Author Topic: Shrinking forcefields - What was the thought behind this?  (Read 3220 times)

Offline Mánagarmr

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Shrinking forcefields - What was the thought behind this?
« on: June 06, 2012, 09:26:47 am »
This has probably been discussed before, but I can't seem to find anything specific.

What was the original reasoning behind shrinking forcefields? Wouldn't static forcefields be a better idea? Sure, they'd be destroyed rather than lingering under a bigger forcefield, but seeing how they need to be repaired to regain their size, thus spending resources, this seems like a moot point.

What is the design decision behind forcefields that shrink, and what devastating gameplay change would come from making them all static?

I'm haven't put enough points into Theorycrafting 101 to be able to see why that would be a bad idea :P
« Last Edit: June 06, 2012, 09:28:28 am by Moonshine Fox »
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Offline TechSY730

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Re: Shrinking forcefields - What was the thought behind this?
« Reply #1 on: June 06, 2012, 09:34:45 am »
Partially to allow a way to take stuff out under a forcefield without having to take it all down, providing some useful offensive tactics for both the player and the AI. Partially to make forcefields not be such a hard protection. Partially making you think about positioning under a forcefield. Partially to make forcefields live longer under a stacked forcefield setup.


Probably more reasons too that you will need to get info from the devs.

Offline rabican

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Re: Shrinking forcefields - What was the thought behind this?
« Reply #2 on: June 06, 2012, 09:36:57 am »
With shrinking FFs ai attacks can cause varying degrees of damage.

Imagine attack on your home CMD. With non-shrinking FF there is either no damage inflicted or you are dead.

Withr shrinking ones you can lose cyrostuff etc to attacks that were never really going to eliminate you.

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Shrinking forcefields - What was the thought behind this?
« Reply #3 on: June 06, 2012, 11:33:17 am »
It's cool :)
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Offline Hearteater

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Re: Shrinking forcefields - What was the thought behind this?
« Reply #4 on: June 06, 2012, 11:44:11 am »

Offline Mánagarmr

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Re: Shrinking forcefields - What was the thought behind this?
« Reply #5 on: June 07, 2012, 06:49:01 am »
It's cool :)
Thank you for this absolutely stellar insight in your design thought-pattern. ;)
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Offline Volatar

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Re: Shrinking forcefields - What was the thought behind this?
« Reply #6 on: June 07, 2012, 08:11:03 am »
It's cool :)

That's plenty enough reason for me.

Offline Eternaly_Lost

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Re: Shrinking forcefields - What was the thought behind this?
« Reply #7 on: June 07, 2012, 09:14:55 am »
It's cool :)

That's plenty enough reason for me.

I think the other reason was that before they shrunk, people would find their FF suddenly dying with no clear reason in the middle of a heated battle.

With a shrinking FF, you can see more or less how much HP they have left at a glance. Small = closer to death.

Offline Wingflier

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Re: Shrinking forcefields - What was the thought behind this?
« Reply #8 on: June 07, 2012, 11:09:41 am »
Not saying we should take away the shrinking effect (personally I think it's cool too), but I just thought you should know that there are very easy solutions to make it visible that forcefields, if they didn't shrink, were about to die.

For example, they could turn slowly turn red as they lost health.  At 50% health they would be purple, and near death they would be bright red.  That's hard to miss.
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Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Shrinking forcefields - What was the thought behind this?
« Reply #9 on: June 07, 2012, 11:21:37 am »
The shrinking is really helpful to repairable forcefields, as it saves you the trouble of having to replace them a lot of time.  It's also cool tactically because you have to consider (whether you're the sieger or the besieged) the impact of the shrinking protected area over the course of the battle.

For the spirecraft shieldbearers, yea, those were added way later.  I'll probably give them a 50% or 30% or something minimum radius.  Or would folks really prefer if it were 100% or 90% or whatever?  I'm basically happy with whatever works for those.  Just not growing as damaged ;)
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Offline TechSY730

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Re: Shrinking forcefields - What was the thought behind this?
« Reply #10 on: June 07, 2012, 11:25:21 am »
The shrinking is really helpful to repairable forcefields, as it saves you the trouble of having to replace them a lot of time.  It's also cool tactically because you have to consider (whether you're the sieger or the besieged) the impact of the shrinking protected area over the course of the battle.

For the spirecraft shieldbearers, yea, those were added way later.  I'll probably give them a 50% or 30% or something minimum radius.  Or would folks really prefer if it were 100% or 90% or whatever?  I'm basically happy with whatever works for those.  Just not growing as damaged ;)

I would rather have like 50% min radius, so that other shield bearers and forcefields can start "picking up the slack". However, I can see good arguments for both near 100% min and near 50% min, and both would be useful in different situations. I'm willing to hear other arguments first.

