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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: Fleet Creation  (Read 27626 times)

Gothars

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Re: Fleet Creation
« Reply #15 on: July 25, 2014, 01:45:09 AM »

- Question about procedural vs. handcrafted: AFAIK most of the Sector is going to be procedurally generated (maybe exempt from core worlds etc.). If you say something is "handcrafted", what does that mean in this context?
Does it "just" mean that you teach the algorithm a lot of special cases? For example, an event or a (set of) market condition(s) generate a fleet profile with ship roles defined specifically for this event/condition. Or do you really mean to assemble certain fleets by hand and script their behavior? (But how would they fit into a procedural world? That would only seem to make sense for things so small or so enormous that they are independent from the state of the sector, or things coming in from the outside...)


- Something else: Can you already share anything about the way fleets with no (necessarily) clear destination behave? I.e. explorers, tech mining fleets, pirates, headhunters, freelancers, maybe patrol fleets. Do you plan on some kind of search or roaming algorithm? Or will the destination be made up (pseudo-) randomly before the fleet is even generated? Maybe with waypoints?


- Putting fleets in orbit sounds neat, visually. What happens if it is are attacked, anything special about that? Modified CR, loot or even combat scenario? Support from the planet?



So instead of the ring of space junk, why not make a dynamic ring of civilian ships orbiting the planet and stations whos size increase and decrease depending on market stability that trade fleets emerge and vanish from and to.
Also can add a simple visual indicator of how well a planet is generally doing.

Debris was already a cool idea, but yeah, combining it with orbital traffic would be really fancy.
« Last Edit: July 25, 2014, 06:43:17 AM by Gothars »
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flanker37t

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Re: Fleet Creation
« Reply #16 on: July 25, 2014, 08:46:14 AM »

Oh, an awesome update, Alex, it seems the Sector will be much more alive now! :)

However, I have a kinda off-topic question: will the NPC ships' loadouts be generated in the same way as fleets? I mean, I can beat any ship with closed eyes mainly because I know all the loadouts by heart. A more or less random loadouts would bring an immense depth to combat, players will actually scan ships first to see what's going on, we will have to adapt our combat techniques to different fleets even if they belong to the same faction, etc.
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Re: Fleet Creation
« Reply #17 on: July 25, 2014, 09:47:38 AM »

My only question is how well this works with multiple mods in play; it looks like you'd need a way to specify "Add this ship to Escort Medium with this weight", so that the final escort medium ship role is a merged conglomeration of multiple mods...
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Alex

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Re: Fleet Creation
« Reply #18 on: July 25, 2014, 11:32:08 AM »

Is there provision in ship roles for multiple ships fulfilling a single preference? Eg, if an outpost is really short on gear and can't even field a medium combat ship, it falls back even further to a pair of frigates, for instance. Or a strike force would prefer to have several frigates and fighter wings, but has to swap in a couple of fast destroyers in a pinch.
Based on how it appears to be set up, that might already be possible; see the "1" next to combatMedium.
Based on how it appears to be set up, that might already be possible; see the "1" next to combatMedium.
I think that 1 is the "weight" of the choice, not the number

For fallbacks, there's only one option, so there's no weight needed - it is indeed a quantity. So yeah, it can work like this, except for the case where you're going from a small to a medium ship - it currently would just swap out one for one, not two for one. Might need to think about that at some point.


To help make the sector feel busy and make it feel alive, I'd like to see lots of 'individual' transport and courier style ships. People still need to travel from planet A to planet B whether on a high speed transport or a bus, and people need the stuff express delivered in un-catchable millennium falcon archetypes.

Hmm. More civilian traffic in general sounds good.

So instead of the ring of space junk, why not make a dynamic ring of civilian ships orbiting the planet and stations whos size increase and decrease depending on market stability that trade fleets emerge and vanish from and to.
Also can add a simple visual indicator of how well a planet is generally doing.

I've been thinking about adding some ships to the orbital junk (it's not strictly junk, btw - more like smaller stations, satellites, etc). It'd just take more coding than I want to devote to that right now. Having a ring of ships in orbit that represent the available ships is a *really* interesting idea, though. I'll definitely keep it in mind.


