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676

Blog Posts / Re: Developing the Mora-class Carrier

« on: May 15, 2016, 08:15:55 PM »

@kazi - Thanks! I'm so happy with that hangar glow too (thatI'llhavetogobackandfixalltheoldones), cough. What, yes?

Plus I think the fact that I was doing a blog post on this forced me to be a bit more rigorous in terms of thought and planning. Okay, that sounds bad 'cause it's like "without doing a blog post, I don't put thought or planning into the ships". But you know - there's an audience to the process, and the process of documenting the creative process adds yet another layer of self-examination.

(Are the time periods that confusing? Maybe we need another Lore blog post or something. You know, to set straight the previous historian's clearly biased telling of recent events; all fringe ultra-Hegemonist propaganda, I tell you!)

677

Blog Posts / Re: Developing the Mora-class Carrier

« on: May 15, 2016, 05:48:23 PM »

(Venture stuff!)

It's true, the Venture is definitely the closest competitor. I would however argue that the Mora is going to have significantly better firepower opportunities.

(And without any detail at all, the Venture might receive some changes to better distinguish its role. No idea what that'll look like yet of course.)

678

Blog Posts / Re: Developing the Mora-class Carrier

« on: May 15, 2016, 04:54:01 PM »

Oh yeah, they're getting moved around a little more - as noted in the final paragraphs (I think), Alex sent over a bit more feedback about weapon layout.

679

Blog Posts / Developing the Mora-class Carrier

« on: May 15, 2016, 04:32:54 PM »

Blog post here.

680

General Discussion / Re: Lorewise, phase should probably would also have higher burn value from time warp

« on: May 12, 2016, 10:33:24 AM »

At least you don't need to worry about warp storms and chaos demons, eh?

All crew on Hegemony merchant and naval ships are required to report such "sightings" to the ship's Psychological Officer immediately for evaluation and disciplinary action.
Disciplinary action will be taken against any crew who repeat such clearly baseless, delusional, and fear-mongering misinformation. Such behaviour will be considered an act of Aiding the Enemy. Any communication of such nature will be redacted immediately and automatically reported to authorities by embedded Hegemony COMINT sub-AIs.

Victory to the Hegemony!

681

General Discussion / Re: Lorewise, phase should probably would also have higher burn value from time warp

« on: May 11, 2016, 11:56:04 PM »

Oh, uh. Probably a bad idea to keep the phase on. That's how you burn out coils. Do you even know what those cost to replace? Jeez.

I shall also quote from the Doom's description:
Certain unnerving psychological phenomena have been reported by sensitive crew members after enduring many rapid phase-shifts in combat conditions. Domain Navy reports on the subject were never declassified and are thought to have been lost since the Collapse.

(Or, to really get to the core of the issue: Phase ships in Starsector are an analogy to WW2 submarines that cruise on the surface using their regular engines then submerge to attack under battery power. The idea is they use a special type of movement which is impractical in the long term to gain short-term tactical advantages. The time wrap ability was, of course, added fairly recently by Alex alongside the Scarab's time warp to really emphasize the unique combat role of phase ships.)

(Phase ships were also totally inspired by that Star Trek TNG episode with the Romulan phase cloak. Oh, and "The Pegasus" episode too.)

In short, phase ships do not use their combat phase ability in normal travel. That said, we could speculate that phase ships are rather top-of-the-line and their construction and/or outfitting and/or some peculiar low-level ability offered by the phase coils might indeed be able to induce unique properties relevant to lowering sensor profile that are, shall we say, entirely perpendicular to their combat operation. We can simply refer to REDACTED BY HEGEMONY COMINT

682

Modding Resources / Re: Paint-Job Tutorial

« on: May 08, 2016, 08:19:20 PM »

Great tutorial. Way more disciplined an approach than I use, cough. (Should really set my ships up with proper masks for all this junk. Someday.)

