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

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Author Topic: Orbital Stations in Combat  (Read 95839 times)

Auraknight

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Re: Orbital Stations in Combat
« Reply #30 on: September 23, 2016, 03:09:27 PM »

I'm working off of old knowledge here, since I haven't tried phase-bombing something since before the rework, but can you still exit phase inside something else? How does charging something in phase work with these? (And could we have a phase station? or modals?) I know before that if you tanked up a phase ship really good, phased, flew at something so you where overlapping it, and unphased, you'd deal a lot of damage to everyone involved, and even if your ship died, the corpse ended up nuking the thing anyways. Was really noticeable with the small phase ships vs. Capitals.
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AgroFrizzy

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Re: Orbital Stations in Combat
« Reply #31 on: September 23, 2016, 03:15:37 PM »

This blog post has pulled me from the void.

I'm soooo excited for the next update. Take your time. Or share something that still needs a hotfix down the month or whatever.

I don't care. It's going to be great. You should email rock paper shotgun once this is done, because they would love this. They're huge fans of star control II anyways.

Thank you! Hype-support much appreciated :)

Haha, the anti Sean Murray.

Seriously, you're incapable of disappointing 'cuz we know exactly what to expect.

Which is exactly why I'm so stoked. You've got a good track record  ;D

If a station is just a big, powerful non-moving ship - life is good! If it's a lot more than that at any given point we're also good. The coolest thing about it will be the ability to take over stations slash defend stations in this manner. Mods can do a lot from there.
« Last Edit: September 23, 2016, 03:17:51 PM by AgroFrizzy »
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Gothars

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Re: Orbital Stations in Combat
« Reply #32 on: September 23, 2016, 03:17:32 PM »

I'm, uh, going to blame that one on David. But as long as we're here, I always wondered about this: how acceptable is it to use "oe", "ae", etc in place of umlauts, in otherwise-English text, i.e. "goetterdaemerrung"? Is the degree of eye-twitching more or less than from dropping the umlaut entirely? And a related bonus question: for a native-German mindset, are o and ö "same letter but one has an umlaut" or "different letters entirely"? (There's a similar situation in Russian, and they're very much different letters to the point of both being in the alphabet, but from what I remember of highschool German, the alphabet doesn't include the umlauted letters...)


Ä,Ü,Ö are for all practical purposes distinct letters and listed in most German alphabets. I'd definitely say that using the transcriptions (Ae, Ue, Oe) is much better than just dropping the umlaut altogether. It's not pretty, but somewhat respectful and technically correct. The alternative always looks to me like a non-native speaker just didn't care. Besides, in some cases the meaning is completely changed (Bär=bear, Bar=bar as in pub).


Edit: part of the reason I'm asking is it doesn't feel right to include umlauts in English text, right. Because they're not part of English!

I don't follow. If you use a foreign name, why not use foreign symbols (except for technical reasons)? For example, in German the name André is always spelled with the french e-acute, and García with the Spanish i-acute.
If you'd try that the other way round and switch the English th with a sharp z (the closest German equivalent), Batman would suddenly live in Gozam city :D



Nope, also does nothing. (Whew.)

How is it with EMP arcs from Tachyon Lances and so on, do they spread between modules?

« Last Edit: September 23, 2016, 03:26:04 PM by Gothars »
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Alex

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Re: Orbital Stations in Combat
« Reply #33 on: September 23, 2016, 03:47:08 PM »

I'm working off of old knowledge here, since I haven't tried phase-bombing something since before the rework, but can you still exit phase inside something else? How does charging something in phase work with these? (And could we have a phase station? or modals?) I know before that if you tanked up a phase ship really good, phased, flew at something so you where overlapping it, and unphased, you'd deal a lot of damage to everyone involved, and even if your ship died, the corpse ended up nuking the thing anyways. Was really noticeable with the small phase ships vs. Capitals.

It'd probably do some damage, yeah.

No plans for phase stations, though I suppose technically it's possible. It'd be kind of weird for modules to phase independently of the station, though, and since much of the advantage of phasing lies in mobility...

Haha, the anti Sean Murray.

(Seriously, though, he's always come across as earnest and excited to me, from what I've seen. And given the amount of pressure and attention, it's hard to imagine anyone doing much better. But I don't want to get too off-topic here :))


Ä,Ü,Ö are for all practical purposes distinct letters and listed in most German alphabets. I'd definitely say that using the transcriptions (Ae, Ue, Oe) is much better than just dropping the umlaut altogether. It's not pretty, but somewhat respectful and technically correct. The alternative always looks to me like a non-native speaker just didn't care. Besides, in some cases the meaning is completely changed (Bär=bear, Bar=bar as in pub).

