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16

Discussions / Re: what linux distros are people here running?

« on: December 03, 2018, 06:44:25 PM »

GalliumOS on a Chromebook. Starsector actually plays amazingly well, no faction mods however.

Yeah, things are a lot faster / better performance this update. My laptop which struggled with the last update is absolutely breezing through things now.

Fedora all the way (hail corporate). The Gnome desktop is less buggy there than on Ubuntu and friends + I like them up-to-date packages and kernel versions (up to a point... Arch Linux just isn't fun).

17

Modding / Re: [0.8.1a] The Mayorate 0.10.3

« on: December 03, 2018, 05:53:41 PM »

Also, is a 0.9 update in the cards, or shall the Cimiterre be left only to my most laser-filled dreams again?

maaaaaaybe 

18

Suggestions / Some user-interface tweaks / difficulty tuning suggestions

« on: December 03, 2018, 05:49:31 PM »

Playing through 0.9 again after a bit of a break... some UI/UX things I've noticed along with some difficulty tuning:

User interface fixes

• Officer level up should be doable from character screen. (You're usually leveling them up at the same time as the player character, makes no sense to level them up separately from the fleet menu.)
• Have a script to create a Linux ".desktop" launcher in ~/.local/share/applications. This is the standard way to launch desktop applications and games on Linux, and will make Starsector show up along with other games installed from places like GOG.
• Viewing the buy/sell ships screen is strangely one of the more CPU punishing parts of the game when playing on a laptop. See if this can't be optimized.
• I have no idea what consumes transplutonics, volatiles, or lobster (or how to produce drugs and organs). Make a commodities screen in the intel tab which explains what consumes what as well as view current commodity sales info.
• Maybe move the codex to the intel screen as well. It makes more sense to integrate it more into gameplay since it doesn't see much traffic in the current "pause" menu.
• Burn level isn't anywhere to be seen on the fleet or refit screen. If you are refitting the ship, you need to know how that stat is changing as you add/subtract hull mods. Additionally, there is no way to find what is your slowest ship at a glance.
• When selecting hull mods, the "Go back" button is in a really unintuitive place on the side. Most players will look to the upper-right corner to close the menu since that is where the close buttons for other screens is.
• Markets change which ships are on sale maybe a little too often. Sometimes I want to complete an extra cargo run to make enough money to buy a ship, but when I come back, the ship I wanted is gone
• The dockside bar is wayyyyy more interesting than the comm directory and serves the same purpose. Most of the comms directory entries don't do anything (portmaster, quartermaster, etc.). Get rid of the comms directory and integrate it into the bar.

Difficulty tuning

• Get rid of the Galatian Stipend unless the player is on "Easy" difficulty. Makes things way too easy.
• Colonies are a little too easy to "cheese" and build tons of structures at. I think the number of structures a colony can support should be limited by market size. It doesn't make sense for a tiny, size 3 colony to have every possible structure and upgrade. (Perhaps the maximum number of structures should be limited to the current size?)
• Financial rewards are consistently too high for bounties and "dockside bar" stuff (rewards seem to be a consistent ~30k regardless of quantity of goods). Maybe cut rewards in half to slow player progression a bit.
• There is no way to escape an engagement when a player has a cruiser or capital, why? You can't even fight a disengagement battle which is super punishing, especially if you're unlucky enough to run into a death-stack of like 80 pirate ships in multiple fleets. Iron mode isn't quite fun yet with some of the BS deaths you get sometimes this way (are the neighboring fleets far enough? or are they just too close to join the battle and gank you with no possibility of escape?  ).
• Orbital stations should not be allowed to participate in a battle unless they are directly attacked. Combined with the above bug, it's like a guaranteed player death if they get engaged by a fleet of any size if near a big station. There's no way to retreat or otherwise disengage unless you somehow kill the station, which is unlikely to happen unless the player is an absolute beast (esp. for core worlds). It's not like stations can move, after all...
• If you join a battle with one of your colonies' orbital stations, it counts against your deployment limit (when battle size is limited). Get rid of this, a station is supposed to be a massive advantage, not handicap you by preventing you from deploying half your fleet.
• A lot of long-time players enjoy this being sort of the "dark souls" of space games. A difficulty option for reduced rewards across-the-board would be welcome.
• You can game the system a bit with the battle-size slider. You have the advantage? Increase it to maximum to ensure the steamroll. You're outnumbered? Decrease the slider so that you can deploy your entire fleet, but they have to come at you piecemeal.

