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Author Topic: Vacuum - Build a Stellar Empire. (0.62a ALPHA build 34) (TC Mod)  (Read 418459 times)

ciago92

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Re: Vacuum - Build a Stellar Empire. (0.62a ALPHA build 16) (TC Mod)
« Reply #585 on: March 05, 2014, 01:42:05 PM »

The fleets not showing is a caused by a feature that allows the game to save ram by randomly generating fleets when you encounter them insead of storing them.
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Bobakanoosh

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Re: Vacuum - Build a Stellar Empire. (0.62a ALPHA build 16) (TC Mod)
« Reply #586 on: March 05, 2014, 01:48:43 PM »

Yes I'm aware of that, but I've already made the 1024m adjustment in vmparams and my rig has 16 GB of RAM. What am I missing here?
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ciago92

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Re: Vacuum - Build a Stellar Empire. (0.62a ALPHA build 16) (TC Mod)
« Reply #587 on: March 05, 2014, 01:58:09 PM »

It's not something that will change when you increase ram, it's something Xenoargh put in no matter what your ram level is. Honestly, I didn't even know it was ram based, I thought it was supposed to be like sensor cloaking or something lol
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xenoargh

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Re: Vacuum - Build a Stellar Empire. (0.62a ALPHA build 16) (TC Mod)
« Reply #588 on: March 05, 2014, 02:50:52 PM »

It's not altogether about RAM, it's by design.

I felt that being able to see the contents of fleets before engaging them was a bit of a cheat and a crutch; IRL, you'd expect fleets to be using active and passive means to prevent you from knowing how many members they have.  Since Vanilla doesn't have any way to simulate sensors on the strategic map, it seemed like the best way to handle it.

It also reduced RAM use and shrinks savegames (which is usually where RAM problems creep up) by quite a bit, because they're as close to "empty" objects as a fleet can get.
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Bobakanoosh

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Re: Vacuum - Build a Stellar Empire. (0.62a ALPHA build 16) (TC Mod)
« Reply #589 on: March 05, 2014, 04:50:39 PM »

oooohhhh! i see now, okay. Here I am thinking it was a problem, lol. Thanks for the clarification.
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xenoargh

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Re: Vacuum - Build a Stellar Empire. (0.62a ALPHA build 16) (TC Mod)
« Reply #590 on: March 06, 2014, 12:53:20 PM »

OK, I think Hegemony's fighter balance is squared away.  Meet the Liberator heavy bomber (based loosely on a Gladius mashup by HELMUT, who kindly released it in the Spiral Arms thread):


This is a heavy bomber, in the classic sense; it has a pair of Assault Cannons, two bomb racks and a Dual LMG on a dorsal turret.  A three-pack has the firepower of a Cruiser when it does a solid bombing run.  They finally give Hegemony an answer to nuke-spam enemies and probably put them over the top vs. Glaug.

So that leaves the Pirates, who need help desperately, the Independents, who should be really fierce, fighter-wise, but have some big issues, and the Punk Junkers, who just don't have much up their sleeve (although I've found that even rolling with them stock, I can use their Boarding Shuttles to great effect, since their carriers are also their heaviest ships, which makes them really interesting).
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xenoargh

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Re: Vacuum - Build a Stellar Empire. (0.62a ALPHA build 16) (TC Mod)
« Reply #591 on: March 08, 2014, 01:35:27 PM »

1.  The Hegemony can beat the Glaug, stock, with the appropriate use of fighters and high-end ships.  Just barely, but that's an interesting improvement.  It may mean I can even un-nerf the Glaug a bit; they got nerfed so hard it wasn't even funny to get them to this point ::)

2.  I think I've figured out exactly what separates the factions that are functional from the ones that are basically broken. 

It's largely about whether the faction has true Strike craft, i.e. something heavy enough to get in and kill tough stuff, and a Fighter type that can handle other Fighters. 

The Independents, for example, handle other fighters fairly well, but generally choke on the Glaug, because they have nothing that will kill their ships, ever.


Also, got a basic, no-frills Drone AI written and the Repair Beam is now a Thing.
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xenoargh

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Re: Vacuum - Build a Stellar Empire. (0.62a ALPHA build 16) (TC Mod)
« Reply #592 on: March 10, 2014, 05:49:23 PM »

Drone AI is a pain in the arse and Drones are just plain weird. 

