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31

General Discussion / Re: Ship types you want to see added before 1.0? What niches are left?

« on: June 15, 2023, 08:09:51 PM »

Stuff using BUILT_IN. Spinal mount Death Rays, Armageddon Launchers that are bigger than a Frigate and blot out the sun. Weapons that transport the target into Phased Space, doing no damage, but shoving them back 1000 su. Basically, stuff that's weird and you can't mount it elsewhere, so the ship can be balanced around it- the Monitor, only in terms of offense.

Ships that actively effect the ability to see on the battlefield. Apogee used to do that; I want to see ships that do that in reverse to the enemy, or that can suddenly clear the Fog of War over large areas, or can blind missiles or give fighters false orders for 30 seconds or whatever. This is an area where it seems like there are lots of niche ships that might be fun.

Destroyers that can actually be late-game player ships. I think piloting Cruisers and Capitals is boring, personally, and ever since stuff like Hyperion / Tempest were nerfed into almost irrelevancy for anything past early midgame, I've missed having things that can fight, kite and dodge, but take some hits without wilting. I don't really care if it's a super-Destroyer that costs a lot deploy or whatever- I want stuff that's fun to fly and can kill things well in player hands, not yet-another group-juggling exercise that lumbers along. Preferably with a gimmick System that the AI won't really "get".

Stuff that's not boardable and is truly terrifying. [[REDACTED]] is scary, because it has a cute gimmick, but I want to see stuff where I'm pretty sure nobody can beat it... then see somebody's silly thing that can. I feel like Derelict leaves too much on the table; it's meant to be like an easy [REDACTED], which is supposed to prepare you for [[REDACTED]]. IDK, I guess I want to see something that looks like a mountain of used copy machines with engines or Doritos served up with a Spicy Pizza Slice. Something that makes me go, "uhhhh, what just happened to my fleet, lol".

Utility ships that have a point on the battlefield. I built repair-ship mechanics... 9 years ago. We still don't have them in Vanilla today. Ammo-reload vessels, ships that deliver magical boxes that restore fighters or CR, ships that provide movement buffs, better ranges, inflict debuffs on enemies... the list could go on and on. This is maybe the biggest missing thing- that the utility vessels are meant to be seen, but not used, is a problem. Part of it is that the ones that are in are so horrible in a fight that players naturally conclude that they should never ever be used that way.

I still think my in-game capture system was more fun than a dice-roll, too.

32

Suggestions / Re: Please, don't make this mission part of the main-quest-line

« on: June 14, 2023, 06:37:12 PM »

True, that. But it's a frustrating mission design atm. If Neutrino Detector was fixed up like in the proposals, then no biggie, it's a new mechanic introduced that leads to more fun, and heck, it provides a template for the same mission type being given as an Exploration mission, which would add a bit of spice there.

33

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

« on: June 14, 2023, 06:32:38 PM »

No problem, let's see if I can help properly then.

Here's a standard Decorative I use:

Spoiler

{
   "specClass":"beam",
   "id":"thruster_fighter_sm",
   "type":"DECORATIVE",
   "size":"SMALL",
   
   "showDamageWhenDecorative":true,

   "turretSprite":"graphics/FX/nothing.png",
   "hardpointSprite":"graphics/FX/nothing.png",

   "turretOffsets":[0,0],
   "turretAngleOffsets":[0],
   "hardpointOffsets":[0,0],
   "hardpointAngleOffsets":[0],

   "fringeColor":[255,255,255,0],
   "coreColor":[255,255,255,0],
   "glowColor":[255,255,255,0],

   "width":1.0,
   "textureType":ROUGH,
   "textureScrollSpeed":1.0,
   "pixelsPerTexel":1.0,
}

[close]

I would think that if these lines were added, you should be good?

   "numFrames":8,
   "frameRate":4,
   "alwaysAnimate":"true",

If not, let me know. You're sure that you've loaded the mod in question in the ship editor, I presume?

