01-14-2022, 12:26 AM
Now that Haxus is back and is in a development spirit, I figure it wouldn't hurt to have a thread with some small ideas to make the game feel a bit more alive. Perhaps some of these have been offered before or discussed, perhaps they haven't. I figured I would throw my 2 cents in and allow others to do the same if they have similar ideas in this thread.
I've had this in the back of my mind for a while but the greatest allure I have to games like this is the immersion. SoH always offered this epic story and sci-fi universe to me, and the feeling of exploring it with the few but otherwise still very lively players this game has always keeps drawing me back. The classic sound of the pager, for example, and the scale of the game world. To add on to this are some small things that I think would make the game more alive. This might be a stream of consciousness thing where I come back and add more, because I've probably forgotten some, but if Haxus finds room in his development schedule for these things it could be neat.
Cargo / Ship Servicing
This is something almost every sci-fi game I've ever played has left out somehow and is for me the most immersive. I've been playing Sailwind a lot lately and the immersion of loading your ships by hand with crates always makes it very engrossing and interesting. While that of course may get tedious and isn't quite the suggestion, it could also be a neat addition too.
Basically my idea is for NPCs to work on ships while they're in port or at the factory pad. When you load cargo maybe a guy walks back and forth with a crate prop from the ship (at the "easiest to implement" end, and at the other end maybe guys can be driving forklifts or operating cranes, although both of these implementations have their own challenges. I've always found pathfinding into ships to be a bit difficult, especially if you have a ramp, but maybe a cargo area in your ship where the dockworkers walk and "drop" their crates (it despawns in their hand) would be neat. Games like Elite Dangerous always fail at this level of immersion, which perhaps it's a niche thing only I enjoy, it's been in the development plans of a lot of space games and has always been glossed over.
Similar to this is more stuff for ship servicing. Maybe when you get repairs people with wrenches lie about under your ship and walk around and do things on top and on the outside. When you get fuel maybe a simple polygon tube is extended by a worker to to either the ship or a special "fuel port" point if the ship has one defined. Maybe when you order a ship cleaning or extermination there are NPCs actually going and doing the deed. The existence of NPCs in the game world has always been rather immersing so this has always been on the back of my mind.
NPC Starships / Civilian Activity
This is another area the game could be livened up a bunch, if not where the most impact could be had. Often your spanning galactic empire feels a bit unalive, unless you have players working with you. There is already ship landing code and often unused space ports in your city, so why not have NPCs flying around ships between your planets? Would be very satisfying and rewarding once you get to that point in the game. A few default built-in ships could be used for this, but having the player also be able to design a ship for use for this task (with some restrictions of course) would add another layer of customization. Similarly but perhaps more difficult would be having NPCs walk, drive, and commute around the planet. Planes flying between airports, ships between seaports. Performance is probably an issue here, but if the performance impact of these simple commuting NPCs or NPC starships could be mitigated it could maybe be a worthwhile addition.
Ship Maintenance / Fighter Wings
Another issue where I think immersion suffers a bit is with the crew requirements of larger ships. Ship crew complement really only depends on the number of stations you have, so for very large vessels it is quite possible to have massive ships crewed by 10-11 people. I think a solution to this is implement a maintenance requirement that scales with volume of the ship, perhaps in a non-linear fashion. So smaller ships can be crewed by just you and maybe one maintenance person, whereas larger ships will have droves of NPCs walking around fixing things. A "maintenance panel" could be added to faciliate this walking around, with the caveat that it only "covers" a certain radius of the ship around it, so you'd need to place lots of them spread evenly about the ship with corresponding access tunnels in order to have maximum maintenance coverage for larger ships. This fits the star wars / star trek vision well because both franchises have scenes where the business of ship life on larger ships is apparent, with officers and crew scurrying about doing various tasks.
A complementary idea to this is to have fighters be usable as offensive or defensive weapons without needing players to fly them. Fighters are a cool staple of sci-fi, and having the ability to say, maybe recruit 3-4 fighter pilots per planet, in a similar limiting mechanic similar to officers, would be a neat addition to combat. Having squadrons of fighters buzzing about in larger engagements would be epic and definitely pick up on some cool tropes.
