Forums » Suggestions

Theme Sectors and Creativity Demons.

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Nov 30, 2003 Phaserlight link
Sheean: I agree planets would be waaay cool, but the devs have said time and time again that they don't want to go in that direction. It's just too much work in a full 3D graphical environment. But hey, we can dream, right?

I think #25 would be awesome and would work since the "atmosphere" could just be drawn into the skybox artwork, and wouldn't be a real object. Maybe the station could be a gas harvesting refinery or something.

#24 and #26: if you can't get out, then how do you get in? o.0
Dec 01, 2003 Sheean link
With 24 and 26 the wormholes are inside the station. So you can`t really get out of the station into the space around it. But you can leave trough the wormhole.
Nov 28, 2003 HumpyThePenguin link
don't you mean they don't cast light rogue? :P
Nov 29, 2003 Sheean link
22) A planet where you can actually land on (the station is on the ground), with trees, vegetation, lakes, cities and that kind of eyecandy... don't know if that would be possible without some major changes tough...
23) A sector with comets flying all over the place
24) Inside a huge space station, and you can`t get out. (a bit like phaserlight's, but I don`t know if in his ideas you could actually get out of the station)
25) A station floating in the atmosphere of a planet like Venus, (or a gas planet like Jupiter) with wind, slower speeds, limited visibility and gravity
26) Like 24, but really, really small
27) On a "new" planet with lot's of lava, lightning, winds, mountains falling appart
28) A huge roid (like couple of KMs) where you can fly trough and also some parts of the roids collapse if you shoot at it
Nov 21, 2003 Skyfox link
Probably the main theme ideas that i want deal with the huge wreakage of anchient alian battles. Simply huge motherships of a race that ceased to exist long before this time, with huge holes blasted into the side, and billions of passages and projections sticking out everywhere allowing for awsome STAR FOX style dogfights.
Nov 19, 2003 Phaserlight link
*bump*

No more physics arguments.... time for more sector brainstorms!
Nov 19, 2003 roguelazer link
18) A sector with a giant shipyard in it, truly huge with crossbars the size of a frigate. Figure maybe 5km from end to end. Textured in randomly-placed "plating" texture, with a giant (think big enough for two frigates) dock and dozens of small docks. See Mission 1 in HW2 for a big shipyard done well.

19) A "boot camp" sector with the same armour/damage setup as sector 404, but with more mazes, destructible target drones, hostile frig cannons and such to train n00bs in.

20) A sector with dozens of unmarked wormholes. I mean, a wormhole every 100m, but they all say "Press enter to activate warphole", no qualifying sector. Some lead to the same sector, some to random sectors, etc.

21) A sector with tons of battle debris. Every ship, using their std textures but "dimmed" to appear old and damaged. With some junkyard dogs to boot.





NOT SECTOR RELATED: Dynamic lighting. As in, weapons cast light. The lights on current stations don't cast light (they appear too, but fly your ship in front of one sometime), the sun casts light, all that.
Aug 04, 2003 Sage link
When I saw the screenshots of sector 0 I decided how cool it would be to have theme sectors. Very rare and often very hard to find, but they would add [edit: Not "ass" Mr. Smartass Mod.] character to the universe.

1. Like one sector would have raging ion storms that wreak havok on weaponry and battery systems making them arbitrarily drain and recharge superfast unpredictably.

2. Or another sector with roids engulfed in flame [edit: better?]. Random explosions going off everywhere, and the eye of Sauron (like in the movie, not in 0) staring down at you. All around a hellish, nighmarish place.

3. A sector with no stable wormholes, rather, wormholes would appear randomly all around the place and you would have to warp just in time to get away. (Not even sure if this is possible with the engine.)

4. Gravity wells. (Again, not sure if this is possible.)

5. An ancient battle site with fleets of wrecked capital ships (possibly alien) and floating debris and live mines (so you better watch out). This sector would have to be really well hidden though. The kind of place you could only find by accident (Possibly only through luck by finding the right random wormhole in 3.)

And by well hidden I don't mean having super-hard bots guarding the place like we have now. I mean hidden. Hard to find even without elite NPC's hounding you. Like how

Well just some creativity demons I had.
Aug 04, 2003 Forum Moderator link
My, what an excellent post.
Aug 04, 2003 Arolte link
EDIT: Damn, he edited his post. I'll get you next time, moderator!! You're bound to slip up again sooner or later. I'll be there...
Aug 04, 2003 Sage link
Fixed, now there is no theme. So ha!
Aug 04, 2003 Celebrim link
Some things I'd like to see:

1) A pitch black sector (no star) where you had to rely on radar to fly. Ideally you'd have to have an upgraded HUD (via a purchased gizmo) which would show objects in wireframe if they where on radar but it was too dark to see them.

2) A sector filled with clouds (of dust, hydrogen, or something) the way most sectors are filled with roids.

3) A sector orbiting a variable star, which would occasionally be engulfed by a solar flare.

