If that's true then why can I hear sounds around stations, why can I hear the sound of my shots physically hitting something and why is that damaged ship that just flew by on fire? If we're in space, we're in a vacuum so sound has nothing to travel through and if a ship can even show smoke steadily coming out then the little thing would be loosing oxygen so fast the pilot would never make it to the station alive. Then while I'm at it why is it we're flying space capable ships from the year 4400+ that have a max regular speed around that of my car (200 km/h = ~55 m/s; *zoom*, "What just past us?" "I think it was a formula one race car from the year 2005.")? Then if the ships are the size they say they are in the game just how many dozens of people fit in a station? Is it one, two or maybe three if they're all dwarves (hiya Dopey, how's Sneezy doing?)? Change the sizes and speeds listed already (easy enough to do, multiple things by at least ten and it'll make more sense), don't know why those sounds were added but whatever, the scale of things though are just wrong.

Arg another one of these threads.

Okay it is a game. Imagine how boring it would be if there were no sounds. If you dislike soudn that much turn it off. The way I think about it is that the soudns were implemented into ships to prevent insanity amongst the pilots. The stations are large enough.
Ships are large due to the propulsions sytems and cargo space.
Km/h? the measurements were meters per second and Newtons. These ships are travelign a lot faster than that.
All ships are built with a safety system to prevent oxygen leakage. The smoke is probably particle emission from the gravity engine itself.
Actually it isn't as easy as you think to change things. To change the speeds means altering the math formula to compensate for the numerical changes unless thy decide to only change the measurement part which I do not think is connected to the actual formula. The sizes... LOL modifications can have some reprecussions and may need some tweaking sicne we have no idea what may be connected to these sizes (perhaps ship docking would be affected and then the poly count goes up and retecturing is needed for all of the stations.

So pelase rememebr thsi is a game and if you think about it. These ships were built in space for space use only. This means that anythign besides a box is excessive when building (that would be real fun right?.

Also lets not that if you were on the dark side of a planet or anything really it would be pitch black and then you wouldn't be able to see. Light speed would not be possible either if this was real.

A realistic version of a space combat game would be more like a submarine simulator.

Also here is another thing to look at. Notice the wind shields, errr.... Veiw ports, made out of visimetal.

Daikaze, if you did the math, you'd realize that 55m/sec = 198 km/hr... pretty slow for space, but fine for the scale of the game.

I like your thinking on the sounds being implemented for the pilots... I know I'd go insane if all I had to listen to was subspace radio Top 40!

As far as I'm concerned, yeah, it's not even close to being realistic, but hey, the game dynamics work, and it's fun, and that's what matters.

If you wanted realistic space, you'd have no sound, very little light (space is VERY VERY BLACK), and no real control of the ship... trust me, you'd want the computer doing everything for you, a human can't grasp the idea of the calculations required to meet up with a ship even just a parsec away travelling at odd vectors at high relative speed.

Sounds like you're looking for a sim, not a game.

Daikaze and tkjode covered a lot of good points, but I personally still think that some of the viewports on some of our ships are still wayyyy to big in relation to the stations. A single wraith is like three floors of a station if your counting rows of viewports on the station. So a one man wraiths cockpit has to be three times the size of my appartment. For one person? and what about the cargo hold, should be huge. My point is that individually the models are fine, though some still look a bit to atmospheric rather then space, but that when you compair them all to each other, stations, ships, transport ships, etc. they are all is different scales and look odd.

Sound, speed, etc. I can bend my beliefs for the sake of gameplay.

I'm gonna assume, for all of your sakes, that the main point of this thread is the date.

Ok so sound in space technically isn't supposed to exist, because space is a vacuum.

Now I am not a physics expert, but if what we hear as sound is the vibration of air molecules exited by a shock wave or something, and in space there is no air to create a noise. Then obviously if you had a microphone outside a space ship you wouldn't hear anything,

but if a ship collided or exploded out side your space ship, that shock wave would still travel though space, and once it reached the pressurized cabin of your space ship wouldn't it resonate on the hull of the ship and then excite the molecules in the air, and actually create an audible sound inside your ship?

Maybe one of you guys knows.

D:

Seriously. D:

yes it would shock, and you probably would hear the same sort of noises when your own weapons are fired.

