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Topics - Schwartz

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1
Discussions / Paragon in Stardeus
« on: October 12, 2022, 11:12:46 PM »
An interesting Rimworld-like take on Spaceship management.
Browsing through some screenshots I found a very familiar looking ship.

Check the trailer at 0:30.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXQdI8wAV58

2
Discussions / Space Haven anyone?
« on: August 19, 2022, 06:04:49 AM »
The crossover of FTL, Rimworld and X-Com hits me right in the feelgoods. We're used to being patient here so I think we can appreciate that it's a small project that is taking years to complete. People said gameplay was a little thin, but it's recently got an update and that's the only version I know. I'm having a blast with it.

You hop from system to system, vacuum up goodies, fight pirates, trade things with friendlies, trade people with slavers, do prisoner exchanges, get boarded and board others, contend with disasters that are honestly just so fun to deal with. It's like a submarine sim that way. How do you deal with fire, which vents do you shut off and who gets locked in where? Who's expendable and whose spacesuit is close to running out of O²? There's also a research tree, implants, nutrition, space sickness, creepy aliens etc.

If I had to point at one thing that needs improvement, it's the ship-to-ship combat. It's kinda like FTL except you just wear down health bars. Hopefully before the enemy jumps out.

Four dead pirate ships being looted, and a couple of derelicts. Dead does not mean there aren't people with spacesuits still in there.

Gave it an Enforcer paintjob... kinda reminded me of it.

3
Bug Reports & Support / Importing Save 95a->95.1a, Officer skill bugs
« on: April 27, 2022, 10:00:25 PM »
Small bug: Importing a save from 0.95a RC15 to 0.95.1a RC6 gives me an officer who is level 6 yet only has 5 skills, and another officer who retained "Reliability Engineering" as its old 95a yellow skill version.

I can send you the save and mod package to make it loadable. This should be a vanilla bug as it's just some QoL mods.

4
Suggestions / AI Suggestion: Stay on Target!
« on: July 01, 2021, 06:14:09 AM »
I had a very frustrating combat encounter the other day where I sent a 2xGrav 1xHIL Sunder (Steady officer, AI mode) in to deal with 3 automated frigates (the shieldless kind) and assumed everything would be gravy.

I then watched in horror as the Sunder could not decide on a target to pick long enough for the 3 frigates to close into hugging range and proceed to spike the Sunder's shields and nibble at its armor with PD weapons from 3 sides. The Sunder then began to turn to and fro slowly(!), again not able to decide who to actually engage when a decision would have erased a frigate within seconds and improved its own flux troubles and its odds immediately.

Basically this highlighted one of the blind spots of the AI. It shouldn't slowly turn and squirm when surrounded while having overwhelmingly powerful weaponry vs. shieldless enemies. That's just a silly combination of things to happen.

I don't know how you would go about implementing this, but some awareness of the efficiency of its weapons vs. chosen enemies that inspired a bit of "dogged determination" to stay on target and kill it. That would be nice. And it can all be done in maths, not much guesswork required.

5
Bug Reports & Support / Diagnosis of AMD OpenGL lag
« on: April 29, 2020, 12:20:32 AM »
I've recently been using a combination of mods that made the AMD issue painfully obvious, and for a pretty specific case. Maybe this helps to troubleshoot it or to find settings and tweaks to make the game playable for us AMD folks.

When a lot of fighters are in combat and the Dassault-Mikoyan Normandy carrier ship system is enabled, FPS suddenly tanks into the single digits like so. Observe twice the FPS once the glows disappear. This happens whether fighters are on-screen or off-screen. I'm thinking it has something to do with drawing glow on many items. Not the complexity of it but simply adding up the numbers. The card can handle expensive stuff like GraphicsLib shader ripples just fine - I generally play with GraphicsLib loaded but shaders off. This is not a mod issue. These mods just showcase it.

Is there a way to disable special effects, or even any kind of lighting, on fighters and missiles in vanilla? If not, that would be a useful setting to have to fix AMD gripes in lieu of a better driver that likely will never come.

6
I don't know if this is a BRDY issue or if it happens in vanilla SS.



[attachment deleted by admin]

7
General Discussion / Ways to alter pirate metagame?
« on: April 21, 2020, 07:16:16 PM »
It's been mentioned before that late-game turns into a big pirate raid fleet grind if you have any aspirations of keeping the core worlds from decivilizing. Pirates just keep churning out these massive fleets, which are tied at least in part to the incidence of pirate bases as their staging ground. And currently, as the player squashes a base, a new one will pop up pretty much right away.