Hats off to Alex; this is actually harder to write than a standard ship AI in many ways.

Still working on the concepts; right now, I have Drone AI that can use the Deploy, Attack and Recall states and will land back on the mother-ship.  It'll attack enemy ships properly, but it won't do the orbiting behaviors just yet. 

Not quite sure if I want to clone the whole system entire; that seems like it'll get really unwieldy and unfriendly performance-wise, certainly no better than what we have now (Drones are, indeed, a performance issue) and certain variables are going to be hard to get; I don't know if the Drones get an integer that tells them which element of a Drone array they are, or whether the mothership gets the number of elements and then goes through the list to assign the Drones their locations in a strict list order.  I'm kind of leaning towards a system where I build the orbiting behaviors and then perhaps build an example of a rigid-array type approach; I've already set it up to use the min/max limits for attacking nearby things.

Anyhow, since it's basically functional to the point where AIs use it reasonably well, I'll probably do some cleanup on it, try to make a simple clone of it for a Repair Drone so that that is a functional thing and do a little more rebal on the fighter stuff before we get to another official release.  Or maybe I should just finish up the fighter-rebal and get a Repair type of fighter working as a demo and then put out a release- that would be faster.  IDK, I don't see any really pressing bugs other than the performance stuff that needs me to hurry this one out so I'm kind of inclined to keep hacking on it a while longer :)
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xenoargh

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Re: Vacuum - Build a Stellar Empire. (0.62a ALPHA build 16) (TC Mod)
« Reply #593 on: March 17, 2014, 01:31:16 AM »

Drone AI works about as well as I need it to, now.

Still working on repair-related Stuff and some code cleanup / documentation.  RL has been kind of a busy mess lately :)
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xenoargh

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Re: Vacuum - Build a Stellar Empire. (0.62a ALPHA build 16) (TC Mod)
« Reply #594 on: March 18, 2014, 12:46:02 PM »

Meet Exigency's newest ship, the cluster-bomber Naxos:



Oh, and... apparently Exigency wasn't playable in Random Battle.  Fixed. 

They're not doing well vs. practically anybody right now; I think they got nerfed too much due to player comments about their "invincible" Destroyer, which is not terribly invincible.  Tri-Tach eats these guys for breakfast atm; nuke-spam > armor and their fairly sickly regen, and they just don't have the anti-missile stuff to deal.  This will get addressed.

Irithia now has four decks, since it's the only carrier they have; that keeps them in the fighter battles a lot better.
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Ranakastrasz

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Re: Vacuum - Build a Stellar Empire. (0.62a ALPHA build 16) (TC Mod)
« Reply #595 on: March 18, 2014, 02:04:32 PM »

Am currently entirely incapable of getting started. I repeatedly get slaughtered by asteroid fleets, and cannot get enough resources to afford any extra ships to avoid that.
In most cases, you die in seconds without any time to react, with a handful of exceptions.

I was able to win a handful of fights, enough to level up once, while I still had a starter fleet of a few ships. Then, I hit an asteroid fight which killed off all my ships, and the new ship was still unable to win any fights.

I am unable to mine enough Germanium to accomplish anything, mainly due to my keep losing any money I might have gathered, or any ships. Unlike vanilla, there are also no mini-fleets available for me to fight which do not slaughter me as well.

The main issue is that unless, presumably, you are of a far higher class, or have the boom-ship, you are entirely unable to avoid being surrounded, overloaded, and obliterated in seconds by multiple frigates and fighters, both of which are faster than you are.

I might be able to take on one, or maybe 2, but 3 is effectively impossible, and the sniper-frigates are impossible for me to counter. They overload your shield from way out of your range, even with significant shield boosting mods. While they might be killable solo (depending on whether or not your hull can take it while you shield-vent cycle and close the distance) if there is any other ships, it kills you.

Also, last time I tried to retreat, which failed miserably.

Any ideas?

