New Item System

[»Ceiu]

Below is a do!@#$%^&*ent I wrote up to detail an item system I think would benefit HS greatly (especially after the first month or so).

 

08.28.2007
HS Item System Revision Proposal



- Why Change? --
The current system in place is by far more in-depth than anything I've seen in SS. It's very innovative and when I
first started in HS it was incredibly fun. However, it suffers from the same problem as all other zones: There are
still "ultimate" or "optimum" setups. Once you hit about 10k experience and 500k, you can have your ship completed
with very little room for improvement or change, aside from switching out guns and bombs.

HS currently operates on what I consider the Slot-system. In this system, each item is given a "type" and each ship can
equip x items of each type. The problem here, is that the only way to limit ships into their designated class (Light
vs Heavy) is to limit items to individual ships. This creates even less usable items overall, and further subtracts from
the overall ship variety.

The system I will propose aims to fix these problems, as well as a few other issues I've noticed in terms of general 
item balance and playability. By taking elements from various games, ranging from Armored Core to Counterstrike, I
feel we could solve many of the existing problems I see with the current system.





- The Basics --
1) Each ship has a Volume (Available Space) and a M!@#$%^&* stat. These determine how much equipment can go on the frame
  and how fast it can move with the minimum required equipment (see below).
  
2) Every ship is required to have a sublight drive and a reactor plant at all times. Since the ship's speed and
  recharge is based on these, it would be problematic to not require them. Ships would likely come in "packages"
  or default setups to solve any issues this would cause.
  
3) The ship's mobility is determined by a formula consisting of the Sublight's Power and the total m!@#$%^&* of all
  equipment (including the frame itself). It would work something like this:

a) The warbird frame has the following basic stat:
	M!@#$%^&*: 2500

b) The sublight drive "Alpha Engines" provides the following basic stats:
	M!@#$%^&*: 500
	Min Output: 5000
	Max Output: 5500

c) !@#$%^&*uming this is the only equipment on the ship, the calculated values are:
	Total M!@#$%^&*: 3000
	Min Output:  2000
	Max Output:  2500

d) Using very simple formulas, this could give us the following SS-stats:
	Top speed:   5000	  (as provided by the sublight drive)
	Init Thrust: 20		(remaining power divided by 100)
	Max Thrust:  25		(Same as Init thrust, but using max-power. Used for afterburners)
	Rotation:	200	   (To be decided, likely: min / 10).

4) The ship's energy and recharge would be determined in a very similar manner:

a) Using the ship above, each item has the following stats:

	i) Frame
		Energy Drain: 0
		
	ii) Alpha Engines
		Energy Drain: 1500
		
b) The reactor plant "Alpha Reactor" provides the following stats:
	Capacity: 1500
	Output: 5000

c) The ss-stats would be:
	Maximum Energy: 1500	 (same as capacity)
	Recharge: 3500		   (Simply output - drain)
	
5) There would be nothing to prevent a player from going above the output limits of either the engine or sublight.
  Should a player develop such a frame, they would simply be unable to move or would slowly lose energy.
  
6) Finally, in addition to the above limitations, each ship (or frame) would have a maximum space capacity. This would
  prevent a warbird from flying around with more equipment than a lancaster (which, in the world of HS, is stupid).
  
  The space capacity would simply be a C - Sum of all S, where C is the capacity provided by the frame and S is the
  space required by each equipped item. Unlike the output limits, this one would not be allowed to be exceeded.

	

This system would effectively separate the ships into their already suggested classes: light, middle and heavyweight.
Naturally, a warbird should not be lugging around heavier weapons and better armor than the heavyweight giants like the
levi and lanc. If implemented well, this would also make the heavyweight ships natural tanks, as they could carry better
armor and higher-capacity reactors, making them more difficult for the light ships to kill.





- Utilities --
With the drain and m!@#$%^&* systems in place, there is no reason to limit the number of utilities a player could carry
around with them, since each utility would have a natural impact on the ship's survivability.

Items in the Utilities category would be unlimited purchase, unlimited count items designed for lifetime use. Such
utilities would be: Cloak, X-radar, ID drives, Summoner, Item Launchers (see below), etc.





- Traditional Items --
Utility packs that allow players to respawn with items have never sat well with me. It leads to excessive item-spam
puts further emphasis on the idea that the players with the most money win.

Another suggestion I have is to implement counterstrike-style items, in that they are cheap, but always one-time 
use. If you die with items, they're gone forever.

To alleviate the problems !@#$%^&*ociated with this type of system, several changes would be made:

1) "Items" would be purchased from center safe.
2) After leaving center safe, items are no longer available for purchase until the player is respawned there following
  a death or ship change.
3) An auto-purchasing system to automatically buy x items on respawn.





- Other experimental ideas --
These are other ideas I've had since playing HS that could be implemented with this system without a great deal of
trouble. Whether or not they would play well hasn't really be thought out...


* Ship affinity
 Certain equipment would work better with certain ships. This already exists in HS to some extent (spider has free
 cloak/stealth, levi bombs fire at high velocity, etc).


* Weapon Types
 Anyone who's a fan of Armored Core will know all about this. There would be two types of weapons: Solid-ammo and
 energy-based. 
 
 > Solid-Ammo weapons:
+ Low equip drain
+ Low usage drain
- Higher M!@#$%^&*
- Requires Ammo

 > Energy Weapons:
+ No Ammo Requirement
- Higher equip drain
- Higher usage drain.
 
 
 This system would allow a large variety of weapons based on what players are willing to accept for their negatives.
 If someone has a boatload of money and is likely using a middleweight-class ship, they'd probably opt for a solid-
 ammo weapon. A light fighter, on the other hand, is likely to choose a light weight energy weapon or a high powered,
 low ammo solid weapon.

