zarkonnen's Blog

Re: Take care

Thank you for your kind words. :)

I have recovered somewhat now, but am restricting myself to about two hours of work a day. Which is pretty frustrating. If you're interested, what I'm working on at the moment is fine-tuning the combat AI to handle fights where there are multiple targets to choose from. To make sure the AI behaves sensibly, I'm introducing code to make ships concentrate their fire and stick with a given target instead of flipping between multiple alternatives.

The AI code is really quite long now, but I'm quite proud of it too. I don't even know if I can defeat it in a fair fight anymore. I need to run a couple of fights of identical ships at some point.

Here's a screenshot of a tiny bit of the reams of code:

Re: Dev 10 Combat Screenshots

Glad you like it. :)

I actually played some MOO II yesterday morning. Plasma Titans for breakfast...

Re: Dev 10 Combat Screenshots

Actually I worry that the new combat system won't be a good thing.

What makes the game (dev 9) good in my opinion is the simplicity and balance. A more sophisticated combat system is not justified in my opinion unless it brings an interesting set of strategic options.

-guest_guest

I totally understand your concern. SE:SS is not supposed to be a space combat game primarily. But me pouring so much effort into the combat feature makes it look like it's going to be a combat game now.

The reason why I'm putting in so much time and effort is that by and large, the previous iteration did not work. In the feedback I received, players described it as boring and frustrating. There is actually quite a bit of strategy involved in dev 9's combat mode,  as can be seen on the videos I posted about shooting down drones, but many people were so turned off by the lackluster initial experience that they never noticed it.

So dev 10's combat mode is a major rehaul. The underlying engine is actually the same one, but planets and asteroids have been added to create "terrain" for the combat to happen in. This has also required an upgraded AI, as the old one was too daft to understand about planets and that you have to go around them.

This new combat mode is intended to be pretty much the final thing. I want to do some alterations and improvements to the other parts of the game - and write a lot more encounters - but I'm not going to do any more major combat work after that. There are always improvements that can be made, but I must be wary of falling into the trap of neverending improvements, never finishing the game. If nothing else, I will eventually run out of money & starve to death, at which point the game will remain unfinished. :P

Re: Dev 10 Combat Screenshots

With the smaller grid it is beginning to remind me of combat in Master of Orion 2. Being able to maneuver through (or crash through... hehe) asteroids is a new idea I haven't really seen before in a game with turn-based space combat.

-drake3

It is indeed heavily inspired by (read: blatantly copied from) MOO2's combat mode. I adore the game despite its age and obvious flaws, and think the combat works especially well, mostly because it doesn't pretend to be a "realistic" representation of space combat.

This is probably part of the reason why asteroid fields haven't come up in turn-based space combat. Real-life asteroids fields are so thin that you can fling yourself through them with very little chance about hitting anything. However, fictional Star Wars-esque asteroid fields are much more fun from a gameplay perspective. It's admittedly unrealistic, but given we're pretending space is two-dimensional, any other violations are really more minor quibbles. :)

Re: Combat Tips

*checks code to make sure*

It depends on the kind of weapon, but for your trusty laser cannon, each evade point helps about twice as much as each square of distance. Slower-moving weapons are more affected by distance, so with a plasma cannon, each evade point helps about the same as a square of distance.

The actual numbers and details are liable to change in the next version, though, as the squares will be smaller.

In the rewritten combat mode this will actually be spelled out:

Re: Great game! Thanks!

I'm glad you like it. :)

Re: Challenge: Get the antimatter charge intermixer

Just to show that it is possible. :)

Re: Customize the ship at the start?

I quite like the idea of players having to earn different loadouts.

Another way to achieve a similar result would be to allow loadout selection only at higher difficulty levels. So at easy/medium you can only play with the default ship, while at hard/very hard, you could get a "freebie" where you can select one of, eg:

* A 2nd laser turret
* A 2nd doctor
* More gold
* More initial fuel

Though I'm also thinking of adding an achievements system - time permitting. Hence, you could get rewarded for your deeds with the option to choose a different loadout. Ultimately, it's a "amount of work to make it work properly and get it balanced" vs "amount of fun added to the game" question. :)

Re: From Combat Tips in general.

For the next development preview, the main focus is on improving combat. More and different combat equipment will definitely feature in later versions of the game - so far, there just isn't that much content yet.

Similarly, I hope to flesh out the character of each individual crew member as time goes on.

Re: a couple of bugs in dev 9

Thanks for taking the time to so thoroughly report all of these bugs. I have added them to the to-do list for dev 10.

Shame about the window size issue, though. I though I had fixed that, but evidently, I'm still getting the wrong numbers. You may be able to manually resize the window.

Re: Chased off != "Explored" + pirates are inconsistent

If you are chased off by another ship, the star system you just fled from should not be marked "Explored" - after all, you didn't actually explore it.

-tacroy

Good point.

Also, from the way the game behaves, it seems that space pirates are a planet encounter in and of themselves, instead of a planet obstacle like the robot drones or the Gloptians. This is odd and inconsistent with the other two events. Perhaps there could be a pirate base the pirate ship flees to or something like that?

-tacroy

Also a good point. The idea was that the pirate ship flies on after encountering you, but it never appears on the map to do so. There's another inconsistency I've already noticed, which is that the Gloptian cruiser simply vanishes when you bribe it. Surely it should either fly away or stick around but not block the system anymore.

