Aiming projectile weapons

[lostprophet]

I\'ve recently come to love the subtle beauty of the bow and arrow, and I was just thinking how are projectile weapons going to work? Will it be automatic, which I am personally against, or will you be able to choose to aim in first person? It would make defending towns and castles more fun, as instead of clicking on people as they run up, you could take them out with swift head shots
Of course, the archery/projectile skill would affect how much your shot errs to the side, so there is a random element for people who are not skilled.

[elscouta]

Bows are really fun. Hard to use but fun. I really liked in Legend of Zelda when you ride Epona and kill your ennemies with arrows. The only problem I see is that real-time combat will disavantage peoples with slow computers/connexions.

And about your idea of castle defense, it could be a great event. Once per month, an invasion from the Stone Labirynth occurs, and a town is assieged and the peoples inside must defend th city or they will *all* die. The player union to fight against the computer threat. Guild union, skilled players protects newbie... Changes radically from PvP or PK and is a lot more fun.

[Yann]

I d love to see all of that ingame, even if i guess it will be harder to implement, being able to aim with your bow is much more realistic and fun than click target, click attack, and wait ...

[Wedge]

Yeah real-time is a quaint idea, but you can\'t suddenly change the combat system for using missile weapons, since other combat isn\'t going to be real-time.

Come to think of it though that would be kinda cool if an MMO game used a Zelda style combat system... though not sure how well it could be applied to multiple people, and youl\'d need a good server to handle that much data, and good connections too, and it\'s totally irrelevant to Planeshift... so yeah.

[edit]
Hmmm well actually maybe this could work, the combat will be automated, so you don\'t actually control when you fire, but you can try and keep your aim on the enemy, and even aim for specificly weak areas (especially if we have area based damage in the combat system).  In addition to having a slight margin of error on your fire accuracy, your aim could also shake more the less skilled you were, so hitting from farther away is more difficult (and perhaps also the more wounded you were).  And of course aiming is somewhat difficult since you don\'t get a crosshair or anything and have to figure out where to aim based on the range of your weapon and your skill.  Yeah that might actually work, although I\'m not sure how hard it would be to do, since basically you still have to translate this into menu-based combat commands codewise, except now your accuracy stat is affected by where you are actually aiming.

[lostprophet]

Well it wouldn\'t just fire for you every few seconds, but you wouldn\'t be able to fire more than once per turn. I guess you\'d just left+right click at the same time or something.

[Shiyar]

Alternately, you could have some sort of circular slider for aiming.  You\'d have a red dot in the center (your target) and a blue dot representing your aim that would move around the target within a fixed radius; if you were highly skilled, your aiming dot would stay much closer to the target and move at a steadier rate.  

The higher your skill, the less distance the dot would have in which to move around.  The higher your health percent, the more steadily it would move (so if you\'re almost dead, it\'s speed would change so unpredictably that you\'d need a lot of luck to hit something).

So you click to attack, then click when you think the dot is close enough to the center for a hit.  It would still be turn based, but it would really take skill into consideration.

Think that\'s a good compromise between the two?

[lostprophet]

I like that method Shiyar, nice one.

[Fish]

I believe do to game constraints a real-time battle system is not practical. What a constraint is as a parameter that one cannot do anything about so it must be worked around.  For instance to swim across the English Channel one must be able to stay afloat.  That is because being able to breathe is a constraint and breathable air is above the water.

Several of the things here are just a guess so I am hoping that one of the programming developers gives us a post to tell us what?s really going on.

Several of the constraints of this game are not being able to cheat easily and the speed of the Internet.  In a game that has real-time fighting action many of the calculations are done in the engine itself.  This makes it reasonably easy to cheat but it does mean a very fast response.  It also means more data has to be set across the network in order to specify certain actions.  The update rate has to be fairly quick.  Therefore having intricate real-time actions will substantially increase the amount of net traffic required which, in the case of having over 1000 people in the game, is a bad thing.  