Content tweaks

• Please make a pirate start where you are neutral with pirates or the luddic path and hostile to several major factions. This would be a fun turnabout on things.
• More "story" missions and scripted interactions for the player while exploring or at dockside bars. These are really fun and add a lot of "life" to the game.
• The spaceport upgrade isn't very interesting gameplay wise. It's absolutely required for any player colony, and doesn't serve a purpose beyond making the upgrade to megaport available. Either build it automatically on colonizing a planet (and deduct the appropriate $), or figure out a more measured approach to it. (Perhaps increase base colony accessibility, and decrease the starport accessibility bonus so that it's a nice-to-have, but not a hard requirement.)
• A small set of story missions (that the player doesn't have to follow) could be used to further explain mechanics, like founding a colony or performing surveys.
• More behavioral changes to differentiate the factions a bit. They all feel very samey-samey aside from the pirates, luddic path, independents, and maaaaybe the Tri-Tacyhons (with their "free ports" everywhere). Maybe have the Hegemony shake you down for bribes when doing anything (ah, corruption) and have the Diktat start impressing the crewmen in your merchant fleets. Enemy factions should make you "choose a side" if they know you're dealing with the enemy.

19

Modding / Re: [0.8.1a] The Mayorate 0.10.0

« on: April 05, 2018, 03:17:10 PM »

It's official, Blothorn, I owe you like 7 beers. Great work on the new update!

To be clear here, Blothorn did like 99% of the work on this - this update wouldn't have happened without Blothorn's contributions. The only significant work I did for this update is the art for the new capital and some in-game text/dialog rewrites (some other misc stuff, but it's not huge). I might still add a few commits in here and there, never quite added my idea for the main gun for the new capital - we'll see where that goes.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And a bit of backstory for fans on why this mod went so long without updates:

- Bad project management on my part. I got really hung up on trying to both add new content AND update to the latest release when Starsector 0.8 came out. At the same time, I started like 27 other non-Mayorate projects and started splitting dev time between them, effectively accomplishing nothing between all of the various projects.

- Life. The majority of Mayorate development happened 3-4 years ago when I was in grad school- since then I moved to a new city, got a new job, my old gaming desktop died completely, and just generally life moves on. I lost the extra dev time I had in grad school, and whenever I had free time, it ended up going to other projects. (One thing I'm slightly irked about my current workplace is that it seems like all of my extra dev time goes to practical/work-related projects and I haven't had any time to devote to for-fun projects like the Mayorate since then.)

- I have to be honest here, I started playing other videogames. (Splatoon 2 is the ***.  )

20

General Discussion / Re: A Sad Day for a Craptop User

« on: July 01, 2017, 11:42:42 AM »

Install Linux. The OS is much more lightweight in terms of memory use than Windows, leaving more RAM free for Starsector. You probably want to go with something lightweight, like Xubuntu or something else XFCE-related.

21

Discussions / Re: Angels Fall First

« on: June 28, 2017, 10:01:31 PM »

Hah, I remember this from back when it was a homeworld mod (like literally a decade ago). Have been trying to gimp the art style ever since!

22

Modding Resources / Re: STARSECTOR Ship&Weapon Editor (v2.7.1)

« on: June 10, 2017, 03:24:43 PM »

I at least got it to compile on Ubuntu Linux. Buggy as ***, but hey, it compiles:

Code

# grab blitzmax from https://nitrologic.itch.io/blitzmax and unpack wherever
sudo apt install libc6-dev-i386 lib32stdc++-6-dev mesa-common-dev:i386 libxpm-dev:i386 libfreetype6-dev:i386 libx11-dev:i386 libglu1-mesa-dev:i386 libxft2-dev:i386
BMK_LD_OPTS="-lgcc -ldl -lfontconfig" /path/to/bmk makeapp -a -r -t gui -o sf-ship-ed.exe sf-ship-ed.bmx

*edit - upon actually trying things the easy way and using Wine, stuff just works. >_<

23

Modding Resources / Re: [0.8a] GraphicsLib 1.1.0

« on: April 25, 2017, 08:11:44 PM »

Going to agree with Dri. That looks like you're either using an out-of-date version of Starsector or a whole bunch of mods that are not compatible with the current version. What mods do you have active?

