a few more clarifications. What I would be looking for is a weapon type of animated turret, it would be used in specific situations where the turret dominates the profile of the ship or would look exceedingly out of place to not rotate (small guns can be eliminated or simplified as mesh detail) these would be weapons similar to the main batteries on a Iowa class battle ship for example. They would be intended for supercapitals only. Realistically this would be an option for modders and for the IC devs to have some impressive visuals for big weapons (and I wouldn't rule out that the system currently exists for some specific weapons in the release version .... )

I do not have a problem with lower end systems being able to toggle the graphical representation off, and having a fire warm up time for these types of weapons is an elegant solution (on a slow machine the turrets will not turn anyway with the option off, on a slightly faster machine they may fire oddly from a different direction, on a high end machine the animation would play properly. in any event the low end machine will have a graphical oddity regardless (fixed turret, vs not quite there), so the penalty to that player is irrelevant, in fact graphical detail settings may dictate that the turret meshes aren't visible anyway due to mesh simplification)

HW2 is an entirely different animal because of how it handles syncing, it is lockstep, it calculatates everything and if it takes longer than a 1/10 of a second (HW2's tick rate) it slows down all clients to the slowest computer. Since it is in lockstep it causes each client to sim the entire battlefield simultaneously bound to the tick rate (essentially lag slows down time(the tick rate), because every calculation must complete accurately)

this means that every gun in HW2 has a turret rotation rate, muzzle effect, projectile, hit effect and damage calculation that occurs on the same ticks on each client regardless of the clients performance. Desyncs only occur because latency for the tick accumulation exceeds a threshold for acceptable play (in fact you can have the game stay synchronized at less than 1 tick a second, as long as the network connection is good)

as my understanding, sins is using a different model for weapon damage that calculates damage per salvo, not per shot, since this is the case the damage rate is more like a damage per second than a direct reduction, the muzzle flashes and hit effects are already significantly desynced from the damage. The damage is not tick tied by a muzzle effect, a projectile intersection or a hit effect, the animations are played to cover the sudo-dps model.

as for AI overhead, strategic overhead is very cheap, it is just bucketing ship types and locations and making a decision on where to send what, the build decisions and economy may actually be more of an issue than the strategic distribution of forces. The actual AI would be bound by the number of possible targets, the parameters that weight those targets, the number and distribution of current resources and the capabilities of those resources. All of these values are quick mathematical comparisons of bulk force strength. This only has to run occasionally as major strategic considerations are in the realm of minutes.

Tactical AI in sins is very simple primarily because of the devs decision to make ships not move much. The tactical AI is resolved mainly by where a goal is and what it is, adjusting for force distribution changes (it may be as simple as sendAIgroup1 to planet, sendAIgroup2 to enemies) even this only has to recalc occasionally, every few seconds (HW2 had a tactical AI tick rate between .2 and 20 seconds depending on the regime it was in)

the ship/battlegroup AI is the expensive part in HW2 and probably in sins, the targeting list for each ship and tracking its position and current weaponry and status is a large set of arrays, sins seems to have a simpler model in order to keep its grand scale (and this is a good thing for a game of this scope) but because of the reduced weapon load from the damage model and weapon facing system the considerations are much simpler and bound by the complexity and number of vessels currently engaged in a mode where calculations are necessary (in almost all case this is only in combat) this doesn't have to recalc every simulation tick explicitly and can actually be done round robin since the effects are only noticeable on a human timescale of around 1 second.

hopefully that explains some of the motivations and the AI considerations (and I wish the devs would give us better hints at to what the AI is actually doing) and if you want to discuss a statistical bulk aggregation/dissaggregation model for strike craft AI (supporting 10's of thousands of fighters per combat) I have a lot of info on that

Hawk, it's great to hear your input, but to be entirely honest:

Why are you bringing this up again? Homeworld has passed out of the discussion. We've established that there's no real reason we should compare the games, simply because of the scale. Though I seem to disagree with Heflys on most points here I agree with him that confusion tends to set in.
The people arguing for movable turrets, as I understand it, are NOT arguing from the point of view that "if HW2 could do it, why can't this?" because that argument is clearly a fallacy. Here the question seems to revolve around:
1) How can the turrets be made to rotate? Clearly there would be a need to change meshes etc. (The fact that HW could do this was simply because it had an engine and ship designs to be able to do this, so we can't compare it with Sins)
2) Would rotating turrets slow down the computer, and if so, is there a way we can mitigate the effect towards the minimal?
3) If not, then can rotating turrets be made an option?
Whether or not the devs decide to do this is up to them, though they said they listen to their customers. Whether or not it is plausible, is, again, up to the devs. I'm sure if they got enough wails from us ungrateful customers they would consider putting it in a major update or expansion.



