no it just needs people to stop with the whole "this is gonna turn into supcom" , at suggestions that would improve the game

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.

The issue is that the very minor aesthetic improvement isn't worth the performance hit for low end systems.

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

In the end, if they can add animated turrets to the game in a patch with the option of disabling them, and it's not a total nightmare to program, they REALLY should add this to the game.

If you ever played Homeworld (1, 1c, 2) and just watched the turrets turn/track/fire on hostiles then you know what i mean. It's just awesome to watch.

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

An option would be great.

A graphical option is the best solution to this problem.

I can go with that explaination.

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.

We probably won't be animating turrets at all since I'm told it will require us to redo all the meshes or some such on all the models. That's way too much time, effort and money for too little gain.

-edit- uhhhh, wrong thrad. -edit

Guys, animated turrets is not something that can be turned into an option -- even ignoring the mesh redoing issues (./cough, give us the option for custom models pretty please... :D). Simple fact is, if you want turrets to turn to face whatever they're firing, then you have to do it right: weapons wait to fire until they bear. Which means every weapon has to be calculated constantly. Doesn't matter if you do -- or don't -- want to show the turret then, you have to spend system resources on determining if its been brought to bear or not, which means everyone has to face the drag.

Maybe its not that big of a drag, maybe it is. But its not something you can turn into an option, and its not something they're going to add just because you wish they had. And on top of that, do you really spend any time zooming in and caring about such minor BS? I don't (unless I'm admiring the pretty graphics... which isn't what I game for, even if I do enjoy it from time to time from an E-Peen perspective. ./pats his 8800GTX).

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.

heh! just ask EvilleJedi. He had to redo a lot of stuff for his HW2 Star Wars mod because the game would slow down to a crawl even on the best machines available at the time. The engine would go down to its knees. There were lots of weapons and a cool (and complex) shielding system. Most of it had to go down the toilet in the name of performance.

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....

That's because he redesigned the ships, added new textures, ships had double the polygons , he upped the size of ships and had to add the a.i. to cope with the new ship size. he essentially exceeded the engines capabilities. Same thing one experiences when playing a game like Cossacks 2 and having 10,000 2d men on the screen; infinite lag. Which would you say had better graphical prowess?

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.

Sorry to be so blunt with my last post, my the point I was trying to re-make from the last discussion on this subject is that you cannot make it an option. All references to any system dragging was because the reason you were asking for an option was based on the idea that people who couldn't run it could turn it off.

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.

OK, let me make the point again.

If you want animated turrets, then the game has to check the direction they need to fire in, and then target them (i. e. swing untill its bearing) before firing. As a result, all computers would have to do that calculation -- if one computer did it, and the other didn't, you'd get a desync error because the weapons would fire at different times. Which means you'd have two players, playing to separate games because the data they'd be playing would be different (probably minor, but it would snowball until the games were completely unrecognizable.

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.

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.



You gathered all that from this discussion, and you're questioning the importance of my "existence"? Amusing....




I'm not that well versed, but I'll take your word for it.

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 :P) 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.

Still dont see why turrets cant work, I have played HW2 in some massive games 4v4 and with 100's of ships all with turrets etc and I can play the game fine. And that game is 5 years old

It could just be the coding of Sins, its not efficient. Or it could just be an option the developers could not get arround too, but to say it cant be done is lazy. It can be done just they do not want to devote the resources to it and I can respect that.