I don't mind the 2D space much. There is a balance that needs to be struck between complexity and viability, especially in a MUD.
This is a weird comment to me, I've used 3d space systems in a MUD before, they're significantly easier to navigate than Aetherspace and I have generally found aetherspace to be the more complex option.
The only real benefit of aetherspace over the systems I've seen is the ability to create large barriers that you're forced to fly around to locate things, the map really isn't really a benefit but a necessity because of the need to navigate around to such a precise degree(ie, down to passing through a single narrow room). But this also makes it significantly more annoying to navigate for general getting around purposes, comparatively getting from planet to planet in 3d systems I've used is typically a matter of launching your ship, setting up a jump to the appropriate system if necessary, then putting in the coordinates of the target planet, and then landing. The complexity only going up a tiny bit if the target is too far for a single jump and you need to plot jumps across multiple systems but that's not really an aspect of it being 3d.
The 3d system just seems so much simpler, so it's confusing why people insist that it's more complicated.
The 3d system just seems so much simpler, so it's confusing why people insist that it's more complicated.
I'm assuming it's primarily because we're going to get to see ship to ship combat, which is infinitely more difficult if you have to take a third dimension and the fact that you don't have a camera to pan around into account. Like, try playing EVE online with a blindfold on. Sure you can jump from system to system and probably do a lot of the trading by using a screen reader, but when things start getting hairy it's going to be hard to keep track of everything. Especially if ship-to-ship combat involves more than just being close enough to lock on and firing. Like, if it starts throwing in AoE abilities, radar/skipdrive jammers, or mines, that third dimension is going to A) make text-based combat more difficult, and Absolutely wreck the game's databases...
The issue is that there are other games that do function with 3d space.
Jammers and the like still need to work out a radius of effect which in a 2d map reliant system means the game also needs to be over laying that effect in a meaningful way on the map that doesn't impact anything else of importance on the map, for example mines that you need to dodge around. It also still needs to calculate whether or not your ship is within the range of those aoes and given that much simpler games can handle a proximity calculation by working out the difference between two sets of 3d coordinates, the "wrecking the database" comment seems a bit over the top if you expect that the game can do the same math with one less coordinate.
Wouldn't wreck the database, but I would expect it to take a fair bit more processing power. For example, an AoE of ten on a 2d grid is just a square. Adding a dimension takes it from a square to a cube, which is a lot more rooms that need to be checked if they are in range (in this case, ten times more rooms). The only way around that I can see is if every room contains a list of reference rooms that are within X distance of it, at which point you move into a database issue instead (because every single room will have references to hundreds of others along with a range).
Unless you are doing nothing but comparing ship positions, in which case you are then comparing the ship position of everything in space period (including all NPCs). And you are cutting out the possibility of doing room-based AoE entirely.
Edit: I guess if you make it do everything positionally and cut it off into "areas" of some kind so that it doesn't have to constantly check every single thing flying, that might work as an alternative. It would seem a bit weird to turn space into areas though, but for a game that is based on having lots of things flying around, having everything constantly polling everything else will become prohibitive (and yes, even in this case the 2d vs. 3d check is going to take more processing; you could try to limit it by just doing a 2d range check first to cut out the vast swath then do the third dimension check if the first set is in range, but that's still a lot of polling on a constant basis for everything up there). It will be interesting to see how they go with it / make it work.
From what I've seen, the other examples don't use rooms for space, SWRs just a coordinate based system with systems being separate zones so the coordinates are relative to that system.
Which isn't too bad when you consider the vast distances that would likely be between systems in the Starmourn sector, you could go out to the edge of a system and keep going if the coordinates can keep going up but you're unlikely to find things because you'd need to travel for decades in the right direction to get somewhere else and we have skip drives for that.
But yeah, the SWR codebase has been handling this since before 1999 (LOTJ from memory is one of the longest running but wasn't the first) and GWSE which was sadly shut down due to issues on an admin level was first up in like 2001 (that one had galactic co-ordinates from memory and they had to tell people to stop trying to fly to earth in newbie ships because you'd never get there).
idk, I was following ToP (which was designed with the 3d system as a core feature) and my main experience with space based MUDs has been the aforementioned systems, so my expectation was that Starmourn would take these systems and improve on them.
Comments
The only real benefit of aetherspace over the systems I've seen is the ability to create large barriers that you're forced to fly around to locate things, the map really isn't really a benefit but a necessity because of the need to navigate around to such a precise degree(ie, down to passing through a single narrow room).
But this also makes it significantly more annoying to navigate for general getting around purposes, comparatively getting from planet to planet in 3d systems I've used is typically a matter of launching your ship, setting up a jump to the appropriate system if necessary, then putting in the coordinates of the target planet, and then landing. The complexity only going up a tiny bit if the target is too far for a single jump and you need to plot jumps across multiple systems but that's not really an aspect of it being 3d.
The 3d system just seems so much simpler, so it's confusing why people insist that it's more complicated.
Jammers and the like still need to work out a radius of effect which in a 2d map reliant system means the game also needs to be over laying that effect in a meaningful way on the map that doesn't impact anything else of importance on the map, for example mines that you need to dodge around.
It also still needs to calculate whether or not your ship is within the range of those aoes and given that much simpler games can handle a proximity calculation by working out the difference between two sets of 3d coordinates, the "wrecking the database" comment seems a bit over the top if you expect that the game can do the same math with one less coordinate.
Unless you are doing nothing but comparing ship positions, in which case you are then comparing the ship position of everything in space period (including all NPCs). And you are cutting out the possibility of doing room-based AoE entirely.
Edit: I guess if you make it do everything positionally and cut it off into "areas" of some kind so that it doesn't have to constantly check every single thing flying, that might work as an alternative. It would seem a bit weird to turn space into areas though, but for a game that is based on having lots of things flying around, having everything constantly polling everything else will become prohibitive (and yes, even in this case the 2d vs. 3d check is going to take more processing; you could try to limit it by just doing a 2d range check first to cut out the vast swath then do the third dimension check if the first set is in range, but that's still a lot of polling on a constant basis for everything up there). It will be interesting to see how they go with it / make it work.
Which isn't too bad when you consider the vast distances that would likely be between systems in the Starmourn sector, you could go out to the edge of a system and keep going if the coordinates can keep going up but you're unlikely to find things because you'd need to travel for decades in the right direction to get somewhere else and we have skip drives for that.
But yeah, the SWR codebase has been handling this since before 1999 (LOTJ from memory is one of the longest running but wasn't the first) and GWSE which was sadly shut down due to issues on an admin level was first up in like 2001 (that one had galactic co-ordinates from memory and they had to tell people to stop trying to fly to earth in newbie ships because you'd never get there).
idk, I was following ToP (which was designed with the 3d system as a core feature) and my main experience with space based MUDs has been the aforementioned systems, so my expectation was that Starmourn would take these systems and improve on them.
EDIT: Also @Thul called it.
EDIT: on advice.