Of course you do hear the beams in space! Everybody knows that since the first episode of San Ku Kai. There is only one thing that you cannot hear there.

You wouldn't hear or feel an explosion unless it was close enough to physically touch your ship with debris or expanding gases. There would be no "shockwave" because there would be no medium through which a wave would propagate...but that's probably what you meant anyway.

As for the sound, I agree with what others said above about this being a game but I'll add another explanation: What if the sounds we hear come from our own ship's sensors which convert changes in the electromagnetic spectrum into auditory signals for us. Hot plasma flying by would certainly give off some sort of EM radiation that could be picked up and converted to an audible signal. The same goes for active fusion reactors zipping by. Just take your cordless phone into the kitchen and use it while you run the microwave and you'll see what I mean.

I don't disagree about the speed vs. scale issue, but I think we could just change "m" to "u" for some generic unspecified unit of measure and be done with it.

I think someone meant m/s as the units for ship velocity. as in, 200 m/s = 720 km/h. besides, try explaining how you get a different thrust when boosting and speed limits.

call it "overboost," the futuristic equivalent of jet fighter's afterburner. When afterburning, the top speeds and max thrust of the engines are greatly increased at the expense of copious amounts of fuel.

Yeah, boosting is throwing the ship's gravimetric drive into "overdrive." The reason you slow down so drastically is because using the drive creates an intertial "deficit" which is corrected by the mass distribution of the universe.....

Besides.... IT'S A GAME....

real interstellar flight wouldn't be a very exciting game.

real interstellar warfare would very quick, and very disturbing.

You'd be able to see your enemy comming from thousands of miles away, and with a small projectile accelerated at a high speed, you could destroy your opponent from ridiculous lengths. (and you thought getting hit by a 1000m rail shot was frustrating..)

Interplanetary warfare would be simple.. Stick a few really powerfull rocket boosters on a large asteroid, and point it toward your adversary's home planet. The defending planet would have a few options:

1) get hit by a 40mile wide rock and suffer complete extermination of life on the planet.
2) launch nukes at the rock to break it into pieces, only to watch the pieces burn up in your atmosphere, setting your sky on fire.
3) Come up with enough nukes to vaporize the rock entirely
4) Manage to see the rock before it's too late to put your own boosters on it and stop it.
5) GTFO....

of course this is all assuming your enemy only hurled ONE very large rock at you... why not fire 20? or more?

Games are fun because they're not real..

*sigh

Space games need not be silent and we already hear a beeping noise from your ship computer saying you hit your target so adding the pounding noise of a sound out in space should you be close enough to hear it is a pointlessly added noise and is only one extra thing for the game to monitor (are you close enough to hear it, yes or no, if yes how far are you and so how loud should it be), I can live with that though. Now as anyone with the misfortune of at one time having an apartment or house near a large neon sign or factory would tell you, hearing the sound of a neon sign buzzing away or steady pounding from a factory is not a good thing. Then as for the station signs they look like they'd be holograms which likely wouldn't make a sound in the first place, even if very large. There are other sounds that can be used that make sense and add sound to a space game with out being a sound out in space which reaches your ship for some reason. When firing a weapon some sort of noise fits as it's on your ship, which you are inside, sounds of getting hit or of your engine also make sense for the same reason, all are used and require no measurement by the game since they are at a fixed distance. There can be noises given by the computer to alert you that you hit your target (which are already being used as previously noted), are getting close to ramming into something, are being targeted, an enemy and/or missile is closing in, that you have reached jump distance, that you have not set a jump location. your jump engine reving up (can't remember a sound there but could be wrong), an alert to a new chat or game message, something alerting you to mission changes, mission bonuses or that your level has increased and so forth. I already conceived of the whole ships computer adding things like a shot passing by you or the satisfying sound of hearing an opponents ship go boom when you destroy it and improving visuals as sensory feedback to the pilot but Im talking about sounds that serve no real purpose and can even be undesirable. If you're that close to a station or bright sign I think you can see it quite well and as noted the game already tells you if you hit something (even if it's way way over there and you can't tell visually) then the pounding and buzzing noises of a station are not really soothing so I tend to cringe when I hear them.

