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[JDCollie]

Edit: Just saw this:

Spoiler

[close]

When I'm not playing Starsector, I do the technical side of this little mod ...

LOL, that is awesome.

Also, I'm loving the updated ships. (Unfortunately, I'm mostly on the receiving end of their ministrations)

[kazi]

BUMP BUMP BUMP! UPDATE! (link in OP)

As a bit of a "sorry I take forever to update" present, I included some of my retouched vanilla sprites from elsewhere on this forum. I think they're an improvement over the originals, but if you don't like them, simply delete them from /graphics/ships. Lots of new art and stuff. Could have added more code and scripts, but at my current modding rate this update would probably come out next year if I waited until I added all the features I originally intended.  

Quick summary of update for those who don't want to read the changelog below (it's looooonnnng):
-Mayorate carriers/fighters are now a viable playstyle
-Couple new small mounts
-New fighters/destroyers/freighters
-New art assets for Mayorate star system
-Updated some vanilla sprites
-Full ShaderLib Support and normal maps
-Faction got nerfed a bit. Not too much though  



Play now. Yes?

Changelog:

Code

v0.7
-Added Foraker-class destroyer. The Foraker is a light carrier with enough ordanance to not be a complete bore to fly, but is very poor defensively. 
-Added Safir-class freighter and conversion (destroyer escort). The Safir is quite an average shipping solution, but it still beats using Buffaloes, right? The conversion makes an okay missile support platform. Just don't try to actually take it into heavy combat. 
-Added Raad-class heavy fighter wing. Mounting a pair of PPCs, this craft is a credible threat to destroyers, frigates and fighters. Replaces the Reaver Gunship.
-Added Angha light bomber wing. Unlike other bombers, the Angha will decimate destroyers and light cruisers but is weak versus capitals. Mounts the special Tracer Rocket Launcher (8x400 damage, ultra-fast, bad tracking).
-Added the PPC weapon (small energy). It's essentially an IR pulse laser without the suck.
-Added Graser PD. A short-ranged PD laser that fires constant, discrete shots. Very comparable to LR PD lasers, but with different pros and cons (more power, less range). All Mayorate energy flak mounts now use Graser PD.
-Added normal maps for ALL SHIP SPRITES AND WEAPONS! (much purple was had!)
-Added ShaderLib lighting information for all Mayorate weapons.
-Added custom planet graphics for Ilkhanna. Kudos go out to Russian/European/American taxpayers for the base image for this. 
-Added custom background graphics for the Rasht star system. Again, thanks to Russian/European/American taxpayers for funding the telescopes that generated the base starfield. 
-Added improved Onslaught sprite.
-Added improved Condor sprite.
-Added improved Apogee sprite.
-Added improved Venture sprite.
-Added improved Mule sprite. 
-Phoenix missiles now track, which is a pretty significant buff. 
-Light Graser fire rate increased, damage decreased. Feels much more responsive when under player control now, although it's a little less bursty.
-Kashef Sensor Suite now gives +5% range, +10% weapon tracking, +50% sensor range. 
-Lilith hit with all-around nerf bat. It's still quite potent, but lost a lot of flux capacity, hull points, and weapon range.
-Inanna wing size decreased to 4. 
-Removed Reaver Gunship. It didn't look very cool and didn't feel particularly useful.
-Removed Esfahan-class destroyer. It was really OP and the art was bad.
-Removed Impactor Missiles. No one uses them, including me. 
-Removed the "Battle1" music track. I got tired of it. 
-Changes to Mayorate base hullstyle (more picturesque venting).
-Changes to Mayorate engine styles. Engines appear much hotter, and contrails are more prominent. All Mayorate ships/fighters/missiles now use custom Mayorate engines. Added "small" engine style for better graphics and performance for missiles/fighters.
-Mayorate faction color is now yellow. No more confusing their fleets with the Diktat! (happened to me all the time...)
-Various performance improvements (although implementation of ShaderLib will pretty much erase those gains in performance).
-Miscellaneous balance changes and other fixes not worth mentioning.

NOTE: Mod now requires ShaderLib.

