Engine exhaust and the speed of light...

[Fossaman]

Couple of ideas here.

1) Engine exhaust. Using your thrusters or turning leaves a trail that can be detected by enemy ships, and they leave a trail when they use theirs too. It could be in the form of long lasting particles, possibly only detectable once you get a certain upgrade. Different values for the 'thrust' variable leave different concentrations. Same for the 'maneuver' variable.

Instead of making a beeline for you when they enter the system, ships with 'attack' orders would cast about for exhaust trails, and then follow them. Not sure how figuring out which direction it goes would be handled.

Oh, and a use for the inertialess drive: Stealth.

2) The speed of light. Objects that are travelling at a significant fraction of the speed of light spontaneously generate radiation in the real world. Why not make them do the same in transcendence? It wouldn't have to be much; just enough to give a little bit of warning that something is coming. Something along the lines of little blue dots on the LRS display.

I'd like to see these implemented as ways to improve the AI for enemy ships; giving them ways to detect other enemies without having them be 'psychic' about it. Pirates could hunt for high concentrations of exhaust trails, which would indicate a heavily used route. If you fly towards a station, they could send out a patrol to meet you at the edge of actual detection range because they saw emissions from your craft before they saw the craft itself. Random encounters would become more random.

Comments, criticisms, additional ideas?

[OddBob]

I LIKE it!

Not sure how figuring out which direction it goes would be handled.

The strongest particles are the most recent. If the trail gets stronger as you go left, they went left. Also adds a whole range of (illegal) drive maskers.

About having it show up on screen:
Now this is radical, but what if you had different modes you could switch to, so if you switch to engine particle detection mode (actually probably something like deep scanning mode, where extra info appears onscreen about everything) then all sorts of cool info appears on your screen.

Switching to Long Rang Sensor mode might be like making the LRS switchable into fullscreen like the map is (but with more info, and [pssibly cooler-looking)

[Fossaman]

I like the idea of a sensor overlay. It seems like that would make it feel much more like you're a person sitting inside the ship, piloting it.

As an extension of this...'theme' I guess you could call it, maybe certain events could be considered 'noisy.' Stuff like blowing up a Luminous stronghold or killing a dreadnaught could trigger patrols or scout craft, which could call in larger ships. Have certain objects, mostly stations, calculate the distance to the event, then set an appropriate delay for action to be taken based on the speed of light.

[Sponge]

Your first idea would really add a lot of depth. It's a fantastic idea, and I don't think it would be TOO hard to add. It's really just some still, or slowly moving, particles generated where a ship flies that become less and less "powerfull" as time goes on. Oddbob also made a great point about drive maskers. The only thing I could see going wrong would be the lag created by all of these particles, and how the AI would know the difference between your trail and another ship's trail. This could make it interesting if a hostile ship follows a trail to a friendly patroll.. It would add a whole new aspect to AI battles.

Your second idea isn't quite as good, I don't think. A lot of things travel close to light speed, namely beam weapons, and I think it would really suck to get irradiated every time your shields went down.

Personally, I would like to see some more technology. Right now we have a bunch of cool stuff, but the only really neat effects we have are things like Cyber Attacks and Smart Cannon shells. How about weapons that can pass through shields? Tractor beams? More than one shield generator for larger ships? Construction tools? I think it would be neat to build your own "fort" of some sort where you can keep wingmen docked.

It would also be cool to have the feeling that you're defending a position. Sure, you can defend various stations, but you never feel like you're holding a position. You and your friends kill a couple waves and that's that.

Anyways, great idea. Hopefully we can see some drive trails in the next release!

[Fossaman]

I don't mean radiation as in glowing-green-death.

Subatomic particles are constantly spawning other subatomic particles, which vanish almost as soon as they are created to avoid violating any of the conservation laws. When an object is accelerated to a significant fraction of the speed of light, those 'virtual particles' become real, because some of the kinetic energy bleeds over into them. So, when you get something traveling really fast, it's spitting out photons and other things like that.

So, nothing harmful, just something that makes you detectable. And it wouldn't apply to lasers, at least, because photons have no mass with which to gain kinetic energy to spit particles with. Particle beams would display this effect, which could make for interesting detection signatures from battles.

