Vector Thrust Development Roadmap Thread - Vector Thrust

Sorta not relevant with feature suggestion or other suggestion thread, but TS, you might want to use this thread to track what to do for the next report, what bug to fix, what feature/mutator/plane/weapon to add or such.

The next update will something more small to pick up the pace, while this update was a joy to make, fine tuning and balancing the specs was quite time consuming. (and at this moment it still wasn’t been uploaded)

The next update will add the SU-30MKI and F-16XL with some two seater variants.

Also if anyone would like to know here it is the future road map
mission editor -> campaign release -> playable bombers -> VTOL -> playable helis -> ...

For tutorials there are two more parts of the UGB, after that it will be a tutorial for an aircraft.

That tut for the aircraft is going to be time consuming to type up.

Midsummersnow wrote: That tut for the aircraft is going to be time consuming to type up.

Would worth the efforts though. A lot.

If I may ask, I'd like to hear what's the exact plan for the next playable planes/plane families too. (after MKI and XL, precisely)

Edited by: Nergal01

At the moment only the next two are decided:
mirage 2000 family -> F-5 family -> not decided

Possibilities to be the next after the F-5 family are: (Su-25, F-22, Typhoon, F-4)
There are other aircrafts that will be added in the next updates that don’t belong to any big family such as some stealth prototypes.
F-1/T-2 are possible to added soon as well, as a sort of variation from the jaguar.

Just to be aware, from the Modeling, mapping, texturing, rigging and exporting, which part are you most interested in the aircraft tutorial?

At this point I'm interested in some of the modeling (weird details for which there is no obvious tool or workflow) rigging for things like airbrakes where you have multiple bones working together (2 for the piston and one more for the airbrake itself) and pretty much texturing in general.

I also don't recommend making any more ground attack families until we have more missions to use them in. More fighters/multiroles = more planes to play with in skirmish.

P.S. about animation, are tracked vehicles fully animated?

OOT: Just an advice for the next report, you'd better list the exact bugfix/issues to clarify things.

Edited by: Nergal01

@ bornloser, thanks for mentioning that details, The aircraft tutorial can be done step by step like the bomb but I’ll try to address those details with care.

As for attack aircrafts, that’s a good point, but at that time is expected that the (real) new campaign is already available.

Tracked vehicles are fully animated, except for now the treads, the wheels turning the desired direction and active suspension. But for the turrets, it is fully animated, and should be, because the projectile really fires from the barrel.

@ V3000TT, thanks, I’ll keep that in mind.

Time to write more descriptions!

I personally would prefer the F-4 to come next, but the Su-25 is also tantalizing.

That said, I would really like to do some Phantom-Fishbed battles…

I was always curious why most of the Ace Combat games started you with an F-4 phantom instead of something different every game.

bornloser wrote: I was always curious why most of the Ace Combat games started you with an F-4 phantom instead of something different every game.

It's a well known universal aircraft which is sort of an M-16 of the skies, easily identified "good guys vehicle", I guess for similar reasons your starter enemies are usally using mig-21s, which are associated with "bad guys".

bornloser wrote: I was always curious why most of the Ace Combat games started you with an F-4 phantom instead of something different every game.

...or F-5E , since it's sorta western equivalent of MiG-21 performance-wise.

V3000TT wrote:

bornloser wrote: I was always curious why most of the Ace Combat games started you with an F-4 phantom instead of something different every game.

...or F-5E , since it's sorta western equivalent of MiG-21 performance-wise.

That was one game and your squadron leader still had a Phantom.

bornloser wrote:

V3000TT wrote:

bornloser wrote: I was always curious why most of the Ace Combat games started you with an F-4 phantom instead of something different every game.

...or F-5E , since it's sorta western equivalent of MiG-21 performance-wise.

That was one game and your squadron leader still had a Phantom.

Eh, Zero doesn't have F-4 as starter plane as well.

Yeah well you know what I mean.

Edit: TS, I just realized the sooner you implement takeoffs and landings the fewer planes you're going to have to remodel/modify.

Edited by: bornloser

I Think this roadmap could be decent for you, give or take a few things, starting from now..