Hazeron is an awesome game and I think we're all overjoyed it's not dying anytime soon. Performance always seems to be a continual limitation but if there is ever room for these types of improvements to bring the game to life in ways that other games never touch on, it would be really awesome.
I've had this in the back of my mind for a while but the greatest allure I have to games like this is the immersion. SoH always offered this epic story and sci-fi universe to me, and the feeling of exploring it with the few but otherwise still very lively players this game has always keeps drawing me back. The classic sound of the pager, for example, and the scale of the game world. To add on to this are some small things that I think would make the game more alive. This might be a stream of consciousness thing where I come back and add more, because I've probably forgotten some, but if Haxus finds room in his development schedule for these things it could be neat.
Cargo / Ship Servicing
This is something almost every sci-fi game I've ever played has left out somehow and is for me the most immersive. I've been playing Sailwind a lot lately and the immersion of loading your ships by hand with crates always makes it very engrossing and interesting. While that of course may get tedious and isn't quite the suggestion, it could also be a neat addition too.
Basically my idea is for NPCs to work on ships while they're in port or at the factory pad. When you load cargo maybe a guy walks back and forth with a crate prop from the ship (at the "easiest to implement" end, and at the other end maybe guys can be driving forklifts or operating cranes, although both of these implementations have their own challenges. I've always found pathfinding into ships to be a bit difficult, especially if you have a ramp, but maybe a cargo area in your ship where the dockworkers walk and "drop" their crates (it despawns in their hand) would be neat. Games like Elite Dangerous always fail at this level of immersion, which perhaps it's a niche thing only I enjoy, it's been in the development plans of a lot of space games and has always been glossed over.
Similar to this is more stuff for ship servicing. Maybe when you get repairs people with wrenches lie about under your ship and walk around and do things on top and on the outside. When you get fuel maybe a simple polygon tube is extended by a worker to to either the ship or a special "fuel port" point if the ship has one defined. Maybe when you order a ship cleaning or extermination there are NPCs actually going and doing the deed. The existence of NPCs in the game world has always been rather immersing so this has always been on the back of my mind.
NPC Starships / Civilian Activity
This is another area the game could be livened up a bunch, if not where the most impact could be had. Often your spanning galactic empire feels a bit unalive, unless you have players working with you. There is already ship landing code and often unused space ports in your city, so why not have NPCs flying around ships between your planets? Would be very satisfying and rewarding once you get to that point in the game. A few default built-in ships could be used for this, but having the player also be able to design a ship for use for this task (with some restrictions of course) would add another layer of customization. Similarly but perhaps more difficult would be having NPCs walk, drive, and commute around the planet. Planes flying between airports, ships between seaports. Performance is probably an issue here, but if the performance impact of these simple commuting NPCs or NPC starships could be mitigated it could maybe be a worthwhile addition.
Ship Maintenance / Fighter Wings
Another issue where I think immersion suffers a bit is with the crew requirements of larger ships. Ship crew complement really only depends on the number of stations you have, so for very large vessels it is quite possible to have massive ships crewed by 10-11 people. I think a solution to this is implement a maintenance requirement that scales with volume of the ship, perhaps in a non-linear fashion. So smaller ships can be crewed by just you and maybe one maintenance person, whereas larger ships will have droves of NPCs walking around fixing things. A "maintenance panel" could be added to faciliate this walking around, with the caveat that it only "covers" a certain radius of the ship around it, so you'd need to place lots of them spread evenly about the ship with corresponding access tunnels in order to have maximum maintenance coverage for larger ships. This fits the star wars / star trek vision well because both franchises have scenes where the business of ship life on larger ships is apparent, with officers and crew scurrying about doing various tasks.
A complementary idea to this is to have fighters be usable as offensive or defensive weapons without needing players to fly them. Fighters are a cool staple of sci-fi, and having the ability to say, maybe recruit 3-4 fighter pilots per planet, in a similar limiting mechanic similar to officers, would be a neat addition to combat. Having squadrons of fighters buzzing about in larger engagements would be epic and definitely pick up on some cool tropes.
Hazeron is an awesome game and I think we're all overjoyed it's not dying anytime soon. Performance always seems to be a continual limitation but if there is ever room for these types of improvements to bring the game to life in ways that other games never touch on, it would be really awesome.