[MesoTroniK]

You call that a long changelog Kazi? Hehe, do not look at mine then. Anyways I spent some time playing them last night, the new ships and weapons are cool but oh my those nukes are still incredibly brutal. If you are interesting in toning them back to a more fair state, and possibly making the AI deal with them in an intelligent manner.

Poke me back

Anyways I will play them some more soon™

[JDCollie]

Good grief, I have been getting thrashed by these guys lately o.O 






I must get some of my own soon . . . oh yes, very soon . . .

[kazi]

Okay so the overwhelming consensus from the mod feedback thread (http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=8122.0) is that the Mayorate is fun, has great graphics, and is very, very "somewhat OP." Balance seems to be the only major thing that people dislike about this mod so far. Although I attribute much of the "somewhat OP"-ness to being the only starting system where everyone is outright trying to kill you at the start of UsS, it's clear I need to spend a significant amount of time nerfing things down a bit (the original intention was to have a bit of a "quality over quantity" thing going on, but it appears people are not fans of that). Even a modest score in the balance category (>0.4) would put this in the "top 5" of the feedback thread lol.

The other area I can improve in is coding/ship systems/unique features/etc., which is a direct consequence of how I've been developing things so far. Been trying to build the "skeleton" of the faction up first (graphics, giving everyone a full set of ships, basic weapons, etc.), before I flesh things out with the cool/tricky stuff. Anyhow, I'm feeling things are becoming a lot more "complete" with the addition of the new ships and weapons (many basic roles are starting to be filled), so the next patch will probably focus more on stuff in the coding department.

You call that a long changelog Kazi? Hehe, do not look at mine then. Anyways I spent some time playing them last night, the new ships and weapons are cool but oh my those nukes are still incredibly brutal. If you are interesting in toning them back to a more fair state, and possibly making the AI deal with them in an intelligent manner.

Poke me back

Anyways I will play them some more soon™

But the nukes are my favorite . I just noticed the nukes do 1500 damage as opposed to the 500 like I thought they did (forgot that the MIRV code overrides weapon_data.csv). Oops.


*Oh, and should anyone have any creative suggestions on unique/interesting things to include in future updates (like "hey a ship system that did ____ would be super cool"), post here and let me know. I'll definitely give it consideration and will possibly bundle it into the next update if I really like it. One such suggestion that made it in was JDCollie's request for a Mayorate freighter... actually turned out to be one of my favorite sprites so far.

[MesoTroniK]

Well IMO Kazi, the main balance issues go as this and they are simple to fix: Many of the weapons have extreme burst damage, the ships are fast, the shields are quite durable, and the logistics values for the ships are waaaay too low. The nukes are a bit more complex, mainly how the AI does not understand how to deal with them, and the fact they detonate at such a large stand off distance.

And if you need ideas, I always have them

[Flunky]

Well IMO Kazi, the main balance issues go as this and they are simple to fix: Many of the weapons have extreme burst damage, the ships are fast, the shields are quite durable, and the logistics values for the ships are waaaay too low. The nukes are a bit more complex, mainly how the AI does not understand how to deal with them, and the fact they detonate at such a large stand off distance.

And if you need ideas, I always have them

But I love having cruisers that use supplies at destroyer rates! Getting some Mayorate ships is currently quite handy in UsS-- they're not only good ships, but they're much more profitable. Of course, getting them requires either busting them up or joining a faction about as popular as pirates.

Now that I'm writing I might as well give some limited feedback... since it's from playing UsS, though, most of it would be obsolete. At the very least, I can say that one issue I've had is that I can only really notice a nuke when it's exploding in my face. As best I can tell it doesn't look too different from any other missile (perhaps I haven't been paying enough attention?) and I've never been able to make out the audio cue mentioned in the OP.

The Cimeterre is fast enough that I have difficulty running them down with frigates in pursuit scenarios; not sure if that's intended. Esfahan is/was too awesome (but you know that already). Lilith is/was an excellent player ship, although when I delegated them to AI they died frightfully often. Almost always miss the target with phoenix missiles, so the tracking sounds nice. Nerf to Inanna wing size, grazer changes, and pd grazer all sound nice. I'm a bit too fond of UsS, though, so I guess I'll have to wait to find out...

[JDCollie]

One such suggestion that made it in was JDCollie's request for a Mayorate freighter... actually turned out to be one of my favorite sprites so far.