Mission Editor/Campaign Editor
|<-Represents a Week
|
Mirage Family
|
|
Eurofighter Family
|
|
PAK FA
|
|
Campaign Improvment
|
|
Jamming
|
|
|
AI Improvements
|
|
|
Start Development of Netcode
|
|
|
|
Implement Muliplayer
|
|
|
Aircraft Pack (Unrelated Aircraft, Supplements Multiplayer)
|
|
|
|
|
Cockpit Modeling
|
|
|
|
Helicopters Released
|
|
|
Hinds
|
|
|
AH Series

Feel free to add anything.

Edited by: NodokaHanamura

Multiplayer is something we'd rather not implement anytime soon. In fact if anything Multiplayer would be an afterthought after version 1.0. Multiplayer as it should be is really a bonus to the single player content, and when games make the mistake of designing multiplayer really early it really restricts development.

flyawaynow wrote: Multiplayer is something we'd rather not implement anytime soon. In fact if anything Multiplayer would be an afterthought after version 1.0. Multiplayer as it should be is really a bonus to the single player content, and when games make the mistake of designing multiplayer really early it really restricts development.

Completely agree with this.

I guess the game would need time to fully develop before web code develops.

V3000TT wrote:

flyawaynow wrote: Multiplayer is something we'd rather not implement anytime soon. In fact if anything Multiplayer would be an afterthought after version 1.0. Multiplayer as it should be is really a bonus to the single player content, and when games make the mistake of designing multiplayer really early it really restricts development.

Completely agree with this.

I don't know, I think it would be a valuable feature. Most single player games just boil down to shooting galleries (enemies almost never flank you in a single player FPS, for example) but a multiplayer victory in any non-COD game is an accomplishment. What would multiplayer limit?

bornloser wrote:

V3000TT wrote:

flyawaynow wrote: Multiplayer is something we'd rather not implement anytime soon. In fact if anything Multiplayer would be an afterthought after version 1.0. Multiplayer as it should be is really a bonus to the single player content, and when games make the mistake of designing multiplayer really early it really restricts development.

Completely agree with this.

I don't know, I think it would be a valuable feature. Most single player games just boil down to shooting galleries (enemies almost never flank you in a single player FPS, for example) but a multiplayer victory in any non-COD game is an accomplishment. What would multiplayer limit?

Yeah but we're not most single player games.

We have no reason or inclination to add in Multiplayer yet because there is no selling point in it, no blatant reason to include such a mode because Ace Combat is predominantly a single-player oriented experience. Co-Op perhaps, maybe, but Ace Combat doing multiplayer itself hasn't at at all been successful due to bad network coding and balancing issues.

We're not going to waste time on something that doesn't work in practice.

I'm not saying that it won't happen, it's just that if we work on multiplayer while the core game is still in the development, we risk developing two mediocre experiences that should are either completely separate from each other in terms of quality, or mesh together poorly.

It's not the time to worry about multiplayer, there are more important issues to address.

Edited by: flyawaynow

Given the Ace Combat, player-is-God-incarnate ethos, multiplayer tends to have pretty bad balance. I mean, balancing for flight in a lot of games is pretty terrible, like how Battlefield 3 starts a player off with only cannons, resulting in 4-10 games spent just learning to fly and trying to hit targets you can't find (unlocking features to an aircraft as you go is definitely not how one should balance multiplayer flight, especially since it pushes away new players). For Ace Combat multiplayer (speaking mostly from PS2 experience, though I did end up playing a little of Assault Horizon's multiplayer) it's a lot of turning fights. There was very little real skill in it.
DFM did make for workable interruption in turn fights, but the fact that it suddenly gave the enemy the ability to magically stay on your tail meant that it was used more often than normal flight when shooting enemies down, which I find to be distasteful, as penalizing the core gameplay mechanic is not how one should stop spirals of death from developing. I guess AC AH's core weakness was how central it made DFM, which as a feature should have been much more a peripheral mechanic with a timer for both activation and for use.
But that's just tangential to the real issue, which is that balancing and making multiplayer interesting is difficult to do.
To air out my own personal opinion, I would like to see multiplayer someday in the future. However, I wouldn't want a hastily developed or ill thought out multiplayer added as a way of simply catering to the "I won't play a game unless it has multiplayer" crowd. Multiplayer gets boring if the only things that people can actually play are the top tier fighters, since the game progresses in a way that makes all medium and low tier fighters useless. Vector Thrust, being in the same development model as the classic AC games, seems less in need of a multiplayer than a strong central campaign and story driven mission structure. For that to happen with any reasonable pace, it means that multiplayer should take a backseat until a campaign or two have come out with the consolidated gameplay. My reasoning being that the development of a properly interesting multiplayer would be a significant undertaking in of itself, since it would require the same degree of effort to create as the single player game.
Personally, I always believed that the player vs player mechanic didn’t work well in matches set at more than six and less than four. Given that in a four player match, if one person dies, that side is at an immediate disadvantage, since the surviving player now has to contend with two others while his partner respawns. At more than six, the gameplay becomes less about individual skill, and more about reflexively tapping the fire button whenever you get lock, since things eventually average out. This results in less focused and less sophisticated maneuvering.
To be perfectly clear though, I am actually a sub-par gamer with a relatively low level of skill across the board, so my take may or may not be valid depending on how good a gamer is.

