One button causes your ship to go straight up, no camera tilt.
One button causes your ship to go straight down, no camera tilt.
Each case, however, your ship tilts (an animation, not an actual tilt of the camera) without the camera tilting with it.
The ships go up and down and appear to tilt in relation to your camera, which remains level.
Our ships already change orientation without changing camera orientation unless it's set to chase cam only. I'm not sure that would actually be helpful - if anything it'd be more confusing than just being able to pitch up to 85 degrees or so.
Our ships already change orientation without changing camera orientation unless it's set to chase cam only. I'm not sure that would actually be helpful - if anything it'd be more confusing than just being able to pitch up to 85 degrees or so.
The engine wouldn't have to support more in-depth 3D and the camera plane orientation in all camera modes would prevent disorientation.
The ship wouldn't actually rotate. It would simply appear to.
There is no rule saying that you have to travel at maximum warp during autopilot. Double click the destination with your slider at Warp 1 if you are in no hurry.
You know, I hadn't thought about that... although, the tendency in video game travel, even if there is a speed control, is to stop, or go fast.
The engine wouldn't have to support more in-depth 3D and the camera plane orientation in all camera modes would prevent disorientation.
The ship wouldn't actually rotate. It would simply appear to.
But that's not an engine-level limitation in the first place - it was always a conscious design decision. While you do start having to implement more complicated control interface mathematics if you unlock full 3D, as Coderanger pointed out (and that's still not actually an engine-level problem), if you just set maximum pitch to near vertical without quite reaching it nothing needs to change at all since you never lose the 'grounding' of the horizontal plane.
Plus, if we have Z-thrust invoke a pitching animation, if the ship is already strongly pitched then it will end up looking flipped on its back relative to horizontal. The motion would also seem pretty awkward at low throttle settings. I think if Z-thrust ends up the chosen method, it'd be less disorienting just to have it clearly be off-axis travel.
Actually, I just realized your proposal is almost exactly how most flight powers are animated in Champions. And I get confused by that sometimes, so I'd have to vote against it on entirely personal grounds
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.
Not true and if it were, there would be some liability there as Cryptic doesn't own the CoH engine.
It was built from the ground up. The similarities are likely cases where some of the same people were involved in both and so they used systems they were familiar with.
Unless he has proof, I'm going with a modded Champions engine, as has been stated many a time.
Of course, if Cryptic really wanted to, they could always built a brand new shiny engine.:D
In Champs you can fly up or down along the Z axis without having to change your X or Y axis. So that functionally was already in the Champs engine.
Some people say ship combat is like submarines in space.. But they are wrong.
Ships in STO are like AutoGyros... Since they can not change their Z axis without changing both their X and Y axis... Which is just silly. (I.E. They can not go up and down without going forward/backward and tilting the ship up or down).
If Wrath of Khan would have taken place in STO, Kirk would have lost.
Wrath Of Kahn, Mutara Nebula - Kirk: "Full Stop. Z -10000 meters, stand by photon torpedos." - Oops.. Not in STO..
(And CoH uses the Cryptic Engine under license from Cryptic. Versions of the engine are used in CoH, CO, and STO)
That's a bit misleading. CoX runs on a much older implementation which shares very little code with CO and STO. A lot of similarities, but five years difference between them. CO and STO are running on more or less the same code (at any point in time there's a few weeks difference, since they don't synchronise their updates).
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 why are the graphics on the ground so primitive looking. The environments are much more lush and realistic in Guild Wars under 4x antialiasing, likewise with Aion. The movement of the targs and saurs is laughable and totally unrealistic.
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.
Actually they are in space. Hard to say how they are moving exactly since it's just a TV show/movie series. In reality, two ships meeting in space and both having the same "up" and "down" have the chances of slim and none. And Slim just committed suicide.
Hollywood does it that way because it wouldn't "look right".
So why are the graphics on the ground so primitive looking. The environments are much more lush and realistic in Guild Wars under 4x antialiasing, likewise with Aion. The movement of the targs and saurs is laughable and totally unrealistic.
You mean how they run sideways isn't realistic to you? lol
So why are the graphics on the ground so primitive looking. The environments are much more lush and realistic in Guild Wars under 4x antialiasing, likewise with Aion. The movement of the targs and saurs is laughable and totally unrealistic.
Because the game is an epic rushjob, including (in some cases especially) the art.
