really!)
(EDIT To Add: first post)
I hate to burst your bubble, but the only ship I've seen to move directly upwards or downwards was the shuttle in Enterprise and Voyager when landing on a planet. Both of these are not ingame in any form, so technically, the engine is fine.
Sure, they can pull off another total engine rework/revamp, but why should they when the current one works more or less flawlessly in their opinion?
Until something drastic happen, like 2/3 or even 3/4 of the player base boycotting and not paying, something that hurt them, they won't do anything drastic. Money speaks volumes. As long as it is floating towards them, meh.
A control system limitation is not anything to do with the engine. You have to realise that. Just like combat, crafting, dalies, These are not shaped by the engine but by what limits the Devs put on them, the engine is just the underpinning that renders what it put in to it.
AHA! When all else fails... I sure wish I saved all those links I had to proof, anyway:
Source
Wrath of Khan, Kirk goes straight up. Look it up on youtube! Watch the DS9 battle(s), plenty of Z-axis fun there.
Nice try, again!
EDIT (To Add)
And This Post from earlier I guess you skipped.
Is it coded into the engine?
Semantics :rolleyes:
The engine allows full aerobatics movement. It is restricted for some reason (disorienting to players?), so it is not an engine limitation.
1 Does the engine allow me to fully use the Z-axis? NO!
2 Does the coding of the engine allow me to fully use the Z-axis? NO!
3 Does it matter if it is possible to fully use the Z-axis? NO! (Because of 1 and 2)
(A lesson in semantics!)
This brings us to my first post again, the only flaw with the engine is the lines of code restricting (or "locking"
EDIT (To fix: Didn't copy and paste the whole post!)
Thank you guys (and gals?) for the great discussion! (Serious!)
Yes. Because despite your stupidly elongated brain you don't understand what a Z-axis is.
Can you go up and down - yes - that's using the Z-axis fully.
Yes, just not in the manner you would like.
Yes, just not in the manner you would like.
of course it matters because then you know you can ask for change and is should not be a great deal of work to change it if it is a case of "well now the pitch limit on the ship is 90 degrees"
this post is as flawed as the first, because it misses an important point, that you not liking something and it being flawed are not ever the same thing.
So the engine allows total Z movement including vertical loops, but the decisions makers don't.
Now what we do NOT know is if the game would know how to handle doing a half loop (ending upside down) granted it wouldn't actually matter as all the weapons have exactly the same firing arc in x/y/z orientations.
On to my complaints about the engine.
1. Hair - this has just been updated with the caitans so good on them, the champions style super-cartoony hair felt really out of place in Trek universe.
2. Zone Size - Sector space, I have no problem with sector space concept, I DO have a problem with the implementation of "space in a box" with a loading scrren every so often, sure have a loading screen for the transwarp, but others it doesn't make sense for. Maybe one day they will redesign it to all be a large seamless space without the need of dialog pop-ups every so often.
3. Item Generation - By all observations they use a similar item system as WoW, that is to say every item in the game has to be manually created (or nonprocedurally as 95%+ of them follow a given pattern) Meaning that whatever item you have, there is another duplicate of it somewhere, likely at tons of places. There is no chance for a SWG-style unique or even really rare item. Not to say SWG was end all, I think some combination of SWG + Diabloesque allowing varying qualities and random properties would be coolest and most likely to yield unique items.
4. Lighting - Many parts of the game have horrendous lighting, this could be an effect of bad map design, but the frequency leads me to think the lighting engine itself could use work.
At any rate, most of the other issues I have are design decisions not engine limitations (such as not being able to fully tilt up as the previous poster feels so zealous about)
Um, did you read the questions? You missed the word "fully". You seem to do that alot, only read what you want into my posts.
Also, shifting the X plane to a 45 degree angle is NOT using the Z plane. Sorry.
All you do is put the object you are trying to fly toward onto the ships X plane, do you not see this? You have to fly AT something Fore first! That is not Z axis!!!!!!!!
You are confusing the z axis of the map with the z axis of the ship. Like I said, 3d Development would come in handy in this discussion
True, for CO. Can I do that in STO? No? That is where the flaw comes into play.