In response to the "imagine how boring it would be if there were not sounds" quote given by Daikaze, the audio aspect of the game is already rather weak and quite honestly, we're really not that far from zero sound as it is. There are some sounds to help show you are in combat and ship sounds but there certainly could be more alert sounds, indicator sounds, there is no one talking in the game while other games can't shut up sometimes and so forth. There are also very few music tracks, far as I can tell there are about four, two station ones, a combat one (which would get rather annoying since you do that most of the time you play but I'm sure we've all learnt to ignore it by now) and then I think one other at the login, if you go to empty space, it is quiet and I can't remember off hand, if there's any music when you're in the station. If there are other tracks I'd like to know how to hear them. Face it, the audio experience of the game is at a bear minimum.

The smoke from damaged ships is another why did they bother and what the heck? kind of thing. Adding the smoke animation was added work for the programers and game to render but it just serves to remind you, this is a game and not real. Just adding blackened areas to having the game render the damaged areas in different ways based on the degree and location of the damage would be less work for the game and not too hard for the devs to manage plus would look believable and still be kinda cool.

The scale matter is something else, if they boosted the listed size of the ship by at least ten times the rest (stations, asteroids, bots, etc...) falls into place nicely. The speed and distance is also rather small as three kilometres isn't that much (Earth's atmosphere goes up to about 1000 Km), if that's all one needs to go out to avoid some problem when engaging an in sector jump for your ship it doesn't make it sound like much. If all those listed sizes were boosted by about ten to twenty times everything becomes more believable. Yes this is a game and no I'm not looking for a sim but to spend $x a month to play something you want to be able to immerse yourself in it. Take the fantasy medieval games as a very good for instance. There is no magic, magical beasts, elves, magical items and so forth do not exist either but yet in a good one they make what you see all fit in place and believable on certain level and in a way you feel pulled into their world, you are a magic wielding elf battling a dragon and going on other quests. With this game though I keep looking at these numbers, the stations, the burning ships and hearing these noises that are all constantly reminding me, this is a game, it is not real. I want to feel like it's real, even if it isn't, I want to feel like here I am in this ship, fighting these things, seeing this station, living this game, the problem is that I'm not.

.

.

I see the kind of responses you guys are making a lot when going through posts in these forums. All these people jumping in to defend odd things or to say oh I'm sure the devs know exactly what they are doing so STFU. Video game development of today is largely done by good sized teams with hundreds of thousands to multimillion dollar budgets even when it's only for one target release version and it still spans a few years of development. But this is all done by four guys, doing what I understand their first game and first project as a business with a small budget releasing a game and updating it for three release platforms at once. I think it's entirely possible they have bitten off far more than they can chew and as much as I'd like this to be a brilliant game with thousands of users at any given time the fact of the matter is that it isn't. Instead here it is now almost half a year after its release and it still feels like a beta version with minimal to no real content, there's only about 20-70 players playing at any given time these days (compare to the thousands playing other MMORPGs all the time [ http://www.eve-i.com/ shows EVE Online player count stats which is typically in the 5-10 thousand ballpark]) and that number seems to be dropping based on the 30 day chart at http://mage.net.tc/vapg/ which lists Vendetta player count stats. I've heard of peaks of around 120 players in the past but now the top number is at about half that most days, things don't look good. My guess is that the game was released early as they were running low on capital again (the project almost ended in late 2003 due to lack of funds) so hoped to release what they had then try to use the subscription revenue to pay for the server upkeep and continued development or that completion was taking longer than Strategy First expected and wanted (they came in around late 2003 which helped bail them out) so pushed them to release before it was really complete or a combination of the two. Whatever the case with player counts that low, getting lower and who knows how many of those just trial users as well as how their team is still just four guys one is forced to wonder how well things are going.

hehe how impressive number of players...

i think i 'll swift to EVE then ?!?

But ho wait... i have a MAC ! and what is EVE Online solution for MAC users?

pleeeeeaaase answer...

Huh? didn't get it? whatchu say?

ho ok no'hing...

just tell your eve's friends that MAC users are also alive on earth...
danm !
Vendatta Online is not perfect but its far away the Best MMORPG i can play on a MAC !

so please... respect it… and let ppl get some fun how they can...

Think of us as a , uhhh, alpha, beta, gamma? Yeah, we're gamma testers!

