The 0.52.1a release is now available. It’s a point release and doesn’t contain any significant new features, but it does have a number of important bug fixes, some enhancements to the modding API, and a few usability improvements.
The full patch notes are here.
This version is save-compatible.
You can download it using the buttons below. You’ll have to reinstall the game, but shouldn’t need to enter the activation code again.
It’s been a while since the last blog update – truth be told, I’ve been too focused on development and didn’t realize it’s been a whole month. (Yes, what I just said is the moral equivalent of when, at a job interview, the candidate is asked what their greatest weakness is – and they reply that sometimes, they work too hard or care too much). My apologies for pulling that on you.
If you’re interested in the details of all the changes that have been made since the last release, this thread has most of them, except for the stuff added in the last week or so. On a high level, the big features and improvements are:
Right now, I’m working on the UI (in particular, making improvements to the trade and refit screens). After that’s wrapped up, we’ll take a couple of days to playtest, and depending on how it goes, put the 0.52a release out.
Achievements
The subjects of achievements came up on the forums the other day. Most games these days seem to have them, so will Starfarer?
Achievements are inherently immersion breakers – they remind the player that they’re playing a game. This cheapens the feeling of reward obtained from actual in-game accomplishments by taking away from the player’s emotional investment in the game.
Achievements also provide an external set of motivations to the player. Indeed, that’s the point – increase the longevity of the game by tacking on a set of things to do, on top of the game proper. But the downside is that this can prompt the player to play in a way that’s not fun – and might otherwise be discouraged by the game’s design. A good example is a “kill X number of thing Y” achievement – this promotes grinding (where the game itself might not), and isn’t an actual achievement in any but the gaming-related sense of the word.
Still, achievements do trigger a feeling of reward.
I think that they’re unequivocally a good thing for a game that doesn’t care about immersing the player – Team Fortress 2 or Super Meat Boy come to mind as examples of games not negatively affected by them. Except for those TF2 servers dedicated to unlocks. Or when your teammates act … sub-optimally … because they’re focused on unlocking something rather than playing effectively. So, scratch that whole “not affected negatively” thing, but I’m sure they’re still beneficial overall. The proof is in Valve actually doing it – it’s hard to argue with the results.
On the other hand, if a game cares about keeping the player immersed (as Starfarer ultimately does), then achievements are something to be careful with. Even if they turn out to be a good thing for a game overall, there is a cost involved.
I’d love to hear what you guys think!
If you’ve been playing Starfarer, you know that there’s no penalty to being over capacity in any of the various stats such as fuel or cargo space. Clearly, that has to change at some point.
The question is, how to keep the player within the set limits?
A straightforward approach would be to treat the limits as hard limits, and disallow the player from being over them at any time. For a straightforward approach, though, it’s not actually very straightforward. Let’s say there’s a cargo limit, and the player loses a ship. What happens now that their cargo is over the limit? Remember, cargo isn’t assigned to a specific ship, but handled as a total fleet-wide capacity. We could automatically dump some cargo at random – but that really hurts (bye-bye <important item>, which there’s no way to safeguard). We could add new mechanics to assign certain items to certain ships – but now we’re adding even more mechanics to make the new mechanics we’re adding “work”, and that’s not a good sign.
We could instead present the player with a choice of what to get rid of any time they’re over capacity. The trouble is, that could be awfully harsh too. Suppose they’ve got a few ships that are just barely within their fleet points limit. Then they lose an officer that was providing a fleet points bonus – and now must choose which ship to get rid of, too. It’s also awkward to keep presenting the player with dialogs that demand attention and can’t simply be dismissed.
Besides, it would make sense that you could go over limits. An external cargo container attached to the hull with a magnetic grapple. A jury-rigged containment field to convert a cargo hold into a fuel cell. An improvised life support system to increase the personnel capacity of a ship. All these sound like they’d require some supplies to put together and maintain, but well within the capabilities of a well-trained crew. Even so, these probably wouldn’t be very reliable, would they?
Makeshift Capacity & Accidents
There are five limits each fleet needs to stay within:
You can go up to 50% over each limit without any penalty, except for an additional supply cost – to build improvised containers, account for unexpected logistical requirements, perform emergency maintenance on all the jury-rigged systems, and other such.