- Question about procedural vs. handcrafted: AFAIK most of the Sector is going to be procedurally generated (maybe exempt from core worlds etc.). If you say something is "handcrafted", what does that mean in this context?
Does it "just" mean that you teach the algorithm a lot of special cases? For example, an event or a (set of) market condition(s) generate a fleet profile with ship roles defined specifically for this event/condition. Or do you really mean to assemble certain fleets by hand and script their behavior? (But how would they fit into a procedural world? That would only seem to make sense for things so small or so enormous that they are independent from the state of the sector, or things coming in from the outside...)

Both/either; a special case in an algorithm or "manually" assembling a fleet is pretty much the same thing. As for being "handcrafted", as I mentioned in the post, nothing is entirely one or the other. To your example, one of the stages in a food shortage event generates a relief fleet. That's a mix of handcrafted and procedural, but it's more "handcrafted" than it would be if the event simply generated a trade fleet, renamed it, and used that instead. Or, for example, there might be a special fleet that needs to be in existence at the start of the game, and factors into the backstory.


- Something else: Can you already share anything about the way fleets with no (necessarily) clear destination behave? I.e. explorers, tech mining fleets, pirates, headhunters, freelancers, maybe patrol fleets. Do you plan on some kind of search or roaming algorithm? Or will the destination be made up (pseudo-) randomly before the fleet is even generated? Maybe with waypoints?

Generally, the approach is to generate the assignments for a fleet when the fleet is created, and the assignment involves a final step where the fleet goes somewhere and despawns.

I just recently added the ability to attach scripts to fleets (and other campaign entities), though, and that's been useful for creating a higher-level assignment AI for fleets. For example, patrols will only get an assignment to orbit their source world initially. Their script will then wait until they don't have any assignments, and will generate a new mission for them - for example, something like "patrol around comm relay for 30 days, come back and orbit for 6 days". Fleets without assignments patrol around the system they're in - this is very much an implementation detail, though. Fleets need assignments to do something meaningful, but there's no reason for them not to have assignments at all times.


- Putting fleets in orbit sounds neat, visually. What happens if it is are attacked, anything special about that? Modified CR, loot or even combat scenario? Support from the planet?

For now, same as always. Except for trade fleets not having trade goods on board until they finish loading :)

(Re: support from the planet: maybe later. I've been thinking about this on an off, can't wait to actually get to it.)


However, I have a kinda off-topic question: will the NPC ships' loadouts be generated in the same way as fleets? I mean, I can beat any ship with closed eyes mainly because I know all the loadouts by heart. A more or less random loadouts would bring an immense depth to combat, players will actually scan ships first to see what's going on, we will have to adapt our combat techniques to different fleets even if they belong to the same faction, etc.

I know what you mean. Dynamic loadouts are another thing I'm really looking forward to adding (or at least trying, though I suspect it'd work out nicely); probably around the time autofactories/blueprints/ship production/etc exist.


My only question is how well this works with multiple mods in play; it looks like you'd need a way to specify "Add this ship to Escort Medium with this weight", so that the final escort medium ship role is a merged conglomeration of multiple mods...

There's file merging, same as with everything else. A mod could add ships to a specific faction's role, to a default role, etc.


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Re: Fleet Creation
« Reply #19 on: July 25, 2014, 12:56:46 PM »

I like the general idea; it's a good approach to the problems of making fleets varied.  That said, there are a couple of critiques I'd like to offer:

1.  I'd really prefer to see more visual uniformity amongst the Factions, to give them a more coherent look and feel.  Of them, only Tri-Tachyon has a distinct visual feel, and the rest feel very generic... and I'd really like to see the game move away from that and towards giving the Factions a unique look and feel, ala Freelancer.  This change will mean that fleets are even less heterogeneous in character, which may be potentially good / bad from a gameplay perspective, but it's going to cost the Factions even more of what makes them visually unique.

Depending on the state of the game art, this may or may not be a big deal to implement; perhaps just some palette manipulations and minor stat changes would be all it took to give each Faction's ships a more cohesive character- a Hegemony Enforcer might have better armor but slightly less speed than a Pirate one, etc. 

