NOTICE: Please do not argue unless you have read this entire post. It ticks me off to no end. (You can skip spoilers.)
I believe the development of rich personal combat mechanics will greatly increase the success and depth of Starmade. Why? With good mechanics, Starmade could be marketed partially as a first person shooter. This would provide the game with the commandos for boarding parties and planetary assaults. Here I'd like to discuss some ideas for personal combat in general, and a few weapons in particular.
Such a vast makeover of the astronaut experience will likely be far down the road after the game solidifies to the point where this content will become more relevant. I'm not expecting you to merge Minecraft and Destiny, mind you, but I (and I assume many others) would love to see a fully fleshed-out feature set for personal movement, survival, and combat.
This is an initial discussion of potential far-future content.
Initial concerns
There are a number of issues with the current game that make Starmade a really, really bad FPS. Theses should be solved first and foremost.
1. "LAAAAAAAG!" screamed the noob as he was blown apart by a latent missile blast
Server lag will destroy personal combat. Even a little bit of lag can mean the difference in a fight, so this must be minimized. As such, personal weapons, damage, etc. must receive the highest priority in the game engine, being the first thing calculated, transmitted over the network, etc. I cannot stress the importance of this priority enough. If ships lag, bug out, etc, but gunfights still rage with low latency in the hallways of a crippled titan, Schema's doing it right.
2. Proper personal equipment groundwork
The sorry state of the helmet shows just how much needs to be done. We need proper equipment slots outside of the inventory. Putting your helmet on-off-on-off-on-wut-wut-wut by mousing over it is no good. I'm sure Shema knows better than to do body armor this way. A number of possible systems have been suggested elsewhere, but some of the features I'd like to see are armor, shielding, stealth, and extra suit boosters. Ideally, equipment should be modular. Balancing these features is probably beyond the scope of this thread, as you could write several pages on that alone.
Edit:Lecic has some good ideas for this.
3. Relevance of personal combat
Currently planetary combat is practically limited to orbital bombardment and boarding actions require several suppression ships fitted with ion, EMP, and stop weapons to pin down a ship with its shields lowered while a boarding party gets in. There have been a lot of suggestions both for planets and ships in this respect, and I'd rather not complicate this discussion by going into details. Suffice it to say this is a prerequisite to the rest of the content in this thread, but is beyond the scope of this thread.
Edit: 4. Better first-person graphics/characterizations/immersion
Crimson-Artist mentioned this as well. I'd like to see my hands, tools, and weapons in first person. If I have a gun out, it's a lot more immersing to see it at the bottom of the screen. Without something along these lines, something just doesn't feel right.
Improvements
These are things that I think need to be added to the game to enrich everything that happens while you're not at the controls of a space ship.
Personal movement
The current movement is kind of... bland. I mean, typical slow-ish run, slower walk, and 5 meter jump. Here are some good additions:
- Crouch/dive for cover/crawl. One key. Hold to crouch, use movement while to lie down and crawl, crouch while airborne to dive to a prone position.
- Dodging and/or rolling (could use the same keys as ship roll by default).
- Proper flight when not in gravity or grappled to a ship. Controls identical to ship core, flight characteristics similar or identical. Perhaps the thrusters would be weaker to keep you from flying off a planet without a core.
- Reduce the ridiculously high 5-meter jump to 3 meters and add a ledge-grab that triggers automatically. Can ledge-grab farther ahead by using the dive-for-cover function.
- Swimming (With proper animations mind you! None of that Minecraft ninja-walking on the surface junk.) Use movement controls to move around underwater similar to space but with a maximum speed of 5 m/sec. Use align control to stick yourself down and walk on the bottom.
- A ranged grapple as suggested by Crimson-Artist. This could be built into a suit by default or be a piece of equipment.
These additional forms of movement will add immersion and fun to moving around the environment and fighting, as well as allowing things to happen that couldn't before.
Better weapon selection
While not critical, it might be nice to have one or two "holster" equipment slots with keys dedicated to draw/holster the items in them. When a holster item is drawn, the hotbar selection is overridden and the bar fades out. This allows for quick-draw weapons fire, etc. Weapons may still be placed on the hotbar. You would most likely use a sidearm and a melee weapon in your holster slots, as these would need to be accessed the fastest. As far as I know, this would be a feature unique to Starmade.
Edit: Where are my feet?
I'd like to see Starmade do something few other games do and let me actually look down and see my feet. This may seem trivial, but I believe such a feature would give Starmade better-than-average immersion in first person. Looking down while trying to stand as close as possible to a ledge and then wondering where my feet are has always been immersion-breaking for me. In that case seeing my feet would be useful as well as fun.
Melee Combat
First, a dedicated melee weapon. The last thing we need is another boring, half-booty melee weapon like a Minecraft sword. Let's do something more spicy. People argue over what it should be, but for the sake of this discussion, we'll assume the weapon is blade-like; can stab, slash and block; and is held in the hand or mounted to the forearm of one's suit.
I'd personally like to see a retractable wrist bayonet, but that's just me... Ignore that! On with the discussion.
Functions:
- Stab: quickly tap and release primary fire - powerful single-target attack directly in front of you. Same power as sniper rifle. Also good for wrecking blocks.
- Slash: hold primary fire and sweep the crosshair slightly to the side. Character makes a 180* swing in the direction of the mouse movement. (can be any angle from vertical to diagonal). Damages all entities it contacts. About half as powerful as a stab.
- Block: Click to block a stab (stabs are hard to block in real life!) or hold to block slashes.
Second, some guns (particularly rifles) should have a block function so that gunmen aren't entirely vulnerable to melee weapons, giving a chance to block an attack and shoot point-blank or draw one's melee weapon. This block could be made weaker than a melee weapon block somehow, like having a shorter window for deflecting a stab.
I'll probably add more stuff to this later, depending on my own thoughts and the feedback I get.
