SEV- Thread on Obfuscation (MM is involved)2weeks to post

[Roanon]

Excuse me for returning to topic in this hijacked thread

Fog of war is nice, but it should not just increase micromanagement. Forgetting given informations in not fogging, but forcing to micromanage. So, if you get informations about a system it is ok that you do not get the latest info every turn, but you should continue to have access to that latest info known to you. Disadvantage: this would create a lot of additional data per result file. But in times of Gigabyte HDs and DSL this should be tolerable.

There should be far more levels of sensors, revealing planet and/or ship details in increasing detail and ranges. Ownership of a planet and number of population should not be known instantly when you enter a system, but a sufficiently cheap scanner should allow you to get at least the "colonized" info from a large distance. May make the game more realistic, but much to chancey if your colonizers only get the "already colonized" info when about to settle down there. Data like number of colonists, and even number / type of facilities should be revealed only by better, more expensvie scanners, though.

I think ship names are fun. But they should not be given automatically revealing the class and the serial number. Especially when constructing new ships it is really bad that everyone seeing them built instantly knows how many other ships of that type you already have if you do not micromanage and instantly rename every ship. Ship names should be left blank and should be shown to everyone if you choose to name your ship. The classes should become visible when you have scanners to detect a ship's components. Too much micromanagement to manually write down a list of components of every ship encountered, compare them, and keep track of classes internally.

[ May 08, 2004, 12:07: Message edited by: Roanon ]

[Suicide Junkie]

If only the host keeps a copy of the full map, and each player has a separate .gam file to download, each player's file could be populated with the info they have seen Last.

The downloads for each player would be smaller, at the cost of more storage space on the host machine.

[Roanon]

Separate .gam files for each player is generally a good idea. There would be no need to encrypt the data, and this would even encourage the player community to write addons for game data management. Only the administrative overhead is a bit higher, for instance pbw would have to be reprogrammed so that each player only will get his .gam file and do not have access to others.

[Aiken]

Small note: I'd like to see the Proxy Partnership "feature" (viewing the systems\planets\ships of partner of your partner) removed in SEV. It's unrealistic, imho.

[dogscoff]

Small note: I'd like to see the Proxy Partnership "feature" (viewing the systems\planets\ships of partner of your partner) removed in SEV.

When you say "removed", I assume you mean "A moddable option to allow/disallow it".

I think nothing should ever be removed by hard code- give modders as many toys to play with as possible.

[Aiken]

Actually, I meant "removed" But yes, making it optional feature is better.

[AgentZero]

I kinda like the whole obfuscation thing, but I wouldn't go so far as to apply it to things like planets. I mean, a planet is BIG, and as soon as your ship enters the system they're gonna know where the planets are, and even have a rough idea of the conditions of said planets. So as soon as a ship enters a system we'd get a rough idea of what the conditions of all the planets were like but not if there's anyone living there, unless the colony has reached a certain stage of development. However, even if you know someone owns that planet, you won't know WHO until you wander on over and take a closer look.

But ships, even big ships, compared to the scale of an entire solar system, are TINY so naturally, they'd be a lot harder to find, and until genuinely advanced sensors are available, finding a ship in a solar system would be like... Well, you know.
When you detect a ship in a star system, I think there should be several stages of identification:
1) There's a ship over there somewhere.
2) There's a ship right there and it's about -this- big...
3) And it looks sort of like this (silhouette)
4) Now it looks exactly like this.
5) It's weapons/engines/shields are about this powerful

And that's all we'd ever know until actually making contact with the empire owning that ship. Then, under Diplomacy, one would have the option to 'Share IFF Codes'. Once this is done, any ships in you 'Unknown' list that belong the empire you shared with will be moved to that empires list. Obviously, any new designs will still come up as Unknown unless IFF codes are shared regularily.

More to say but no time to say it..