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

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Messages - kazi

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1
Mods / Re: [0.95a] The Mayorate v1.1.0 (2021-11-25)
« on: November 25, 2021, 10:53:49 PM »
I was going through some stuff today and rediscovered I had nearly finished working on the next release of this mod a year or two ago. Why keep things to myself? It seems like a shame to have the new art and music never see the light of day. Went through and checked things out tonight and polished things up a bit to create a release. There are probably a few things I missed, let me know if you come across any big bugs (github issues are preferred, but I suppose you can still post here too).

Anyhow, happy second Thanksgiving! Here's version v1.1.0.

Download link

Changelog:

- Starsector 0.95a compatibility.
- Rasht star system economy rebalanced for 0.95.
- Added a new hostile market/encounter music track for the Mayorate.
- Fixed a bug with Graser sound effects. They should sound substantially more beefy now.
- Redid the Lilith sprite. The old one was 7 (!!!) years old. I didn't know what I was doing then. It's debatable if I know what I'm doing now. Either way it's an improvement.
- Added a new Cimeterre sprite in the same style as the new Lilith sprite. Looks waaaay better.
- Tornado AM projectiles have been substantially buffed - they are much more likely to reach their targets now (but can still be shot down by good PD).
- Grav Driver deals EMP damage again. It hits a lot harder now.
- Disruptors use a custom autofire AI again. (Prevents the AI from wasting these shots on fighters.)
- Probably a lot of extra stuff that I'm forgetting about.

New sprites:



(If a moderator sees this, yes - you can add this to the mod index. Seems to have taken people a few years to get things added. ;))

I'm not really playing Starsector too much anymore, but the Mayorate may return some day in a game of their own. Or not. I have a bad track record with these things.

2
This guide is ancient. (I don't even use IntelliJ anymore...)

If you use something like Gradle to build you can actually tell JDK 8 (currently supported, no Oracle required) to compile to Java 7 using something like the following in your build.gradle file:

Code
sourceCompatibility = 1.7
targetCompatibility = 1.7

3
General Discussion / Re: 10 Years of Starsector!
« on: January 04, 2021, 06:55:07 PM »
Oh man, has it really been 10 years? That makes this at least the 5 year anniversary of the removal of "When is Starsector coming out? ... When it is ready. We are not Blizzard though, so this doesn’t mean 5+ years." from the FAQs  ;D

I'll see you all in 2030 when 1.0 gets released. (Kidding, I hope it's soon though.) Congrats to everyone involved for a great game in the meantime.

4
Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] The Mayorate v1.0.0 (2019-12-10)
« on: February 17, 2020, 04:07:45 PM »
Hello, can I port this mod to the Chinese starsector forum?  https://www.fossic.org/forum.php
 :D

Absolutely :)

5
Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] The Mayorate v1.0.0 (2019-12-10)
« on: January 07, 2020, 06:14:36 PM »
So, uh, interesting tie-in with world events: the art reference for one of the Mayorate faction portraits was killed recently. A few years ago, I wasn't the greatest artist ever (disclaimer: I am still a terrible artist), and I really struggled with making faction portraits that weren't absolutely atrocious to look at (scroll back to the early days of this mod thread if you don't believe me). After some initial failures, I came up with a new method of tracing reference photos and repainting the face and clothes with new light sources, colors, etc. that delivered more acceptable results. I used references from a lot of different sources: stock photos of pharmacists, weddings, and as it so happens, the late IRGC general Qasem Soleimani: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/06/world/middleeast/iran-soleimani.html. The main two qualifications were a near-ideal expression for a videogame portrait and that the reference was not immediately recognizable.

Mod portrait:


Reference image:


I'll likely be removing this portrait in the next patch: 1) It's probably my worst portrait art-wise (despite having traced things, I managed to utterly suck the life out of Qasem's expression) and 2) in light of recent events, I can't stop seeing the person behind the photo and get constantly reminded of the lovely state our world is in. Anyhow, I'd like to keep things relatively non-political in this mod thread, but figured this little bit of mod history would be interesting to others given current world events. Hopefully there are no wars in the upcoming year aside from the strictly fictional ongoing conflict between the Hegemony and the Mayorate.

(To my knowledge, no one else has been killed on the basis of being an art reference for this mod. :()

6
Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] The Mayorate v1.0.0 (2019-12-10)
« on: December 10, 2019, 10:00:03 PM »
Big thread necro. But a good one I promise!

Updated to version 1.0.0 for Starsector 0.9.1a. Download here: https://github.com/jstaf/mayorate/releases/download/v1.0.0/mayorate-1.0.0.zip

Changelog for those who used to play this mod back in its heyday (2014?):

Spoiler
v1.0.0

General changes:
- Starsector 0.9.1a compatibility.
- Massive code cleanup/reformat. Project builds now use Gradle instead of IDE-specific toolchains.
- Bumped version to 1.0.0. This doesn't mean that work has stopped, merely that this mod has reached what I wanted it to be all those years ago when I started this project. It's all grown-up now... *sniff*

Sound and music:
- Campaign music is part of the base mod again. Not sure why it was removed in the first place.
- Removed unlicensed music + added Njol (Jeremy Soule) to the campaign music.
- Temporarily disabled battle music for missions. It didn't always fire correctly, and I haven't had time to work on redoing the music plugin.
- Reverted changes to Graser and Grav Cannon that caused the weapon to fire out of sync with the actual weapon sound fx.
- Went through sound fx and decreased volumes of those that were out of line with mount size.

