::nods:: Yeah, this mod is much more rewarding than in Vanilla FL. If you haven't tried it yet, I highly recommend you give it a spin.

And Argh doesn't have it on the list, because it's a bit far off, but if anyone is willing and able to host a 24/7 server with around... I'd say 20-30 slots, please send an email to Argh; the mod still needs a server. The one we're using for testing can't support more than about 6 players, by my estimate.

Thanks for the money thing, Argh. gonna try again now, if the servers up.

Soda-Stocker of TLR.

Sit Back, Relax, Sodas are in the fridge

I have a smallish "vote" I'd like everybody to consider:

Would you prefer me to release a new Alpha:

1. After I've rebuilt in a new System and changed all of the Bases to Islands (not crappy Alpha Islands, of course, but improved versions)

2. After I've done not only the following, but also put in several new aircraft and ships, and messed with the Factions a bit?

We're talking maybe a few days for #1, but it won't be incredibly different, but #2 will probably take at least a week, given that I have to playtest it before release, etc., etc.

I'd say #1, beacuse you aren't limited to a certain amount of realeases. Finish the stuff in #1, release it, and finish the stuff in #2, and release it. We get less stuff at a time, but much more frueuently.

How about some crazy ideas & suggestions?

1. Set hull damage ratio way high so if you hit anything = boom!

2. Convert all weapons to using ammo, that you have to buy, and does not use any energy.

3. Lower the turning ratios and banking to make it more realistic.

4. Better higher resolution water texture.

5. Modify the system background file into a sky rather than using an object to do it. Would be nicer on some older pcs.

6. Add bird faction with 'ships' in the shape of birds. You could make them shoot birdcrap at passing players

7. Add whale faction with 'ships' in the shape of whales. Or dolphins.

8. Make it so if you kill animal factions all other factions hate you forever

9. Add clouds with special black lightsources to simulate shadows.

10. Set component damage ratio high so weapons are not lost.

11. Use the armor hit_pts_scale feature to make some 'ships' stronger than others even without higher hitpoints.

12. Set your islands to use the warp disruptor buoy sur file and see what happens with all those accidental deaths.

13. Remove nanobots and shieldbats altogether. You should have to do repairs when you land.

14. Make your ocean deeper so there can be submarines.

@Louva:

I am still chuckling about the crap-throwing sea birds

Lemme go through these in order:

1. Set hull damage ratio way high so if you hit anything = boom!

Running into things is already lethal for almost everything... that is what you meant, right? Ask everybody who's been playing... crashing into another object with Fighter at any high speed = dead Low speeds should not result in insta-death, imho- you *can* survive a bit of battering if you're at a very low speed. But if the current impact damage goes much higher, then a simple slip during docking or formation flight would = death, which would get old, fast.

2. Convert all weapons to using ammo, that you have to buy, and does not use any energy.

I tried that, actually.

There's a nasty catch, though. Ammo-using weapons must be Missiles- just setting "uses_ammo = true" doesn't work. And Missiles apparantly will not play their firing sound more than once per click event. Find a way for ammo-using weapons to make their firing sound every time they shoot, and I'll make everything use ammo (don't worry folks, I'll be nice about it, and let you have lots of ammo, and make it as cheap as the engine will allow- I'm competitive, not cruel).

3. Lower the turning ratios and banking to make it more realistic.

You have played it, right? The banking is pretty realistic right now, within the limitations imposed by the Docking AI. Some aircraft turn better than others, of course, but none of the aircraft currently in the game have actual turning behavior (defined as "change of vector and position" ) as good as FL's ships. This will, of course, continue to get fine-tuned as the game-design gets finalized- some aircraft will turn better than they do now, and some worse. But I wanted to see a lot of interesting flight models... and thus far, I've got them pretty close to what I want.

4. Better higher resolution water texture.

Oh, lord. The texture's already 1024/1024... you've gotta understand... the Ocean object is HUGE.

And it has to stay that way. Early on, I experimented with grids of much smaller squares, and put them edge-to-edge, thinking that this would be more efficient, let me implement some neat LOD tricks, etc.

It didn't work. The FL engine doesn't know what to do with mesh edges on two objects that are almost perfectly aligned, and basically you see tris from one "through" tris of another, alternating constantly, even though the objects aren't actually touching. It kind've flashes, and it gave me an instant headache. So it's not a workable solution, unfortunately.