Edit:
Managed to get a ship able to actually close and kill things, and have enough ships that I haven't lost this game yet. Brawler class + Melter on standard build. Seems to obliterate anything it hits, and burn drive lets you close in. Also seems to be effected by the +300 range beam booster.
~~~
Navigation skill seems to have either a  bugged tooltip or data. 1/1/2, 1/1/2, then 2/2/2. Actually could be intended, and level zero displays values for level 1, but unsure.
Some ships still lack varieties with full loadouts, such as the Phalanx class.
« Last Edit: March 18, 2014, 02:23:22 PM by Ranakastrasz »
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xenoargh

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Re: Vacuum - Build a Stellar Empire. (0.62a ALPHA build 16) (TC Mod)
« Reply #596 on: March 18, 2014, 05:05:33 PM »

Well, I guess I could make the starting fleets even more powerful or give people a couple more free levels-worth of skill points at the start; give people an "easy mode", so to speak.  I already made it easier by giving people a "helper" frigate, just like Vanilla ended up doing; I don't have any objections to making "easy start" mode where you get more skill points / money / ships.  I'll see about getting that done for the next build once the fighter rebalance project and Repair stuff is a real thing.
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Jazwana

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Re: Vacuum - Build a Stellar Empire. (0.62a ALPHA build 16) (TC Mod)
« Reply #597 on: March 19, 2014, 09:36:43 AM »

Ran into a out of memory crash when jumping into a system outside corvus  - with the usual fixes to vmparams and 64-bit version java already applied.

Spoiler

Code
2069510 [Thread-5] DEBUG com.fs.graphics.TextureLoader  - Loading image graphics/backgrounds/background5.jpg into existing tex id 327
2069933 [Thread-5] ERROR com.fs.starfarer.combat.O0OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO  - java.lang.OutOfMemoryError
java.lang.OutOfMemoryError
at sun.misc.Unsafe.allocateMemory(Native Method)
at java.nio.DirectByteBuffer.<init>(Unknown Source)
at java.nio.ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(Unknown Source)
at org.lwjgl.BufferUtils.createByteBuffer(BufferUtils.java:60)
at com.fs.graphics.TextureLoader.o00000(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.graphics.TextureLoader.o00000(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.graphics.TextureLoader.o00000(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.util.ReplaceableSprite.class.int(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.BackgroundAndStars.ØO0000(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.BaseLocation.renderBG(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.CampaignEngine.renderBG(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.A.ØØ0000(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.B.ØÓÒ000(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.oOOO.A.Ò00000(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.combat.O0OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.o00000(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.StarfarerLauncher$2.run(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

[close]
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xenoargh

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Re: Vacuum - Build a Stellar Empire. (0.62a ALPHA build 16) (TC Mod)
« Reply #598 on: March 19, 2014, 11:03:57 AM »

Hmm. 

How long had your game been running?

Did you have any menus open or anything at the time?

Did it happen again, when you reloaded?

At a guess, I'm thinking it's an engine-side memory leak;  I'll have to report it to Alex and see if he has an idea what's up.
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Peter1x9

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Re: Vacuum - Build a Stellar Empire. (0.62a ALPHA build 16) (TC Mod)
« Reply #599 on: March 19, 2014, 11:35:24 AM »

Am currently entirely incapable of getting started. I repeatedly get slaughtered by asteroid fleets, and cannot get enough resources to afford any extra ships to avoid that.
In most cases, you die in seconds without any time to react, with a handful of exceptions.

I was able to win a handful of fights, enough to level up once, while I still had a starter fleet of a few ships. Then, I hit an asteroid fight which killed off all my ships, and the new ship was still unable to win any fights.

I am unable to mine enough Germanium to accomplish anything, mainly due to my keep losing any money I might have gathered, or any ships. Unlike vanilla, there are also no mini-fleets available for me to fight which do not slaughter me as well.

I ran into the same problem when I tried this mod last year, and quickly lost interest.  Mining asteroids just seemed suicidal at the start of a new game.  Huge pirate armadas would camp almost every one of them.  And without smaller fleets to take on, there was no realistic way to make money.

This mod (and Starsector to a lesser extent) could really use some kind of difficulty scaling system.  Alex put more small pirate fleets in the default game to make starting out easier, but it is still a bit hard at the beginning.  However, once I do level up the Starsector campaign goes from tough to very easy.  

One change that might help with asteroid mining would be to scale the pirate encounter chance and pirate encounter fleet size with the player's fleet.  After all, a small fleet without any capital ships should be harder to detect than a large fleet.
« Last Edit: March 19, 2014, 11:57:05 AM by Peter1x9 »
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