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What would really get me into playing Perpetuum...
psykobilly
Member Posts: 338
Collision and friendly-fire.
I posted this at release and the devs claimed it was too difficult, too resource intensive etc. I didn't really buy it, and I still don't. Bot to bot collision and potential for friendly fire would change the blob mechanic entirely. IMO, it would make a decent-to-good game much, much better.
Anyone know why it would be a problem to put a small collision cylinder at the center of each bot?
Or why it would be a problem for weapons fire to interact with the collision cylinder the same way that it currently applies to trees/shrubs/hills?
I like the game, but I would get behind the game majorly if these features were in. Blob pvp is lacking currently I think.
Comments
This question is better asked on the official forums, but I'll explain.
The primary reason I believe is exploitability and griefing potential. A lot of wonderful features will never see the light of the day because of these reasons. Better have less features and a solid gameplay than more features and exploitable gameplay.
As a programmer I can assure you that dynamic collision is indeed difficult and resource intensive.
Plants, buildings and terrain are different because 1) they are static and 2) they work on a tile level (10m x 10m). Bot collisions would need to be dynamic (every bot x every bot x every tick = lots of calculations) and have _much_ higher resolution or they will glitch a lot.
Also, small object high speed collisions would be very sensitive to any kind of lag and desync, which would be perceived by the players as collision bugs.
As for friendly fire, with the current precision weapons doesn't make much sense. We'll have AOE weapons one day and there it would be logical.
Can't see how you could exploit collision in Perpet. I mean... box someone in on an alpha island? Not much of an "exploit". You could easily make the collision cylinder small enough to minimize potential for this (or add battletech style jump jets and completely eliminate any possibility of it).
Many MMO engines have dynamic collision with possibility of friendly fire. It's 2011. These 'difficult' problems have been solved in many other games.
Friendly fire makes perfect sense if you have ever seen the way blobs works in perpet. Just because you have a precision weapon doesn't mean you should be able to shoot it through 10 layers of bots.
warhamer online has box collision and allows 100 vs 100 fights, which is more or less the total number of PO's online players. DDO is a 5 years old game with box collisions. EVE online is a 8 years old game, allows 1000vs1000 fights and has box collision too. Each one of those games have their very own mechanics but what I 'm trying to say is that box collision may be difficult, but older games have got it to run it. Also, I find more ways of exploiting not-box collision than box collision.
And about FF, I agree with psykobilly.
funny because collision detection is what i was sort of expecting from EvE back when i tried it. i was trying so hard not to hit planets and all the astoroids.....and then i realized you take absolutely no damage from hitting stuff.
lame.
by no means was it game braking for me but it did kind of lame out the whole game.
Taking damage from collisions wouldn't work in EVE. Imagine a trade hub like Jita with thousands of players flying around. Also, bumping ships is a general practice in High-sec fights and it's considered griefing when it has no combat purposes. Bumping is half way between damage and just collision-block. Damage would be easily exploitable.
About planets, I kinda agree. It's lame when we warp through them.