2.  I don't mind that, if there's nothing "better" around, the Hegemony will produce a Medusa, but it sounds like creating the web of dependencies is going to be really time-consuming, if one wants to ensure that a given planet won't have anything it can build if the Faction's preferences say ABC but the only Blueprint around is D.  How is that eventuality being handled?

Questions:

1.  The .faction files are well and truly broken, in terms of backwards compatibility now?

2.  Enabling which Blueprints are available happens through setup of the Markets by code fiat (for now), yes?

3.  Special fleets can still be built via code by adding new FleetMembers and all that?
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Alex

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Re: Fleet Creation
« Reply #20 on: July 25, 2014, 01:12:58 PM »

1.  I'd really prefer to see more visual uniformity amongst the Factions, to give them a more coherent look and feel.  Of them, only Tri-Tachyon has a distinct visual feel, and the rest feel very generic... and I'd really like to see the game move away from that and towards giving the Factions a unique look and feel, ala Freelancer.  This change will mean that fleets are even less heterogeneous in character, which may be potentially good / bad from a gameplay perspective, but it's going to cost the Factions even more of what makes them visually unique.

Depending on the state of the game art, this may or may not be a big deal to implement; perhaps just some palette manipulations and minor stat changes would be all it took to give each Faction's ships a more cohesive character- a Hegemony Enforcer might have better armor but slightly less speed than a Pirate one, etc. 

The TT visual feel is more of a coincidence at this point (it's really the "high tech" visual feel, not TT), although I'd imagine they're still likely to get access to higher-tech blueprints when those are in the game. One of the things I'm thinking about here is making hullmods something faction-specific; this would likely entail some skill changes, too.

I don't actually like the idea of factions having completely non-overlapping ship sets. Some unique ships are good, but it feels like stuff like the Hound or the Lasher, standard workhorse type ships, should be pretty universally available. Part of it is that there are, say, only so many frigates you can have before they start being basically the same thing, so if you have 10 factions or whatnot, having several unique frigate choices per becomes unreasonable. Part of it is it wouldn't make in-fiction sense for the sets to be non-overlapping. Yet another part is that I'd like blueprint discovery to be something the player can use to influence the world (e.g., find Onslaught blueprint, sell to some minor independent world, watch total and utter chaos unfold).

We'll see, though. This is something that needs more thinking through.


2.  I don't mind that, if there's nothing "better" around, the Hegemony will produce a Medusa, but it sounds like creating the web of dependencies is going to be really time-consuming, if one wants to ensure that a given planet won't have anything it can build if the Faction's preferences say ABC but the only Blueprint around is D.  How is that eventuality being handled?

I don't quite understand the question. Is there a missing negation somewhere, maybe?

1.  The .faction files are well and truly broken, in terms of backwards compatibility now?

The original fleetCompositions still work. Not taking that out at the moment.


2.  Enabling which Blueprints are available happens through setup of the Markets by code fiat (for now), yes?

Blueprints aren't a thing at this point. The way it works is by basically assuming that everything is available, so, preferences are what matters.

3.  Special fleets can still be built via code by adding new FleetMembers and all that?

Yes. That's how patrols and trade fleets are created, actually. There's a MarketAPI.pickShipAndAddToFleet(String role, CampaignFleetAPI fleet) method that makes this work.
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HELMUT

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Re: Fleet Creation
« Reply #21 on: July 25, 2014, 01:27:17 PM »

I like the general idea; it's a good approach to the problems of making fleets varied.  That said, there are a couple of critiques I'd like to offer:

1.  I'd really prefer to see more visual uniformity amongst the Factions, to give them a more coherent look and feel.  Of them, only Tri-Tachyon has a distinct visual feel, and the rest feel very generic... and I'd really like to see the game move away from that and towards giving the Factions a unique look and feel, ala Freelancer.  This change will mean that fleets are even less heterogeneous in character, which may be potentially good / bad from a gameplay perspective, but it's going to cost the Factions even more of what makes them visually unique.

Lore wise it actually make sense that the Hegemony also make use of high-tech ships. Strike Force Pollux are soldiers from the Domain so it's not surprising that they are armed with high-end weaponry like Paragons and other high-tech toys. Since they are now leading the Hegemony, it make sense that their core world's SDF are much more advanced than other systems. When you look at the local Hegemony colony in Corvus which share its own system with Pirates and hostile Tri-tachyons, they are probably a backward, isolated system, which would explain their extensive use of lower tech vessels.

