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Mounts in a Sci-Fi environment (video of test drive)
KenFisher
Member UncommonPosts: 5,035
Thoughts on mounts in a Sci-Fi environment (MMORPG)...
Obviously the tech would exist to make vehicles fast. Would this be workable in an MMORPG?
Video: Engine Test of Dune Buggy in Snow (old model, physics are still way off, just enough to show concept)
Also thoughts on if vehicles should be "pocket ponies" where you use a skill and the mount just appears. Arrive at a destination and it vanishes on dismount.
Are there alternatives to pocket ponies? Large parking lots around cities... car rentals maybe.
Ken Fisher - Semi retired old fart Network Administrator, now working in Network Security. I don't Forum PVP. If you feel I've attacked you, it was probably by accident. When I don't understand, I ask. Such is not intended as criticism.
Comments
Would be awesome, but can you imagine driving a buggy in an mmo with lag, would feel like you slammed on the breaks.
Yeah, lag would be a problem. Short lag burst, fly off a bridge into the canyon... hehe, oops.
Might have to slow it down a bit. Just eyballing it, I'd guess it's at least 2x the speed of fast land mounts in medeival games.
You can do this very thing in Fallen Earth. And they aren't pocket ponies.
Really? And no lag? When I played FE a while back, I don't remember mounts, must not have been implemeneted yet. Maybe should give it another try.
Thanks for the tip. I'll check it out. I remember seeing vehicle pics, but forgot about it.
If I'm not mistaken, mounts have been in Fallen Earth since day one. Getting a horse was even easy, but the vehicles you had to put in quite some work to craft (or buy one that someone else crafted, I think, but it'd be expensive).
You had motorbikes, cars and yeah, dune buggies.
The really beautiful thing about FE's vehicles and mounts is that they're part of the persistant world. So-, you dismount, they stay there. Even the wildlife can attack and destroy them!
That also means, if you die, you may end up quite far away from your vehicle. No worries, though, you can pay a garage to have it towed!
Another cool thing: All vehicles in FE has (or at least "had", been some time since I played) different climbing capabilities. You could not go up a steep incline with a motorbike, but you could with a horse.
I can't tell if you mean mounts in the traditional sense(pull them out of your pocket) or just vehicles in general based on other's comments.
I supposed you could count the Flash in Planetside2 a mount... atleast it has the best physics for drivable vehicles in an MMO.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVYthBL7fbY
Yup. Auto Assault.
Great vid. Looks awesome.
Funny shutdown trivia. Auto assault players were compensated with a copy of Tabula Rasa.
edit: kant spel
Feasible? Absolutely. Practical? Not really. In order to accomodate those super fast speeds in a futuristic vehicle, environments would have to be massive, and the pc requirements would be massive as well since you'd have to render environment tiles much more quickly. With the average computing power of today's PC, you'd need a VERY powerful gaming rig to pull this of seamlessly. Add mobs and terrain features and possibly environmental particle effects, and you vastly increase the power needed to do this without an fps of like 5 or something.
edit: You might be able to get past a lot of this with some sort of blurring effect, but it would have to be subtle, which means you'd still need a lot more computing power than we typically see in a home PC.
Just before SWG shut down they added the ability to pilot your ship on planets. I saw some pretty fast ships that didn't lag...much.
That was awesome!!!!
Yeah, I'm looking at that too. Vehicles that do 60 mph put a lot of pressure on having gigantic zones, and with that all the more load server and client side.
I noticed in Fallen Earth vids that even fast vehicles don't really move all that quickly. Maybe about the same speed as an epic flyer in WoW if that fast. I'm going to poke around and see what I can learn about their zone design.
No clue where I'm going with this... just learning about what's possible / practical / desireable.
Horses, motorcycles, 4-wheelers (quads), cars, and dune buggies. But it's been a good while since I've played. Could be more by now. But yuppers.
Have to agree. Looking very very good.
Might want to check out how CoH did this. Mind you it was the character and not a vehicle but you coud run almost 90 mph, fly 68? mph I believe and jump around 75mph. Not really any lag either.
We can reach 90 miles per hour easily in vehicles now, though. That's not very sci-fi like. When someone says sci-fi mounts I'm thinking hovercraft or something going hundreds of miles an hour. That PlanetSide vid looked great, but I'm willing to bet that the open world isn't nearly the same scale as a typical mmorpg. And as far as Fallen Earth is concerned, have you seen the graphics? They aren't bad, but the textures for the ground all look very similar. I guess if you're willing to take a hit to texture quality it might be possible, but I'm not sold on the concept.
I may very well be completely wrong, though. I'm no expert.
My statement was in response to the statement that 60mph put a lot pressure regarding zone size. Games that were 8 years old with decent graphics have done it with faster speeds. There may be some information to be gained in how they did it.
True, and I'm not saying it's impossible, but to do it well would probably be expensive and an unjustifiable cost in the long run. I honestly hate mounts in general and miss the days when you had to actually spend time getting from place to place unless you had a mage to port you or something.
Then again, I'm a masochist.