If there will ever be I-War 3…

Aside from the ‘Newtonian’ flight model, without which it would not be I-war, I’d like to see attention to the ‘backworld’

Not the back story, but rather, the technology and reasoning behind all the technology that makes the world of the game operate.

I’ve never played a game with ships as believable as I-war. I think this is because so much effort was spent on rationalizing the technology behind the ship. Those technology then gave concrete forms and rules for the formation of the ship(s) itself. The ships were (mostly in I-war) were built up from this principal.

Many space related games have fleets of ships that just ‘look cool’, and don’t really have any thinking put into them beyond that (okay, they might have more, but my point stands).

Without this ‘backworld’, I don’t think it would really be I-war 3

PS – does anyone own the orginal I-war manual? It is insane. From what I remember.

A little insider secret… I was working on a massive mod for I-war2, the details are in the thread ‘New mod coning soon!’ (I absolutely hate that stupid typo, but I can’t seem to get rid of it.) Anyway, until my brother told me it would be breaking some law somewhere, I was originally going to call it Independence War 3: Into Chaos. So I called it I-War2 ADVANCED for the duration of the project.
The point is, it was going to have everything I thought a good I-War3 should have, and was going to build on I-War2, since it was a mod. I was even cooking up a shiny story line which picks up right where I-War2 left off. Lots of alien action, with subfactions and civil wars, the Marauders ressurected, and to top it off, your old enemy Caleb Maas engineering the whole thing.
Here are my favorite features, which I think any good space game should have (although none do that I know of.)
Dynamic hulls, which means if your shot hits an enemy, you see a realistic hole blasted in it, with debris chunks flying, all of which were originally part of the 3d mesh for the hull. I’m talking about what movies have been using for a long time, but I haven’t seen used in any games yet.
Volumetric fluid effects for smoke, fire and other fancy stuff. Some games do in fact have this.
A fully dynamic economic system. I think this one is self explanatory.
As part of the dynamic hulls feature, every system, every inch of every ship would be dynamically featured. Plasma pumping through the ship, electric lines, corridors… Everything simulated to the fullest possible extent, which allows for a wildly dynamic damage model. This is something I-War2 seriously lacks.
A procedurally generated world. Okay, many games have this one, but I’m thinking of what Space Engine has. The whole galaxy fully present, along with many other galaxies, with high detail right down to walking on a planet’s surface and tripping on its equivalent of a friendly cat (with seven eyes!)
A really, really cool feature that I’m not sure would actually work, is procedural generation of spaceships, ensuring infinite numbers of designs, infinite variations, and all of it completely correct relative to the available technology and resources. Every ship you meet would be perfectly plausible, and the system would still, because of procedural generation’s funny quality of generating the same given the same seed numbers, produce the same ships every time you play the story, maybe with variations caused by non-scripted events, ie the player’s actions.
Last but the opposite of least, a Newtonian physics system with a high degree of realism. I-War2’s system is decent, and, annoyingly, the best out there, but it falls short when your ship takes damage. Say you just took a deadshot in the tug’s top right engine, and the auto-repair will take several minutes to fix it. Your enemy is still alive, and you need to kill him. The possibilities are huge. Every time you try to accelerate in a straight line, the lack of a quarter of your thrust in the top right will cause you to swing in that direction, as well as not accelerating as fast in the first place. Also, because the spider tug uses it’s main engines for turning, the tug will certainly not turn like you expect it to, requiring a rather high level of alertness and skill to beat your fully maneuvering foe. This is just one example. I’ve though of dozens of scenarios that could have been massively improved, or were even unimplemented, like collisions and missiles not doing subsystem damage. Shots only! 🙁
These features are so desirable in my mind, that if there were ten games which all had these features, I’d still get them all. Everyone does it a little different, and all the games would be fun.
Apologies for not saying anything funny in this post, but I think the topic is a very serious one.

–IronDuke

Quote Chessking: it would be possible for there to be a “destroyed” ship, but it is still in one piece.