34

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

« on: June 14, 2023, 02:22:36 PM »

If the spectype's PROJECTILE, you need a named reference to, you guessed it, a .proj file.

35

Suggestions / Re: Neutrino Detector Revamp

« on: June 14, 2023, 02:00:08 PM »

Those ideas could well be combined into one - use the detector while moving, as now, but the spikes of irrelevant sources get smaller over time, and dots are continuously added on the map. Once the whole system is neutrino mapped it should stop/minimize costing volatiles. That way you still had a predictable cost limit, but could also use the detector in small bursts.

That might work; it means that if you want exact information, pay for it, but it gets rid of a lot of the things that make the mechanic less than fun. Then we're down to costs and whether there's anything interesting out there to actually find.

36

Suggestions / Re: Neutrino Detector Revamp

« on: June 13, 2023, 11:22:07 PM »

That's an interesting suggestion. I was trying to come up w/ something simpler that achieved the goal of making exploration beyond the periphery reasonably profitable, dangerous and interesting, in the sense of, "I wonder what's out there this time".

The idea of sitting around burning an expensive resource to filter out false positives has some merits, if it's worth it more often than not. I just want a reason why I'd actually want to drag around Volatiles- it becomes what the mechanic intended then, where we can trade an optional resource for more Fun. On that note, if fighting Pirates or Indies, maybe Volatiles could drop sometimes, to give the player a potential source of resupply?

There may be better solutions. I don't know if there's any straightforward way to draw in that interface via a mod, or I'd probably just try setting it up to see how it feels.

37

Suggestions / Re: Derelict autoresolve

« on: June 13, 2023, 06:27:21 PM »

I've thought (and heck, coded over here) that the mechanic needs to be improved, so that Derelict encounters scale much more sharply past early-game. Alex did make them scale somewhat, but they become a speedbump that I just want to skip pretty early. So I made them really quite nasty here once you hit max level and can be expected to have a fleet worthy of the name.

38

Suggestions / Re: Neutrino Detector Revamp

« on: June 13, 2023, 06:24:35 PM »

Yeah. This proposal gets rid of that and other hassles. It does have the slight disadvantage of being more like those "Open World" snoozefests where you're going to points on a map to collect things that aren't meaningful or interesting <stares meaningfully at Horizon Zero Dawn> but I think that could be mitigated through having opportunities to meet Something Really Scary once in a while, and treasures worth the potential risk. It'd certainly make Iron Mode risk-taking more interesting, if it represented a way to sometimes get way ahead... if you don't lose your fleet.

39

Discussions / Re: There's a Java-based virus on the loose in Minecraft modding (Fracturizer)

« on: June 13, 2023, 06:20:17 PM »

<reads description of the payloads> Man, that's... a lot of work to achieve a handful of infections. Pro-level work there. Waaaay beyond, "made first virus for fun".

As for SS... much less of a risk, realistically. The application's pretty well kept out of the file system, especially on the writing end. What reads it's able to do are limited. That said, it's unclear what could be leveraged by adding third-party JARs to support bad behaviors and get around those fences. Luckily for us, if not Alex, it's not so wildly popular that anybody of that caliber's likely to spend the time to figure it out.

40

Suggestions / Neutrino Detector Revamp

« on: June 13, 2023, 03:45:51 PM »

The Neutrino Detector mechanic is not really Fun.

In theory, it's supposed to provide a way to explore systems and find distant pieces of interesting space-junk to loot.

The reality? Not so much. If you're efficiently canvassing a system to Survey the planets, you'll find pretty much everything. If you add in a cursory zip around asteroid belts, you've generally found everything worth finding. So, it slows you down, eats a resource you don't want to carry around that's quite expensive, and adds very little new Fun. Meanwhile, you're eating time spent playing on staring at a UI element, hoping that it's not just a pointless goose-chase.

A better mechanic:

Using the Neutrino Detector should eat X Volatiles, require the fleet to stay completely stationary for a full day. Once it's run, then the System overlay should now mark the locations and size of the sources, because the positions have been triangulated (see mockup illustration).