If you do implement a <100% minimum (call it M%), would hit M% radius at M% health (and then not shrink any further), or at 1 HP left (so that it keeps shrinking all the way, but still never below M% radius before it dies)?

EDIT: Oh, and if we do go with 100% min radius (or M% radius at M% HP) for spirecraft shield bearers, the dynamic coloring would work well for that, though I don't know how much of a pain it would be to code, and how much GPU/CPU load it would take.

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Shrinking forcefields - What was the thought behind this?
« Reply #11 on: June 07, 2012, 11:43:05 am »
I would rather have like 50% min radius, so that other shield bearers and forcefields can start "picking up the slack". However, I can see good arguments for both near 100% min and near 50% min, and both would be useful in different situations. I'm willing to hear other arguments first.
I'm thinking something like 90% would be tactically ideal: that way a stack of spirecraft shieldbearers can "pass it around" themselves, but they'll all go out before the normal stuff starts taking hits.  If you don't want the spirecraft ones to take fire because you think your normal shields can handle it, just put the unrepairable ones in low-power.

On the other hand, maybe 100% is the best: do you want your spirecraft shields spreading out the damage amongst themselves?  Or do you want them to go down one by one so that afterward you may have lost some completely but the remaining ones have higher % health left?  Seems like you would want that so you could reclaim the cap and build more (if desired) rather than having a lot of lower health ones sitting around.

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If you do implement a <100% minimum (call it M%), would hit M% radius at M% health (and then not shrink any further), or at 1 HP left (so that it keeps shrinking all the way, but still never below M% radius before it dies)?
The latter, it just changes the lower end of the interval, not the fact that the slope is linear from one end of the interval to the other.

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EDIT: Oh, and if we do go with 100% min radius (or M% radius at M% HP) for spirecraft shield bearers, the dynamic coloring would work well for that, though I don't know how much of a pain it would be to code, and how much GPU/CPU load it would take.
I don't really want to try to do a diffuse on these, I don't think it would work well with the pretty distinctly purple graphics.  But I could be wrong.  Adding diffuse is a mild increase on the GPU and thus not something I'd leap to do, but probably nothing compared to the additional cpu cost of having movement-blocking forcefields in the system.
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Offline TechSY730

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Re: Shrinking forcefields - What was the thought behind this?
« Reply #12 on: June 07, 2012, 12:27:03 pm »
Fair enough about the 90% or 100% min radius arguments. I can live with that too.

If you don't want the spirecraft ones to take fire because you think your normal shields can handle it, just put the unrepairable ones in low-power.

Um, one problem with this. I'm pretty sure spirecraft, once constructed, cannot be put into low power mode, which seems odd. This is especially troubling for things like the shield bearers.

Speaking of things that seem like they should be able to be turned off but can't, Neinzul Regeneration Chambers cannot be put into low power mode

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Shrinking forcefields - What was the thought behind this?
« Reply #13 on: June 07, 2012, 12:47:39 pm »
Um, one problem with this. I'm pretty sure spirecraft, once constructed, cannot be put into low power mode, which seems odd. This is especially troubling for things like the shield bearers.
Can you confirm this on each of the spirecraft types?  My dev environment is running AVWW right now and doesn't do so well with AIW running in the background, etc.  Looking at the code it should be making at least all the spirecraft with attacks low-power-able; I can see why the shield one doesn't get it because it probably isn't considered extended-mobile-military.

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Speaking of things that seem like they should be able to be turned off but can't, Neinzul Regeneration Chambers cannot be put into low power mode
Probably the reason for that is that low-powering them would do nothing: ships would still enter, they don't pay attention to the low-power flag for that purpose.
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Offline TechSY730

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Re: Shrinking forcefields - What was the thought behind this?
« Reply #14 on: June 07, 2012, 12:54:02 pm »
Um, one problem with this. I'm pretty sure spirecraft, once constructed, cannot be put into low power mode, which seems odd. This is especially troubling for things like the shield bearers.
Can you confirm this on each of the spirecraft types?  My dev environment is running AVWW right now and doesn't do so well with AIW running in the background, etc.  Looking at the code it should be making at least all the spirecraft with attacks low-power-able; I can see why the shield one doesn't get it because it probably isn't considered extended-mobile-military.

I'll check into that over my lunch break.

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Speaking of things that seem like they should be able to be turned off but can't, Neinzul Regeneration Chambers cannot be put into low power mode
Probably the reason for that is that low-powering them would do nothing: ships would still enter, they don't pay attention to the low-power flag for that purpose.

Maybe that can be added as a new feature request in mantis?