I recommend you to read further than just the first few lines. Jobs do not have influence on the ships themself. None at all. You people have to stop thinking of this as a complete rewrite of what we currently have. All the core elements, all the shipfighting it all stays. What in the hell is wrong with the possibility of earning some money while you are on the station? What valid reason is there to say that this is a bad idea? It is such a small feature that simply provides more interactivity on the station which is all completely optional. As I said before, it is still important to balance the amount of players and the amount of ships so that everyone can have a post. But it will not always work. At some point someone will be on the spawnstation with nothing to do and will have to wait. It is important that such players will then not be bored and turn away from the game and are given something else.
Basicly if you don't want jobs, don't use them, the game will probably be well balanced so that you will rarely be stuck at the station. But for those people who wish more depth and roleplay, let them have it. I tell you this game will profit from it.
[QUOTE=Mezzokoko;41692129]I recommend you to read further than just the first few lines. Jobs do not have influence on the ships themself. None at all. You people have to stop thinking of this as a complete rewrite of what we currently have. All the core elements, all the shipfighting it all stays. What in the hell is wrong with the possibility of earning some money while you are on the station? What valid reason is there to say that this is a bad idea? It is such a small feature that simply provides more interactivity on the station which is all completely optional. As I said before, it is still important to balance the amount of players and the amount of ships so that everyone can have a post. But it will not always work. At some point someone will be on the spawnstation with nothing to do and will have to wait. It is important that such players will then not be bored and turn away from the game and are given something else.
Basicly if you don't want jobs, don't use them, the game will probably be well balanced so that you will rarely be stuck at the station. But for those people who wish more depth and roleplay, let them have it. I tell you this game will profit from it.[/QUOTE]
#1: Why would individual members of a space crew be able to earn money for themselves? They are in space for a reason--they're on a mission, they don't want to score bucks on the way. It just doesn't make sense.
#2: It's not optional. Whether you like it or not, if there is currency in the game, it will be what it's all about. Why? Because if there's currency to be earned, that means there's things to be bought. People will always want to buy things. People will always be thinking about buying things. It's simply a distraction from the gamemode.
#3: There will be plenty to do for people, even if all of the ship's stations are filled. Plenty to do. More likely, there often won't be [I]enough[/I] players to fill the stations and run the ship efficiently. You'd probably be lucky to get every station filled, after all there can be multiple ships.
#4: I'm confused as to how jobs give the game "depth".
#5: If any currency is involved, it should be a net of money that belongs to the ship as a whole. This fund might be used to buy weapons and new technology that will benefit the functionality of the ship as an exploration tool/diplomat/war machine. Cooperation, not competition within the ship. Synergy between each crew member. Everyone works together, there are no selfish actions. Everyone is useful in fulfilling the crew's goal. Everyone knows that their lives are on the line in that space ship, and working together means self-preservation as well. People are forced to help out in any way they can, even if they aren't good at anything. Then, their skills will advance and their responsibilities within the ship will develop. Everyone will know who the pilot is, or the engineer, or the gunner. This cooperation will forge strong relationships between crew members. And though the crew members understand each other and have synergy, they all have unique skills, insight, personalities, humor, and ideas that will greatly affect the social dynamic of the crew and the ways in which conflicts within the game are resolved. That is depth. This is simple stuff that would be destroyed with the addition of an inter-crew currency.
You have a few good points but let me show you that they don't neccessarily contradict with jobs.
#1: In Public servers you will probably not always stay on the same crew when you die. The crew will maybe find someone else to replace you. In the meantime you are unemployed and can make money. With this money you have earned you now can support your new crew. There are few possibilities how this could be done. Either everyone gives all the money to the captain or each crewmember is responsible for his own post and its upgrades. There will barely be anything individual to buy (Maybe the augments, but I am not really sure about that one yet) so I don't see why a crew should "argue" about money.
#2: It is very likely that there will be some kind of currency, because you will have to buy all the upgrades somehow. In that case jobs are just an extension and are in fact very optional.
