Hmm, space combat?

[SpaceDrake]

Originally posted by thebigbaddude2k in the Sony PS forums
You know about the navy that you guys have been thinking about? Well I say screw water combat! I want space combat! Big battleships and fighters and stuff!

To which my reply was:

Well now, IIRC the HARTs go into low orbit to drop their pods, correct?
Perhaps space combat could slowly become an extension of the desire of all sides to shoot down HARTs before they drop their pods... but don't want to bother with the gauntlet of air defenses that protect the things when they are launching from their bases.

You'd start off with what would essentially be modified Mosquitos that can operate in a vaccum. The HARTs would probably be armed (heck, the occupants could man the guns!) and then bigger ships would slowly be developed, until an entire second side of the game was developed around space combat, especially big capships that can lend orbital bombardments to ground assaults (since the capture of Auraxis is still the primary goal of all parties involved.)

This is PlanetSide, however, and any such "expansion" would be a loooooooooooong ways down the road... I'm thinking that the basic "Vaccum-capable Skeeters" would show up a year and a half from release, and the biggest of the capships (carriers and dreadnoughts, likely) would show up three years after initial release at least. This would make sense in both development terms and story-wise: it'd give the dev team plenty of time to work out any issues involved with such an expansion, and it'd allow story-wise for the construction of the necessary infrastructure to support such things. (Hell, the construction yards for the bigger capships will probably need to be off-world. It'd be hard just getting those things off the ground.

There would be several concerns in technology, though. First off, the way the game is constructed now, each continent is a "zone". There is no single planet map in actuality, which cuts waaaaaay back on latency and rendering issues. If you go into orbit (and can concievably come down at will) then unless you do some kind of cheap fixed sprite thing you'd need to show the whole planet at a time. That can be done with today's technology, but you'd been at least a P4 and GeForce 3 or equivalent setup to render that at anything approaching a playable framerate.

The second issue is related to the first - zoning. The game architecture would have to be remodeled into a single massive farking zone. The Devs are doing naval combat already, though, so I assume they've got this worked out. (Frankly, in a year or so a niftily designed load balancing netcode combined with the uber 64-bit base hardware coming out this year would be capable of handling such strain.)

My blood boils at the mere thought of all this - it'd have to be a long way off, but god-damn, it's an exciting idea. Here's to hoping they do it.

What do you guys think?