What I really need is a method that will create "wavetops" on the "surface" based on LOD information, that isn't a royal pain to implement... i.e., it'd suck to have make 1000 grid entries to show wavetop entities at appropriate LODs, and if I put all of the "waves" into the Ocean.cmp file, it'd have 100,000 polys, or more... performance would suck. Haven't quite figured out a good way to solve this yet... but will probably settle on the 1000 grid entries, to maximize performance for all systems and take advantage of LOD.

5. Modify the system background file into a sky rather than using an object to do it. Would be nicer on some older pcs.

Uh, if you know about a more efficient way to do this than by using a Background with a low-poly skysphere, I'm all ears... I used the most effiecient method that I'm familiar with... I suppose you're talking about building a skybox, instead of using a sphere? So far as I can tell, every background in the game is an object... and players can always turn the display off, showing a plain blue sky, if performance suffers.

Outcast... have you turned the "sky" on, and if so, did it make a performance difference? You probably have the slowest comp in the group... let me know if it impacts FPS in any noticeable way...

6. Add bird faction with 'ships' in the shape of birds. You could make them shoot birdcrap at passing players

<starts laughing>

7. Add whale faction with 'ships' in the shape of whales. Or dolphins.

8. Make it so if you kill animal factions all other factions hate you forever

<stops laughing>

... it might be cool to do something like the "cow karma" effect from Fallout, but I don't want to overdo it. And that's a lot of modeling time spent on something you don't get to kill, dock with, or otherwise do much with... except not kill. And accidental murder would make life very tough I might add this sort've thing in as a 1-in-1000 chance Encounter... much later... when the game is feature-complete otherwise. So don't hold your breath... Shamu isn't going to show up soon

9. Add clouds with special black lightsources to simulate shadows.

Clouds are planned. Gonna need to playtest them to see how they hurt FPS on low-end machines, though- I was planning to use Nebulas, although I might just use semi-transparent phantom_physics CMPs instead, so that they can take better advantage of LOD. The light-source idea might work pretty well, although it'd have to be something less than true black, and there are issues with making the angles match up, as well as performance issues to be considered- each Lightsource is pretty intense stuff, as it needs to be factored into the resulting color of every polygon onscreen at render time. It's definately a feature I want in the game, to complete the experience- it's just a matter of "how", not "weather", if you'll forgive a bad pun

10. Set component damage ratio high so weapons are not lost.

I dunno about you... but the only time I've lost a gun is if I nearly died running into somebody... and losing a gun should, imho... be part of doing business.

11. Use the armor hit_pts_scale feature to make some 'ships' stronger than others even without higher hitpoints.

I'm sure that I'll be tweaking AI ships quite a bit for added difficulty as the builds get more refined. Right now, the aircraft are all using identical Loadouts, and have no advantages over players, other than infinite_power. The AI's already pretty tough though, so I suspect I'll keep them where they are.

12. Set your islands to use the warp disruptor buoy sur file and see what happens with all those accidental deaths.

Yeah, then they'd fly right through it... and the Junker CSVs would be able to drive through even more of it. I plan to junk that island and make a new one, in two pieces, with two far more accurate SURs for the next version. That one was just sloppy, hurried workmanship on my part. The next ones will be waaaay better.

13. Remove nanobots and shieldbats altogether. You should have to do repairs when you land.

After a lot thought about this, I have decided to keep nanos in. Why? Because players are supposed to be heroes. And heroes should be tougher to destroy than the villians. So either I'd have to nerf the AI (which I quite enjoy, as opposed to wussy mods where the AI is apparantly drain bamaged), or make player's ships tougher- neither solution appeals, because it'd really screw up the mod's game balance.

Shieldbats are already gone- you can't buy them, and except in a very few cases, you'll never salvage them, and soon you won't be able to, period. They won't be coming back, even when shields come back as "armor ratings" for warships, etc.

14. Make your ocean deeper so there can be submarines.

The problem with that is simple, and unavoidable:

How to get there?

The Death_Zone that is in place right now (to kill the AI and players when they try to go beneath the ocean's surface, and to actively discourage the AI from flying too low) has to stay in the mod. Really. The original Alpha had a "solid" Ocean, but that didn't work, for a huge variety of reasons- reason #1 being that the AI would fly right through it, even though players could collide with it, and reason #2 being that it interfered with spawning behaviors for "ships". After a lot of experimentation, frustration and compromise, I've got the current solution in place. I don't see any workable alternatives at this time, unfortunately.

Soooo... I've got this nasty death_zone between the "surface" and "underwater". Know any good way to get players from Point A to Point B that isn't a jumphole ? Because a jumphole'd work... but then players would be flying aircraft underwater, which would ruin the effect.