[Griffinhart]

Just had a crash in Exerelin, think it's due to this mod. Using the Mayorate_v0.7_no_music archive, got the following crash error during play:

Fatal: Ship hull variant [ilk_esfahan_assault] not found!

Checking the archive, there is no ilk_esfahan_assault.variant file in data/variants, nor is there a corresponding hull in data/hulls.

ETA: Just saw the 0.7 changelog. Seems like you forgot the remove a reference to esfahan somewhere?

ETA2: Nevermind. Offending lines are in an Exerelin file.

ETA3: There are still references to ilk_reaver_wing in Mayorate_v0.7_no_music/data/missions/hegemony_sdf/MissionDefinition.java on lines 52 and 53. Not sure if this will cause a crash; I caught these references while grepping my mod directory because Exerelin has a reference to ilk_reaver_wing that caused a crash.

-- Griffinhart

[kazi]

Now that I'm writing I might as well give some limited feedback... since it's from playing UsS, though, most of it would be obsolete. At the very least, I can say that one issue I've had is that I can only really notice a nuke when it's exploding in my face. As best I can tell it doesn't look too different from any other missile (perhaps I haven't been paying enough attention?) and I've never been able to make out the audio cue mentioned in the OP.

The Cimeterre is fast enough that I have difficulty running them down with frigates in pursuit scenarios; not sure if that's intended. Esfahan is/was too awesome (but you know that already). Lilith is/was an excellent player ship, although when I delegated them to AI they died frightfully often. Almost always miss the target with phoenix missiles, so the tracking sounds nice. Nerf to Inanna wing size, grazer changes, and pd grazer all sound nice. I'm a bit too fond of UsS, though, so I guess I'll have to wait to find out...

I'll make the nukes easier to see in the next patch. The audio's a bit hard to hear unless you're really close to the ship that's firing them. The Cimeterre is fast, but perhaps it shouldn't be quite that fast. Might slow it down at some point. Also yeah, I love playing UsS more than just mod compilations, can't wait till Uomoz adds the latest version.

Just had a crash in Exerelin, think it's due to this mod. Using the Mayorate_v0.7_no_music archive, got the following crash error during play:

Fatal: Ship hull variant [ilk_esfahan_assault] not found!

Checking the archive, there is no ilk_esfahan_assault.variant file in data/variants, nor is there a corresponding hull in data/hulls.

ETA: Just saw the 0.7 changelog. Seems like you forgot the remove a reference to esfahan somewhere?

ETA2: Nevermind. Offending lines are in an Exerelin file.

ETA3: There are still references to ilk_reaver_wing in Mayorate_v0.7_no_music/data/missions/hegemony_sdf/MissionDefinition.java on lines 52 and 53. Not sure if this will cause a crash; I caught these references while grepping my mod directory because Exerelin has a reference to ilk_reaver_wing that caused a crash.

-- Griffinhart

Whoops, forgot to mention in the OP how to fix that. Although I have no control over Exerelin's core files, copy/pasting the Mayorate.faction file from Mayorate/data/world/factions to Exerelin/data/world/factions will restore Exerelin compatibility. I include all of the Exerelin-required information into the .faction file so you can always play the most up-to-date version with a simple copy/paste.

And although the two references in the mission definition aren't crash-inducing, they will make the mission unplayable. Might have to hotfix that, but not a game-breaking issue.

[JDCollie]

While playing with the Belial PPC, I noticed that it seems to have a couple weird properties. The first is that the bulk of the scatter seems to fall outside of the firing arc indicated by the guide, and the second is that the projectile speed is inconsistent. Sometimes the pellets come out really fast, and other times they come out very slowly; since the projectile lifetime doesn't change, this means that the shots fall far short of maximum range.

I'm playing 1.3.7 version of Uomoz's mod btw, so it's entirely possible this was long since fixed.

[kazi]

While playing with the Belial PPC, I noticed that it seems to have a couple weird properties. The first is that the bulk of the scatter seems to fall outside of the firing arc indicated by the guide, and the second is that the projectile speed is inconsistent. Sometimes the pellets come out really fast, and other times they come out very slowly; since the projectile lifetime doesn't change, this means that the shots fall far short of maximum range.