#3: You missed the point. The jobs are for these who a currently NOT on a ship. Read carefully to prevent misunderstanding.
#4: It maybe doesn't add the depth on the spaceships because people will have lots of stuff to do. But when they visit the station it is more than just a spawnpoint. It is also a place where other things can be done. You can buy upgrades, send Subspacemessages to ships lightyears away and so on so forth. It is nothing big but it can help the games feeling. It is a central point which has to be visited to do certain things or to do spacemissions. By making the spacestation more than just a dead point in space you automaticly create more depth.
#5: I like that idea, but in that case, jobs can even help it. Individual crewmembers can bring in some amount of credits to help their ship out. This also motivates ships on the other hand to frequently recruit crewmembers.
[QUOTE=Mezzokoko;41695770]You have a few good points but let me show you that they don't neccessarily contradict with jobs.
#1: In Public servers you will probably not always stay on the same crew when you die. The crew will maybe find someone else to replace you. In the meantime you are unemployed and can make money. With this money you have earned you now can support your new crew. There are few possibilities how this could be done. Either everyone gives all the money to the captain or each crewmember is responsible for his own post and its upgrades. There will barely be anything individual to buy (Maybe the augments, but I am not really sure about that one yet) so I don't see why a crew should "argue" about money.
#2: It is very likely that there will be some kind of currency, because you will have to buy all the upgrades somehow. In that case jobs are just an extension and are in fact very optional.
#3: You missed the point. The jobs are for these who a currently NOT on a ship. Read carefully to prevent misunderstanding.
#4: It maybe doesn't add the depth on the spaceships because people will have lots of stuff to do. But when they visit the station it is more than just a spawnpoint. It is also a place where other things can be done. You can buy upgrades, send Subspacemessages to ships lightyears away and so on so forth. It is nothing big but it can help the games feeling. It is a central point which has to be visited to do certain things or to do spacemissions. By making the spacestation more than just a dead point in space you automaticly create more depth.
#5: I like that idea, but in that case, jobs can even help it. Individual crewmembers can bring in some amount of credits to help their ship out. This also motivates ships on the other hand to frequently recruit crewmembers.[/QUOTE]
Hm, okay. I like the idea that you can't return to a space ship when you die. I actually think that's how it should be--once you die, you are reborn somewhere else (maybe a space station--some kind of hub where dead people go) and you can do things that influence the quest of your old crew and help them in some way. Maybe by transmitting messages to them, studying a map of the universe to help guide them in the right direction, warning them of potential danger, transporting useful materials you've attained wherever you are, etc. You could also sabotage the crew's enemies from afar. I think it would be cool.
And hey--what if you could establish a new ship while you're in the afterlife? That would be awesome. Maybe you'd also have control of the Physgun, Gravgun and Toolgun in the afterlife...but maybe that's a little far fetched. I don't know. But just imagine all the cool things you could do with them!
Anyway, whatever you do in the afterlife, after 30 minutes you would be forced to choose whether you would like to return to your original ship, or another ship. You wouldn't be allowed to stay wherever you are. I guess the excuse for this occurring would be that the cloning technology that you have access to has a cooldown timer of 30 minutes.
I feel like once you die, it would sort of become your mission to help your crew out in any way you can. There should be ways to influence their mission in ways you couldn't while you were alive on the ship. You'd be able to become a real asset to them, even while not totally present. But during your time in the afterlife, your views might change. After all, you're surrounded by people from other ships, people who had other missions, people who might have even been your enemies. You would see the points of view of everyone else. Maybe even make friends. So my point is, during your time in the afterlife, your views would change, and once you have the ability to clone yourself and return to a starship--you might not choose your own.
I still don't believe in jobs or an inter-crew currency. But you have some good ideas there.
