Fractal Softworks Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

News:

Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

Messages - BringerofBabies

Pages: [1] 2 3 ... 7
1
Blog Posts / Re: Personal Contacts
« on: August 13, 2020, 06:02:57 PM »
Do you get contacts at your own colonies?  Say, my first colony developed into a nice size 6+ world that is as big as a major faction's capital world.  Player can get bar missions from his own worlds.

You might get underworld contacts there, but not player-faction contacts. Those would be too weird - the default interaction writing doesn't work, etc.

It could be interesting if sometimes you could find other faction contacts on your worlds - a Tri-Tachyon trader who stays on your world to manage trade routes, or a Hegemony diplomat/military attaché, for example. Holding out for such a contact would be inefficient for a player who wants to improve their standing with a specific faction, but a lucky player could take advantage of those contacts to streamline their core world visits. Those contacts could also have a lower maximum importance, too - after all, if they were really that important why have they been sent to someone else's planet instead of staying at their organization's HQ?

2
Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] Player Station Construction (v3.1.1)
« on: March 14, 2020, 12:46:14 PM »
Negative growth can't reduce the size of a colony, so it doesn't particularly matter. Population progress towards the next size will get down to 0% and then stop.

3
They certainly could be tags. In that case the general categories would solely be those three you mentioned, as they are the mod flags supported by Starsector, and the categories wouldn't be very useful for sorting/searching by users but just as a warning/info tidbit displayed with the mod info.

4
For standard mods, I'd say that major categories are Ship Packs (just adds ships); Factions; Portrait Packs; difficulty changes like Ruthless Sector, Second Wave Options, etc; sector generation changes like Unknown Skies, Adjusted Sector, etc; and then you have a variety of mods that add more things to do like Secrets of the Frontier, terraforming, station building, gate building/reactivation, new industries. The mod index classifies Nexerelin and Varya's Sector as Megamods because they do so many things - I'd like a category name that gives a more specific description than that, but I can't think of one.

5
Suggestions / Re: Escort Coordination: Rule for Small Ship PPT
« on: February 27, 2020, 05:45:12 AM »
Forcing fighters of escorting carriers into Support functions would also prevent any player confusion of what sort of escort they get when they assign a carrier to escort - just the carrier escorts while fighters have fun elsewhere vs. an escort with the full firepower of the fighter wings.

There have often been requests for some sort of "wolf pack" order, where ships attempt to fight together without necessarily escorting or defending each other. Changing the escort behavior to have the discussed effects would be a good time to add such a wolf pack order, so that frigates could stick with other ships while acting aggressively and PPT ticking down, and carriers could be assigned to stay near other vessels while their fighters are not kept leashed.

6
Suggestions / Re: Sensor Mechanics
« on: February 19, 2020, 10:37:54 AM »
And then phase ships might do the opposite to sensor profile.

That sounds like a good tie in to the requested phase logistics ship(s)!

7
Specifically, the survey data items are not unique, they have no data tying them to a specific planet. As such, Nexerelin is unable to implement the colonizing such that player surveyed & sold planets are ripe targets, because there is no information about which planets you have sold data for and which you have kept for yourself after surveying.

8
I'd like to suggest something:

When granting autonomy to a colony, having the option to leave the admin you set in, be in charge of that colony and taken away from your admin pool and out of your direct control. I'm asking this because, more often than not, once i inevitably reach the point where i can't handle all the worlds on my own and grant autonomy to some of them, they will be left with admins with 0 skills (unless they are alphas, but in this playthrough i decided to go against that) and this hurts the colony more than it should and a lot of times i would prefer to just abandon one of my admins to have it be in charge of that autonomous colony just so it doesn't take a big hit from lack of skills.
Hmm that's an idea; I'll think about it.
(Things to consider: What happens if you revoke autonomy later; whether this interacts weirdly with admin cap; maybe some other stuff)

Would it be possible to force that admin to be available for hiring at the no-longer-autonomous colony?

9
Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] Boggled's Terraforming Mod (v3.0.4)
« on: February 02, 2020, 11:22:59 AM »
I think the biggest difference between the Starsector style and the examples I linked (including the tool generated ones) is that the Starsector terran planets have big, sharply detailed topographical style ridges/mountains. I think that style is probably not strictly accurate to what one would see from orbit, but more implying what a normal map would do without actually implementing normal maps. The generation tool allows for decal type things (craters/canyons, etc) but I don't think that it would handle the massive mountain ranges well. It probably would do fine for the non-habitable planets that we don't care about though.

