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106

General Discussion / Re: Odyssey looks quite unique

« on: May 05, 2017, 05:04:25 AM »

Practical designs are going to be far more ugly, because they would have to deal with the problem of artificial gravity. Extended weightlessness is one of the biggest threats to human health in space travel--our bodies aren't designed for it.  Magical artificial gravity the way its portrayed in most sci-fi media isn't a thing, nor is it particularly plausible, so most practical designs are going to involve spinning drums or habs on rotating spokes. Any design with a top/down orientation is highly suspect.  But who wants to see a bunch of flying paintcans?

Eh...stable antimatter storage is a Domain-era technology.  I would be unsurprised if the Gate system was implementing Krasnikov tubes, which are as equally plausible as soft science fiction artificial gravity.

(Google is your friend.  Be prepared for sloppy sketches if you try to read the mathematical modeling from Arxiv.org, rather than the plain English summaries).  It's not logically impossible, but you certainly don't want to pay the energy cost yourself for maintaining the required exotic boundaries yourself.

107

General Discussion / Re: AWOL documentation for newbies

« on: May 04, 2017, 11:43:58 PM »

Yes, already saw that it had failed regression testing that way, and that the plan instead was to ship with a 64-bit Java 7 for .81.  The configuration has been left as default there (do not use system Java).

Without the sound, the RAM usage tops out at 900k during preloading and only goes up to 1.3MB when playing without incident.

108

General Discussion / Re: AWOL documentation for newbies

« on: May 04, 2017, 09:58:44 PM »

Right-clicking is inoperative on the system Starsector is installed on (6-year old hardware, 16GB RAM, JVM that ships with game crashes out 3 times in four from null pointers during preloading if sound is enabled at about 1.2GB...graphics are much better without sound.  I'm unsure whether spiking the memory limit would make things work.  Main Java is Java 8, but I haven't tried to use it; I'd prefer to increase the memory limit on the Java the game ships with.)

So, to confirm at a level of detail suitable for a tutorial:
* create CTRL-1
* left-click on target
* then: C 1 assigns as many in group 1 as required.

109

General Discussion / AWOL documentation for newbies

« on: May 04, 2017, 05:43:10 PM »

Most pressing newbie questions for me, no searchable or easily found documentation on either forum or wiki; this is for .8a:

• How to issue an order to a specific group as designated by CTRL-.... on the fleet screen; also, which orders make sense to do this with.    (Fortunately, I can guess how to issue most orders fine, but chaining them has no identifiable documentation.)  The eliminate order is particularly interesting.
• What player actions in the normal market do to it, qualitatively (stabilize, or destabilize).  I suspect, from the config files, that the military market is destabilizing much like the black market is. EDIT: finally saw the relevant blog post that explains the normal-market behavior and in-game display.

These are examples of what is blocking me from playing the midgame reasonably.

I'm playing the combat scenes as a slow-twitch game -- I am perfectly fine letting the AI do the actual combat, and just manually position for combat.

110

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.8a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: May 04, 2017, 04:57:04 PM »

Newbie speaking ....

Tutorial: Revising the presentation of the prompts per Rimworld examples is reasonable, they do need to be more effective at getting attention. I didn't have a problem with them when well-rested, but they were easy to overlook when tired.

The tutorial had the correct level of detail: it was slightly pushy (which is good), forced me to use all key game mechanics that did not have a steep learning curve (and yes the save command is a key mechanic, newbies should not try playing ironman), but was not a personal insult to experience.