First of the number of players is important in a MMORPG, you know what that MM part means, Massively Multiplayer, this is multiplayer but with so few people you can't class it as massively multiplayer, just multiplayer. Then with the game universe being rather large and so few people playing you can easily go long stretches without seeing another player unless you purposely go places you may run into other players like warp areas and waiting but even then there can be no one for a good while. Part of what makes MMORPGs interesting is all the other people you can hook up with and do things with but when there are so few playing you can't do that so this then just becomes and online RPG without the RPG content. Then VO is not EVE, not by a long shot, it's just that EVE is the only successful space based MMORPG (there is an online petition to bring it to the Mac at http://www.petitiononline.com/eve2106/petition.html which the EVE devs are supposedly interested in). My preference is also Mac but have an old Windows PC which I could play EVE with, I was hoping this would be EVE for the Mac with better combat but it's an unfinished game. As for MMORPGs in general for the Mac, if you like the medieval fantasy thing there's WoW as Blizzard released that for both Mac and Windows. The only problem there is that it has so many people playing they've had server issues and there can be annoying queues while waiting to do some things.

Back to VO now though, as another user pointed out recently in another thread VO as it is is more like multiplayer space FPS than a MMORPG since there's really no RPG content at this time and all people often end up doing is PvP since it's not long till that's about all there is to do. It gets to be like Quake or Doom (which also have Mac versions if you like FPSs) and the like where if you die you just respawn someplace and then go out for some more with no real penalty but the loss of the weapons you had but should be able to pick up again without too much trouble. Since the game throws money at you so freely, ships and weapons are rather cheep and does not charge you for repairs plus there is no real death penalty it works that way just fine. But Quake and Doom are not RPGs, they are FPSs, you go out, get some weapons and items then blow the crap out of the other guys on-line, the game could insert some computer controlled players to bump up the head count but still all you do is go out and blow other guys away. There is no immersion in this game as an RPG due to the lack of RPG content, there is no look at all the things I can do with it, all the options to explore, all the ways I can set up my ship and so forth. It's possible that may end up happening as apparently Jumpgate is still around, despite it sporting even less players now than VO, so VO may be able to supply the devs with enough revenue to keep at it for sometime yet but VO has got a long ways to go and from what I've seen of Jumpgate it looks like a much more finished product than this. If blowing the other guy away is your thing though there are other games you should be able to do that in on the Mac with no continual use fee, I just can't see the point of giving them up to $10 a month in the hopes it gets to be more complete down the road and stops being Quake in space.

Edit:
Gamma testers, yep that works. You guys are paying gamma testers. Since they should relaunch the title as an expansion once or if they finally get it all polished up as a cattle call to the game review sites and mags to look at it again thereby creating some free publicity that really is exactly what you're doing, gamma testing the future rerelease of VO.

"I see the kind of responses you guys are making a lot when going through posts in these forums. All these people jumping in to defend odd things or to say oh I'm sure the devs know exactly what they are doing so STFU"

Suprisingly YOUR post didn't get that kind of severe negative response, which shows amazing restraint given the tone of your initial post in this thread. This is overall a good, helpful community.

"Edit:
Gamma testers, yep that works. You guys are paying gamma testers."

That's really not a revelation. Many of us who have been with Vendetta since early on ASKED for this so that things would continue.

"My guess is that the game was released early as they were running low on capital again (the project almost ended in late 2003 due to lack of funds) so hoped to release what they had then try to use the subscription revenue to pay for the server upkeep and continued development"...

That's not a "guess". Those are details that are a matter of record.

..."or that completion was taking longer than Strategy First expected and wanted (they came in around late 2003 which helped bail them out) so pushed them to release before it was really complete or a combination of the two."

That's incorrect. SF has the resources to roll out a boxed product with the usual embellishments and get it to the stores. That's why Guild worked with them. Guild owns Vendetta and makes all the decisions.

"Whatever the case with player counts that low, getting lower and who knows how many of those just trial users as well as how their team is still just four guys one is forced to wonder how well things are going."

Guild knows how many users are just trial users. Things are going well enough to keep the lights on, the doors open, and the coffee hot.

"... they should relaunch the title as an expansion once or if they finally get it all polished up as a cattle call to the game review sites and mags to look at it again thereby creating some free publicity that really is exactly what you're doing, gamma testing the future rerelease of VO."

That's pretty much the plan. The lack of any significant advertising is deliberate. They need enough income to keep development cruising along. If there was a need for more subscriptions they'd direct more attention to getting the word out. Things are fine.