Both are consequences of me not quite properly updating encounters when the game around them changes. I will endeavour to fix them in the next release.

Re: Infinite weathered objects

This is indeed a bug. The capsule is supposed to be marked as empty post-opening, but clearly it is not.

Though having one that spontaneously reproduces behind your back sounds like a fun idea. :)

Re: Why -400 for "Lost Ship"?

The bug is indeed that the exploding capsule docks you 400 points. Before dev 9, it destroyed your entire ship, and I accidentally left in the score change for "Lost Ship" when I changed it to only kill someone.

This will be fixed in dev 10. For now, I can only advise you to be extra-careful when handling strange unmarked containers, and to consult your local archeologist if in doubt...

Re: Scoring issue

Good point I plain hadn't considered. I think quitting the game instead of ending it should simply not put you on the high scores list. Especially given that there are a few situation where ending the game instantly will save you from losing a lot of points...

I've put the change on the to do list for dev 10.

Re: Challenge: Get the antimatter charge intermixer

You're generally on the right track. You can also get gold by defeating the Ocranians and looking for it in ruined cities. Also, certain crew members will do a lot better than others in mining gold...

But no, it's no easy task. :)

(I'm currently looking into the best way to record games of SE:SS for purposes of interactive tutorials/advertising/walkthroughs. When I have figured it out, I might see if I can record a really successful game.)

Re: Really excited about this

I'm glad you like it. :) More content is soon to follow...

Re: Congrats on Dev 9

Thanks!

Re: Bethesda - Thankfully, I'm not planning on being employed by the mainstream games industry, so I can diss them as much as I want. :)

Re: Accepted Objections, attacked nonetheless!?

*consults code*

Yes, that's a bug. Well spotted, and thanks for reporting it!

I've fixed it in the code base now, so it'll be gone in dev 10.

- David

Re: Some Feature Requests

Hi aruta,

Commenting on your requests in turn:

- Planets around the stars who can be explored once you enter a solar system. (Make nebula's explorable?)
A: I'm kind of tempted to add this, because it would be kind of cool to have all the planets. But on the other hand, it makes the user interface much more complex, and adds a lot of art requirements for the planets. And ultimately, I'm not sure if it would add that much to the gameplay - scanning/exploring each planet in turn would be fun the first couple of times, but the 100th time you enter a new star system, you probably just want to know if there's anything interesting going on.

- XP/items/perks/stats for captain and crew
A: Well, they do have stats/perks in the form of skills. XP would be a fun (and potentially quite easy) thing to add - but should stat gain from XP be indicated somehow? I'm not that fond of "X is now level Y" pop-ups, especially because the game avoids visible stats in general. (In something of a bid for realism - real life doesn't have HP and XP.)

- Sandbox mode. Unlimited fuel for example. Or just a lot of it (own mining plant?)
A: There will be difficulty levels in dev 10. I'm currently planning on Easy, Medium, Hard and Random. (Random turns off the balancing sub-system and allows pure chance to take its course.) A large part of the difficulty level will be how tight fuel is - Medium will be about as tight as it's now, Easy will pretty much guarantee you can visit every star at least once, and Hard will be, well, hard.

- More stuff to find. Maybe honor points? Or raised science skill for finding new lifeforms in stead of only fuel rewards to balance things out?
A: Oh, there will be lots more stuff to find. :) Obviously, the expansion will have a lot, but the base game will also steadily gain a few encounters with each dev release to keep things interesting. There will also be bigger game sizes - at the moment it only goes up to medium because there just aren't enough encounters to yet fill a really big map. I'm thinking that Fleet HQ should occasionally reward you with another crew member if you do well.

- David

Re: Customize the ship at the start?

Hi,

Having ship customization at the start is something I've been playing with. My main worry is that if there's too much stuff to do before the game actually starts, that will get tedious to do each time. I also worry that newcomers may be overwhelmed.

One thing that will definitely go into dev 10 is that you start out with some space gold - so when you find someplace to buy things / hire people, you can actually buy/hire them without having to hunt for gold first.

Out of curiosity, do you feel that the initial crew overview screen is actually helpful? Or is it information overload?

- David

Re: Major Invernesse & Drones

Hi,

Thank you for reporting the problem. This is a known issue, where leaving combat mode occasionally freezes the game. It should be fixed in the next development preview. If you do still encounter it in dev 9, please tell me!

- David

Re: Bug when "Solar beast" drains last energy from engines

No, the parasite should definitely not be giveable to the emperor! Apparently the code doesn't check if the ship-addon is actually visible to the player.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We'll fix it in dev 9.

(There's also a related, darkly amusing bug where you can give a pirate prisoner as a present - and he gets exhibited in the "Hall of Presents" by the emperor. Oops.)

Re: Crash while clicking on Space HQ after recieving a mission.

This seems to be a problem that crops up somewhat randomly. We hope to fix it in dev 9, or failing that, at least add enough log info to pin down the precise problem!

Re: Great little game here!

You'll have to see. :D

We've just about gone through the mountain of feedback email we received for dev 8, and will be starting on dev 9 in earnest come Monday.

Re: Great little game here!

You're welcome.

It turns out I have to manually unmark-as-spam your messages, since the system has taken a dislike to you. But it is adaptive, so hopefully it will learn. In the meantime, don't worry if your posts don't go up instantly.

As for mods, it's definitely a possibility. But getting the game moddable is obviously extra work, and right now we want to focus on making the game. So we may well do it, but it won't be at the time of the initial release.