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Sorry to bump an old thread but I made my living in Privateer looting ships. I had confed so pissed they had a heavy and 3 broadswords at almost every jump point. :D That was fun running like heck, shooting em off my back with the aft turret. You could do very well as a pirate, I upgraded my ship by hulling cargo ships in tory for a few days before I ever started playing the story missions.
 
no doubt.
i made $ in privateer way faster as a pirate than as a merchant.

take off, loot till bay is full, land, sell, wrinse&repeat.

it was especially ez once you get a centurion. before that it was a bit of a chore.

-scheherazade
 
I think it would be ideal to have a pirate medium-sized fast transport. A pirate freighter couldn't be too large or too slow. It would need to move in fast, grab the loot, and then run. A central pirate "bank" could be a larger vessel, like a Drayman or a frigate.

Ideally, I would see pirates sending in a few light fighters to beat up on a target and take out its engines, or at least keep it busy while the medium transport closed in and latched on. The pirate fighters could then try to destroy the target as the transport ran away.

What would be really neat would be to have the feature where if the pirate transport got too near your ship, it would latch on and you would see your cargo drain away on your cargo manifest screen. That way, as a player, you would still have to fight for your life after being boarded, and you would even have the chance to try to chase down the pirate transport and take your stuff back.

To do so, you would need the option of being able to do the same thing to other ships (clamp on and leach away cargo), maybe with a special tractor beam, docking clamps, and cargo transfer system. It could potentially operate in a somewhat similar fashion to docking in X-wing Alliance.
 
Sphynx said:
What would be really neat would be to have the feature where if the pirate transport got too near your ship, it would latch on and you would see your cargo drain away on your cargo manifest screen. That way, as a player, you would still have to fight for your life after being boarded, and you would even have the chance to try to chase down the pirate transport and take your stuff back.

To do so, you would need the option of being able to do the same thing to other ships (clamp on and leach away cargo), maybe with a special tractor beam, docking clamps, and cargo transfer system. It could potentially operate in a somewhat similar fashion to docking in X-wing Alliance.

I don't see this so much an issue of playing tug of war over crates. These pirates latching onto you are likely to be damaging your hull/cargo space in order to get at your stuff. I would think flight dynamics would be crazy with another ship somehow attached to you, and I don't know how you'd realistically latch onto something like this without the target ship being seriously disabled. It would seem to me that you're screwing over the original cargo ship in order to take its loot, so there's no a good way for the target to then turn around and try to chase back his stuff. If there were any way to succeed at this, how did they manage to accomplish this in the first place?

scheherazade0xf said:
no doubt.
i made $ in privateer way faster as a pirate than as a merchant.

take off, loot till bay is full, land, sell, wrinse&repeat.

it was especially ez once you get a centurion. before that it was a bit of a chore.

You should log in if you have a Crius.net account.
 
@ Chris,
I agree, it would have to be something more serious than a tug-of-war. I would be interested in seeing people's refinement of my idea. How would we make piracy more realistic without actually having boarding parties?
 
Why would you need a boarding party at all? I thought Privateer worked quite nicely in that once the merchant ship exploded they could tractor in the loot. I, as others have mentioned, made my first fortune in Privateer by being a pirate. Sure there wasn't massive loads of cargo in the Merchant's holds but more often than not there would be two fat juicy Draymans without militia escort sitting right outside of Hector Mining Base for me to pillage. Pirates work on the same principle, blow merchant up and tractor in loot. Why would they want to risk boarding the merchant (i.e. where they could be ambushed and overwhelmed by probably a larger merchant crew). Merchant has two choices, drop their cargo, or be blown to smithereens. It's simple, it's a pirate's way. :)

Now I know someone is thinking, "Maybe the pirates want to capture the merchant's ship." That'd doesn't really make much sense. Pirates hunt in packs. Packs of Hunchbacks or Draymans are not really all that intimidating. Plus a stolen/captured merchant ship would be wanted all over the galaxy, as soon as the pirate landed on a civilized station/planet they'd be seized immediately.
 
One thing that I didn't like about the concept of "just blow it up" is that most likely cargo isn't in a armored box. Means if you blow up the ship you have to be lucky enough to get some cargo that isn't damaged enough to sell it.
What about shooting till the merchant surrenders and then tell him to drop his cargo? You could have subsystems like engines, weapons, shieldgen or other things that are targetable and when you get a freighters subsystem he will more likely surrender or something like that.
 
Well in X2, you could capture ships and sell them, it was about the best way to make money without doing LOTS of flying around. Plus you couldn't get pirate ships in your fleet any other way (at least not that I know of). The way it worked was once you got a ships damaged to a certain point the pilot would surrender rather then die and eject, leaving the ship for you to take. As I recall you could kill the ejected pilot also :D but that might hurt the chance that the next guy would eject.
 
There's also the matter of cargo types that can not realistically survive vacuum exposure (like pets and luxury food). You can't really capture that cargo to sell it since it would be ruined when dumped.
 
Pets for sure wouldn't survive the vacuum. Food on the other hand when packed into cooling containers could survive it.
Maybe you should have a way to select the cargo you want or even better...find out what cargo is onboard before attacking a ship that has for example cows onboard ^_^
 
I'm not suggesting that the Pioneer folks should elliminate the possiblity of blowing a ship up and taking what's left. I'm just thinking of what modern pirates (and they do exist) do. They board a ship, hold people at gun point (unless they are more violent), take what they can, and leave. It would be nice to have some sort of game element that paralleled that.
 