Like I have said, even if it is intentional, it is still a flaw.
Yes, but in your OP you make it clear that you think this "flaw" has something to do with the engine - which it doesn't. This was proven by several people who pointed out dedicated use of the Z-axis in CO (read: the option to move only vertically). You don't seem to understand what a Z-axis is however, and think it somehow only relates to the ship's POV - which is incorrect. The axises represent the wholeness of space (the front, back, left, right, up, and down of an area). STO does allow us to go up and down relative to the X-axis of every space in the game, and therefore represents a "flaw" in your argument that we cannot (due to your misunderstanding of what the Z-axis actually is).
Let me try and put it a different way for you: When a ship is moving forward it is moving in relation to the X-axis. If the ship pitches up, say at 45 degrees, it is now moving up for every unit of movement that it is moving forward (thus moving in relation to both the X and Z-axises).
If that explanation fails, then try to imagine a plane on take-off.
Failing that, we can't help you.
I look at it this way...
The interior spaces are WAY too large. The Devs said they were forced to make spaces too large due to the engine/camera system. This leads to two conclusions;
I've chosen to give Cryptic the benefit of the doubt and have concluded that the engine is sub-stantard.
Mostly true. The CO engine is an updated CoH engine, but extremely updated. For example, in CoH, animating the upper and lower torso separately on a characterize cannot be done. This means that a character cannot run and shoot at the same time, for example; instead, he must stop and pose for a shot, in which case animators root the character in place (otherwise he'd slide around while firing).
In CO and STO, the upper and lower torso can be animated at the same time, meaning characters can run and shoot simultaneously.
Obviously, this may not be the biggest change, but it's one of the most obvious. For example, I don't know how the engine calculates distances, line of site, and so forth. But there are some differences between the CoH engine and the newer Cryptic engine.
As for the Z-Axis issue, it's called a constraint. And both parties fighting that issue are absolutely correct.
The engine allows the constraint, so you could blame "the engine." Though that'd be like blaming your car engine for not running with no gas in the fuel lines/tank. You're the dope who didn't fill it up
Whats the biggest limitation that is coming back to bite us? Probably that the whole engine assumes each player is in exactly one place and on exactly one map. This sounds like a pretty sane assumption when making a game, but alas, once a player is both a ship and a person it becomes inconvenient. Hmm, what else. It would be really nice to have a more complete HTML parser/renderer in the engine. Our custom UI language works really nicely for building stuff like a game HUD, but for a simple dialog HTML would be far easier.
And this is why, even for my issues with STO, I will swear by you guys. I have never come across a more communicative set of developers or community reps than I have at Cryptic. Love you guys!
Are you referring, for example, to the notion that we couldn't exist inside our ship and travel through sector space at the same time?
In Open Beta there was a server lag bug where, for example, entering Spacedock from the space around it you'd beam in... and be your ship. The reverse also happened, where you'd be your Captain avatar at ship-scale. Since you'd still be on "Ground Controls", then that happened to me once my Captain fell to the very bottom of the Spacedock map before she transformed into her ship.
You can either be your captain, or their ship. You can't be both. This is why you can't control your ship from the bridge.
I accept this limitation.
This is a policy decision, not a limit of the engine.
The engine doesn't like dealing with a ship here and a person.......cheat.
1. The micro second your in combat, you are turned into the standard 'ship'
2. If you want to manually fly your ship...you are a standard ship...still
3. If you have your navigator set course.....now here is the cheat.
you go to your 'ship internals' area and the engine spawns a drone camera ( that happens
to look like your ship) to travel the route...it is not you, it is an NPC.
However, the drone 'camera' feeds the front view 'video' to your main viewer.
you can give the 'drone camera' new instructions...like change destination to 'fill in the blank'
or enter so and so system [if it is a combat area, you zone back as normal] if it is a non-combat
area...you can stay drone.
The trick is, you are always in that 'internal ship' area..as far as the engine knows, it is just you
are giving instructions to an NPC 'your ship drone'
yes it is a cheat......work around or whatever....but if it works?
PS. IF it works, you owe me a STO T-Shirt signed by the developers