Campaign:
- Mayorate faction color changed to light-yellow so as to not conflict with the Persean League as much (they stole my previous color so now there can only be war  :P).
- General writing polish pass. Slight lore rewrites in places to make things even more vanilla-friendly than they were before.
- Mayorate relationships revamped - the Mayorate is now hostile with most organized governments and religious factions. They generally are neutral/suspicious with pirates, independent factions, and corporations.
- Rasht now has 3 Mayorate markets and 1 Luddic Path market, with significant time spent balancing the economy so that the Mayorate/Path markets can stand on their own and be stable/self-sufficient/non-disruptive.
- Removed all custom market conditions - they didn't really add much to gameplay.
- In addition to the reinforcements and diplomacy options, Mayorate officials will provide the option to acquire Mayorate blueprints if your reputation with the faction is cooperative or higher.
- Added a portrait to the player selection screen and Mayorate inventory. Mayorate commanders and base personnel may also occasssionally use AI portraits.

Gameplay:
- Variant polish: all variants now have the ship's primary weapon as weapon group one. Many alternating weapon fire groups have been changed to linked to make it a lot less likely to accidentally fire off a shot when you don't want to. Variants now match ship OPs. All ships now have autofit variants.
- Reverted changes to Graser PD that made it super OP.
- Redid Narayana weapon mount setup, removed built-in gun (the old gun was used for prototyping and I never actually finished things before the 0.10.x releases). It's now a heavy carrier with 4 large missile racks and improved sensors, which gives it a unique niche (heavy fire support). Very weak if surrounded or enemy ships make it to melee range.
- Add normal mapping for Narayana hull (results in more accurate/improved lighting fx with GraphicsLib).
- Removed fluxtorp. It just wasn't a good weapon art-wise.
- AI Crew hullmod has been renamed to AI Command Shunts and no longer impacts crew usage. (This was more of a disadvantage than an advantage given crew reqs for exploration.) The description is a lot better too, so you can actually tell what it does now.
- Ravana now uses the interdictor ship system and loses maneuvering jets. Speed slightly buffed to compensate for loss of the jets.
- Angha bombers now launch missiles much closer to the target (600 range). This both makes Angha wings easier to intercept and defend against, as well as substantially increases the chance that their attacks connect with the target.
- Many Mayorate hulls now have blinkers.
- Significant rejig of engine mounts for Narayana, Ravana, and Cimeterre (this is an aethetic tweak only, but makes these ships engines look a lot nicer).
- Removed Phoenix II rocket launcher. Nothing uses it and it was pretty meh.
- Removed built-in "pulse gun" on the Tiamat and replaced it with a medium hybrid mount. This makes it a bit more distinct from the Lilith (only one Mayorate frigate now has a built-in spinal mount gun).
- Belial PPC spread tightened, projectile speed increased, number of projectiles decreased. Belial sfx changed to old pulse gun sfx. Increasingly lethal over
  the old version.
- Added Tracer SRM8 and Tracer SRM40, which are small and medium mount versions of the Angha's rocket launcher. The SRM8 is a carbon copy of the Angha rocket launcher with 8 shots (very deadly, low ammo capacity). The SRM40 has increased flight time and tracking ability to enable launching from side missile mounts, and can fire multiple 8-shot salvos on a long cooldown.
- Probably some other stuff I forgot about.

Bugs:
- Yes, probably. Please report them here.
[close]

Fast faction overview for new players:
  • Full roster of ships and has pretty much every feature you'd expect from a full faction mod
  • Balanced against vanilla. The goal is to have a lot less "power creep" compared to several other modded factions where things are slightly stronger than they should be and the game feels a little too easy. (Some stuff may actually be a little under-powered relative to vanilla.)
  • Vanilla-friendly writing that doesn't get shoved in your face. Chat with one of the faction's higher-ranking officials in-game if you want to know more about the faction.
  • ~20 minutes of (mostly) original music. If you've used Audio Plus, the tracks are included there.
  • Lots of slower, ponderous ships with heavy frontal firepower and armor and terrible shields. Mayorate ships are designed for keeping the pressure up and many weapons have bonuses at high flux. Fast, maneuverable enemies will eat your lunch.
  • Some fun things worth checking out: Disruptors, nukes (Tornado AM), Angha wings, and the Cimeterre's Thermal Lance

7
For the log, check starsector.log in the root directory of wherever you installed Starsector.

8
Modding / Re: New to modding
« on: August 13, 2019, 05:55:57 PM »
For modding the marines, you'd need to likely create a new marine commodity for every different faction and then somehow get the different marine commodities produced by the vanilla industries. Due to how complex that'd end up being, I'd recommend against trying to do this.