It won't tell the player whether the sources are false-positives, but it'll give the player something to steer towards and make using it less clunky.

In addition, this is an opportunity to create better tension and Adventure. Distant sources of neutrinos, outside the periphery of a System's planets, might be Something Very Interesting. Maybe it's a Pirate fleet, undergoing a stealthy rendezvous (and not thrilled that it's been noticed). Maybe it's a small group of "berserk" Domain vessels, lost in the void. Maybe it's someone who needs a rescue. Maybe it's just an interesting wreck. Maybe it's just some radioactive garbage from a long-ago space battle; junk, but interesting junk, because maybe it has a clue about where a nearby Pather base is located, or something. So running out into the deep black of a System to chase down one of these sources is potentially lucrative... and potentially perilous. That sounds like fun.

41

Suggestions / Re: Please, don't make this mission part of the main-quest-line

« on: June 13, 2023, 03:29:36 PM »

I once had to search for a game-week+ to find one of those. The fact that they can get attached to random clouds or whatnot well outside the planetary belt is kinda un-fun, for the reward. I think this was meant to get players to play with the Neutrino Detector... which needs a revamp, imo. I'll write that up.

42

Modding Resources / Re: Spiral Arms II - Free Community Sprite Resources

« on: June 09, 2023, 08:25:02 PM »

Wow!

43

Suggestions / Re: Complete the row of weapon groups

« on: June 09, 2023, 02:24:41 PM »

I'd like an "always uses Autofire" group and "do not ever use except manually by player" group, personally. The first would simplify a lot of stuff w/ AI (all Groups for a Variant could be consolidated to that one before combat) and the second type would both be nice for Built-In weapons that the AI can't use well for <reasons> and / or as a place to put weapons that are passive in nature or should not use standard autofire AI but aren't Decorative, for example.

44

Modding Resources / Re: Spiral Arms II - Free Community Sprite Resources

« on: June 09, 2023, 02:10:07 PM »

When the Luddite Earth Mother was asked, "How many legions do you have?", her answer was, "enough".

AI Image Source Note: these images were all made with img2img prompts and Stablity AI's Stable Diffusion, using the model known as Dread_V3 and the LORA called BlackAndGoldAI. Text prompts were probably something like, "((spaceship)) ironclad, ((aerial view)), pipes, rivets, panel lines, greebles, (((detailed and intricate))), rocket engines, jet engines, small details, dirt, hydraulics, hatches, struts, grunge, rust, oil stains, post-apocalyptic, low-tech, steampunk, dieselpunk, machinery".

Spoiler

These are inspired by ideas of the Luddites going in for a lot of pomp in their warship designs to awe the faithful, as opposed to the plainness of Luddite society. This was typical of many medieval societies, where the major faiths, being support systems for the societies' castes and hierarchies, wanted to show off their power through decoration and symbology. Grand cathedrals in space, ridiculous levels of metalwork on warships? It totally happened, historically.

Today's emphasis on functional design for military objects is a relatively modern idea; one can go back to the 19th Century and see that even serious military-grade systems often came with aesthetic flourishes reflecting their cultural heritage. Even today, it's kind of funny how people think some new weapon system is "cool" or not largely based on how it looks, and that can influence what gets funded for serial production and what remains merely conceptual. One presumes the Lockheed Martins of the world have stylists thinking about how to make things look cool after the engineers figure out to make them work.

The basic idea was that these ships, under the filigree, remain Luddite in design- heavy on armor, low on high-tech features. So they're largely based on base designs I'd already decided were "Low Tech" or "Midline". But they're both a functional device and a symbol, which felt right.

The Path, of course, eschews such frippery, as they both lack the financial resources and have decided that this is antithetical to Ludd's vision of individual simplicity and harmony with life everywhere... and is hubristic besides. This is one of the few points of their heresy that gets them much positive attention from other Factions- the Pirates, for example, agree that it's ridiculous that Ludd's armed representatives swan around in gilt while their people live archeotech lives, and even representatives of such factions as the Hegemony, while polite in public, often laugh at the waste and expense that these ships' extraordinary ornamentation require.