Speaking of blowing up ships. Would it also be possible to salvage wracks from other battles or your own and sell these parts? Surely you won't get much but maybe some bigger pirates could need the on or other armorplating that you found.
 
gevatter Lars said:
Pets for sure wouldn't survive the vacuum. Food on the other hand when packed into cooling containers could survive it.
Maybe you should have a way to select the cargo you want or even better...find out what cargo is onboard before attacking a ship that has for example cows onboard ^_^

Well that would be solved if you could buy a scanner capable of analyzing the cargo carried by a targeted ship.
 
Death said:
Although not an iron-clad protection, by not charging for the finished game they avoid quite possibly drawing the attention of EA's laywers. I don't know about the Pioneer team's financial resources, but I rather doubt they stack up to what EA could throw in the pot, should push come to shove.
If you pioneer developers invests your time to this great game project, why don't you make it as an independent and open source game?
Like Vega strike project. It's true it won't be the same like the recent plans in wc universe. But pioneer'd be free, no lawsuit threat from EA. Just remember what happened when blizzard threated the Freecraft developers.
And Vega strike has a good quality game engine for a space sim game like pioneer. They are porting it to the ogre3d advanced engine now.
 
Halman said:
Hehehe, where the hell do you ZOMG MAKES IT TEH OPEN SOURCES NOW people keep coming from?
Do you have any argument or just trolling?
The only reason for using closed source, if the pioneer is based Wing Commander Secret Ops programcode.
I pointed out the fact there are legal risks. Open source and independence from wc world has no legal risk. Developers artists working hard on this project. There is no too need much extra work to manifest it as a VS mod project, like Privateer Remake.
However Privateer remake project is also legal-risky project because of origin's (now EA) IP. A similar (cloned world) could be also fun, also important without legal risk.
 
Well they seem to be doing just fine making their own engine. I wouldn't mind seeing more open source, moddable engines around. Since I'm not much of a coder. But I don't think vegastrike is ready to do what they're doing with this project.

In any case, let em put out the demo first at least.

As for lawsuits, that's why it's free, it's not like they're making money, if anything it's a big cost to them. Most won't sue as long as it's a non-profit effort and it isn't and out right copy of their code or art. I think if anything we should sue EA for rights to the WingCommander games, heck I know I'd buy one if they were selling it but they aren't and most likely won't. So if they turn their nose up at people willing to pay them that their problem, fan projects shouldn't worry them since they don't seem to want anything to do with the game anyway. Of course I could be wrong maybe their hard at work on WingCommander 6. :rolleyes: But right now as far as I know you can only get a copy of the older WC games on Ebay and that's a limited resource, not everyone is going to want to sell their game, sooner or later there won't be any more around. I've seen game smaller game companies keep their old games up for sale even a decade after it game out. And that's what they should all do since the copyrights prevent you from touching it within your lifetime. How hard would it be to have a server up so people could pay 5-10 bucks to download an old game anyway?

I just wish it could work out like toys for bob and star contorl II, toys for bob owned all the content but not the name, after the game got 10 years old they released all the content and souce code to the fans who ported it to new OSes and people can now play that great game again.
 
Unregistered said:
Do you have any argument or just trolling?
I think that when somebody comes out of nowhere telling the members of a WC fan project that they should not make a WC fan project, he should be very careful throwing words like "trolling" around.

The only reason for using closed source, if the pioneer is based Wing Commander Secret Ops programcode.
Strictly speaking, yes, there are no other reasons for using closed-source for a non-commercial project... but then the open-source people show up, and demonstrate exactly why open-source is a bad idea.

See, open-source is a way of doing things, and it's a really great way of doing things. Unfortunately, however, it's also more than that - to a very large group of people out there (and that group almost certainly includes you - but if not, I apologise for the insult) it's an ideology. And a truly obnoxious ideology at that. We're talking about people who claim that it's great to make a half-assed, half-finished product because hey - it's open-source, so the user can finish it himself, and besides, closed-source is the way 3viL Microsoft makes its products!!!!

The closed-source option is a great way of asserting that you oppose this disgustingly stupid ideology. It's a wonderful way of stating that, no, damn it, you're not going to just make a half-assed engine, you're going to make a game, and it's gonna be finished, and it's gonna be polished, and it's gonna be something no open-source game can ever be - it's gonna be great.

(I'm not saying Pioneer is gonna be great, mind you - I hope it is, but it's still far too early to tell whether it'll even be finished, let alone great. But I sure have more confidence in it than I would if it were open-source)

However Privateer remake project is also legal-risky project because of origin's (now EA) IP. A similar (cloned world) could be also fun, also important without legal risk.
You know, most people who work on WC fan projects aren't interested in simply making a space-sim. They're interested in somehow continuing the Wing Commander universe. And as for the legal risks, they don't exist as long as you don't do anything stupid, like call your mod Wing Commander 7 or something.
 
It's sad open source gets a bad name, don't be fooled alot of open source apps do fall by the wayside but when done correctly they can be the best apps in their field of interest.

Alot just lack three main things, motivation, interest and organization, the last one being key to any successful project, open source or not.
 
I agree their are some opensource things that are actualy good. Still I think that Pioneer has a very good developer team that knows what they want and how to get it done.
Their is no need to be open-source.
 
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