Damage Question?/

[Gandalph]

Starfury measures everything in ls, as far as weapon damage goes, how much is an ls?
For example, my Tachyon Cannons do most damage at 10, so what is 10 in ls??

[Mehrunes]

The distance numbers listed above the damage amount are in ls (i.e. 10 is 10 ls).

[ October 11, 2003, 03:22: Message edited by: Mehrunes ]

[Ed Kolis]

ls are light seconds; it used to be km (kilometers) but we kept bugging Aaron to make it at least slightle realistic; I never bothered to check out the scale but at least it's not completely ridiculous (the moon is 50 km from the earth??? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/shock.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/rolleyes.gif )

[ShakyJake]

Since the speed of light is 300,000 km/sec, a single lightsecond would be 300,000 kilometers. Impressive, eh?

[Gandalph]

Experimentation suggests that my Tachyon cannons do most damage in combat at 70 ls distance. According to the popup windows, the tachyon cannon does most damage at 10 spaces. It does not compute! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/confused.gif

[Suicide Junkie]

At level 1, those cannons do 25 damage at point blank, and then 5 damage less for every 10 ls away you are.
(Possibly scaled up by 2.5x)

Try firing at a stationary target with the exact same weapon component/slot from the two distances.

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by Ed Kolis:
ls are light seconds; it used to be km (kilometers) but we kept bugging Aaron to make it at least slightle realistic; I never bothered to check out the scale but at least it's not completely ridiculous (the moon is 50 km from the earth??? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/shock.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/rolleyes.gif )<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">So now instead of everything being scaled in 'km' for surface combat it's scaled in 'ls' for 'warp drive'... Our ships are moving at several times the speed of light since we can cover 10 ls in a lot less than 10 seconds. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif Not to mention that fact that the beams cover those distances almost instantaneously. That might make sense for the Tachyon beam. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif But not for the other weapons.

Ah, well. Yet another example of the 'hurry and and make it work' attitude in game development. It's present from tiny companies like MM all the way up to giants like Infogrames/Atari.

[ October 12, 2003, 16:40: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[Mehrunes]

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
Ah, well. Yet another example of the 'hurry and and make it work' attitude in game development. It's present from tiny companies like MM all the way up to giants like Infogrames/Atari.<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">No, that's what they call "abstraction", i.e. bending the rules for better gameplay.

[ October 12, 2003, 18:25: Message edited by: Mehrunes ]

[PvK]

Or, just lack of interest in using terms or measurements that resemble reality in any way at all. If someone cared, they might've figured out a slightly more accurate unit of measurement, without having any effect at all on gameplay.

PvK

[Phoenix-D]

And slightly more accurate would be right. The scale is terminally off, given that even a medium sized planet should be on the order of 6000 times the size of your ship..

[Ed Kolis]

Maybe if we bug Aaron enough we can get him to make the scale string moddable - instead of " km" or " ls" it could be ",000 km" like in SFC, or whatever you want it to be...