Ship battles

How would an automated combat system feel?

My experience would be the easier it is to see the information the better – and with a ton of laser shots flying all over it’s hard. Group up all the stuff and put it more automated maybe, at least for the normal "lasers". Missiles etc. could be manual like kick/gouge/bash are.

Of course a player must be manning the console in order for the fight to proceed and should have a way to stop firing.

Yarrrr…automation and grouping of weapons so they don’t take up individual lines would be great…manual firing can get hectic the more ships there are…

Another MUD I played on briefly had an interface called VT-100
essentially it had a ‘frame’ around the text with character data, such as what room you were in, exits, what was on the ground. The contents of this ‘frame’ never move in relative position to each other, kind of like a starship HUD. Maybe we could code something like that? A HUD for people in ship combat that can be turned on/off. That way you could have your ship’s shields/weapon charge/remaining warheads available at a glance without using the STAT command and without having it scram instantly past when something happens.

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|Shields: <%> Turbolaser: <%1> Laser: <%> Ion: <%> |
|Missiles: # Torpedoes: # Rocket: # Pulse: # |
|Fuel: % Hull: % Course: % Speed: ___ |
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There would be something like this permanantly affixed to the top of a pilot’s/gunner’s screen updated every time something changes.

How ironic, I was JUST reading about VT100 in some mud coding forum. It’s a cool thing, but I THINK we would have to COMPLETELY replace how we currently send/parse text. But it has some neat features, like autoupdating lines of text, and ONLY updating the chars that change, not the entire thing (reduces bandwidth), and has some cool color features.