Introduction
In most of our favorite movies and TV shows, space ships are shown to have wings or otherwise aerodynamic shapes. As you all know though, this is not optimal in a vacuum where there is no drag or lift to be gained with shapes like that. In video games, it is a mixed bag. Some games like Space Engineers and Star Made have no drag in space so your ship can keep floating endlessly. In Starbase, we have drag, the so called "space jelly" that slows ships down without a constant force applied. It is often considered a limitation on the gameplay, but what if it was turned from a performance enhancing mechanism into a gameplay mechanic?
The Problem
Anywhere you go in the Starbase community, you will find the discussion about the design of ships that are viable not matching expectations, either in appearance or capability. Much of this has to do with comparing the trailer ships to the combat ships we have now. There are of course beautiful and functional ships now, but the beauty comes second to functionality. So, how can we make the functionality look beautiful and allow for many kinds of ships to all be viable?
Proposed Solution
For any solution in Starbase... or anything really when dealing with complex game theoretical systems, is to understand that you cannot easily force anybody's hand, you can only provide changes in the trade-off and incentive environment. If you want players to build ships that match the aesthetic and gameplay expectations and goals of the players, you need to provide a viable way to do that that beats the unwanted way such that a rational person would usually choose the desired option out of it being the better choice.
Focusing on small features and tweaks is important later for tuning, but they will likely not have the effect you want since they are so embedded in the larger framework. Here is how I think we can change the environment to help promote ships that gain beauty and diversity through function:
Make space jelly drag surface area dependent. We already have unrealistic drag in space and lasers that move at the speed of bullets, making the drag act like there is air everywhere would not be that much more unrealistic. We can ignore lift (unless we wanted to add that to planets), but just make it so that the vector of the ship's motion will encounter an opposing force proportional to the surface area of that side of the ship.
I expect that this would be computationally heavy to perform in real time, but I imagine it being possible to calculate at the same time as LODs are generated. The simplest model of this would require a different drag coefficient to be calculated every 90 degrees around the ship, essentially making a cubic representation of the ship. In-between angles would then be calculated by combining faces of the drag cube. If more faces of the representational shape could be added, that would be more accurate and help with ships that may have holes in them to beter represent the reduced drag for those angles.
Expected Implications
This would dramatically shift the ship making tactics around. If you wanted to fly a cube, it would require an immense amount of thrust to make up for it but the ship would be equally sluggish in all directions. If you want efficient acceleration, you could either make your ship narrower with respect to the direction you want to move quickly in (likely narrow from the front). However, this would come at the tradeoff of reduced strafing ability.
Boxy ships would not be useless with this model, but would not have the acceleration advantage that ships with dedicated directionality could. This may lead to combat looking more like dog fights, with it being difficult to slow down narrow ships without turning and chases and reversals being more common than circle duels.
One unfortuanate trade off you would see is that ships would become even denser. As drag is only calculated at the surface, ships that have empty space in them would be wasting thrust to move around those volumes. This would make the problem of hands-on-ness and repairabilty worse so that would have to be fixed by other methods.
Another possible outcome could be even more thrust walls. People may choose to ignore the drag mechanics and instead just cover their ship in thrusters rather than optimize for a particular thrust to surface area optimum. This also would have to be addressed by other changes and additions.
Overall, I would expect that ships would begin to flatten out a little more than they are now, this might also help to reduce the weapon spam since fewer weapons could be positioned along a thin ship. It may also allow small fighters to have the role of being more nimble than anything else since their small size could mean that even on their widests side they would have very little drag.
Conclusion
Starbase showed us a vision in the trailers of a game that we all want to see. How many of us were on-board just from seeing those videos as they were? But players are very good at solving problems, including the "problems" of the game looking nice and being fun. So, to bring those things back we can't punish or reward directly, but instead have to create an enviorment where the best path for any reasonable player is to make the game look nice and be fun. Drag being a feature instead of a performance maintainance mechanism might just be one such envioronmental change that can set us on that right course. What do you all think? I look forward to hearing what you have to say.