Thank you for explaining! Added some e's.

I don't follow. If you use a foreign name, why not use foreign symbols (except for technical reasons)? For example, in German the name André is always spelled with the french e-acute, and García with the Spanish i-acute.
If you'd try that the other way round and switch the English th with a sharp z (the closest German equivalent), Batman would suddenly live in Gozam city :D

Hmm. Where does that stop, though? Say there's a russian name, should that be written in cyrillic in an otherwise english text? What about chinese or japanese? I don't think it's reasonable to expect an english speaker to know how to pronounce an e-acute, o-umlaut, etc. They're not part of english nor in the alphabet. A text that includes these might be more faithful to the original spelling of the word, but it's no longer in actual english.

If one does want to include those (and it makes sense sometimes, for sure! especially in a historical context, or where the accuracy of the original is particularly important for some other reason), it'd probably make sense to italicize the word to emphasize the fact that it's in another language.

Maybe it's different in german, given that "stuff above the letter" is a more common occurrence in the first place? I mean, I don't even know how to type these in on the keyboard.

Re: th vs z, at least both t and h are in the german alphabet :) But then, place names get weird anyway. Köln vs Cologne? "Gozam" seems less weird than that.


How is it with EMP arcs from Tachyon Lances and so on, do they spread between modules?

They don't, no.
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Harmful Mechanic

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Re: Orbital Stations in Combat
« Reply #34 on: September 23, 2016, 03:53:52 PM »

I'm working off of old knowledge here, since I haven't tried phase-bombing something since before the rework, but can you still exit phase inside something else? How does charging something in phase work with these? (And could we have a phase station? or modals?) I know before that if you tanked up a phase ship really good, phased, flew at something so you where overlapping it, and unphased, you'd deal a lot of damage to everyone involved, and even if your ship died, the corpse ended up nuking the thing anyways. Was really noticeable with the small phase ships vs. Capitals.

It'd probably do some damage, yeah.

No plans for phase stations, though I suppose technically it's possible. It'd be kind of weird for modules to phase independently of the station, though, and since much of the advantage of phasing lies in mobility...

I can see one application here; a research facility that's suffered a terrible accident. Several modules on the station are wrecked, and a few sections keep phasing in and out at random. Would make for an amusing jump-off point for some ghost-story missions.
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Morrokain

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Re: Orbital Stations in Combat
« Reply #35 on: September 23, 2016, 04:11:26 PM »

Don't know why I forgot to ask this!

How do stations get spawned in a battle?

Are they *always* at the spawn point of a capital like a football field where the endzone is each side's station/stations and the no man's land battleground is in the center?

And, if not, can they be selectively placed by the player at all, through modding or even in game for tactical reasons (such as on top of capture points)?
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Dri

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Re: Orbital Stations in Combat
« Reply #36 on: September 23, 2016, 04:16:07 PM »

You're going to use these mechanics for the Salvage system ain't ya? Some big, shattered hulk with a few weapon modules on it so it can actually fight back (meagerly) would make for some nice encounters for the early game.

If it does become possible to refit stations, will you be able to add hullmods to them (with nonsensical mods, like Aug Engines, disabled)? Thinking on it, you wouldn't be applying hullmods to individual weapon modules but rather to the main station and that would apply the applicable hullmods to all modules, yeah? I do hope that you'll make refitting stations a thing! I'd imagine building one would be a large investment and letting the player refit and customize it to really make it their own would be great!

Stations seem like a big workload for David. Is there gonna be low-tech, midline and high-tech styles of stations to boot? Also, in the final screenshot I can see some Talons—they look like they've been tweaked a bit (could just be seeing things as resolution is too small, though). I'm curious as to how many sprites David has made edits to in the current dev build!
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kazi

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Re: Orbital Stations in Combat
« Reply #37 on: September 23, 2016, 04:18:36 PM »

Excellent progress, as usual. Looking forward to whatever the update brings. This feels like it will be the biggest addition to gameplay yet (all those pieces from before are starting to fit  together).

(Not looking forward to having to draw out a gigantic Mayorate station, but there are worse fates...)
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David

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Re: Orbital Stations in Combat
« Reply #38 on: September 23, 2016, 04:20:45 PM »

Stations seem like a big workload for David. Is there gonna be low-tech, midline and high-tech styles of stations to boot? Also, in the final screenshot I can see some Talons—they look like they've been tweaked a bit (could just be seeing things as resolution is too small, though). I'm curious as to how many sprites David has made edits to in the current dev build!

