I also thought it was supposed to run on top of the line systems, and incorporate some of the latest graphical effects. And wouldn't it be possible to remove the turret effect the farther the ship is away from the screen? Even though the game still calculates the number of ships in a current match, that doesn't mean it's going to reach a crawl because turrets are animated.

Then they can turn down the graphical settings, or simply turn such animations off (it can be done.)

Well, they might be in the game actually, particularly since the developers have been hiding things about the latest graphical improvements. Who knows....

A graphical option is the best solution to this problem.

Thats what always bugs me people will shout "oooh but it's such a huge performance hit my PC won't be able to cope"

Add an option for the people who do have ninja PC's.

-edit- uhhhh, wrong thrad. -edit

People also seem to point out how Homeworld has tracking turrets, and indeed it has. However in Homeworld you control smaller fleets and spend most of your time zoomed quite close in, unlike SoaSE were you would usually be zoomed out and controlling a lot more ships. Even Homeworld 2 can't cope fully with itself. Get enough ships into a battle and the engine coughs and splutters and goes into emergency really low res textures mode.

I don't recall my version of HW 2 coughing or sputtering when I had numerous ships in combat. Some people's PC's can actually cope with such detail, hence the request that it be turned into an option. And if the game did lag, I can be certain that turret animations wouldn't have been the cause. HW also took place at a zoomed distance predominately, hence the option to zoom out. Yarlen states the only reason turret movement isn't in the game is because it would've taken too much time to implement, and not necessarily a big deal (it isn't).



Seriously, I'm not sure where everyone is getting this concept that animated turret's will drag down game performance, particularly when we were stating such things could be optional. No one's bee forced to play at the highest graphical settings.

And we didn't realize they weren't going to implement it until Yarlen stated it, it's not like we were ranting and raving over spilled milk. I also stated, on several occasions (I couldn't have been the only one) that it actually wasn't the pertinent. We were just refuting the claim that rotating turrets would result in unplayable game play (lag), particularly when a 9 year old game could do it with little issue. That's all....

Yeah, but there were noticeable improvements after cutting down the number of weapons and the shields. And the quality of the models nor the textures were sacrificed.

Anyway, I was just talking about the HW2 engine there, adding more of the same to what Busby22 said.

Would I like to have rotating turrets? My answer: Sure, why not. But they ain't doing it, so we're stuck with the way it is now (which is perfectly fine with me).

I'm not a programmer, but I do belive that Ron has a point. Animations would have to be synchronized with whatever process there is for targeting/firing etc.

Performance impact? I dpn't have a clue. Maybe somebody will make a mod with ships that have rotating cannons, for the pleasure of us all.

Not sure what you mean, since weapons still have to target and fire, whether or not the turret is animated. Nor am I sure why it is a detriment to graphical prowess, even though the game is still calculating targeting, when the turret isn't animated, particularly when the turret is no longer animated, and the beam/laser is firing in a similar manner as it is now. What I'm getting is that the game would still be afflicted, even with graphics settings having been toned down. But all of this is a moot point.

Ron its like talking to a wall.

They will never accept the fact that something so major and completely important to their own existance is absent from a game they will never understand.

He's right.

Look, right now a ship in game consists of an unique ID number, a mesh, 3 textures(color, normal and data), a position, a vector and speed.

Add in just one turret, and you have an additional ID number, mesh, 3 more textures, a position, a vector, and another speed.

Now lets make it a Kol with about 15 weapons. You make that one ship take almost 16 times the processing power to keep track of.

As it is in Beta 4, I've seen my 3ghz Dual core start to choke up when I had myself and 3 AIs all at max fleet cap on a very large map. It helps that 3 of us had almost all our junk in the same system at the same time, in some kind of battle to the death. (I lost, they teamed up on me ) It wasn't my GPU, I checked my performance logs and it was definitely the CPU with both pegged at 100% for about 5 minutes.