In most of our favorite movies and TV shows, space ships are shown to have wings or otherwise aerodynamic shapes. As you all know though, this is not optimal in a vacuum where there is no drag or lift to be gained with shapes like that. In video games, it is a mixed bag. Some games like Space Engineers and Star Made have no drag in space so your ship can keep floating endlessly. In Starbase, we have drag, the so called "space jelly" that slows ships down without a constant force applied. It is often considered a limitation on the gameplay, but what if it was turned from a performance enhancing mechanism into a gameplay mechanic?
The Problem
Anywhere you go in the Starbase community, you will find the discussion about the design of ships that are viable not matching expectations, either in appearance or capability. Much of this has to do with comparing the trailer ships to the combat ships we have now. There are of course beautiful and functional ships now, but the beauty comes second to functionality. So, how can we make the functionality look beautiful and allow for many kinds of ships to all be viable?
Proposed Solution
For any solution in Starbase... or anything really when dealing with complex game theoretical systems, is to understand that you cannot easily force anybody's hand, you can only provide changes in the trade-off and incentive environment. If you want players to build ships that match the aesthetic and gameplay expectations and goals of the players, you need to provide a viable way to do that that beats the unwanted way such that a rational person would usually choose the desired option out of it being the better choice.
Focusing on small features and tweaks is important later for tuning, but they will likely not have the effect you want since they are so embedded in the larger framework. Here is how I think we can change the environment to help promote ships that gain beauty and diversity through function:
Make space jelly drag surface area dependent. We already have unrealistic drag in space and lasers that move at the speed of bullets, making the drag act like there is air everywhere would not be that much more unrealistic. We can ignore lift (unless we wanted to add that to planets), but just make it so that the vector of the ship's motion will encounter an opposing force proportional to the surface area of that side of the ship.
I expect that this would be computationally heavy to perform in real time, but I imagine it being possible to calculate at the same time as LODs are generated. The simplest model of this would require a different drag coefficient to be calculated every 90 degrees around the ship, essentially making a cubic representation of the ship. In-between angles would then be calculated by combining faces of the drag cube. If more faces of the representational shape could be added, that would be more accurate and help with ships that may have holes in them to beter represent the reduced drag for those angles.
Expected Implications
This would dramatically shift the ship making tactics around. If you wanted to fly a cube, it would require an immense amount of thrust to make up for it but the ship would be equally sluggish in all directions. If you want efficient acceleration, you could either make your ship narrower with respect to the direction you want to move quickly in (likely narrow from the front). However, this would come at the tradeoff of reduced strafing ability.
Boxy ships would not be useless with this model, but would not have the acceleration advantage that ships with dedicated directionality could. This may lead to combat looking more like dog fights, with it being difficult to slow down narrow ships without turning and chases and reversals being more common than circle duels.
One unfortuanate trade off you would see is that ships would become even denser. As drag is only calculated at the surface, ships that have empty space in them would be wasting thrust to move around those volumes. This would make the problem of hands-on-ness and repairabilty worse so that would have to be fixed by other methods.
Another possible outcome could be even more thrust walls. People may choose to ignore the drag mechanics and instead just cover their ship in thrusters rather than optimize for a particular thrust to surface area optimum. This also would have to be addressed by other changes and additions.
Overall, I would expect that ships would begin to flatten out a little more than they are now, this might also help to reduce the weapon spam since fewer weapons could be positioned along a thin ship. It may also allow small fighters to have the role of being more nimble than anything else since their small size could mean that even on their widests side they would have very little drag.
Conclusion
Starbase showed us a vision in the trailers of a game that we all want to see. How many of us were on-board just from seeing those videos as they were? But players are very good at solving problems, including the "problems" of the game looking nice and being fun. So, to bring those things back we can't punish or reward directly, but instead have to create an enviorment where the best path for any reasonable player is to make the game look nice and be fun. Drag being a feature instead of a performance maintainance mechanism might just be one such envioronmental change that can set us on that right course. What do you all think? I look forward to hearing what you have to say.
