The next great leap for empire space games would be a Nexus strategy game. The feel, look, and interface was exceptional. Not only did the ships have turrets, each turret could be assigned to different targets.

Maybe I'm behind the times, but the War Craft/laser tag look displeases me considering what was done before. Simulation adds depth and maturity to a game. Ships ought maneuver more like beached whales--no gliding into formation. Ships should accelerate slowly, but have higher top speeds. But all this isn't Stardock's style, so I'll take whatever I can get.

In every battle at least once. Well, when playing against the AI of course.

Which is why you could switch it off in the options menu.

High cpu usage is really no argument against it.

They could use tracking animation for only the biggest turrets, like those monster turrets on some of the capital ships.

then implement the switch to turn it off in the game lobby then for multi games! so if everyone has a high end pc then they can turn it on, if not then off, have a seperate option for skirmish.

i think it really deserves to be in there, cmon homeworld had it! to match up its gotta be in there!

Kenetor

well its still nice to watch, if it were all about performance we would be watching triangles flying around shooting dots!

as for say about what pc you have dont always work, you could have an ingame performance test where you get a number (they do this in supcom) which gives a good base to decide if you comp can run with moving turrets or not

esthetics is all down to personal preferance, and i would like to have a choice

Kenetor

no i mean that each person runs the performance test after they install and the result is then logged can can be brought up in the lobby either next to there name or via a hotkey



well supcom seems to do it fine and also has walking animations to do with hundreds of units, although supcom is far from perfect.

i just dont think it will take much to point a turret in the direction its firing, it has to work out the direction for the projectile so why not pass the info on to the turret?

Kenetor

and supcom runs on what type of computers now?

Ironclad cannot run the risk of limiting themselves to the rich elite.
so they include a flawless, unhackable self-tester into sins that displays your game capacity. I doubt thats what they want to do.

it can take a lot, the great wall of china is built not upon a few big stones, but many smaller ones.

the point being: games get bogged down because they do a few really tiny things that consume video and processing power, in a game with so many units thats dangerous.

So turning off planet elevators in the options menu creates sync issues with multiplayer games?

No it doesn't of course. Since both, the moving turrets and the space elevators are graphic fluff with no consequence on gameplay, it wouldn't be a problem for multiplayer at all.

Edit: To elaborate a bit more.

I dunno about the inner working of the sins engine, but I imagine that it works something like this:

Each ships weapons check if an enemy is inside its range. If the enemy is it checks if it inside its firing arc (since Sins only has 4 firing arc possibilities (front, back, left and right) with full 180° this check is quite simple). If the enemy is in, the weapons shoot and damage is applied. Now the weapon waits the WeaponCoolDown time and shoots again at the same target if the target is still in range and not already destroyed.

Now to add turret moving, it would just need another action before/after damage is applied, the turret would move to align in the direction the weapon has shot. It continues to track the enemy until the enemy is out of weapon range or angle (which would be the same check the weapon already does to see if it can hit an enemy).

Of course, with this system the turret tracking would lag a bit behind the first shot of the weapon. But it's a very easy and also fast system (it doesn't need that much more calculations).

Now this sort of action doesn't need to be send to other clients. It can be easily calculated clientside and is of no interest to other clients. I imagine damage and when shot will be shared info between clients, but why would you want to share turret tracking info?

Now, someone tells me why this isn't possible?

besides you cant even see the small turrets, im talking about the big one at least all cap ships should have moving turrets,

as for supcom i think i have a pretty average computer and it runs fine, amd X2 4200 dual core processor (core 2 duos are better and cheap these days too) 1 gig of ram and a X800 graphic card which i got when it came out, i hate that my machine USED to be top end now its average.

so its not the rich elite but everyone that can play it, come feb there will will be further engine improvements with the add on.
so if they didn't include it now id definatly wanna see it in a patch st some point when the optimise the engine more.

Kenetor

Planet elevators are a particle effect, not a model.