4) Sector(s) with a black holes, nebula, binary stars of various types, pulsars, or other really cool cosmic phenom displayed on the skybox.

5)

I like your idea for a sector filled with derilicts and debris (perhaps with gigantic shards of rubble as from the remains of a dyson sphere displayed on the skybox), and of course the sector with ion storms is obvious but nonetheless cool.

I believe less than perfectly stable wormholes have been mentioned before.

Gravity wells are tough, because the object has to be reasonably big before they are interesting, and even a reasonably big object - say 30 km in diameter - is pushing it in terms of the engine as I understand (texture issues?) and yet still realisticly has no really noticable gravity. Still, perhaps we could ignore physics to give a 3 km object or something a tiny gravity well (say 1 m/s drift near it).
Aug 05, 2003 Phaserlight link
Well I might as well add my 2c to this list ;D

1) A sector with black obsidian-glass asteroids that you could only see when the sun reflected off of them.

2) A sector with translucent ice roids; you can partially see through them. There would be a frozen station in one of the larger ice roids, you could see it but to get to it you would have to find your way through a large translucent ice maze.

3) A sector with a few fiery psychedelic purple/orange radioactive roids that would slowly sap your armor if you got too close. (Similar to PJ's #2)

4) A "space city" sector that was just one huge station with dozens of lanes, tunnels, alleyways cutting through it and plenty of neon lights. (this one is actually going to happen! ;)

5) A sector in which a constant battle between two warring alien factions was taking place.

6) A sector near a quasar. The interference would cause radar to give false readings and cause homers to go haywire.

I also love PJ's and Celebrim's ideas. My favorites are PJ's #5 (kinda reminds me of that quote from Blade Runner) and Celebrim's #4 (black hole!)

One beef with Celebrim's idea #1: I love the concept, but even if there was no nearby sun, wouldn't the light from distant stars give enough light to see? Maybe the whole sector could be engulfed by a very large, dense dust cloud, like in the middle of an accreting planet.
Aug 05, 2003 ctishman link
Ooh ooh, what about a sector where pirates in valks with rockets jump you as soon as you warp in?

;)
Aug 05, 2003 Arolte link
LOL!! Already been implemented, ctishman.
Aug 05, 2003 Celebrim link
"...but even if there was no nearby sun, wouldn't the light from distant stars give enough light to see?"

If you think that, I'm guessing here that we are dealing with (pardon me) 'city slicker' that doesn't know what real darkness looks like.

Have you ever been out in the country on a moonless night? For that matter, how often are you out at night away from street lights/house lights?

Actually, I think most of the sectors are over lit. Because of the lack of an atomosphere, shadows in space are perfectly delimited and nearly absolute. The dark side of an asteroid should be nearly pitch black not just merely dark. The problem of course is again versimulitude. In this case, reality itself will not 'look right' to the average observer because are expectations about shading and coloring are based off an environment where light is diffused in an atmosphere and always being reflected off nearby surfaces.
Aug 05, 2003 Phaserlight link
Heh heh... touche, Celebrim.

Seriously though, I have done a fair share of cross-country backpacking, and I know what it's like to be caught on a mountainside in a rainstorm at night with no batteries for your flashlight (long story). Yeah, it's dark when there's no moon (the stars actually shine a lot brighter), but it's a lot darker when there's no moon and the sky is covered with clouds.

In space since there isn't any atmosphere I would expect it to be just as easy to see by the light from distant stars unless it was blocked out by some form of cosmic dust. I really didn't mean to get into a discussion about optics in space though, as far as gameplay is concerned, I really like your idea of a "blind" sector. I just think it would be wierd to have hundreds of stars in the skybox, and yet be unable to see a ship that was 10m away.

Physically speaking, yes, sectors may be overlit and not optically accurate.... but they look pretty darn cool as they are. Just pretend it's the ship's visual enhancers at work.
Aug 06, 2003 Celebrim link
I'm a caver, so dark for me is dark. I imagine a mountainside in a rainstorm at night with no batteries is nearly that dark.

My experience is that without a moon, the sky is fairly bright, but the ground is surprisingly not so. You look up and see all this light, but without a light of your own, everthing is just black shapes against the skyline and things fade into blackness more than a few meters away. It doesn't have to be as pitch as a cave, but it should be so pitch black that you can only tell where the roids are because they are blocking out the stars.
Aug 06, 2003 toshiro link
phaserlight, just a *little* optics, and i'll shut up.
light is emitted by stars in a radial pattern. light travels in a straight line (ideally) and thus, the further you are away from a light-emitting star, the less light particles (rays) will hit per surface unit. the stars we see in the sky are really, really far away, so we get barely enough light to see just them. the light isn't strong enough to be reflected by the earth's surface, so we can't see it (the surface).

and in the core shadow of a planete or planetoid it's really awfully dark.
Apr 12, 2004 Magus link
*bump*