The same thing could apply for TTs, an isolated TT system, for some reasons might be on a shortage of their usual high tech ships so they instead use something else until it can be replaced.

But overall the usual identity "Hegemony=low-tech, Tri-tachyon=high-tech" could still be somewhat working. After all the Hegemony seems much more expanded so most of their worlds only have low techs stuffs available, while Tri-tachyons as a corporation must keep their fleets standardized, perhaps?

Anyway, it's a very nice addition. I'm curious to see how fast you can switch a planet to a wealthy, organized world into a pirate haven.
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Re: Fleet Creation
« Reply #22 on: July 25, 2014, 02:17:08 PM »

Quote
Lore wise it actually make sense that the Hegemony also make use of high-tech ships. Strike Force Pollux are soldiers from the Domain so it's not surprising that they are armed with high-end weaponry like Paragons and other high-tech toys.

well..... they were sent from the domain "many years ago" on slower than light travel, so I'm not entirely certain that that is the case

afaik (and this may be headcanon, I forgot how much of these i actually saw)

low tech: started "many years ago" before the invention of effective energy weapon and shielding, most of which brought to the sector by Pollux
midline: current level civilian tech, declassified weapons for civilian and local militia use, "standard" tech level at the time of collapse
high tech: cutting edge domain technology at time of collapse, kept in working order and safeguarded by the elitist Tri-Tachyon corporation
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Toxcity

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Re: Fleet Creation
« Reply #23 on: July 25, 2014, 02:54:06 PM »

Well the Aurora's description in-game mentions that it's used by the Hegemony, but is mostly used by corporations.

Quote
In engagements, the Aurora's large energy turrets annihilate targets at extreme ranges with impunity, while missile launcher hardpoints deal with what is left. Most blueprints required to manufacture an Aurora-class ships are closely guarded corporate secrets, but a few have also seen service in the Hegemony Defense Force and rarely, in the hands of enterprising mercenary captains.
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Gothars

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Re: Fleet Creation
« Reply #24 on: July 25, 2014, 03:15:50 PM »

I'd really prefer to see more visual uniformity amongst the Factions, to give them a more coherent look and feel. 

For this it would be great to have faction icons painted on (some of the) ship hulls.


well..... they were sent from the domain "many years ago" on slower than light travel, so I'm not entirely certain that that is the case

They arrived via hyperspace, but without a gate. So their journey may have taken hundreds of years, and their ships were probably (updated) antiques even when the started. :)


low tech: started "many years ago" before the invention of effective energy weapon and shielding, most of which brought to the sector by Pollux
midline: current level civilian tech, declassified weapons for civilian and local militia use, "standard" tech level at the time of collapse
high tech: cutting edge domain technology at time of collapse, kept in working order and safeguarded by the elitist Tri-Tachyon corporation

As I understand it, only expansion-epoch (high-tech) ships were used in the time before the collapse, core-epoch (midline) and mastery (low-tech) ships are both historical relics. Even the fact that they are named after historical eras strongly indicates that.
It's a bit as if we would start building WW2 fighter planes again after a major collapse of civilization, because nobody has the know-how to assemble a modern jet.
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kazi

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Re: Fleet Creation
« Reply #25 on: July 25, 2014, 04:12:07 PM »

I'm going to second the motion for more visually uniform factions. Mixing and matching ships from different epochs/tech levels/whatever really grinds my gears aesthetically. I find myself always gravitating towards fielding only midlines, only high-tech, or only low-tech. Usually I don't mix and match except with ships that are kinda in between (Apogee = high/medium tech, Sunder = low/medium tech, etc.).