IbizenThoth wrote: Given the Ace Combat, player-is-God-incarnate ethos, multiplayer tends to have pretty bad balance. I mean, balancing for flight in a lot of games is pretty terrible, like how Battlefield 3 starts a player off with only cannons, resulting in 4-10 games spent just learning to fly and trying to hit targets you can't find (unlocking features to an aircraft as you go is definitely not how one should balance multiplayer flight, especially since it pushes away new players). For Ace Combat multiplayer (speaking mostly from PS2 experience, though I did end up playing a little of Assault Horizon's multiplayer) it's a lot of turning fights. There was very little real skill in it.
DFM did make for workable interruption in turn fights, but the fact that it suddenly gave the enemy the ability to magically stay on your tail meant that it was used more often than normal flight when shooting enemies down, which I find to be distasteful, as penalizing the core gameplay mechanic is not how one should stop spirals of death from developing. I guess AC AH's core weakness was how central it made DFM, which as a feature should have been much more a peripheral mechanic with a timer for both activation and for use.
But that's just tangential to the real issue, which is that balancing and making multiplayer interesting is difficult to do.
To air out my own personal opinion, I would like to see multiplayer someday in the future. However, I wouldn't want a hastily developed or ill thought out multiplayer added as a way of simply catering to the "I won't play a game unless it has multiplayer" crowd. Multiplayer gets boring if the only things that people can actually play are the top tier fighters, since the game progresses in a way that makes all medium and low tier fighters useless. Vector Thrust, being in the same development model as the classic AC games, seems less in need of a multiplayer than a strong central campaign and story driven mission structure. For that to happen with any reasonable pace, it means that multiplayer should take a backseat until a campaign or two have come out with the consolidated gameplay. My reasoning being that the development of a properly interesting multiplayer would be a significant undertaking in of itself, since it would require the same degree of effort to create as the single player game.
Personally, I always believed that the player vs player mechanic didn’t work well in matches set at more than six and less than four. Given that in a four player match, if one person dies, that side is at an immediate disadvantage, since the surviving player now has to contend with two others while his partner respawns. At more than six, the gameplay becomes less about individual skill, and more about reflexively tapping the fire button whenever you get lock, since things eventually average out. This results in less focused and less sophisticated maneuvering.
To be perfectly clear though, I am actually a sub-par gamer with a relatively low level of skill across the board, so my take may or may not be valid depending on how good a gamer is.

I think it's not about DFM, MP is freaking unbalance is because the fact that everyone keep doing nothing but spaming QAAMs all the day while flying ridiculously OP DLC plane (you know....)

Correct me if I'm wrong though, but that's AC6's MP in a nutshell....from what I've heard.

plus let us not forget that most of the AC community are....sociopaths...from the rumor I've heard.

Edited by: Nergal01

Dunno, used to lurk on acecombat.net before it turned into acecombatskies.com. The community seemed pretty healthy. I haven't interacted at all with it since AC6 came out, since I didn't have an Xbox. I'm pretty sure the sociopaths thing could probably be explained by the sudden influx of COD fans from assault horizon.

Multiplayer requires a lot of finesse to do right in shooters, and I get the feeling that it requires even more of it in something that is based on weapons systems like a flight game. I feel that detailed multiplayer options and banlists, with customizeable maps (think mission editor used like Forge in Halo) and equalizers would make the game less QAAM spammy and less restricted to DLC and tier A and S class aircraft.