That wasn't actually what I said. You can return to a spaceship if you want but first you will spawn at the spacestation. Your crew will have to pick you up there so you can jump in back to action. I don't really think people want to be forced into an "afterlife". As for jobs again: I do not know how often I already told this. If you have a crew you don't have a job. If you have a job, you don't have a crew. To go around the whole "Individual money will compromise Teamplay" thing: If the only things that are buyable with money are ship upgrades which help the WHOLE crew, how should there be competition?
Alright, then I was mistaken. I apologize.
So why would your crew have to pick you up while they're far away, doing an important mission? They can't pick someone up from a space station every time somebody dies. That would become a real nuisance, and people would probably stay in the station forever, or at least for a very long time. The crew would only do this once they get bored. I believe the developers strive to make sure this never happens.
The afterlife I describe is just what you're talking about. The difference is, you don't get picked up--after 30 minutes, you get cloned back on your old ship, or a ship of your choosing. The reason you're forced to do this is so that people don't stay in the afterlife because they're having too much fun. If you could stay indefinitely (which would also be the case if you could get picked up), the game would become just about the afterlife--totally obliterating the gamemode. To create a balance, you must be forced to come back after a certain amount of time.
Yes, if the only things you can buy are ship upgrades which will benefit the whole crew, that would be fine. But I think you should be able to do more than just buy things for your ship. I don't know--the idea of money just seems too foreign from the theme of this game. I think it would be cooler if you had to be creative with your methods of influencing the outside world--your starship, or others (the methods in which you can influence them, I described in my above post).
@ Why should you pick Crewmembers up at the stations?
The idea of teleporting crewmembers to any ship in the universe is in my opinion a very bad idea. It makes people lazy and not care that much about keeping crew alive. You could potentially sacrifice a lot of people and after the fight just reinvite them to your ship. That is way too easy and takes away too much of the survivalaspect. In this aspect we should look at FTL. FTL forces you to survive with what you have until you reach a store to recruit a crewmember (Or slavetraders whatever you call it). To get around the issue of the spacestation being far away I also suggested a good workaround. You simply have to put virtual spacestations across the galaxy which all point to the spawn. This way you have lot of stations available by only designing one. In the same time recruiting is not as much pain in the ass as it would be if there was only one location to get to the spacestation. So people actually can and will get recruited in a moderate and reasonable time. Either by their own ship or another one (if you decide to change ship). The only purpose of the job system is to be prepared for the worst-case scenario. Jobs are not meant to replace the game, I never said or wanted this. It is nothing more than a convenient element which some players might enjoy but are in no way forced to. As I said players can make money in the meantime which will encourage ships to regulary check in.
Good point. The pick-up system doesn't seem like such a bad idea, if handled correctly and with the absence of jobs and inter-crew currency. I still think some of the things I said should remain with that.
[QUOTE=Pvt Anderson;41697847]...transmitting messages to them, studying a map of the universe to help guide them in the right direction, warning them of potential danger, transporting useful materials you've attained wherever you are, etc. You could also sabotage the crew's enemies from afar...establish a new ship while you're in the afterlife(?)...control of the Physgun, Gravgun and Toolgun in the afterlife(?)...
...
I feel like once you die, it would sort of become your mission to help your crew out in any way you can. There should be ways to influence their mission in ways you couldn't while you were alive on the ship. You'd be able to become a real asset to them, even while not totally present. But during your time in the afterlife, your views might change. After all, you're surrounded by people from other ships, people who had other missions, people who might have even been your enemies. You would see the points of view of everyone else. Maybe even make friends. So my point is, during your time in the afterlife, your views would change, and once you have the ability to clone yourself and return to a starship--you might not choose your own.[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Pvt Anderson;41698264]Good point. The pick-up system doesn't seem like such a bad idea, if handled correctly and with the absence of jobs and inter-crew currency. I still think some of the things I said should remain with that.[/QUOTE]
You raise some good points but I have to disagree with having a shared currency of the ship as crew members can freely join another persons ship or server which means individual players have no worth. I think if players have their own money then they can choose to fulfill the route they like best; say if they are an engineer they may want to upgrade an engineering thing (like a skill tree). However all this stuff is going too far into RP I think.
