Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[chandl34]

Haha, I've always liked comparing this game's campaign to Sid Meier's Pirates!.  Now we've got our currents.

Yarr! One of my all-time favorite games, btw.

What other stuff from Pirates would you lije to put in Starsector?

Having the crew sing sea shanties and wooing the Governor's daughter.

[FooF]

I can't imagine trying to woo Warlord Kanta in a dancing mini-game... Since the player character is never really seen outside of a portrait, and the cycles don't go by that fast, character aging and death really wouldn't fit but that was always something I was aware of and enjoyed playing Pirates. The fact that even though it was fairly "open" you were on a timer. As I've said in the past, if there was some story mission that put in giant red letters "Accept this and there's no going back" and the whole Sector was put on notice for some impending doom, I'd be all for it. Time, or the lack thereof, can be a powerful motivator in games.

[SonnaBanana]

Having the crew sing sea shanties and wooing the Governor's daughter.

I want space-shanties and wooing the governor's mother, yes.

[Nick XR]

Having the crew sing sea shanties and wooing the Governor's daughter.

I want space-shanties and wooing the governor's mother, yes.

Light sabre fight mini-game with surprise perma-death mechanics >.<

[SonnaBanana]

Anyway, what more stuff are you going to add to Hyperspace, Alex?

[gotry]

next year's update looking good, cant wait. and i mean i literally cannot wait, alex ma brathna, i have cancer. i will be dead within say... 2-3 months. alex, i need you to release the next patch before the semi-sentient network of synaptically connected neoplasms slowly proliferating in every oragan of my body succeeds in overriding my consciousness.

i fear what may come afterwards, butt... perhaps the awakened malignant mind could be distracted from reforming humanity in its image by regular Starsector updates, so that its raw hatred is directed towards mod creators, and its demands of tribute could be met by sacrificing Vayra in an arcane ritual

good luck, ins'Allah

[Gothars]

i have cancer. i will be dead within say... 2-3 months.

That's an inappropriate topic to joke about. Please avoid to do so in the future.

Blog post here.

Really cool, that will invigorate travelling. I really didn't expect something so elaborate. Will there be a special combat scenario for fighting in a slipstream?

[megabot]

This looks incredible!  One point of feedback -- the visual representation of slipstreams on the sector map needs to be scaled by intensity. 

In the examples, the slipstream indicators seem to have the same intensity regardless of width, so wider areas of the slipstreams stand out much more.

This is the inverse of the actual gameplay effects, where a narrower slipstream is 'faster' than it is when it widens out, a big fat wide arrow slipstream indicator stands out a lot more than the narrowest segments.

Thinner sections of the slipstreams would benefit from proportionally boosted brightness or opacity on the starmap to make them 'stand out', the way they will when you're zipping through 'em.

Interesting idea! I gave this a quick try, and it doesn't work out that way - rather, it starts to look more confusing; if the wider sections are faded out enough for that to stand out, they're also faded out enough that's hard to tell that they're actually wider, so it becomes a "why is this faded out" (which, in fact, it could be also because the stream is dissipating, or because it's fading towards a "break", etc) rather than "ah, this is wider, so it'll be slower".

More information can sometimes become more visual noise and make things less clear rather than more; it's interesting to see where that point is sometimes!

sugestion: maybe messing with arrow width/shape/size/number could do it

wider hyperspace lane? thecker(but not longer) arrows, which have more space between each other than a fast one, which has thin arrows

[megabot]

also on a side note, what are hyperspace ghosts even?

i am not asking for the detailed lore or meaning or whatever, but like - what does your fleet pick up? or does it even pick up anything? is it like a permanent sensor ping, in terms of appearance for your sensors, or like a big spread out debree field, or a big ball of mass, or..? what are we even remotely talking about here, aside from what it actually is

[JUDGE! slowpersun]

also on a side note, what are hyperspace ghosts even?

Well, calling them space fog banks would have been a little on the nose...

[Alex]

Really cool, that will invigorate travelling. I really didn't expect something so elaborate. Will there be a special combat scenario for fighting in a slipstream?