What's extra-pathetic is that they didn't even finish some of the things they specifically sold as extras.
edit: Specifically, pathetic on the part of the people in charge, not the employees who were tasked with working miracles even Scotty couldn't pull off.
So why are the graphics on the ground so primitive looking. The environments are much more lush and realistic in Guild Wars under 4x antialiasing, likewise with Aion. The movement of the targs and saurs is laughable and totally unrealistic.
The STO art style isn't exactly going for realism. Its more of a hybrid. And turn off AA in Guild Wars and it looks just as jagged as ever.
Animation seems to be a different case altogether. I haven't seen an MMO yet that got animation 100% right.
Animation seems to be a different case altogether. I haven't seen an MMO yet that got animation 100% right.
That's a technological issue. We know exactly how to do this (the stuff people like Pixar do is not secret, everybody in the industry knows how it's done). The issue is that computationally, it can't be done in real time, at least not yet. What you see in games is a collection of hacks and trickery to get "reasonably good" without creating excessive CPU stress (the GPU can't help here). MMOs are additionally limited over cinematic games because of their sandbox nature. Every time you see a cinematic game like Crysis, it's important to realise that every scene you play has been carefully staged to have a limited number of "hard" things going on at once, and things like AI and enemy spawning are creatively TRIBBLE to control this. Obviously you can't do that sort of thing in an MMO, because you can't control players and it has to be "fair"; this means they can't push the technology limits quite so hard.
That's a technological issue. We know exactly how to do this (the stuff people like Pixar do is not secret, everybody in the industry knows how it's done). The issue is that computationally, it can't be done in real time, at least not yet. What you see in games is a collection of hacks and trickery to get "reasonably good" without creating excessive CPU stress (the GPU can't help here). MMOs are additionally limited over cinematic games because of their sandbox nature. Every time you see a cinematic game like Crysis, it's important to realise that every scene you play has been carefully staged to have a limited number of "hard" things going on at once, and things like AI and enemy spawning are creatively TRIBBLE to control this. Obviously you can't do that sort of thing in an MMO, because you can't control players and it has to be "fair"; this means they can't push the technology limits quite so hard.
Still, in Guild Wars, you can wander through lush green and grass filled fields, it feels and LOOKS like you're really there and GW is OLD!! Likewise in Aion, they have these ****y hermit crabs that you kill for easy points, but if you look at the graphics when they attack you, it looks like a real crab. Even the crabs are done well. The graphics are beautiful in Aion. I stopped playing it because it's boring and grindy. I'm waiting on Terra which also has some LUSH graphics and some really interesting monsters in it. Love me some monsters.
But the targs are a JOKE. They run backwards and attack you backwards. As Mike Tyson would say, "it's LOOOODICRUTH!!"
Still, in Guild Wars, you can wander through lush green and grass filled fields, it feels and LOOKS like you're really there and GW is OLD!!
That's different. It's just a question of how much artist time is available to polish environments. STO has an unfortunately large amount of art for the number of artists, because of the ground/space split, and they've mostly been polishing space art so far - like the player ships, which have been receiving a lot of attention.
A lot of the ground art is fairly lacklustre, but it's going to take a long time before that gets fixed (also, not an engine limitation).
But the targs are a JOKE. They run backwards and attack you backwards. As Mike Tyson would say, "it's LOOOODICRUTH!!"
That one is just a bug. I think it's a bug with more than NPCs: some effects play with their rotation set to zero instead of whatever it should be.
Comments
Our ships already change orientation without changing camera orientation unless it's set to chase cam only. I'm not sure that would actually be helpful - if anything it'd be more confusing than just being able to pitch up to 85 degrees or so.
The engine wouldn't have to support more in-depth 3D and the camera plane orientation in all camera modes would prevent disorientation.
The ship wouldn't actually rotate. It would simply appear to.
You know, I hadn't thought about that... although, the tendency in video game travel, even if there is a speed control, is to stop, or go fast.
But that's not an engine-level limitation in the first place - it was always a conscious design decision. While you do start having to implement more complicated control interface mathematics if you unlock full 3D, as Coderanger pointed out (and that's still not actually an engine-level problem), if you just set maximum pitch to near vertical without quite reaching it nothing needs to change at all since you never lose the 'grounding' of the horizontal plane.
