Perhaps in an expansion the animations could be added, but for right now i think this is the right way to go. In most battles i play i am zoomed out to see all of the action, and turret rotations are the last thing i am thinking about. The only time i really zoom in is when i am watching the replays of past games. Even then the lack of turret rotations dont bother me.

you're arguing mostly video card memory over CPU Usage, very different things.

I think they said that multicores are still not common enough on the market to use.

Rotating torrents would need alot of extra cpu power. You have to choose what target you're shooting at, if the torrent can 'reach/aim' at the target correctly, and track it. And I doubt you could have a animation for that moving torrent.

I'd have to disagree, given that (virtually) all CPU's now sold are dual core or better, and true quad cores are coming onto the market.



... Do you mean "turret"? A "torrent" is a part of a peer-to-peer file sharing network to handle the distribution of files.

Thats a shame, as i see a need for it in later games.

Oh well, im comfortable IC will make it smooth

Then add the feature into the game engine to be used later by modder. A year from now computing power won't be a problem, and people will want ot make ships with tracking turrets. But if they don't add this feature now, it won't be posible later.

And the reason why to add it now and even spend time changing the ship models: Because it's realistic.
And if you're woried by performance issues, play a Homeworld1 skirmish without unit caps, build 8 capital ships, 40 destroyers and 400 frigates and see how it will run.
I have played that game on a 166 MMX with 32 MB of ram, a 8 MB graphics card, and it would start to lag only after I built about 200 ships.
And that was 8 years ago, and the game didn't have turrets only on the big ships, it had turrets on every ship class down to the corvettes (the multi-gun corvettes had 6), they even had a fighter with articulated weapons (the defender fighter 3 articulated MGs)

And there are a multitude of mechanisms to go around this problem, for instance, using level of detail (or LOD). Basicly, it replaces the model of the ship with a low poly one when you are zoomed out.

Models in this don't have more details than the ones in Homeworld 1, and if a 166 MMX could run a game with 200 ships (only counting mine), then more tham likely a core 2 duo from today with 1GB of RAM is up to the challenge.
The problem with the games today is that everyone rushes to release them. Nobody takes the time to optimize them properly anymore. That's what happend to Homeworld2, a good game that could have been great, and Imperium Galactica III, rushed and released as Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, another of the "could have been" ones

By the way, Nexus has the option to turn off animated turrets.

It really comes down to quality of the simulation for me. I don't want to see guns firing through their own hull, I don't want to see shots zooming away 90 degrees from the direction the turret is facing. I want to see ships and their respective turrets moving in response to targets' movements, and I want to see shots fired straight outward from the way the turret is facing.

It's not childish to want to see a polished and quality game, and it really takes away from the experience for me to see where corners were cut in building the simulation aspect of a game.

Good thing ships don't do that

The short explanation of it (I've given much longer explanations multiple times in other threads) is that the engine supports missing but the data is setup such that frigates and capitalships never miss each other but there is a miss factor on hitting strikecraft. This is desired to suit the lore and gameplay. Even today, our technology and knowledge of Newtonian Mechanics is such that missing large, slow moving objects with fast moving projectiles is virtually impossible. In the Sins Universe it is even less likely. Feel free to edit the hit percentages in gameplayconstants.constants.