I think less well off/smaller/independent factions should use a hodgepodge of ships, but stronger/larger factions should have a very consistent feel and style.
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Re: Fleet Creation
« Reply #26 on: July 25, 2014, 07:14:24 PM »

agreed.....

most sci fi games have a single distinct "feel" for a faction, but then that's justified by the factions usually being alien races who developed their technology apart from ours... In human vs human space battles (which is actually terribly rare in media....) one would imagine the ships all have a similar aesthetic....

where SS is stuck with is the idea that people would be using ships from distinctly different eras of human development, yet somehow these ships are on a (more or less) even playing field

It's a bit as if we would start building WW2 fighter planes again after a major collapse of civilization, because nobody has the know-how to assemble a modern jet.

like that, except the WW2 fighter can somehow still take down a modern jet, which is pretty much impossible unless technology has barely advanced for the past hundreds of years BEFORE the collapse

eh... idk.... somehow I feel this is gonna take some mental gymnastics to justify.... even more so now that factions are getting more disjointed from their tech level
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xenoargh

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Re: Fleet Creation
« Reply #27 on: July 25, 2014, 07:23:26 PM »

Quote
I don't actually like the idea of factions having completely non-overlapping ship sets. Some unique ships are good, but it feels like stuff like the Hound or the Lasher, standard workhorse type ships, should be pretty universally available.
I agree with this in principle- I just want to see paintjob variations, really, that gives each Faction more of a cohesive look visually.  Ideally, they'd have small stat-line differences, but just having them use a Sprite swap would be good enough and easily implemented :)

As an example, right now the only thing that separates the Pirates from the Hegemony visually is Onslaughts.  Hence, they don't feel very distinct culturally.  

In this regard, look at the modded factions, where each one has a distinct visual feel; this is more appealing to me as a player, because it creates a much stronger sense of identity; I can build up a fleet of X Faction ships, if I want to RP.  

Anyhow, without knowing anything about the state of the art assets, I can't speak to the level of difficulty / time that making things more coherent would create.  I'd suspect that it's not a big deal in terms of time spent, though; doing straightforward palette manipulations is going to do it for a lot of cases.

Quote
I think less well off/smaller/independent factions should use a hodgepodge of ships, but stronger/larger factions should have a very consistent feel and style.
I agree with this strongly.  It's quite OK to engage in a lot of asset re-use for minor factions, and if done cleverly, it can create a feeling that they're a blending-point, culturally, with the other groups they share space with.  With the big factions, I kind of expect a lot more uniformity.

Quote
I don't quite understand the question. Is there a missing negation somewhere, maybe?
More that I didn't really express myself clearly due to my limited understanding of the underlying mechanic, sorry :) 

Anyhow, the question is, "If Factions have strict preferences to build ABC, but only have Blueprint D, will there be a mechanic that will allow that to happen, or will the Faction not build anything at all?"
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Alex

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Re: Fleet Creation
« Reply #28 on: July 25, 2014, 08:02:57 PM »

As far as tech levels: think of it in terms of technology having mostly plateaued a long time ago. The "tech levels" more represent different schools of design thought. Sure, some slight improvements to engine technology may have been required to create the "high tech" ship designs, but they were far from being a qualitative change, and likely came with their own set of trade-offs.

Anyhow, the question is, "If Factions have strict preferences to build ABC, but only have Blueprint D, will there be a mechanic that will allow that to happen, or will the Faction not build anything at all?"

Ah. That shouldn't be a problem, would probably just make it fall back to the default role specification if the faction role specifications failed to produce an available ship. The default roles should contain every ship/variant that's meant to be used, so it would work out.
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Re: Fleet Creation
« Reply #29 on: July 25, 2014, 08:29:51 PM »

Well I am going to have to be a good fanboy and give Alex some support here.  :P

If the fleets are all of one solid type, that limits what kinds of fleets we can fight. For example, what would an onslaught be like if it had hyperion escorts? Nobody knows, they don't exist, but I bet it would be pretty nightmarish. The different tech levels each do some things better than the other ones, and they each have their weak points and strong points. If each faction always has the same weak points it makes the game seem more flat. Yeah, the factions then seem more differentiated, but they aren't even supposed to be, compared with many sci-fi game factions, which have alien races. In starsector they are all humans, and they all use the same technology.  And remember, this is supposed to be somewhat post-apocolyptic - nobody is going to be too picky about the weapons they use as long as they do the job.

Don't worry, I am sure Alex will make sure the factions are differentiated enough.

And on a related note, pirate fleets and Hegemony fleets might look similar, but if you fight the hegemony you can certainly tell the difference.  ;D
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