I know discussions are good and all but its kind of flying away from the initial thread so is there any suggestions or improvements on anything that we have seen so far? Rather than speculating things that are not / likely not in the game like jobs.
[QUOTE=GTbrawlers;41698734]You raise some good points but I have to disagree with having a shared currency of the ship as crew members can freely join another persons ship or server which means individual players have no worth. I think if players have their own money then they can choose to fulfill the route they like best; say if they are an engineer they may want to upgrade an engineering thing (like a skill tree). However all this stuff is going too far into RP I think.
I know discussions are good and all but its kind of flying away from the initial thread so is there any suggestions or improvements on anything that we have seen so far? Rather than speculating things that are not / likely not in the game like jobs.[/QUOTE]
I fully agree on that. To be honest I don't really think all this stuff we have been discussing will be in the first release of FF but I guess we can pick it up later once the time has come. We will have a better image of how things work and probably also find exploits that need dealing first. I might then also try to give my thoughts a better and more understandable structure so that most misunderstandings should be cleared.
edit: Apart from that: When can we expect an update by the devs on the current status of the gamemode?
I've got another question/suggestion.
Will there be something like a communication system on a ship that can also be damaged?
I think it would be very cool if you could sabotate or destroy the communication system on an enemy ship, so it will be very hard for them to coordinate their actions as a crew. The more that system would get damaged the worse signal quality would be. Of course you should be able to fix the system during a battle.
For me it seems like a very efficient und intellegent way to give your crew an advantage over the opponents.
I hope something similar wasn't mentioned yet!
Sorry for my imperfect Englisch (:...
I think the internal communication shouldn't be made vulnerable for three reasons:
-Internal communication on vessels is done by many individual radios rather than a single system.
-It is harder to modify voicechat (Which probably is mainly used for internal chat)
-While yes, it might be an advantage for the enemy vessel, it is also a rather unneccessary and frustrating one. The game should always allow for the crew to organize.
I could imagine that there is a communicationsystem which is responsible for intership communication, but I don't know what use it would be to sabotage that one. Also if there is gonna be ship to ship communication I think it would be best to go for text-only chat. It is more reasonable because text is easier to transport in space because it is a smaller amount of data. Plus it makes the tension between the ships stronger, because they can't hear the enemies voice. Also if there is gonna be some kind of transmission loss it will be easier to implement on a textbasis, rather than a voicebasis. It could be represented by scrambled or missing letters e.g. "S+OP ATTA+K+NG +E +EAN YO+ NO HA++"
I wouldn't like the ship comms to be voice, what's with people that don't have mics or don't want to talk?
If you don't want to talk? Don't talk.
I am a hundred percent sure that there will be support for both voice and textchat.
[QUOTE=Mezzokoko;41707131]--Snip--[/QUOTE]
I agree with Mezzokoko on this. Although it would increase the realism, this is meant to be more of a fun gamemode and that is a big ask for a small aspect. Possibly have a module in the scanner room for long range communications which allows for recruitment requests etc and stranded signals to be sent (so if you get stranded you will have to try your best to get that up before you all die!!)
[QUOTE=cartman300;41707352]I wouldn't like the ship comms to be voice, what's with people that don't have mics or don't want to talk?[/QUOTE]
Most roleplay servers use the policy that you can't use voice chat as it ruins immersion. That being said this isn't a roleplay gamemode so it is up to the server owners or players whether they use voice chat or not.
When this gets released I'll probably get a teamspeak server to accompany it for all those who want to voice chat.
For text chat, someone could easily write a radio plugin like seen in clockwork or even just a group chat with channels.
This is very long, so skip to the TL;DR if you don't care. Most of this is game design blather, I don't mean to nitpick or offend or anything, and you're welcome to criticize me.