683

Blog Posts / Re: Economy Revamp

« on: April 29, 2016, 11:31:52 AM »

Since "bigger icons" is out and "numeric overlays" is out, how about a special icon meant to represent "caselots" for a given commodity (like the board game Risk)?  It might not solve the problem entirely, but if there was a special "crate" or "barrel" icon that was readily distinguishable as being a multiple rather than another unit of the commodity (sounds like a challenge for David to distinguish supplies against ;-)), then you could replace the first few icons at the bottom (front) of the icon stack and it would help indicate very large quantities.  Say if the commodity load is greater than 50, then caselot icons would begin to appear, each representing 5 units, with 25 actual icons or some such always included in order to give a sense of scale.

This would create a disparity where ~49 commodities would appear bigger (49 icons) than 50 commodities (5 caselots + 25 icons), but that could be tuned to taste -- lowering the allowed number of "actual" icons, setting the required number of "actual" icons to equal the same threshold where caselots appear, etc.

We actually tried that, using MoO2 as inspiration - remember how science/food/production/pollution stacked and had 10x icons? Didn't work very well in Starsector due to the sheer number of different icons and their more representational nature. MoO2's icons were very abstract and there were only 4 categories, for 8 total icons, contained in three very clearly designated rows on the screen. Meanwhile Starsector has .. uh, what, 16 or something base for 32 total? (somewhat) arbitrarily placed on the screen. The market screen is already visually noisy and this just made it worse because suddenly the number of different icons doubled.

684

Suggestions / Re: A "total time played" counter

« on: April 27, 2016, 04:55:42 PM »

Weird! When I get into a game, I don't want to know how long I've played. Let's me focus on the experience itself, on whether I'm enjoying myself or not, engrossed or not, rather than feeling bad about the time I've ... (hmm, "wasted" is a strong word) ... used. Or somehow quantifying it. Similar feelings about achievements: why let this external factor into the experience that should be judged on its own merits?

I mean, I know the worth of my time -- I've got a freelance rate for that

685

Bug Reports & Support / Re: The Typo Thread

« on: April 24, 2016, 03:48:39 PM »

The L4 and L5 asteroids in Corvus and Valhalla are such that L4 is behind the system's gas giant in their shared orbit and L5 is ahead. If I'm understanding this right, it should be the other way round.

How embarrassing, fixed.

Pirate Buffalo has (D) in its name and says "poorly maintained" in its description despite actually having no (D)efect hullmods.

It does now!

686

General Discussion / Re: Why no new blogs/ updates since February?

« on: April 15, 2016, 10:36:59 AM »

I think Alex has a solid philosophy of "Don't make no hype 'til you got a working prototype."

For what it's worth, there's some fantastically exciting stuff coming along. I've been considering another post on ship spriting though it seems like that'd be kinda mundane in comparison. But hey, maybe it'd be fun while the Great Work is coming together.

687

General Discussion / Re: New teaser from Alex' tweeter.

« on: March 31, 2016, 04:57:25 PM »

All of the skulls hidden in the terrain are pretty cool.

Now I feel bad that I didn't actually intend that.

688

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.7.2a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: March 02, 2016, 11:15:27 AM »

Hey David, what did you mean when you said that you're now working on ever so slightly larger ships?

Larger than just frigates, which the latest batch of new ships has been.

689

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.7.2a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: March 02, 2016, 09:46:49 AM »

They are? Ahh, the weapon arc facings, off by 10 degrees - thank you, fixed.

Prototype hulls, I tell you.

690

Announcements / Re: Starsector 0.7.2a (Released) Patch Notes

« on: February 29, 2016, 10:07:18 PM »

Minor bug: the Pirate skin of the Wolf seems a bit shifted to the right. You can see this by comparing other skins with the Pirate one in the codex.

... Also, the naming and descriptions of special skins aren't very consistent. The Pirate skin for the Kite has a Pirate indicator and description but none of the other Pirate skins do, even ones that are actually different from Defective skins (Buffalo, Mule). The Dominator XIV's description is different from every other XIV ship. Hegemony Auxilliaries don't have descriptions, although I note that the Kite one has a commented-out description.

Oh yes, fixing those up now.

(And man, I did indeed butcher one line of pixels out of the Pirate Wolf! Can't believe no one noticed before - thanks for pointing it out.)