(I will just go ahead and say that the current GraphicsLib works perfectly on my end with the current version of Starsector, so that's unlikely to be the problem)

24

Mods / Re: [0.7.2a] The Mayorate v0.9.2 (updated 25/04/16)

« on: April 23, 2017, 06:40:57 PM »

Balance side: One of the biggest things that I see mentioned is your missile cruiser. IIRC, it has 2 large missiles, one medium missile AND Fast Missile Racks, which can easily become stupid OP, even in .8. I would say at least remove FMR AND cut down the mounts to 1 large and 2 mids. That way it is still a missile cruiser but it isn't bulls*** OP.
Also, I would seriously talk with the other modders to see what issues they have with your mod, as sometimes there can be issues that can be right in front of us and we can't see them. Your mod has some nice things but needs many tweaks here and there to get it perfect and the others can help with that.
Working on the rare metals bug will also be good, which was another big issue I had with this.
If you haven't already, please stop replacing the Apogee sprite (and any other vanilla sprite if you do).

Sound side: PLEASE, for the love of the Goddess and everything that is holy, STOP using sounds from famous games (Mass Effect, MechWarrior, FreeSpace are a few that I remember)! It is lazy, can throw off the player and from what I have heard, you can make some pretty damn good sounds on your own.

Excellent! That's exactly the kind of feedback I'm looking for. The Apogee bit was an easy fix to make just now haha. And yeah, the missile cruiser had to be a little OP previously to compensate for the faction not having any heavy missile/support capitals (but that's fixed now  ). The only thing here I feel somewhat sketchy about is the sound business, but we'll see haha (I pretty much added the disruptors just so I could have a PPC...)

Disruptor was an absolute pants weapon in the most recent version. SS+ or ship weapons pack added a similar weapon (heavy ion disruptor I think it was?) that basically did the same job, but was waaaay more effective for the flux and OP cost. Which was a shame as the sound and visual for the Mayorate disruptor are really great. I think the charge up delay on firing really hurt how the AI used it.

Graser PDs and that family were a really neat idea with the increasing damage with ship flux, and balanced pretty well. You also added the grav gun toward the end, the super high bullet speed kinetic weapon with decent range. That was also really niche for an anti frigate weapon for cap ship, definitely a keeper, though the weapon description says that you will add the weapon description this time around :p.

Cimeterre needed counselling though. That ship had suicidal tendencies on a whole new level, not sure how much you can change without manipulating the core AI files though.

Be sure to get the Ravanna to burn 8 and a little bit of love as well

Yeah the Cimeterre's biggest problem is how glassy it is and that it had an ultra-high damage ultra-short range weapon. Basically it always needed to stay at close range to do anything, which is of course where it can't get away and promptly dies. Going to have to get creative to fix that one haha

25

Mods / Re: [0.7.2a] The Mayorate v0.9.2 (updated 25/04/16)

« on: April 23, 2017, 05:48:31 PM »

Until this mod gets a serious balance and sound pass, I won't touch it

Specifics would be useful here. 

26

Modding / Re: Misc modding questions that are too minor to warrant their own thread

« on: April 23, 2017, 11:19:04 AM »

Can confirm this. No rule commands are found no matter where I put them (even if I do the "ruleCommandPackages" in settings.json). I'll see if I can send you copy for testing.

*edit - sent via pm

Alright, fixed it - turns out it was using the wrong classloader.

Thanks- that's awesome! Any chance I could get a copy of the fixed build for modding purposes? (can't do too much on my end until I can make it to the main menu)

27

Mods / Re: [0.7.2a] The Mayorate v0.9.2 (updated 25/04/16)

« on: April 23, 2017, 11:06:02 AM »

So, it's that time of year again. Let me know what sucked about the last version so I can fix it (or add it!) for this one.

Current todo list:
- 0.8 compatibility
- Rare metals bug (most of the offending market condition is getting axed)
- Consul functions are getting bundled into the typical "station leader" persona
- [REDACTED]

Currently hit a bit of snag due to SS not recognizing modded rulecmds (might require another SS hotfix before this mod can be updated), but hey, getting there slowly...

28

Modding / Re: Misc modding questions that are too minor to warrant their own thread

« on: April 23, 2017, 10:34:16 AM »

It fails with any rule commands in a mod, as far as I can tell.

Could you possibly send me a copy? Would make testing a bit easier.

Can confirm this. No rule commands are found no matter where I put them (even if I do the "ruleCommandPackages" in settings.json). I'll see if I can send you copy for testing.

*edit - sent via pm

29

Mods / Re: [0.7.2a] Portrait Pack v1.2.2

« on: April 23, 2017, 07:59:34 AM »

This mod is indeed crashing the game on start up :s

That's why it's only marked as having compatibility for the previous version of starsector, not this one. Every update breaks the mods. All of them.

30

General Discussion / Re: Responding to distress calls never worth it?

« on: April 23, 2017, 12:18:13 AM »

I thought it was an actual distress call and got ganked