There won't, no! I can see adding a nod to being inside a slipstream in the combat background at some point - though very carefully, don't want to make the background look too busy - but as far as any sort of special mechanics, that'd be an AI nightmare.

sugestion: maybe messing with arrow width/shape/size/number could do it

wider hyperspace lane? thecker(but not longer) arrows, which have more space between each other than a fast one, which has thin arrows

Honestly, I think it works well as-is! It's easy enough to learn the correlation between "wider = slower" and the map conveys that very clearly. Adding some other differentiator to wider sections (that you can already see are wider) makes it more confusing, I think - it raises the question of "what's this trying to indicate" and it's not at all obvious that the answer is "that it's slower", especially given that width already conveys that.

also on a side note, what are hyperspace ghosts even?

i am not asking for the detailed lore or meaning or whatever, but like - what does your fleet pick up? or does it even pick up anything? is it like a permanent sensor ping, in terms of appearance for your sensors, or like a big spread out debree field, or a big ball of mass, or..? what are we even remotely talking about here, aside from what it actually is

What you see is like a regular sensor contact, the sort you get when you're approaching another fleet, a mining station you haven't discovered, a debris field, etc.

[Alliostra]

I think one thing that could go a long way to make the half-a-cycle change appear more organic to the player would be to simply randomize the actual date where the slipstreams change by, say, a month and a half, and to make a smaller part of the network change at an earlier or later date than the rest does (although this would probably be harder to actually implement).
These irregularities shouldn't be severe enough to make people stop planning around the "seasons" of course, but I feel like a little bit of unreliability wouldn't hurt the system while making it that much more believable.
This could also allow for interesting (or annoying) scenarios to happen, such as the slipstreams persisting a bit longer then usual before changing, just long enough to allow you to rush to the defense of your colony in time- or the opposite of that.

Edit: Couldn't a special combat scenario while in a slipstream just be something small like the faster drain of PPT in a corona? The zero flux boost always being active or just a bit of extra bonus speed for all ships come to mind, and it doesn't seem like the AI would react strangely to that, as it can deal with getting a speed boost from Nav rating or having SO installed already.

[SonnaBanana]

Back to our regularly scheduled "rleaz wen"....
Alex, any chance you'll be getting 0.95.1a out before Christmas?

[Tearydan]

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!!

So happy to see this in the game, literally stopped lurking and made an account because I need to say thank you.
I had figured that maybe there would be some sort of waves in hyperspace where you could catch a ride on, but you've created a system which has outdone my hopes.

Very interested at your hints regarding the terrible implications of the slipstreams though. Each update I've done a full playthrough to the endgame content, but it's been nice seeing how it's increasingly threaded into the narrative.

[Alex]

I think one thing that could go a long way to make the half-a-cycle change appear more organic to the player would be to simply randomize the actual date where the slipstreams change by, say, a month and a half, and to make a smaller part of the network change at an earlier or later date than the rest does (although this would probably be harder to actually implement).
These irregularities shouldn't be severe enough to make people stop planning around the "seasons" of course, but I feel like a little bit of unreliability wouldn't hurt the system while making it that much more believable.
This could also allow for interesting (or annoying) scenarios to happen, such as the slipstreams persisting a bit longer then usual before changing, just long enough to allow you to rush to the defense of your colony in time- or the opposite of that.

Ah - it sort of works like that, just within a calendar month. But there's a fair amount of swing in how long it takes for slipstreams to dissipate or come into being.

Edit: Couldn't a special combat scenario while in a slipstream just be something small like the faster drain of PPT in a corona? The zero flux boost always being active or just a bit of extra bonus speed for all ships come to mind, and it doesn't seem like the AI would react strangely to that, as it can deal with getting a speed boost from Nav rating or having SO installed already.

Hmm, that could work! I was thinking something more literal in terms of blowing ships around, but the 0-flux bonus being always on is both thematic and doesn't benefit a specific group of ships over another *too* much, so it's a really good candidate. (Otherwise, you get into kind of unfortunate "now you gotta drag every fleet into a slipstream and fight them there" territory... potentially, anyway - less of an issue in hyperspace since there's a fuel cost for doing that.) Right - will keep this in mind, thank you!

Back to our regularly scheduled "rleaz wen"....
Alex, any chance you'll be getting 0.95.1a out before Christmas?

The release will be coming out... when it's ready

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!!

So happy to see this in the game, literally stopped lurking and made an account because I need to say thank you.

Aaaaaaaaaaaahh!! Welcome

I had figured that maybe there would be some sort of waves in hyperspace where you could catch a ride on, but you've created a system which has outdone my hopes.

Fun fact - way back some years ago, that was my idea, too. But I had a rough time making it work, both with the visuals and structuring the waves so that they were 1) fast enough to be useful and 2) possible to see coming and actually catch. Stationary slipstreams really helped resolve these mechanical problems, and it was easier to make the visuals work, too.

Very interested at your hints regarding the terrible implications of the slipstreams though. Each update I've done a full playthrough to the endgame content, but it's been nice seeing how it's increasingly threaded into the narrative.

You'll need to keep a keen eye out!