Furthermore actions are sent as a request to the server.  The server then calculates the result then updates your graphics engine which displays the result.  This helps eliminate cheating a lot.  This would make real-time battle calculations a difficult problem.  It might be one of the reasons why ever quest doesn?t do it.  Essentially you just shoot at your target and the server determines the result.  Attacking is done pretty much the same way you selected target, get close, point yourself at it, than the game server tells your computer to make slashing motions and play music.  Any more than that would hurt the game scalability.

There might be some cool workarounds on this and it would be interesting to know some of them.  For instance in ever quest, once again, monks can kick. But it?s not a fast action maneuver that you would expect from a single player game.  When you hit the kick buttons eventually the monk gets around to doing it.

At any rate this is more or less an opinion not a fact.

[Kuiper7986]

If a real-time system is used what about the 56k\'ers? FPS games are usually very laggy for the 56k people. about six-sevenths of the people in the world have dial-up. So if you take that in consideration? Can it be fair if someone lived in North Dakota or Africa and wanted to play Planeshift? No, it\'s not their fault. So we should try to make the game compatible for everyone. The game is meant for a large audience which means a lot of people. By making this game more and more of a FPS will draw the 56k people away will which in term mean you\'ll be drawing most of the main audience away. I say PS keep the original way of using a bow and arrow or whatever their plan was. Just don\'t make it a FPS type. That\'s why there are stats like accuracy. This will help you hit much easier.

[Taurandur]

Isn\'t it possible to use the two ways?

So people could choose to use the way wich is best for them, the automatic one or the manual one.

[elscouta]

If the automatic way does always head shot, everybody will use it. But if it is weaker, some peoples will have an advantage on the others.

I hope that in a few years, everybody has ADSL...

[Drilixer]

as mentioned - using such a method would open up the way for 3rd party programs/modifications for numerous First Person Shooter cheats such as auto headshots and firing through walls and other obstacles...  not to mention the added time for the 2D artists, programmers, and rules department.

And dont forget the thread on this very forum which discusses \"Fallout 3\" on the XBOX.  You people hate the idea of going from Fallout\'s turn based system to this Diabloesque real time stuff...  New players would probably feal the same way (unless we grab the hordes of anti-roleplayers from FPSs and Diablo)!

[Wedge]

This isn\'t a realtime environment system, I already said that wouldn\'t work, it would have to translate to regular stat based code.  However keep in mind the game is going to use automated realtime combat, as far as I can tell.  It would be possible to have something like Shiyar said, a timed button press system for when your attack turn comes up.  And now that I think about it would work for all weapons and magic too, although in varied setups for what you have to hit and the timing variations.  I don\'t think the game is out yet, but look for a demo of Gladius to see one way this has been implemented, in a TBS of all games!  Also instead of basing the aimer difficutly strictly on the player skill, it is relative to the difference of skill between the player and target in the related stats.  This way the stronger a opponent you are fighting is against your attack, the more difficult it is to hit well, as would be common logic.  

Connection speed isn\'t really an issue, the timed attack section can be handled client side and the result sent to the server.  Variations of this system have been used in a number of RPGs, and it simply helps alleviate a bit\' of the monotony of combat, adds some variety, and keeps you more attentive.  It would be possible to use a cheat program to get a perfect hit everytime, but the same people who do that are pry just gonna go out and try to use a bot as well.

[Drilixer]

I dont see how your aim is effected at all by the other player\'s stats.  If your aim is true it is true no matter what you are firing at.  Are you proposing that someone\'s aim (crosshair in this case) start flying madly around the screen if you walk up to a creature that is uber powerful Vs. you?  I dont see the advantage of using a system like you are proposing (even minus the frantic targeting reticle) besides being a novelty factor.

[Monketh]

What you were saying about the monk has given me idea (one that no doubt someone else has come up with before).  What if you \"que\" up your moves into a list, they would be performed when the sever/client could do them.  Therefore reducing lag.