Personally, I am perfectly okay with combat being on a 2D plane now or in a standalone release. This is why:
[B]-- Battles would be more focused on the entire crew's cooperation.[/B]
Yes, in a real situation, pilots [I]are[/I] extremely important. If you don't get hit by anything, you don't need to have high defense. It's a common concept seen in EVE, Guild Wars 2, etc. The problem is that it's not very fun when the pilot and the weapons are the only important jobs because the pilot pulls a Crazy Ivan every fight. In a 3D piloting situation, to make the game equally fun for everyone, it would probably require that the other jobs be overtaxed to inflate their worth relative to the pilot.
[B]--Lower barrier of entry.[/B]
In a 3D environment, effective maneuvering would probably require a flight stick or two. 2D maneuvering is easy to do at a basic level but still allows the skill ceiling and room for tactical growth that would make it a fulfilling job. It strikes more of a balance between 'the pilot's skill doesn't matter' and 'the pilot is the most important crew member'. High-level or skilled players would not be able to instantly destroy a newb like they can in EVE or other games, which more suits a no-commitment game like Garry's Mod. The playing field is more equal: though a high-level player has a much better ship overall, a low-level player would be able to hold their own against them. One-shot-kills and helpless situations are anti-fun (for most games).
[B]-- Free-maneuvering of a ship in 2D is different.[/B]
It isn't something that you see done anymore, and it requires you to think differently about your movements. If multi-person battles were ever allowed, things like phalanx formations would be basically impossible, requiring completely different tactics so that ships in front don't get blasted by their allies from behind (Assuming that friendly fire would be possible). However, if a standalone were ever to be made that had windows and all that, it would be hard to justify the 2D locking. Perhaps something like Flotilla does, which is a hybrid 2D grid + elevation movement scheme. That would stay relatively close to the FTL roots while allowing the freedom of movement, but still keeping most of the positives I've explained.
A suggestion I'd make here is that, similar to other mods, you have the pilot sit in a chair that captures keystrokes, which is much faster than a point-and-click interface for doing multiple things at once, like engaging multiple engines. I don't think the chair is necessary for other stations though, and is probably bad because they'd have to stand up to run around or away when mobility is very important in a gamemode like this. For simple things like "go to this space dock", the point-and-click interface would be fine though.
All that said, I'm completely unsure as to which display approach would be better: the console with icons, or a hybrid 3D/icons display.
The simple display looks like what you'd see on a console, but it's somewhat immersion-breaking because you know where the other ship is, and they are just another arrow that you shoot at. Something that used a render target screen to look in on a little space with icons and models of ships might look better, I don't know. It would definitely be harder to code, so no arguments on that point.
Another suggestion that I would like to make is to have the display operate kind of like a sonar: you have intermittent pulses that emit from your ship, shown on the display by a sweeping ring. What this would do is create a lot of tactical possibilities, because an enemy further away from you is harder to get a lock on. You only know their position when the radar ring hits them, which takes longer and longer the further they are away from you. Getting closer would let you keep a much more stable lock on them, but is more dangerous because they can do things like teleport onto your ship, hit you with stronger weapons, use jamming, etc. Something like decoys would also work with that model, because your movements are more hidden when you're farther away, and a counter to that is launchable probes that give you vision of a small area for a time.
But they may be friendly, and going with Mezzokoko's idea of garbled text transmission, you'd also have less transmission error the closer you were. A scrambler (whether from the other ship or planted on your ship by drone or spy) would then decrease your effective communications range instead of just having a flat number of characters that are scrambled or something like that.
Considering what we know about location-finding technology, you'd only need the sonar-like method if they were farther away from you. When they were closer, you'd be able to use a LIDAR tracker, visual recognition, or even just more rapid radar pulses with intelligent prediction software to have smooth vision of where they are. (These all are just technological excuses for having smooth movement at close ranges, of course.)
I think that what I'm suggesting sounds overcomplicated in the information-dense way I've presented it, but is very intuitive to a player in practice and therefore not requiring much education for them to understand what's going on. Any random person knows that a cellphone works better the closer you are to a tower. Also, please forgive any mistakes I've probably made when referring to radar and sonar, I have some concepts confused between the two.