After a few experiments, black and gold and white and gold both conveyed the sense I was after.

On the technical side, this was a fun series to mess with. I've learned a lot about the concepts of statistical convergence (i.e., how many inference steps typically result in the best probability of a given set of inputs being followed, or "how to get OK results without waiting so long") and LoRAs to stabilize stylistic elements and keep stuff roughly on-theme. In this case, I'm using this LoRA on top of the main model, prompts and img2img base designs.

[close]

45

General Discussion / Re: Expectations for 1.0

« on: June 07, 2023, 09:43:55 PM »

1. Victory scenarios, or at the very least, scenarios which result in various stable-ish outcomes and a victory credit roll. It's not really "Mount and Blade in Space" when there's no way to conquer anything or achieve a lasting peace, short of glassing every other human colony in the Sector, which has always felt really nihilistic.

2. Choices that actually matter. Most of the adventures have obvious Right Answers or they're elaborate FedEx quests. More Fallout-esque, "there are several answers, and they all have tradeoffs" adventure scripting would be a huge plus for replayability. Don't get me wrong- I think that Alex and David have actually done really well this last couple of versions in terms of improving the feel of the game and connecting players to the lore. I just think there's more room for interesting stuff, like a Fallout-style ending where the player gets to review their important choices and sees how they affected the end.

3. A thorough revamp of how we relate to Factions once we establish our own. Seriously, the game really needs an official diplomatic system, not, "spend Story Points to get out of trouble until you can't, then glass everybody else".

4. Mechanisms for sharing the Gates with the Factions, which greatly change Accessibility. Allow new ones to be built.

5. Factions should behave dynamically, at least in the most basic ways. For example, every Faction should have a "budget" based on their "GDP", and every 3 months, they should be able to spend some of that "budget" to either improve their Colonies or buy additional fleet assets for <missions>. There isn't any coherent reason why the crippled Colonies must remain so. If they're never allowed to occasionally invade one another, that's fine, although I still think that's a mistake; people play Nexerelin largely because the official game doesn't do what they want. I think that there should also be ways to perma-destroy stuff on Colonies, not just "disrupt" them, so that there are options short of glassing. That should probably cost Fuel, need the local defenses to be Disrupted, and lots of Marines, and take significant amounts of in-game time, like a siege in Mount and Blade did.

6. The missile meta and the gradual erosion of the player's personal power in combat is one of the reasons why I just can't make myself play Vanilla's combat balance any more. It's boring and feels cheap to build a fleet that's designed to launch <some automated attack style> whether it's missiles or fighters, wait for it to work (or save-scum if it doesn't) and then Retreat, rinse and repeat. I want player-ships that are designed for players, require skill and can be effective at tipping the balance into end-game content. I don't think that's where things are.

7. Hyperspace remains either an obstacle-course that doesn't serve much purpose past stymying exploration, or at best a slog. I often think that Hyperspace was a design mistake; that instead this would be a better game design if that part was largely abstracted, so that the interesting parts in Systems could've had more love and time spent on it. I'm currently playing around with having [REDACTED] and Derelicts show up there occasionally in challenging numbers to give players a mountain to climb if they want, with treasures worth the trouble. Might mod in Gates to every System, so that once I've gotten somewhere, it's not a boring slog getting back again.

8. More options for Sector size and other starting conditions that feel roughly balanced. For example, a start with a Venture and a pair of Wolves- a "trader start" that makes sense and won't gimp the player during the Tutorial, etc.

9. A fix for the "corner camper" problems that are inherent to the current combat game design. Sometimes I think that the right answer is simply to make the battlefield so large that it can't happen, or force ships going further than X from the center to flee if they don't turn around quickly enough.

10. More variety of Buildings and Industries. There are mods that add both and look like they'd probably improve the feel.