Plus, if we have Z-thrust invoke a pitching animation, if the ship is already strongly pitched then it will end up looking flipped on its back relative to horizontal. The motion would also seem pretty awkward at low throttle settings. I think if Z-thrust ends up the chosen method, it'd be less disorienting just to have it clearly be off-axis travel.
Actually, I just realized your proposal is almost exactly how most flight powers are animated in Champions. And I get confused by that sometimes, so I'd have to vote against it on entirely personal grounds
There should be an accolade for traveling certain paths without breaking the old warp speed limit from TNG.
Y'Know, being environmentally conscious.
Heh, I know, they could call it "Sunday Driver Diplomacy", or maybe "Senior Citizen Corps"!
A little late replying, but see here:
http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?p=2343940#post2343940
(And CoH uses the Cryptic Engine under license from Cryptic. Versions of the engine are used in CoH, CO, and STO)
-np
Some people say ship combat is like submarines in space.. But they are wrong.
Ships in STO are like AutoGyros... Since they can not change their Z axis without changing both their X and Y axis... Which is just silly. (I.E. They can not go up and down without going forward/backward and tilting the ship up or down).
If Wrath of Khan would have taken place in STO, Kirk would have lost.
Wrath Of Kahn, Mutara Nebula - Kirk: "Full Stop. Z -10000 meters, stand by photon torpedos." - Oops.. Not in STO..
Edit for clarity on X, Y, Z.
That's a bit misleading. CoX runs on a much older implementation which shares very little code with CO and STO. A lot of similarities, but five years difference between them. CO and STO are running on more or less the same code (at any point in time there's a few weeks difference, since they don't synchronise their updates).
So why are the graphics on the ground so primitive looking. The environments are much more lush and realistic in Guild Wars under 4x antialiasing, likewise with Aion. The movement of the targs and saurs is laughable and totally unrealistic.
Actually they are in space. Hard to say how they are moving exactly since it's just a TV show/movie series. In reality, two ships meeting in space and both having the same "up" and "down" have the chances of slim and none. And Slim just committed suicide.
Hollywood does it that way because it wouldn't "look right".
You mean how they run sideways isn't realistic to you? lol
Because the game is an epic rushjob, including (in some cases especially) the art.
hehe...ya.
two-year mmo development....
I wonder who came up with that idea ?
.
What's extra-pathetic is that they didn't even finish some of the things they specifically sold as extras.
edit: Specifically, pathetic on the part of the people in charge, not the employees who were tasked with working miracles even Scotty couldn't pull off.
The STO art style isn't exactly going for realism. Its more of a hybrid. And turn off AA in Guild Wars and it looks just as jagged as ever.
Animation seems to be a different case altogether. I haven't seen an MMO yet that got animation 100% right.
That's a technological issue. We know exactly how to do this (the stuff people like Pixar do is not secret, everybody in the industry knows how it's done). The issue is that computationally, it can't be done in real time, at least not yet. What you see in games is a collection of hacks and trickery to get "reasonably good" without creating excessive CPU stress (the GPU can't help here). MMOs are additionally limited over cinematic games because of their sandbox nature. Every time you see a cinematic game like Crysis, it's important to realise that every scene you play has been carefully staged to have a limited number of "hard" things going on at once, and things like AI and enemy spawning are creatively TRIBBLE to control this. Obviously you can't do that sort of thing in an MMO, because you can't control players and it has to be "fair"; this means they can't push the technology limits quite so hard.
Still, in Guild Wars, you can wander through lush green and grass filled fields, it feels and LOOKS like you're really there and GW is OLD!! Likewise in Aion, they have these ****y hermit crabs that you kill for easy points, but if you look at the graphics when they attack you, it looks like a real crab. Even the crabs are done well. The graphics are beautiful in Aion. I stopped playing it because it's boring and grindy. I'm waiting on Terra which also has some LUSH graphics and some really interesting monsters in it. Love me some monsters.
But the targs are a JOKE. They run backwards and attack you backwards. As Mike Tyson would say, "it's LOOOODICRUTH!!"
That's different. It's just a question of how much artist time is available to polish environments. STO has an unfortunately large amount of art for the number of artists, because of the ground/space split, and they've mostly been polishing space art so far - like the player ships, which have been receiving a lot of attention.
A lot of the ground art is fairly lacklustre, but it's going to take a long time before that gets fixed (also, not an engine limitation).
That one is just a bug. I think it's a bug with more than NPCs: some effects play with their rotation set to zero instead of whatever it should be.