Hard Ware

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Hardware

Basic information

Dave laid out elsewhere that skills deterine what gear you can use...and that gear decides what you can and cant do...

heres some ideas of mine as well:

- Diablo-style items

Most of the gear that goes into a suit wont be visible on the suit model.. this includes things such as extra ammo, fuel, your combat computer/deck, the tactical interface, and the programs (Hacks) you have loaded.

This will cut down the needed number of models and would be just simple icons that can only be seen by the player in question.. either in their inventory or the loadout panel for their suit.

Not to mention, the icons for the given item-types would be rather simple too... such as a deck that has differing capabilities would be a different color or hue than a deck that has different capabilities..

This is a sample of what I have in mind

Basics...

Item name consists of Item Tier, Item Aspect and Item Name.

For example, Beginer Basic Laser tells you:

1. It is intended for tier 1 players (Beginer)

2. It doesn't have any special aspect (it is generic)

3. It is a laser weapon

I'm not saying this is the pattern we have to go with, just saying it makes it pretty easy to understand. If I have a Champion's Burning Laser of Decapatation, I immediately know a lot about the weapon, for example, from just the name. That makes it easier for me to make decisions about do I want weapon A or do I want weapon B.

Weapons would have Item Slots on them, which would allow additional powers or modifications to be applied. These would not show up in the item name. The idea here is to set things up so that it is crystal clear what is going on and why.

(Eiji) I agree with this method... simple, and effective. Furthermore, we may want to add something that tells if the item is mountable or it needs to be carried (as a rule, I think handheld weapons and gear should be the cheapest, since they dont require any installation to use them...)

Anyway...when you mentioned "item slots", what exactly do you mean? (Like you suggesting using an item such as a targeting scope?)

The idea is similar to in Phantasy Star Online and Phantasy Star Universe, the frame slots / weapon slots. You can take a basic weapon (Saber) and you can apply a modifier (double hit) and the saber then has that power. You can take an armor, apply an item in a slot, to modify it more towards your needs. EQ2 has adornments, City has enhancements, etc. Its common to have a baseline thing -- be it an item or power -- and then allow the players to "make it their own."

In our terms, we could have slots to enable alternate firing roles for weapons, slots to modify ammo usage or capacity, slots to modify accuracey or rate of fire, etc. The idea would be to have several slots on most items, so that there could be a lot of player-decided variation. What we have to be careful about is setting things up so there isn't just a single desirable configuration. For example, City had it messed up pretty badly originally -- everyone just loaded up as many damage enhancements as they could for the most part. So they went back and made it so if you have more than three of the most popular enhancements, the effect starts to drop off.

In our case, I think limiting the slots and what can go in them would be adequate. Similar to how power ups worked in SW:G -- you could only have one power up at a time.

Anyway specifically, the intent would be to incorporate this into the item design from the get go.

Also (another note) my thought is that the suit is sort of a tree:

+-- Suit

 \---Power Plant Slot
 \---Left Arm
   \-- Weapon slot
     \-- Accessory Slot
     \-- Accessory Slot

Thats not necessarily how its presented to the user, its just how I'm thinking about it mentally -- the suit has "slots" that are used for whatever is equiped on it, and the equiped items (in turn) have slots for things equiped into them.