I'd like to suggest a possible stylistic direction to go in as well: the Source mod Dystopia. I've played, mapped and textured for Dystopia in my spare time, and consider its technopunk aesthetic to be very appealing. Based on that, players can have the best of both worlds, the super-clean sleek and shiny ships by the military or DataTrust, or the grungy, utilitarian ships of the rebels. It would be easy to integrate their textures into your mode because Dystopia already has Garry's Mod mounting support, so you could even use their player models if you wanted. I'm not sure how Puny Human would feel about you using their stuff, but they probably wouldn't mind if it wasn't for profit.
Suggestions that others have made that I want to comment on:
[B]Augmentations/Implants:[/B]
I like this idea but am not sure if it would overcomplicate the game or not. Obviously FF is going to be more in-depth than FTL, you control only one person so it's necessary. Some inspiration could probably be taken from Dystopia, meaning that certain classes or jobs or even races have different total implant capacities, which lets the implants be more balanced if they are powerful and are worth more points to put in.
[B]Space Docks:[/B]
I like this, but would add that if you respawn at the docks when you die, there should be many docks scattered throughout the galaxy and you would be able to teleport to any other dock for free (or a small fee). I'm not sure if something like this is possible, but 'other docks' could simply be the same location with only the people that are 'there' rendered, which means that a mapper wouldn't have to make a million docks in their map.
This strikes a balance between having a penalty for death and giving meaning to a crewmember's life, but not forcing them to wait for a long time for the ship to pick them up and be doing something again. Both normal death and permadeath work with this option as well: you can argue that all your things are preserved due to warranties (for items), interstellar remote banks (for money), and being a clone of the same person, with the same memories (for ranks/jobs). Alternately, permadeath can be explained by a galaxy-wide ban on cloning.
[B]So, TL;DR:[/B]
2D movement is good and I don't think that they should have free 3D movement even if they make a standalone release.
Have the pilot sit in a chair to work his station.
Have the ship radar work more like an actual radar.
Go for Dystopian dualism: shiny new ships and
[QUOTE=Asrael;41726061]--SNIP--[/QUOTE]
Although I skipped 3/4 of your post this is what I have to say in response.
1) I agree with you on keeping it on a 2D plane as that keeps with the FTL originality which is necessary when alot of space sims are coming out this and next year. This also makes it easier to work with.
2) Your space docks idea can be simplified. Since the map is on a 2D plane where the user doesn't need to see a 3D rendered world (Just small skybox areas surrounding the exterior of the window). This means that all the space stations in the game can actually be placed beside eachother but can be totally walled off from one another. The player won't actually know and its easier for mapping and design. Simple teleporter rooms with text above them will suffice for stations e.g. Andromeda Station, Gamma Station.
3) I think you would be refering to a captains chair assuming the captain is the pilot or just a commanding person who patrols the ship ensuring people are on duty (doubling as security)(Depending on how that ship is ran). As for chairs for stations; that would make it harder to interact with the console and it would mean dismounting the chair whenever you needed to move, say in an emergency or to flee a room when it gets hit.
4) I assume with the radar you want a line that moves in a 360 degree anti clockwise rotation from a central point. Although that would be cool and things it doesn't fit in with scientific laws but hell, this is sci-fi so it would be kinda cool and retro!
5) Your different ship types is kind of a 50/50 thing.This would only be beneficial if there were VIP only ships where to command it you had to have server VIP otherwise it would be first come first served as you can't actually buy ships. Unless you just meant to have all ships equal in ability but with different appearances and layouts plus ability is determined by crew size and skill (and maybe player bought upgrades. I'd definitely endorse this idea more).
[QUOTE=GTbrawlers;41726413] -snip-[/QUOTE]
I don't blame you for skipping a good deal of that. That was what was all brewing in my head after reading the entire thread.