I think that probably doing this as particles in terms of programming would eat RAM at an alarming rate; maybe when an object exceeds a certain velocity, you get a probability of objects within a certain range getting a bearing on you? The player could have an overlay that shows a certain number of the most recent tracks as lines on the map; if there were a lot of tracks hitting at the same time, it would send an alert: 'large signature detected' or something like that.

The faster something was going, the more likely it would be that it would be detected; the more massive it was, the same.

[george moromisato]

Using your thrusters or turning leaves a trail that can be detected by enemy ships, and they leave a trail when they use theirs too.

I like this idea and it would make enemy ships behave more intelligently.

Ants, in fact, use a very similar system. Ants leave a chemical trail when they search for food. When they find food and return to the nest, they leave a different trail. Other ants can tell the difference between trails that lead to food and trails that don't.

The only problem in Transcendence is implementation. Ideally, I want a function that an enemy ship can call. Something like:

GetTrail (x, y) = 0 if there is a trail >0 otherwise

But how would that be implemented? There are two obvious solutions:

1. A giant 2-dimensional array into which I can plug in x and y.
2. A giant list of trails points.

The problem with the first method is space (memory, to be exact). A array that covers the entire system would be anywhere from 1 to 10 megabytes, depending on how precise the trail is.

The problem with the second method is time (CPU time, to be exact). The GetTrail function would have to iterate over the list of trail points on every call. Since there might be thousands of trail points (with each ship leaving a trail) this would get very expensive (i.e., slow).

In order for this to work I need to create a sparse array, which is essentially a hybrid between the two methods. We only allocate portions of the array in the places where ships leave a trail. We keep a list of partial arrays and iterate over them.

The only problem with that solution is programmer time. Which is to say that you shouldn't expect it soon. But I still think it is a good idea.

[goat not sheep]

Don't worry. We can wait.

[evilbob]

George, its your game, and what you've done so far is awesome. I belive in you. I won't hold it against you if it isn't implemented

[Yugi]

Evilbob has a point - most of us only ever thank you (George) when new features are added, forgetting about the old.
So, I just want to say:
Great game, George!
Keep up the good work

[bsb]

Couple of ideas here.
.....
2) The speed of light. Objects that are travelling at a significant fraction of the speed of light spontaneously generate radiation in the real world. Why not make them do the same in transcendence? It wouldn't have to be much; just enough to give a little bit of warning that something is coming. Something along the lines of little blue dots on the LRS display.
..........
Comments, criticisms, additional ideas?

It is not true that objects moving close to the speed of light radiate. You might be getting confused with the Cherenkov effect, or Cherenkov radiation - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation
However, right now there is something similar in the game, as you no doubt have noticed - big, not that fast projectiles do get registered on the radar screen. Small ones do not, I presumed, because of their size, not because of their speed.

[Fossaman]

You might be getting confused with the Cherenkov effect, or Cherenkov radiation - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation

No. I'm not. I'm pretty sure this phenomenon has been observed in particle accelerators. And all projectiles register on the LRS, as far as I know.

[bsb]

OK, this is getting off-topic, but bear with me. It is possible for high-speed particles to emit - but they must be accelerating (where the acceleration may be negative as well). If an object moves at a constant velocity, it can not emit, or it would violate the relativity principle. That is, we would be able to tell at what speed the object is moving without referencing it to an external frame of reference, by simply measuring the amount of radiation it spits.
Since most particle accelerators are circular, the particles that go around them are subject to an acceleration. And therefore the charged particles emit the so called synchrotron radiation - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron_radiation
OK, if we take into account that an object must accelerate in order to achieve a near light speed, then yes, the projectiles in the game should be emitting in the beginning of their flight. But once they leave the weapon, there is nothing that pushes them anymore, so they would cease to radiate.

[Burzmali]

George, as to creating exhaust tails, wouldn't it be easier to generate them in the same way particles are created? Since you would only have exhaust tails while accelerating, the number of particles created wouldn't be too high. I'm not sure how particle clouds are stored in game, but if you added an age and direction characteristic to each, the AI would find a series of clouds, locate the newest, and chase in the direction the player headed.