3D Physics

[Karl913]

Ok, had an idea that l understand is a -very very- long way off l'm guessing. What happens if we get rid of the 2D plane we have currently? l'm thinking something along the lines of Starwars style physics where gravity has still a little bit of effect. There would be a new layout on ships (Thinking of Q and A to up up/down, using the same speed physics so you'd have to turn it off, W and S as they are, Z and X as Left/Right for broads and wraith, and different keys for things, such as R for corvette.) and would allow a new depth to combat, and allow for some interesting upgrades, such as 'Deep space travel' which would make your battleship turn downwards and then use a hyperjump, costing about 35k energy to go down and another 35k to go back up. This ability would make your BC completely invisible and invulnerable, and nothing could enter it or exit it. Also thinking about the camera: It would go down and tilt ever so slightly down when moving your ship down.
As l said, this is likely a looonnnnggggg way off so l'm not going to try to push it into your major priority list.

[Sheogorath]

Ehm... *Cough* How can I say this.

Oh well.

1) It's going to make a complicated game EVEN MORE COMPLICATED.

2) It's going to add a few thousand layers of complex stuff for the poor dude which has to work on the game.

3) It's not going to add anything new.

4) I don't like it.

[Karl913]

Notice l said it's a long ways off. It could definitely add to the complexness of the game. It could definitely use some refining from community feedback.

[Red-Rocket]

it will also make the game even more hard hitting on your hardware...much more, the game is already quite laggy for alot of players and is a turn-off for some new-players

[Karl913]

Didn't really think about lag all that much... Alright.

[Siretu]

I'm not sure if this is a good idea. I know you'e saying it's a long way off but I'm not sure you're understanding the problem here.

The game in its current state isn't made for 3d. The entire top-down view of the game doesn't really work well with having 3d space. Even if ignore all the technical aspects and the effect it'll have on the performance, it's still not viable for this game. I'd basically have to redo the entire game design from scratch(ignore the programming parts of it, I'm just talking about the design).

For 3d to work, I believe another camera view would be needed. The current top-down view just doesn't cut it. The problem is that I'm not going to add a first person view. Cruiser Command was never meant to be played that way and the SC2 engine just doesn't handle it well. As Red-Rocket said, with the current state of the game, it's already quite laggy. Even SCU's third person view is kind of bad and clumsy and it was created by some AMAZING coders.

So basically, I'm okay with 3d if: I was remaking Cruiser Command as a standalone game and I wanted to make it an entirely different game from the current Cruiser Command. It wouldn't really be Cruiser Command anymore.

The other solution is if I just add something simple. I could add a couple of different height layers, have an ability that changes between them and have the ships change height when they use them and then do collision detection based on the same layer, but WHY?

The problem here is that I'm not seeing what it adds to the game. As I said earlier, it's hard to represent with the current camera view, it'd be hard to see which layer someone else is on, but even if you disregard that fact, I still don't see the point of it. I personally dont think it would make the game more fun but I'm sure it would make it harder for new players. Therefore, the biggest problem (even if you ignore everything I mentioned earlier) is that I don't know what it would bring to the game.

[Karl913]

Understood.