11. Less reliance on soft caps and more reliance on cost to balance player-fleet power.

12. Less artificial limitations on AI fleet size, or better mechanics to represent situations. If a Pirate Armada's dumb enough to tackle the Hegemony's capital, a huge fleet should erupt from it, representing their strategic-level assets being deployed. It should look like a Somali pirate "fleet" attempting to raid Washington DC- the good ol' Hegemony Defense Fleet should arrive. Same with other Faction capitals; they should be on an entirely different level than they are presently. Same with the difference in feel of a fleet coming to raid your colony, vs. one that's trying to glass it; the second should be a truly terrifying end-game threat level, and if triggered early, should be the start of a strategic death-spiral all the way to "does not have Colonies", rather than something you occasionally fly-swat while your real enemy is a smallish bunch of anti-tech terrorists and unorganized criminals.

13. Full modding access to the ship drawing systems, at least in terms of extensible callbacks. It and the UI are the biggest areas that aren't inherently very moddable, especially the Tactical Pane view, which I've been wanting to mod for ages now. Think about modders adding features like tactical formations, new Admiral commands, etc., to flesh out the game for years to come.

14. On a technical level, putting all ship graphics of a Faction onto a single large sprite sheet at runtime would probably speed things up considerably. Rendering ships in sprite-sheet order would help this. Also would help a lot with VRAM limits, because anything that's not needed can be deallocated.

15. Addressing whatever's causing Pieces to be abnormally expensive (try spawning a hundred of them and watch what happens to framerates when AIs are actively present). It's something either going on w/ collision or drawing, I think, but that's all I've been able to parse from profiling it. I have this probably-stupid theory that they're generating collision circles that are either waaaaaaaay too big or that are tiny, leading to per-frame tests vs. the polygons. But that's probably wrong.

16. Access to explosion events in EveryFrameCombatPlugin. I want to get rid of particle spam.

17. Strongly consider looking at the GPU-driven particle system that's been released or my multithreaded system and implement something like that, as these are areas that are still surprisingly slow. I'd be happy to lend my source for free- the version that's over here in private is considerably better than the public version and now includes an engine system and generic trail system, including a punctual smoke with animation that's surprisingly cheap. If nothing else, a callback to Engine drawing, explosions happening and trails being called by projectiles, etc. would mean fewer complexities and headaches; most of the time spent writing that was spent writing around native systems, abusing gamecode in creative ways, etc.

18. Modernize the Java. I've been using 8 for something like four years now; it's fine, it's faster and it handles memory and garbage-collection better. I understand wanting to stay in a comfortable place and not wreck things, but that's what code forks are for, lol. I'd be stunned if it doesn't compile and run on 8 without a major hitch, though, unless you're doing <something weird> that depended on one of the few things that ever got deprecated in Java, and in that case, there's almost certainly a well-worn workaround on Stack Overflow at this late date, lol. I'd prefer to use the latest JVM that JWJGL supports well, though.

19. Past 1.0, please quit breaking the mods that touch the Economy, Skills, etc. Extensions, yes, whole new behaviors and UIs that deprecate existing functions, no. I get that making the economy work in the way that you really wanted has been hard, but at some point, it needs to be fixed with numbers-nudging rather than new functions; honestly, I hoped it was officially done in 0.95 other than balance, because it's relatively unimportant compared to the stuff higher on this wishlist, imo- the current system is a good-enough balance between accessibility and function, and it's still more complex than I think it ever really needed to be, but most players appear to be happy with it.

I've quit releasing things and I've put off installing 0.96 largely because of the huge headache porting forward anything that touched this stuff deeply became. Merely reading the code to deal with Fleet spawning in 0.95 made my head hurt a bit- it's a spawn event that calls a FleetFactory event that calls a Market, etc., etc.... sheesh, I just want to make a Faction fleet at <place> and have it <do stuff>.

It's like climbing a cliff that grows every time I get to the top, lol. I'll eventually get around to seeing how badly EZ Faction's broken, etc. and sorting through all the stuff in Rebal that will have to be redone or reworked, but after 10 years, I'm tiiiiiired of doing that, lol.