Exactly!
I was thinking, considering the ring-based reactor systems in the game, that this would actually happen quite a lot. Those rings are barely within the confines of the ship, so if a barrage of shots takes out the shields and tears up the hull, then naturally they could target the ring and blow a hole in it with a couple shots. All that fuzing plasma in there would blow out, ripping a whole in the ship a good fifty meters long if it’s a corvette. With the reactor down, the ship would be a cold hulk with a debris cloud until repairs are enacted, and the reactor may not be repairable for hours. Not to mention it is totally dead in the water, and unethical foes may continue firing to make sure they whole crew is dead. (Not something I’d do…)
The force of the explosion would also accelerate the ship somewhat, and the explosion would kill some of your crew. If you know beforehand that you’re going to lose the reactor and you know where it’ll blow, you can point that spot at your enemy if he’s close, but it won’t do much and is very hard to get right.
Of course, there are special systems to prevent reactor breaches, such as giant plates to quickly slide over and clamp on a breach, very fast-acting auto-repairs, and ring shut-off valves. All this would make it a delightful challenge to destroy a ship.
I have good news, Chessking. I can’t make an I-War3 per se because of copyrights and all that, but I can start my own game. It will take years, but it’s worth waiting for a good thing, and I’ve already started work. You should check my ‘New mod coning soon!’ thread if you haven’t already. Most of the stuff listed there will be in my game. (My teeth just clanked like knights in armor because of that embarrassing typo. Please ignore it!)
(Ignore it? Who am I kidding? With me bringing it to your attention so much, how can you ignore it?! 😛 )
BTW, a first person ability to walk around the ships, stations, and planets (and blow stuff up! 😀 ) was practically number one on the to-do list. I was aggravated by not even being able to look around the cockpit in I-War2.
All in all, my definition of ‘destroying a ship’ is this: Render it permanently unable to accomplish the purpose for which it was constructed, and permanently no longer a threat.

–IronDuke

P.S. I’m glad you like my ideas. Asking an older brother for his opinion is apparently not a good idea… :silly:

If Particle Systems has the copyrights to I-War, would it be possible for them to take on the idea? (Perhaps if your idea will become your own game, my idea could be used for I-War 3.) All of these ideas are exiting!

:ohmy: IronDuke, you’re only a year older than I am.

Limit Theory is looking awesome. When I read the info on their site about the huge amount of procedural stuff in there, I got really excited. I also like the infinite universe and the open-ended gameplay. Storylines are the best thing a game could have, but I haven’t any sandbox space games. When I noticed they have a prototype completed, I zipped to the download page. I then noticed with a little forum digging, that it was only for Kickstarter backers.
When the smoke alarms went off a few seconds later, bringing me to my senses, I smashed the glass marked “Break in case of space sim grumpiness,” grabbed the fire extinguisher there, and put my hair out.
After waving the smoke out of the room, I took a look at The Mandate. Watching the videos describing the whole system of the crew, I thought, “Nailed it!” The crew simulation, interior of ships and so forth is almost exactly what I was thinking of. I can’t really explain properly, but the videos do. I mean, even in awesome EoC, the ships still feel like an empty box with engines and guns. Interior stuff would quickly fix that.
My game is certainly a massive task, but I actually have plenty of time to work on it, and premade game engines like Unity3d make it much easier.
I poked around the forums for a couple hours, and, as far as I can tell,the rights to the whole I-War universe are owned by Atari. Even if they don’t own them all, they presumably own enough to chase us to the Badlands cluster and back if we violate any copyrights. Attempts have been made to contact them about releasing I-War stuff as open source and other things, but as far as I can tell, they have all failed. So no I-War3 per se for the foreseeable future. 🙁 Of course, similar games might pop up. I was even planning to use the same reactor system in my game, because of research into something like it, which I believe is called a ‘Tokamak.’

–IronDuke

My suggestion to you, IronDuke, is to aim for a degree in computer programming, and get a few guys to help you on your project. In the meantime, keep going.