10
Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] Boggled's Terraforming Mod (v3.0.4)
« on: January 30, 2020, 05:58:16 PM »
What type of textures are used for planets? If it is a standard texture wrapped around a sphere, then perhaps these might be of use (all some form of Creative Commons license):
https://opengameart.org/content/planets-terran
https://opengameart.org/content/terraformed-mars-map
https://opengameart.org/content/planetary-textures-2048x1024
https://opengameart.org/content/far-colony-epsilon-eridani-planets-4k-surface-maps-complete-and-fixed
https://opengameart.org/content/10-terrestrial-planet-wrapping-textures

Additionally, that uploader of that last one says that they made the textures using their free tool: http://www.texturesforplanets.com/

11
Suggestions / Re: Exploration notes
« on: January 28, 2020, 06:41:55 AM »
The next version of the game will have better cleanup of exploration intel, including a "delete item" option.

12
Nexerelin lets you do so, in addition to making the other factions eventually send their fleets after pirates as well.

13
Discussions / Re: Find out how to boost your sales by 400%!!!
« on: January 17, 2020, 01:46:10 PM »
I've never developed a game with one (or any game larger than tiny learning projects), so I don't know how much extra dev effort is required to make them happen.

Not that I've ever made one, but my understanding is that it is a decent amount of work to set up, although depending on your build pipeline it may be possible to set it up once (per game) and produce a demo from the current state of the game at any time.
Generally you want your demo to be a restricted slice of the game (possibly the very beginning of it), so you would need to:
1) Code in the prevention of escaping the restricted slice (cut off after time, can't leave an area, progress past a story event).
2) Removal of assets not in the demo slice. This includes both art/audio, but also scripting/code if possible. You want to make sure that enterprising hackers can't discover what flag/bits needs to be flipped to enable your entire game just from the demo, in addition to just reducing download size.

In addition to the basic mechanics of setting up your demo, you would also need to consider what would make the best demo for your game, and maybe even have to build demo specific content that won't show up in the main game, because you need to both introduce players to the game and give them an idea of the main gameplay. The demo for Brutal Legend did a good job introducing players to the game, as it was just the beginning of the game/tutorial, but did a poor job of showing off what the player would be doing for the rest of the game because it didn't show even an inkling of the true strategy game. Releasing a bad demo could even reduce sales of a good game (at least early on when the return on investment tends to be highest).

14
Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] Stop Gap Measure - Ships for Vanilla
« on: January 17, 2020, 01:31:54 PM »
Apotheosis would have the benefits of adjacency and also being a related term, but there are a ton of fun words to mean "the highest point" or "the best".

That said, refresh my memory one what the SWP Zenith is? I play with both (when I last had time to play, that is), but only remember the Apogee based Zenith.

15
Discussions / Re: Need suggestions for science fi and fantasy AUDIO books
« on: January 11, 2020, 06:35:29 PM »
Fantasy recommendation:

It's not particularly "adult", but not also specifically for kids or anything (link for discussion of adult content and appropriateness thereof), but the Dragonriders of Pern (by Anne McCaffrey and children) series has been around for a while.

It obviously has dragons, which are sentient and bond with their riders from hatching. The books start out fairly straight fantasy, but as the (massive - started publishing in 1968, most recent entry by original author's daughter was 2018) series gains more entries, some of them dig into the history of the setting where it gains more soft sci-fi elements (no starship battles or anything though). For your purposes, I recall the original books not having too much politics and not an overwhelming cast of protagonists, with action/adventure mostly being about surviving and exploring their world - the series isn't about war. It's been a long time since I read these and I only read the earlier ones, so I could be somewhat mistaken in the ratio of action/politics, but that is what I can recall.

To get into it, I'd go with either the original trilogy: Dragonflight/Dragonquest/The White Dragon, or the Harper Hall trilogy: Dragonhall/Dragonsinger/Dragondrums. Apparently The White Dragon incorporates some of the characters in the Harper Hall trilogy, and the author recommended that people read those three before The White Dragon, but I don't think that sticking with one trilogy would make things too confusing.

If you do like those, the later books are a mixture of direct sequels to each other and standalone novels, and tend to bounce around in the timeline of the setting - the series isn't a single long tale to be read in one specific order only.

Sci-fi "recommendation":

The Honor Harrington (by David Weber) series is 14 novels, with additional series/anthologies in the "Honorverse" by Weber and other others. The series is about an officer who goes from commanding one small starship (a frigate or something) to an admiral. In high school I tried to pick this up, probably somewhere in the middle of the series and got through about one and a quarter books before getting bored due to what I described at the time as "too much politics" (enjoyed the first one I read).
In my adulthood I have since read and enjoyed GoT, and also have read a (possibly abridged) graphic novel of the first Honor Harrington book and found it to have plenty of action/adventure (spending sufficient time on battle specifics) and not much politics. As a result, I am not sure you'd actually like this but it may be worth finding out more information on. I'd probably tolerate it a lot more now than I did back in high school myself.

Addendum:
Should you decide that dragons aren't actually all that important, I can recommend a handful of things that are definitely adult due to the violence/matter of fact brutality in the setting, have lots of well explained action, and not much politics (protagonists are small players in a big world, so politics is something that largely happens to them, not something they take part in).

Pages: [1] 2 3 ... 7