For editing files, stay away from Microsoft Excel if you value your sanity. I'd recommend a text editor like VSCode, or a fully-fledged IDE like IntelliJ IDEA (really old tutorial) if you'd like some extra hand-holding. The .variant, .wpn, etc. files are all JSON files, though Alex uses a custom JSON parser that is extremely permissive of syntax mistakes.

9
How do you add cargo to a market? I though the way to go would be the following, but after some debugging, there aren't actually any submarkets for whatever reason to add cargo to. The market itself was created via json file in data/campaign/econ

Code
// we start off with the MarketAPI "market"
SubmarketAPI submarket = market.getSubmarket("military"); // submarket is null and there are no submarkets as far as i can tell
submarket.getCargo().addWeapons("tachyonlance", 100);

10
Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] Interstellar Imperium 2.1.0
« on: August 07, 2019, 02:10:47 PM »
If there's no fuel, it means the faction is having trouble keeping that market supplied with fuel. There can sometimes be fuel on the black market, even if there's no fuel on the open market.

11
Blog Posts / Re: Skills and Story Points
« on: July 08, 2019, 07:34:21 PM »
Re "story points": You shouldn't get these from leveling up. Why not reward them for completing actual "stories"? Level ups are fine but seem a little timegate-y, esp. at later levels once diminishing returns kick in. You should be rewarding these special points for special events or milestones, to encourage the player to get out of their comfort zone and do activities they might not otherwise do.

For instance:

* Launching your first saturation bombardment against a planet.
* Decivilizing a planet.
* Abandoning a colony.
* Going to war with someone besides pirates and pathers
* Waking up some cryosleepers.
* Running out of fuel and having to make a distress call.
* Becoming a pirate lord. (Currently near-impossible unless you want to grind pirate rep for hours and somehow never get attacked by accident and have to kill them.)
* Finding out about the Luddic Church's free lunches.
* etc., etc.

I find Starsector interesting, but a lot of the really awesome content sometimes never gets done because the player isn't comfortable with it or sees things as high risk (Starsector is difficult and that's great, but it deters you from taking risks most of the time because of how punishing a loss can be). I realized the other day that I simply don't do certain activities just because I want to keep all the factions happy or the high-risk stuff just isn't worth it (I have yet to bombard a planet... no reason to do so as far as I can tell...). Was scrolling through rules.csv the other day and there was a ton of great stuff that I've just never seen because I always end playing the same way. You should only earn "story points" from completing activities that advance your personal story or get you out of your comfort zone and doing something really cool.

Rewards on level up == participation trophies. Why not reward the player for doing all of the cool stuff?

(Also I would really like more story-based content and quests. Sue me.)

*edit - even better. Get rid of "levels" from XP entirely. You should only "level up" from completing milestones, not aimlessly grinding away at the same pirate bounties and exploration missions that give easy money.

12
Wow. Thanks for the fast response! Going to try this out....  ;)

*edit - works.  ;D

13
How do you spawn a system bounty? Been trying to figure this one out for awhile and making no progress. As far as I can tell, every system has a SystemBountyManager which spawns the events, but I can't figure out how to get the SystemBountyManager for a given system.

14
Big thread necro here, but I just encountered this one myself and ran into the same issue. It looks like this one can either be caused by xrandr being missing or launching the game for the first time in Wayland (context: the X display server is slowly being replaced by Wayland, and has just become the default for several Linux distros). Evidently LWJGL is trying to run xrandr and parse its output via regex to determine the screen resolution on Linux. If xrandr is not present or gives funny output (xrandr is a tool for X, and may return be returning weird things on Wayland), LWJGL will fail to return the screen resolution, crashing the launcher.

If you're a user and encounter this error:

* Install xrandr, if you haven't already.
* Log out of your current desktop session, then log in again on an X session (on GNOME, click the little gear icon and select "GNOME on Xorg"). The launcher should work after that (if xrandr is installed). Strangely, this only appears to be necessary for the first launch, after that, the launcher will work on Wayland. (why??????)

On the dev side, the real solution seems to be to upgrade to LWJGL 3 - https://github.com/LWJGL/lwjgl/issues/112 (if you're already using LWJGL 3, then I'm at a loss here). If it can be caused by running on Wayland like I think it is, the error will become more common as more distributions adopt Wayland as a default (Ubuntu hasn't yet, which is the big one in terms of Linux users).

15
We have a lot of great mods here. We have a lot of great people who make mods.I like very many mods here, but almost all of them have a large dysbalance by type of ship.

Honest answer? Frigates are easier to draw. A lot of modders (including me) don't have much prior spriting experience, so you get a lot of people who start with small ships and slowly make bigger ships as they get better at art. The larger ship sprites are very difficult to draw (and look good) when you're starting out, so you don't see very many of them.

It also very dependent on the art techniques used to make the sprite. Kitbashes (like the Mayasuran mod you mentioned) are relatively fast and easy to make, because you're just copy/pasting chunks of other ships and sticking them together. On the extreme other end, I won't disclose how much time I wasted modeling things in 3d before I switched to painting sprites with a tablet.  :-X  (hint to any future modders reading this: don't do 3d)

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