I think for a game like Sins, rotating turrets are unimportant enough to apply to the supercapitals only. Perhaps any firing delay would only have to apply to them - I agree with Eviljedi. His next paragraph is the embodiment of why Lightzy's solution of preset firing delays are elegant (please correct me if I'm wrong). Edit: ...so we don't need to quote that paragraph.




Which, of course, would make it possible to animate the turrets with no detriment to CPU calculations, though first salvos on small craft would look odd as those craft would simply blow up with no clear reason.

Like either Heflys or Annatar said (forgive me - I can't remember which) or, indeed, implied, EvilJedi seems to be more of an authority on this than most of us, given his experience with the Warlords mod.

Forgive my annoyance; I just don't see why we're still comparing HW/2 with Sins.

Eh first some of you really need to know what you are talking about before you post. Second again the amination could or could not have issue with dysnc all depending on how the game engine works. All of this is guessing and if you look back, the dev made a statement on the issue allready. It can be done, however the time and cost it would encure at this time does not justify the outcome. IE not worth it.

It is great everyone like me wants this, but it CAN be done it just WON'T be done at this time.

new topic!

salu!

Yeah, so? I never implied anything to the contrary.

Also, WTF is a supercapitol?

In HW2, I've always understood super capital ships to be battlecruisers and (in the mods) battleships. I actually think the term is a misnomer, since capital already means "head", eh?
I think super capital equates "absolute mother of an uber-sized destructivator", or something similar to that.


Am I one of those? I'm so ashamed!


Yes! Now let's just let this topic die...

Well, this game has capitol ships, and all five of each race are "equal" (ish). While some of them are more powerful to start with (starting with a Dunov would be foolish, for example) you can't really call any of them "super" or better than the rest.

Well, on the point of language, I don't see how any ship can ever be called a super capital ship - how do you differentiate between "head" and "above-head"? It's not very logical. I think it's just come into use as in my last description.
I don't have experience with Sins and can't glean enough from the trailers, gameplay movies etc. to find out whether Sins ships would even have this difference between two huge-ship types - but I'll trust others' judgment.

As far as that goes, Sibil, yes you can label something a super capitol ship. Your right that it doesn't make sense if you change capitol to head... but the fact is that head ships don't make any sense either

Capitol ships are big ships, the "main guns" as it were. Super capitol ships are really big ships then

Well that seemed to prove more that the game would slow down because of numerous craft, not because of a.i. is tracking economic issues.

Point taken - I revise my view
Thanks!

Oh, we were talking about different things. Economics can slow down the game is what I was trying to point out.

I ask forgiveness to all for my posts yes they are mostly speculative and not based on proper math or any development experience.
all I was trying to say is that I don’t think the deves will put them in now because of previously posted resons that i dont need to qoute
And I THINK that they were left out to make the game a bit more compatible with older machines I will now re read the entire blog to see were I went wrong in my posts.

Next at the risk of sounding touchy feely



Thanks for the honesty comments like that truly help a relatively new poster on this forum to feel more welcome
I’m also impressed with the intellectual level on most of the people on these forum congrats to you guys keep up the good work we are winning more gamers over day by day and that’s the important thing.
Now lets let the topic die and go enjoy a few more games of soase  

You're quite welcome

And don't worry about forgiveness or anything like that from any of us - besides, we are all mere gamers, below the level of the godlike developers

I really appreciate what Ironclad has done with the game, its just that for me, turret animations would add so much to the immersion of the game. I don't know if there is an informal poll running somewhere about this, but I hope that the devs at least consider it in a future update.

Seconded - we'll just have to see what they do, whether it's upgrading the meshes or some other sort of magic...