1. I like drawing space things.

(2. Good lord how could you possibly notice the edits to the Talon?)

3. As for number of sprites that were edited, uh, I have not been counting.
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MesoTroniK

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Re: Orbital Stations in Combat
« Reply #39 on: September 23, 2016, 04:34:44 PM »

I am really curious, and dread how large the bigger stations might end up being.

Dri

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Re: Orbital Stations in Combat
« Reply #40 on: September 23, 2016, 04:37:22 PM »

Well since David actually enjoys drawing space things, they might be pretty big! >8D
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MesoTroniK

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Re: Orbital Stations in Combat
« Reply #41 on: September 23, 2016, 04:38:21 PM »

Is going to end up breaking me...

Gothars

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Re: Orbital Stations in Combat
« Reply #42 on: September 23, 2016, 04:42:09 PM »

For hitting home that station cores are indestructible, it might be good to make their armor static and their hull points ? or 99999. Otherwise I foresee new players hit them with concentrated fire for quite some time.



On cool application for stations would be passive environmental entities that serve as terrain, e.g. huge asteroids or solar shades in the middle of the map.


Language off-topics:
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Hmm. Where does that stop, though? Say there's a russian name, should that be written in cyrillic in an otherwise english text? What about chinese or japanese? I don't think it's reasonable to expect an english speaker to know how to pronounce an e-acute, o-umlaut, etc. They're not part of english nor in the alphabet. A text that includes these might be more faithful to the original spelling of the word, but it's no longer in actual english.

Thing is, there are official system for the Romanization of these completely separate writing systems, because they are unintelligible otherwise. On the other hand German, French, Spanish, English and so on all already use the Romanic character system, just separate sub-portions of it. In computing this is btw represented by the "Western Latin character sets".
The pronunciation would of course still be all bungled up, but then at least you know that you're doing it wrong :D

Cool that you took German in highschool, btw :) And sry for our hard grammar and arbitrary gender assignments...


Maybe it's different in german, given that "stuff above the letter" is a more common occurrence in the first place?

Na, I believe Americans just have a thing for butchering "Americanizing" foreign names, and a long tradition of it ;D Probably on account of being an immigrant nation. While, I guess, we Europeans are more likely to get immediate and enthusiastic feedback from our dear neighbors when trying to drop an alien letter from a foreign name ;D
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Megas

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Re: Orbital Stations in Combat
« Reply #43 on: September 23, 2016, 04:54:29 PM »

Maybe some space stations can have a core.  Kill the core, kill the station, like classic Death Star and a bunch of other video games.
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xenoargh

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Re: Orbital Stations in Combat
« Reply #44 on: September 23, 2016, 05:20:51 PM »

Very excited about all of that blog post.  The use for "sub-modules" on ship design in general is quite exciting, the multiple shields is exciting, being able to build Stations with components is exciting, and I like the range fix; that's essentially what I did for Vacuum and it worked. 

I think that Station combat is one of the things I've looked forward to most in SS as it heads into the latter stages of development.

A thought on the obvious problems that arise from "to-scale" Stations:

1.  It'll almost always be cheaper to draw a bunch of small quads than one big one, because of fillrate issues when dealing with stuff that's screen-sized.
2.  No. 1 also means that most of the Stuff can get culled visually if it's all a bunch of Components.
3.  The biggest problem that can arise is absurdities involving rotational speeds and AI in general with Really Big Things. 

Generally put, it's going to be necessary to recalculate collision / avoidance volumes and treat the Station as a large combined entity; that will probably be a bit challenging.  Perhaps a good approach would be to run some code that combines all of the hit geometry by cutting line segments where they cross each other, calculates an ellipse with an offset that more than covers that... and then recalculates whenever a component separates.  Expensive as a one-time event goes but probably not too bad.  That'll largely keep the AI OK with big sizes, in terms of avoidance; they can largely aim at staying outside the ellipse.

I wouldn't worry about this, much, though; if you need a Climactic Battle where the player fleet has to engage a Really Big Station, that's a new battle type, where the player fleet could deploy either in the traditional fashion and face the problems of command use to correct the issues that will arise, or deploy all the way around, with fewer AI messups but a lack of supporting elements.  But AI messups are going to happen with Really Big Things regardless, so I wouldn't consider it the end of the world.
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