Sins needs a faster damage tracking system

from Sins Forums

Does anybody else find it frustrating that it takes a few seconds before the shield/hull numbers catch up with the damage? Is it lag or something? Like the HP numbers stay static and then all of a sudden jump 500+ in large battles. This also gets worse the more ships you have, so while your firing all your ships at that target, it might already be dead. And its not because the missiles havent hit yet, because most of the time the shield/hull numbers change BEFORE the missiles even get close.

I really dont understand why ironclad made the hp numbers update so slowly. It punishes you for focus firing, (isnt shield mitigation enough?), having large numbers of ships, and for having a slow computer. From what i can understand, its not that hard to include instant damage tracking.. Plenty of games have the size and scope that sins has, (Supreme Commander) and they have instant damage tracking.

It will also make the game a bit more competitive as well, as it removes most of the randomness before the target ship in question dies 

4,358 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

I agree it would be nice but I'm affraid that due to the limited capacity of the Iron engine something like this would be hard to implement, also because the game would have to be dramatically altered in order for it to work. The dev's probably have more pressing matters to deal with right now...

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

That is the engine problem, and without making major changes it's not possible to fulfill the requirement.

The problem is that, any major change of the core mechanics may - or I should sys - is 100% percent - cause kinds of bugs, including crashes and black screens and anything you can imagine and anything you can't imagine.

So the consequence will be one of the two followed:
- the devs are busying fixing bugs, and a hoard of guys yield in the forum why they can not have the release to play, and they will not play anymore until all the contents are released;
- the devs heard the voices and send out the pre-release version, and a hoard of guys yield in the forum why there are so many bugs, and they will not play anymore until all the bugs are fixed.

I don't like any of the two situations, so the current situation is best for me, though obviously not good.

Multiplicity - Control multiple PCs using one keyboard and mouse
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

The damage rate is probably related to the tick rate of the engine.  For all I know, the tick rate of the engine could be 2000 milliseconds and everything in between is simulated by the game.  It's an odd way to do it perhaps, but it's possible.

Bottom line, don't screw with the engine.

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting Volt_Cruelerz, reply 3
Bottom line, don't screw with the engine.
End of Volt_Cruelerz's quote

Agreed. I don't want more strange bugs. Just let the dev guys fix the existing ones first.

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

This will be a Sins 2 thing, if it happens.

 

Going multi-core would increase the horsepower available to the engine enough to look at things like that.

Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top

A rework of the Iron Engine to be 64 bit would be spectacular.  Sins II's scale would surpass Sins I by a long shot simply because the added horsepower of the extra cores plus the additional RAM.  At that point, it might be alright to increase the rate at which ships take damage.