 
* Alternate Weapons
 Fairly self explanatory. Purchase multiple guns/bombs and use a command to switch between them.

[Masaru]

Sounds perfect. I'd love to see this happen.

[BlueWyvern]

I believe this topic has come up many times, but never in such detail.

This idea would bring alot of change to the zone, something that might help the population out alot.

Besides that it sounds like it would bring MORE diversity to an already diverse zone as well as exemplify the potential of ASSS beyond the current Hyperspace.

Sounds like alot of development work though. (I'm not familiar with ASSS so I could be wrong)

Good luck and I hope it goes through.

Edited August 28, 2007 by BlueWyvern

[Sharpflame]

I don't know... I really like the current buy system, but I can't say I don't like this idea. I'm not sure.

[Russky]

I guess it would help, because it gets unbalanced between frequencies sometimes... because of the privs!

[Dr Brain]

The "basics" could be implemented in an hour or two. Redoing the weapons would take much longer.

 

I've never liked the idea of ship affinity, really.

 

Auto buy can be dangerous, IMO. It has to be really simple to set up, otherwise we'd be better of just letting players can use a macro.

 

Arnk and I were working on an ammo system similar to the one you mentioned at the end of your post.

 

but...

 

All that being said, I'm convinced that your system will have the exact same balance problem that the current one does. Namely, no one is there to continually tweak everything so that there's no one best configuration.

[»Ceiu]

My biggest concern is more diversity. There's basically only two of each item type per ship, so there's not a whole lot of difference between the ship setups. I feel that the system I'm proposing would allow for even greater diversity among the same ships -- you'd basically have a light, middle and heavyweight version of all 8 ships. Further, with frame styles (2 light weight, 4 middle weight and 2 heavy weight) this would create even more options, as people could do light-light, heavy-light and so on.

 

Balance is also a concern of mine, but only in the sense that I dislike the idea of the ultimate one-size-fits-all setups. Right now there are archetypes for each ship that can be given to any player and they'll perform well in the zone. I imagine in my setup the middle weight stuff may fall prey to the same thing, however I'm aiming to make every ship balanced in the sense that it will have a natural weakness -- be it mobility, defense or offense.

 

Some other things:

Arnk showed me his ammo system, which is how I know it's possible. Again, like the flag mode we've discussed, some of my ideas are derived from what I've seen already -- from you, arnk and d1.

 

Also, regarding the tweaking: I'm willing to put a great deal of work into setting up and tweaking such a system if you allow it to go into place. In fact, I was expecting to be doing most of it myself anyway, since you're busy with real-life stuff and likely don't have a lot of time to dedicate to HS at the moment. I figure the balance issue is easy to figure out: If a large majority of the players are using very similar setups, something is probably "broken" with the equipment.

[Dr Brain]

I think we've already got diversity, just not balance between the items. Your system is going to have the same issue with energy scanner that the current system has, namely that everyone needs one to be compe!@#$%^&*ive.

 

You'd also find yourself falling into the slot trap because of game restrictions. You can only have 1 SLD, 1 bomb, 1 gun, 1 brick, 1 x-radar, etc.

[JoWie]

Suggested most of this 3 years ago

[aquarius]

I like the idea of "weight". Every item has weight to it, and purchasing an item will slow you down.

 

But, Cerium, this is not a great idea for Hyperspace, rather a new zone, which could use a custom/edited build of HSCore which is public.

[BlueWyvern]

He's way ahead of you aqua.

[aquarius]

Players should be able to customly create their own sublight drives and reactors. This would be very interesting. Maybe some sort of web-based application that links to the zone. Providing categories of ship settings. Every time the player, for example if the player increases the value of InitialRecharge and MaxRecharge, then a green bar at the bottom of the page will move down, OR, just a green box indicating the Sublight. Another green bar for Reactor, ect.

 

Cerium I am sure you can come up with a good forumula/solution to allow players to build their ships from scratch. Once they 'Save' their items on the site, it moves into their inventory, from which you can actually sell your own work.

[BlueWyvern]

You'd have to make it very obvious and intuitive, you'd be surprised how stupid some people are.

Then again, you're a programmer, you think about that everytime you program something.

Edited September 7, 2007 by BlueWyvern

[aquarius]

It just needs a good GUI.

[BlueWyvern]

I wasn't talking about the website really, I meant the idea of transferring people from continuum to a website.

[aquarius]

The average player will not get so deep into his items, he will simply ?buy the existing ones, or ?buy them from players. Those who actually enjoy customizing their ship -fully-, will have no problem visiting a neat website.

[BlueWyvern]

Oh i see, so you won't remove the ?buy system. Then that's cool! ^_^

[gfd]

sounds like some major changes. overall, i think it sounds pretty cool. i do like the surrent settings just fine, but im not against changeing things.

 

...and how do you learn to program this kind of stuff?

[aquarius]

sounds like some major changes. overall, i think it sounds pretty cool. i do like the surrent settings just fine, but im not against changeing things.

 

...and how do you learn to program this kind of stuff?

 

forums.minegoboom.com

[Suicide_Run]

Is this buy idea getting implemented when HS gets updated with map and what not or is this just another idea we can just talk about but will never appear?

[Dr Brain]

Yes. It will never happen.

[BlueWyvern]

Unless Cerium makes it, then I'm jumping the HS boat

[»Ceiu]

Given some recent developments in real life, there is a strong possibility that I will never make this.

[BlueWyvern]

Boo!

Someone kill Cerium so he has no life!

Edited September 15, 2007 by BlueWyvern

[Suicide_Run]

Guess all the hope and dreams of players thinking this will happen went straight down the drain