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[Darkreaver1980]

Hi there,

how about a nice irc chat? Space pirates and zombies has one too and its pretty popular, people allways talk about starfarer in there, cos we dont have a starfarer channel at all

i have a pretty hard time to see which damage type the enemy´s do, i first thought all machine guns etc do explosive damage but some do kinetic damage and still havent found it out which enemys use what.

It would be nice to have some feedback, like if a kinetic weapon hits the shield, display some kind of shield dispersion effect, just a small one...so you know that something realy bad for your shields hit it. I would suggest the same for armor/hull damage, maybe some kind of minor explosions or particle effect for it if explosion type hits the hull. or maybe change how the damage numbers are displayed. Like it uses a bigger font if kinetic hits the shield or something similar.

i love the new shield balance in the 0.34a preview version, works much better than before! I think the most amazing thing about starfarer is the flux system, i just love it...it reminds me so much of mechmarrior: i actualy like the way it works in starfarer even better

How about more stuff that uses the flux mechanic? Like a Nebula where you have 200% flux dispersion, or only 50% etc. Or maybe some kind of support weapon, like a beam which you can use on friendly ships to lower the flux?!

Btw, somehow the steam overlay isnt working in starfarer, so i cant chat with my friends while playing it

[Tomn]

Well, you can check which of your weapons are what in your weapons group indicator - they'll say what weapons are kinetic, HE, energy, etc. etc.  I think there's also a coloring convention for the actual projectiles, too - kinetic weapons tend to be white, or something like that.  Though I'll admit that in the heat of battle I honestly can't be stuffed to look too closely at the hot electric death coming my way in order to analyze what color it is and what type of damage that represents.

IRC would be a good idea, I think.

[Avan]

Indeed; I've been meaning to suggest this myself for some time.

[Alex]

It would be nice to have some feedback, like if a kinetic weapon hits the shield, display some kind of shield dispersion effect, just a small one...so you know that something realy bad for your shields hit it. I would suggest the same for armor/hull damage, maybe some kind of minor explosions or particle effect for it if explosion type hits the hull. or maybe change how the damage numbers are displayed. Like it uses a bigger font if kinetic hits the shield or something similar.

Funny thing - we already have some shield animation graphics for just this purpose. Just haven't had time to add those in Btw, the "shield hit" sound is different for kinetic damage vs everything else, though it's easy to miss in the heat of battle. Good points in all, better player feedback for this would be good, but it's tricky to get right. Just as an example, with damage numbers - since they accumulate damage from all sorts of sources, making it larger when some of the damage is kinetic might be misleading - and I'm not sure someone would immediately make the connection as to why the numbers got bigger all of a sudden..

How about more stuff that uses the flux mechanic? Like a Nebula where you have 200% flux dispersion, or only 50% etc. Or maybe some kind of support weapon, like a beam which you can use on friendly ships to lower the flux?!

You know, nebulas actually worked this way in earlier builds. You could even charge them up by firing beam weapons through them, and charged nebula clouds raised the flux levels of ships inside. Ended up being a huge mess in pracice (see your point above re: feedback to player). Still, cool ideas, and we'll probably revisit them at one time or another.

Btw, somehow the steam overlay isnt working in starfarer, so i cant chat with my friends while playing it

Hmm... you added Starfarer to your games in Steam, right? It works for me, just tried it.


About IRC: I haven't really used it before. Any tips? What server to try and set up a channel on, what's a good client, etc? From reading up on it briefly, it sounds like maintaining a channel has some overhead (similar stuff to deleting spam accounts/posts on the forum), so I'm a bit concerned about taking that on.

[Darkreaver1980]

It would be nice to have some feedback, like if a kinetic weapon hits the shield, display some kind of shield dispersion effect, just a small one...so you know that something realy bad for your shields hit it. I would suggest the same for armor/hull damage, maybe some kind of minor explosions or particle effect for it if explosion type hits the hull. or maybe change how the damage numbers are displayed. Like it uses a bigger font if kinetic hits the shield or something similar.

Funny thing - we already have some shield animation graphics for just this purpose. Just haven't had time to add those in Btw, the "shield hit" sound is different for kinetic damage vs everything else, though it's easy to miss in the heat of battle. Good points in all, better player feedback for this would be good, but it's tricky to get right. Just as an example, with damage numbers - since they accumulate damage from all sorts of sources, making it larger when some of the damage is kinetic might be misleading - and I'm not sure someone would immediately make the connection as to why the numbers got bigger all of a sudden..

oh wow thats great! i love all these small details, would be realy nice if it gets implented soon. im also pretty curious how these shield animations looks


i think explosions are kinda lacking if you blow a ship up, more debris and destroyed parts would be nice. i would also like some high tech weapon that is able to disable a shield for 10-20 seconds if it hits a ship with shields up, it does no damage at all. so its pretty harmles if you manage to drop your shields in time.

i added starfarer to my steam games but i cant open the steam overlay with shift+tab in the game, nothing happens, it just opens the tactical map

[Alex]

i added starfarer to my steam games but i cant open the steam overlay with shift+tab in the game, nothing happens, it just opens the tactical map

Hmm, that works for me. Stupid question, but are you actually running it from Steam?   What OS, btw?

[Darkreaver1980]

Yes, i start starfarer by clicking on starfarer in the steam games list. Usualy when i start a steam game a small windows apear on the lower right corner saying "hit alt + tab to open community features", this is not the case in starfarer.

i am running windows 7, 64 bit, 5850 HD, 4 GB Ram.

[Avan]

I can test it out when I get back to my main computer on tuesday, where I have steam setup

[Alex]

Thanks, I'd love to know how it goes. I do have access to a windows 7 laptop, but it's not mine, so I'd rather not install Steam  on it - but might have to.

I'm not sure what I'd actually be able to do if it turns out the overlay doesn't work under some set of circumstances - not doing anything particularly odd with the display code.

[Avan]

Just tried: windows 7 + steam + starfarer launched from steam
the steam overlay works for me in-game.

[theShadow]

If I may get back to the topic of IRC, there is a handy guide that tells you everything you need to know.

How complicated the process is really depends on how much effort you feel like putting towards it. The simplest thing to do is download an irc client, put in a server name, such as irc.freenode.net, and tell it to join a channel with the name of your choosing, "#starfarer" or "#sf" or something. it will automatically create one for you.

in fact, I am hanging out in #starfarer now :p