Post by captainkoloth on Dec 25, 2021 16:33:39 GMT
I want this to be my favorite game of all time. I am willing to bend over backwards, forwards, and sideways for that to happen. But it's just not a well executed game.
I am an astrophysicist, aerospace engineer, and a gamer. I want to love this game. I tried hard to love this game. I am squarely the target audience for this game, and I am willing to give it a tremendous amount of leeway. However, while there may be a tremendous amount of extremely accurate stuff going on under the hood, that's precisely the problem- it's under the hood. As the player, you can't see any of it.
Sid Meier, the famous video game developer of Civilization, PIrates, Railroad Tycoon, et al. fame, has a number of axioms for good video game design. One of these is that you need to be cautious that the player is the one having the fun rather than the designer. This is a perfect example of a game that fails that rule. If you read the store description, you'll see that, for example, the game has an extremely accurate orbit propagator. I am certain this is true. But where do I see that in the game? There is no visibility into how orbits are being calculated, what forces are being taken into effect, or into what the orbital trajectories would look like with a less accurate propagator. The orbits might as well be completely abstracted and not physically calculated at all. I'm not sure a typical player would be able to tell. The designer had a lot of fun coding a highly accurate propagator, but the results are invisible and ultimately irrelevant to the player.
Even more important is what this does to the combat phase. On the game's website it will talk about how each projectile is being physically simulated with real equations, the force generated by magnetic coils, the torque it imparts to the firing spacecraft, etc. Again, I'm sure this is true. I'm very excited by this as a theory. But there is no layer connecting the physics to the gameplay. As a player, all you see is a confusing mass of colors, some slowdown, and then some messages about what got damaged. You have no idea what weapons damaged what, how, where, when, or why. You have very little capability to do anything to really affect the combat, and again, while I'm sure all the physics of the engagement are highly accurate, they are totally invisible to the player. The designer clearly had an enormous amount of fun coding an extraordinarily accurate physical simulation of space warfare. I'm sure it IS accurate. But he forgot to include an intermediate layer actually connecting the player to any of the calculations occurring or allowing him to meaningfully affect it, or even see it.
The sad thing, this would be very easy to fix since all the hard work of calculating the physics is already done. One could envision some kind of log showing what weapons were fired, what calculations were made regarding, e.g. their velocity based on the power input to the weapons involved, what happened when the projectiles hit the other ship, etc. Many combat sims that strive for realism have such logs (e.g. in a tank game showing what projectiles hit where and what they did). However, since the game has unfortunately long since been abandoned, this will never happen. I wish this weren't the case. I so want to love this game... but it's a good set of equations running somewhere, not a good game. And I'd even be OK with that at some level, but I don't even know what the equations are. I recognize that I'm about five years late to the party. I recognize that the game was made by a single developer, and that no one is ever going to make any more changes to the gameplay. But the fact that somewhere an accurate physics simulation is happening that I am completely unable to see is not of a lot of value to me as a player or a consumer.
I am an astrophysicist, aerospace engineer, and a gamer. I want to love this game. I tried hard to love this game. I am squarely the target audience for this game, and I am willing to give it a tremendous amount of leeway. However, while there may be a tremendous amount of extremely accurate stuff going on under the hood, that's precisely the problem- it's under the hood. As the player, you can't see any of it.
Sid Meier, the famous video game developer of Civilization, PIrates, Railroad Tycoon, et al. fame, has a number of axioms for good video game design. One of these is that you need to be cautious that the player is the one having the fun rather than the designer. This is a perfect example of a game that fails that rule. If you read the store description, you'll see that, for example, the game has an extremely accurate orbit propagator. I am certain this is true. But where do I see that in the game? There is no visibility into how orbits are being calculated, what forces are being taken into effect, or into what the orbital trajectories would look like with a less accurate propagator. The orbits might as well be completely abstracted and not physically calculated at all. I'm not sure a typical player would be able to tell. The designer had a lot of fun coding a highly accurate propagator, but the results are invisible and ultimately irrelevant to the player.
Even more important is what this does to the combat phase. On the game's website it will talk about how each projectile is being physically simulated with real equations, the force generated by magnetic coils, the torque it imparts to the firing spacecraft, etc. Again, I'm sure this is true. I'm very excited by this as a theory. But there is no layer connecting the physics to the gameplay. As a player, all you see is a confusing mass of colors, some slowdown, and then some messages about what got damaged. You have no idea what weapons damaged what, how, where, when, or why. You have very little capability to do anything to really affect the combat, and again, while I'm sure all the physics of the engagement are highly accurate, they are totally invisible to the player. The designer clearly had an enormous amount of fun coding an extraordinarily accurate physical simulation of space warfare. I'm sure it IS accurate. But he forgot to include an intermediate layer actually connecting the player to any of the calculations occurring or allowing him to meaningfully affect it, or even see it.
The sad thing, this would be very easy to fix since all the hard work of calculating the physics is already done. One could envision some kind of log showing what weapons were fired, what calculations were made regarding, e.g. their velocity based on the power input to the weapons involved, what happened when the projectiles hit the other ship, etc. Many combat sims that strive for realism have such logs (e.g. in a tank game showing what projectiles hit where and what they did). However, since the game has unfortunately long since been abandoned, this will never happen. I wish this weren't the case. I so want to love this game... but it's a good set of equations running somewhere, not a good game. And I'd even be OK with that at some level, but I don't even know what the equations are. I recognize that I'm about five years late to the party. I recognize that the game was made by a single developer, and that no one is ever going to make any more changes to the gameplay. But the fact that somewhere an accurate physics simulation is happening that I am completely unable to see is not of a lot of value to me as a player or a consumer.