The # of these bases to exist can be set in the config.

"minPirateBases":2,
"maxPirateBases":3,


This is the default and it pertains to pirate bases that threaten NPCs. I always set the minimum to 1, but don't really notice a difference. Is this the right approach? Are there better measures to take? I don't want to erase the pirate threat entirely, but them coming around less often and meeting more of an even match with the faction defense fleets would be a start.

So I'm keeping this question broad. It could be solved through config changes, modding or even just particular playstyle tricks if you've got any.

8
Sometimes when NPC ships are phased or come out of phase, they don't show their usual pink glow but a white one. I have traced this most of the time, I think, to phase GFX happening (far) offscreen which come into view as the player moves the camera or switches focus.

It could also be a driver / GPU quirk but I only have this R9 270X to test.


9
As the title says. This is an old issue that I was hoping would disappear as this really kills fun for me. SS is very touchy with saving and you're basically not allowed to switch windows (if you are playing windowed fullscreen), do any clicks or otherwise touch anything while it saves. When a CTD happens, the resulting save may be okay, or it may be corrupt.

10
Bug Reports & Support / [0.9.1a-RC8] Planet backdrop freezing
« on: June 04, 2019, 10:45:53 AM »
I noticed checking colony info at Chicomoztoc (not trading, they hate me..) that the planet stopped spinning on some screens and continued to spin only on intel & fleet screens. The clouds continued to animate, and for the brief transition period between screens, the spinning would resume.

11
Bug Reports & Support / [0.9.1a-RC8] Minor bug with CR & storage
« on: June 02, 2019, 02:18:57 AM »
Some of the ships stored in my colony show 0% CR 'stored'. The tooltip suggest these ships are mothballed. When I hover on the question mark however, the CR increases to 85% or 100%. When I hover over it again, the CR decreases to 50%.

Taking the ships out of storage at either point, I'm pretty sure it will set the CR to 100%, 85% and 50% respectively. Taking them out without hovering on the question mark defaults to the first value.

This doesn't account for all ships. It may have something to do with them sitting in storage since RC6. Anyway, being able to manipulate CR just by moving the mouse is clearly not supposed to happen.

Edit: Nope, happens with production ships as well. They start at 0% CR and raise to 50% when I mouse over the question mark. At least the number stays the same.

12
Suggestions / AI use of missiles & torpedos vs. phase
« on: May 27, 2019, 04:24:27 PM »
I'll let this picture say it all. We see not one problem here, but two. The red arrow indicates player movement.

Spoiler
[close]

13
Check out the speckles on those ships. This is on Gilead.

The black market screen shows the same. Oddly enough, my own fleet on the sale screen appears normal.

Spoiler
[close]

14
Doom doesn't currently respect the phase mine radius very well. Example: It'll place a bunch of mines in front of a pirate station, then approach and unphase within the mine's radius. It'll also place mines dangerously close to allies.

The first issue is probably not limited to a single ship, but it's most evident with the Doom since they usually are near where phase mines are. I have seen silly Afflictors decloak and get one-shotted by allied phase mines.

Spoiler
[close]

She did that to herself. An obvious case of psychological projection.

Edit: Three times on one fight!

Spoiler

[close]

15
Suggestions / Trigger happy torpedo bombers
« on: May 17, 2019, 12:21:32 PM »
Bombers now have this thing where they use player ships and other allies as attack waypoints from which they make passes at the enemy. So far, so good. This part is actually pretty cool.

Atropos and other torpedos have AoE. In combat, especially in large engagements, there's a lot of debris floating around the battlespace.

Putting these factors together and into a battlescape with a lot of junk floating around (think pirates or pathers) turns Dagger bombers into suicide-machines for any shieldless or unwary flagship. They'll happily launch their ordnance even with a big fat piece of debris blocking their entire line of sight. Even if that debris is squarely in front of a friendly ship. Even if they're launching on top of said ship and the only outcome is brutalizing their own leader. Come to think of it, maybe there is an upside that I'm trying not to think of. The same thing happens with fighter wrecks, but that we can excuse as 'happy little accidents'.

- The least invasive option would be removing AoE from torpedos. We lose a bit of realism here.
- Another option would be to have bombers make their attack runs off to the side some distance away from the friendly ships they're escorting.
- Making bombers aware of debris would be ideal of course. Missile AI in general is stumped by debris currently, and since missiles are precious trump cards in combat, that might be worth it.

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