[B]2)[/B] If it were possible to do that sort of exclusive visibility where you only see the people "at your station", you'd only need one station to be actually made. Then all the stations can be as complex as you like with only a linear increase in map size and complexity instead of exponential. I seem to have a fuzzy recollection of something like that existing. My idea for teleporters was basically a big point-and-click console where you'd select your location on a galaxy map and then have a bunch of flashy teleporty effects happen, but that might not be feasible.
For example, let's say the space docks take the Gmod Tower approach of having social areas that people can hang out in, arcades, movie theater, etc. You'd probably need at least some of this, so that people waiting for responses to job applications weren't bored. If you had each dock being its own separate walled-off place, every feature would need to be duplicated for every dock, and most of them besides the main dock's wouldn't actually get used. On top of that, if the size of the galaxy ever changes, you'd need to make more and more stations, each with all of their own features, which increases map size, edicts used, compiling time, etc etc.
Having just one real station would allow any changes to the docks to be made without map changes or reloads, since the existence, locations, availability and other data points about the docks are all just a big data structure. You might even allow docks to be destroyed that way and become unavailable for a while, but I doubt that would be in FF.
The compromise approach is to have the main dock be one big social area, and be teleported to smaller outposts that are all individually made. Unfortunately that means you can't make or destroy stations without recompiling the maps and restarting the server, which is an important feature for servers that might be larger or smaller than your average size. There's also the minor consideration that a player could be waiting for a while with nothing to do on a smaller outpost while their ship is on its way.
Basically, for extensibility and ease of changes, they should probably be different 'layers' of the same location, if that's possible of course.
[B]3)[/B] I mentioned that having the chairs for any other station than pilot would probably just be annoying. Instead of a chair, you might have a little thing you press Use on to link your keyboard to the console like Wiremod, which would let you run away pretty fast if you need to. I dunno, there's possibilities. I like the point-and-click interface for every station but piloting, since manipulating multiple things with only one source of input would be terrible.
I suppose Engineering could also have keyboard input for some kind of decoding minigame perhaps, as a complement to the module enhancement. That might address the problems of module research taking a really long time but being mostly idle work: you could let the computer go at its own pace if you needed to step away to fix something, but sit down and help it go faster by working on it actively.
[B]4)[/B] I probably didn't explain the radar very well. I did my best at editing it, but I meant that it should be what is actually more scientific for space radar: a 360-degree pulse that happens every 1 second or so and lights up the enemy if it hits them. It would look like an expanding ring around your ship that eventually disappears off the edges of the radar.
(As a side note, I think that that sweeping, rotating line is actually real, the spinning radar dishes you see on top of ships are sending out focused pulses rapidly and directionally. Might be wrong on that.)
[B]5)[/B] Since it doesn't seem that a ship designer is possible, yeah, they would all be roughly equal in ability, just different in layout. Ability is already pretty determined by crew size and skill, and also how long you've had your engineer working on modules since those seem to be very important.
Player bought upgrades would work, but you'd want to have some kind of enemy info display that showed their upgrades. Perhaps something like the sensors subsystem in FTL, where upgrading it shows you the system they have, and then where their power usage is going. Considering that it could be PvP though, the visible power usage upgrade might be overpowered.
Well, now that I think about it, a ship designer might be possible. If every ship's space is just a little box, a player could design their ship out of certain base layouts and plug parts into slots, a lot like Spacebuild's tools that lets you auto-assemble ships of any shape. I don't remember exactly what that's called. All the map would need to do is spawn those parts in their particular locations, using point_template entities. Since point_template can do static, dynamic, and physics prop spawning, it could be used quite powerfully that way.
Oh yeah, and on that note: if the ship vibrates and flings you around using ent_viewpunch or physical impulses, you gotta have physics props sitting around to clutter everything up the moment you get hit.
As a final thought, I'd love to see third-person shoulder views with HUD on the back, like Dead Space. That has to be my favorite HUD ever.
2) In general I would like the idea of many different themed spacestations but I guess there will not be any use for it since one would do totally fine, which though was more detailed.