The revised fleet information display, with a tooltip containing a detailed logistics report
That’s a lot of information on the tooltip, isn’t it? What really matters is the simplified panel on the right, though – all you need to worry about is keeping the accident risk down, and making sure you’ve got enough supplies to maintain the extra capacity. The tooltip is there if you’re interested in understanding exactly what’s going on, but it’s not something you need to look at often.
Now, on to accidents – if you run out of supplies, or go more than 50% over any capacity, you run the risk of having a serious problem.
As best I can tell, a cargo crate containing weapons slammed into an improvised habitat. Ouch.
The consequences of an accident depend on its cause, but will always aim to bring your fleet closer to its limits. For example, a personnel-related accident will cause a loss of crew and marines – though it may also cause some collateral damage to cargo or fuel, especially if those are over capacity as well.
The consequences can be very harsh – up to the total loss of a ship – but accidents are also something you shouldn’t be seeing on a regular basis. They’re there for when you’ve made a mistake (didn’t carry enough supplies to support your fleet, say), or for when you’ve made a gamble and lost (can I tow this extra loot to the station to sell?).
Of course, this applies to AI-controlled fleets as well – so later on, you’ll be able to inflict grievous losses on the enemy simply by disrupting their supply chain. Freighters also become much more important – a particularly large fleet needs lots of supplies to stay in the field – and to haul off all the salvaged goods.
As most of you probably know, Starfarer was featured by TotalBiscuit in his WTF is…? series a couple of days ago. In fact, chances are that if you’re reading this, you came here because of that video.
A couple of things: one, this is really, really awesome. I can’t express how happy and excited I am that Starfarer is reaching a lots of new players. It means a more active community, more player feedback, and of course, more financial resources to support ongoing development. Two, it also means that our web server is struggling mightily with the herculean task of handling all this traffic. I’m looking into ways of improving its performance, so hopefully we can do something about it in the near future.
In fact, it looks like it’s doing a bit better now – but I can’t tell if it’s because traffic has dropped off a bit, or because the configuration changes I made are helping. Ah, the vagaries of trying to optimize a live server.
Given that New Year’s is coming up, it’s only appropriate to talk about how you acquire shiny new stuff in Starfarer. Oh, wait… Christmas is the “presents” holiday, New Year’s is the “get drunk” one. Never mind! But just the same, that’s what I want to talk about. Shinies, not getting drunk.
… now that my feeble attempts at humor are over and done with, let’s continue.
Battles are a key way to progress through the game. They’re not the only way – you’ll be able to build up an economic power base, for example – but that’s not what this post is about. Battles offer an opportunity to get stuff for free, even if you don’t fancy yourself a pirate, but something slightly more honorable-sounding. The flip side is you can easily lose some hard-earned assets, too – ships, crews, even cargo if the outcome is bad enough.
What I’d like to do is outline the mechanics as they stand, talk a bit about the motivations for doing it this way, and sprinkle in a couple of screenshots. For the sake of this discussion, let’s assume the player won the battle. If they lost, things happen slightly differently, but it’s more or less a mirror image.
Casualties, Boarding, and Repairs
If you’ve played the combat portion of the game, you already know that instead of simply blowing up when hull integrity reaches 0, ships become floating, disabled hulks. There’s a small chance for each of these to be repaired after battle (most likely, player skills will allow you to raise that chance).
So a friendly ship can emerge from battle in the following ways:
The options for enemy ships are slightly different. Retreating ships have a chance to be captured after battle, and the player has a choice between boarding and scrapping these. Disabled ships that can potentially be repaired can also be boarded or scrapped, while ones beyond repair are scrapped automatically.
Also, if a ship takes hull (not armor) damage, then there’s a good chance that some crew will be killed, in rough proportion to how much damage the ship actually took. It’s possible to win a battle and end up losing enough crew that you can’t meet the skeleton crew requirements to deploy most of your ships – so it’s a good idea to carry enough extra crew for these kinds of emergencies. Outside of combat, it’s assumed that automated systems let you get by well enough to navigate the ships, so even extensive crew losses won’t stop you from being able to move around the Sector.
The Odyssey has taken some damage, but the pirate fleet has been eliminated as a combat threat
