Hide the core

[TractGildart]

It seems to me that lots has been said recently (or maybe all along) about the ship cores and the combat dynamic they cause, namely, that winning a fight involves drilling a hole through the enemy ship to the core. I propose a solution.

We all know where the core is because that is where the little display diamond is on the ship. What if the diamond surrounded the whole ship? What if the size of the marker was dependent on the ship itself? What if you actually had to dig through the whole ship, ripping whole chunks away, trying to locate the core? What if taking out weapons control actually mattered, because you need time to locate the core in the ship? Suddenly escape pods would become a viable idea when your ship is too damaged. Burnt out hulks would remain in space after battles, since the core wasn't found but the ship was abandoned.

I think having the display marker NOT tell us exactly where the core is located would drastically alter the way that combat takes place in the game, while still allowing the simple construction mechanics that the cores exist to produce.

 

[jericoz]

I like this idea but don\'t know if this would cause a lot of coding issues for schema?

 

[wahakalol]

I totally agree that having the diamond on the core is a terrible idea. However, instead of having a massive blue diamond surrounding one of those (oh so popular) gigantic ships, I fancy the idea of having the marker automatically relocated to the geometric center of the ship

 

[Echo_17]

+1

This could be supplimented by adding in scanner modules that can pinpoint subsystems within a certain range. This gives radar jammers a new purpose because lets face it...they aren\'t much help now. Stealth players would also enjoy this because they no longer need to go head to head with larger class ships, simply disable the ships weapons and engins and you have won the engagement.

 

[Megacrafter127]

Having the marker not at the core will cause performance issues, since the location of the marker would\'ve to be recalculated each time the ship rotates or translates. To avoid those problems, the marker has to be on the pivot point.

Now you may wonder, why not put the pivot point into the geometric center? Because that would cause the same performance issues, unless one would move the base (point 0,0,0 in the block grid of the ship) each time a block is added or removed, which requires to completely rewrite the array, that stores the data(the octree won\'t make it better) and that takes longer, the larger the ship is. Whatever you try, you\'ll always run into performance problems after a quite short time.

 

[ltmauve]

Or the core could not be nessacary to have the ship, and could be removed and placed elsewhere. The place with the core is the pivot point.

EDIT: Woops, put this down wrong. The place where the core was orignally is the pivot point. The core could be placed anywhere, and the pivot point would not change. The pivot point would be the IFF beacon location.

 

[NeonSturm]

Or the core could not be nessacary to have the ship, and could be removed and placed elsewhere. The place with the core is the pivot point.


This.

Use cockpids to control your ship