3) Pretty much agree on that, a chair is not neccessary and makes things more unflexible. I am not really sure though what you could use your keyboard for in piloting (It still looks pretty simple who knows if something else is to come)
4) I am not really sure but I guess many people would prefer "normal" sensors which simply shows everything in realtime. I like the idea though myself and maybe we can have a cvar for that which allows simple switching for individual servers.
5) Ship designer: The ships must be integrated into the mapping so creating a special Shipdesigningtool would be both more work and maybe even not neccessary. I think it is enough if there will be a documentary which simply says which entities have to be placed where to create a working ship. But maybe this is possible with the 2D-Universe. A question out of curiosity @Ziks : Where is the 2D-Map saved? Is it a Textfile or an entity within the map?
[QUOTE=Mezzokoko;41732839]-snip-[/QUOTE]
3) It does look simple now, and I don't really know what piloting works like, but in multiple future possibilities that I could think of, a keyboard seemed more intuitive and efficient:
If you were to control each engine's rotation and power individually, you'd want a key for rotation clockwise and counter-clockwise, and a key for power up and power down for each engine. This seems a bit like overkill to me.
If you controlled the ship as a single entity, you'd want a key for forward and back, strafe left and strafe right, rotate left and rotate right.
If you used the point-and-click interface, you'd have to specify a target location and facing. This method would make piloting the least fun as a job to me, because it would make maneuvering stiff and difficult. It also wouldn't give you the sense that your ship is a physical object in space that you are controlling.
Ideally I'd think that in-combat maneuvering would be 'manual mode', and moving otherwise would be autopilot point-and-click to locations.
5) Oh yeah it would be a lot of work. If it ever were made, it almost definitely wouldn't be in the first release. If it were made though, I think it would draw a lot of people to the game because of the novelty and possibilities of creating your own ships, and in a system that is much easier and more stable than Spacebuild.
If people are bothered about custom ships then I'd happily take requests as I can map. Then with said requests I could integrate them into an existing map or a new space map for people, or send the file to the community owner who would like it on their server for them to integrate.
It would probably the best to integrate as many ship designs as possible before the release so that even without custom maps there is good variety. An idea would be to make each ship unique and exist only once. That makes it a bit more interesting, especially if the ships are designed with an individual attribute (like in FTL, where some ships had Cloak or drones but lacked shields or crewmembers).
How about a shipmapping contest, in which you simply have to give the bare ship structure as an entry. The dev team just adds all the other stuff like systems, life support etc. That could be a good workaround until there is a proper tool for this.
Wonder if very limited ammo weapons could work, with something like 3 shots before having to be recharged? Would have to be recharged when out.
... also a stun option, so we can all go "Set phasers to stun!".
[QUOTE=hogofwar;41766574]Wonder if very limited ammo weapons could work, with something like 3 shots before having to be recharged? Would have to be recharged when out.
... also a stun option, so we can all go "Set phasers to stun!".[/QUOTE]
Or, if you want to be more like FTL, we can just punch each other to death.
[QUOTE=Asrael;41770334]Or, if you want to be more like FTL, we can just punch each other to death.[/QUOTE]
I vote for a Trek-style brawling system!
[video=youtube;7Hxmv3RYaVM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hxmv3RYaVM[/video]
[QUOTE=LimEJET;41771266]I vote for a Trek-style brawling system!
[video=youtube;7Hxmv3RYaVM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hxmv3RYaVM[/video][/QUOTE]
Trek-style is best-style!
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AphxyjrH4SE[/media]
This game seems very similar in some ways to Final Frontier, I like the damage effect, though it's a bit too much all the time.
[video=youtube;AZt3lmfB-zs]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZt3lmfB-zs[/video]
Part 2 is here, sorry for the delay.
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5hLPt7PKl0[/media]
I've got another 5 weeks of my job left, but if I finish early I'll get back to working on this immediately.
Just noticed that the logo on youtube looks very similar to the fortress forever logo. [url]http://www.fortress-forever.com/[/url]
So what's next on the agenda for things to be previewed?
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