I'm playing 1.3.7 version of Uomoz's mod btw, so it's entirely possible this was long since fixed.

I've noticed this behaviour as well. It's caused by a random number generator coming up with a skewed set of speeds for projectile movement in x and y directions (how the "buckshot" spread is generated). It functions "properly" if the generator spits out a normal distribution of x and y speeds (most of the time). If it comes up with a set of y speeds systematically skewed high or low, the pellets all come out slow or fast as a result. I'll look into making the behaviour become a little more reliable in the next patch. I'll also decrease the "spreading" a little, that bit has been annoying me for awhile.

Also, here's an updated fix for the new "Dev" version of Exerelin (my other fix only worked for 0.632):
Copy this mayorate.json file to exerelin's /data/config/exerelinFactionConfig folder. Overwrite the old one. Play Exerelin as usual.

[JDCollie]

While playing with the Belial PPC, I noticed that it seems to have a couple weird properties. The first is that the bulk of the scatter seems to fall outside of the firing arc indicated by the guide, and the second is that the projectile speed is inconsistent. Sometimes the pellets come out really fast, and other times they come out very slowly; since the projectile lifetime doesn't change, this means that the shots fall far short of maximum range.

I'm playing 1.3.7 version of Uomoz's mod btw, so it's entirely possible this was long since fixed.

I've noticed this behaviour as well. It's caused by a random number generator coming up with a skewed set of speeds for projectile movement in x and y directions (how the "buckshot" spread is generated). It functions "properly" if the generator spits out a normal distribution of x and y speeds (most of the time). If it comes up with a set of y speeds systematically skewed high or low, the pellets all come out slow or fast as a result. I'll look into making the behaviour become a little more reliable in the next patch. I'll also decrease the "spreading" a little, that bit has been annoying me for awhile.

Also, here's an updated fix for the new "Dev" version of Exerelin (my other fix only worked for 0.632):
Copy this mayorate.json file to exerelin's /data/config/exerelinFactionConfig folder. Overwrite the old one. Play Exerelin as usual.

Thanks


Also, I know it's a bother, but I can't help but notice that the Mayorate lacks a capital level PPC. If we already have the Belial, then the mighty Apollyon PPC (or some better name) would give anyone who dared to close with the Mayorate a good look out the other side of their face   I mean, come on, a capital shotgun is both as impractical and awesome as it sounds.

[kazi]

Also, I know it's a bother, but I can't help but notice that the Mayorate lacks a capital level PPC. If we already have the Belial, then the mighty Apollyon PPC (or some better name) would give anyone who dared to close with the Mayorate a good look out the other side of their face   I mean, come on, a capital shotgun is both as impractical and awesome as it sounds.

Maybe. 

Also, how do people feel about the music I've been writing for this mod so far? Is it something I should be spending time on, or is my attention better focused elsewhere? (I noticed I scored poorly on audio, but Exi also uses many of my music tracks and scored very high... hmmmm...  )

Off topic but here's a wip of something I originally intended to be a combat track but might now be a little too hardcore
https://soundcloud.com/kazi11/controlled-burn-wip

Just for kicks, here's a screenie of my oscilliscope giving up on life (you'll know where when you hear it).

Spoiler

[close]

Been learning Java, there will be some pretty new toys in the update (whenever that is...)

[MesoTroniK]

Also, how do people feel about the music I've been writing for this mod so far? Is it something I should be spending time on, or is my attention better focused elsewhere? (I noticed I scored poorly on audio, but Exi also uses many of my music tracks and scored very high... hmmmm...  )

Been learning Java, there will be some pretty new toys in the update (whenever that is...)

I enjoy the music you make But the difference in audio score on the mod feedback poll is likely because Exi uses original sounds for the weapons and ship systems. As great as your sounds are, they are borrowed from other games.

Also about the music, in the upcoming update I am removing the music that is shared between both our mods. For several reasons, I ordered more original music and I am trying to reduce the file mass of the mod, music control will likely be exposed in the API soon™, and many people run both the faction mods at the same time or a compilation such as UsS so sharing music is somewhat superfluous.

Hmmm, new scripted toys?