I've thought about having a special "taxi" vehicle that had loads of hitpoints (so that it could survive the passage through the Death_Zone) moved very slowly, and was unarmed. But it might get abused by unscrupulous players. Other than that, I don't have a really elegant solution to this problem, sad to say.

Edited by - Argh on 11/21/2004 9:36:14 PM

Edited by - Argh on 11/21/2004 9:39:58 PM

I want to add a couple more notes:

I thought about implementing ammo in another way: make Energy unable to regenerate. That way, you'd only get "re-armed" when you landed. This might work, but it'd lead to a number of complications:

1. Every ship would have be even more carefully-balanced than they are now, because ammo usage would become a huge factor in their design. For example, the Starflier has 6 guns- does it get 6X more ammo than other fighters, or about the same (which would mean, in a practical sense, that it could fire 6X less seconds than comparable fighters)?

If I went ahead and gave it 6X ammo (which would be "fair" )... a Starflier could go to two guns, and then it'd have many more seconds of firing time than anything armed with fewer weapons, including the design (the Police Fighter) which is currently optimized for two automatic cannon, it's only arms.

Which might or might not be a good idea. The current balancing act uses both the number of shots fired plus the refresh rate to make the aircraft relatively balanced for their typical weapons load. What you're talking about there would make it harder to avoid producing "pigeon-hole" design issues, that "twink" players would rapidly ferret out, resulting in less variety in player loadouts overall, and making the game less newbie-friendly.

2. In addition, each gun (whether a machinegun or automatic cannon), would have to have its energy use calibrated around this issue. Which isn't that much of a hassle, really, compared to the ammo load for aircraft, but it would add some complications. For example, a fighter armed with Mk. 1s might be able to fire 3X more shots than one armed with Mk. 3s. And unlike now, where this is a "soft" issue with fighters, as they can "cool" their weapons (i.e., regenerate their Energy supply) this would become a "hard" issue- some types of fighter armament designs would probably be totally useless, in game-balance terms.

So... basically, I've thought about this a lot, and done some testing with this option implemented, and I'm not sure it would be a benefit to the game's design. It's hard to hit things (by design), so players probably expend 50-1000 rounds per kill (bombers take a lot of killing), just for combat against other fighters (at 10 rounds per second, it doesn't take many guns many seconds to deplete even a large ammo supply in combat- the Starflier puts out 60/sec... ouch!). And basically it'd allow players to spam constantly until they ran out, instead of having to be tactical about it- they wouldn't have to occasionally pause and let their weapons cool. So I'm pretty ambivalent about ammo usage in the game design, especially when it comes to the automatic weapons. I hope this makes the issue clear to you- of all of the design issues in the game, it's one of the ones I've thought about the most, and I'm pretty happy with the compromise I've got now.

Tell you what, though... I'll wait for feedback from current players of the mod. If everybody agrees to try this out in proper multiplayer fashion, we'll try it- I'll hack the current energy supplies up by about 5X, and reduce the regen to 0, and we'll play the next Alpha with limited ammo, and see if we like it better this way. It's about the only way to implement ammo for machineguns that works well, so... I am willing to try this out with players, once I get the next Alpha out. Speak up, folks, either for/against this proposed gameplay change... it's a doozy, but it might be fun

Edited by - Argh on 11/21/2004 10:13:19 PM

New screenie from Alpha 4 dev: the Startracker has been replaced...



And, while I'm at it... I've put in ammo for the guns. And it works. It's having all sorts of weird effects on game balance, which I've been working on... here's the scoop for what to expect in Alpha 4:

1. New aircraft. At least 1, probably 3. The Startracker replacement was a royal PAIN... took me about 4 hours, working from somebody's not-very-well-made Gmax files. I basically had to rebuild it in large chunks, because it was very poorly designed geometry. But I liked the design, so it's in, and I think it came out OK. This new Startracker (at least that's it's name until I start hacking DLLs) is a two-gun, fast-moving aircraft... very, very flimsy, but it's a great dogfighter 1 on 1. I'm thinking that it's going to be the "starter plane"- it's easy to fly, but it takes some skill to actually kill things, and players will want to switch up (and then switch back to it if they're doing a lot of PvP, as it's probably going to be good at that, despite its low armament).

2. Re-balanced everything. Had to- the ammo rules meant that I had to make some tough choices. Only MP play will really make sure I did a good job...

3. The Starflier is a little tighter in its manueverability. Our tests online indicated that it wasn't worth using for PvP, period... now it is. It's still not a super-plane by any means, but it's less lumbering and helpless.

4. The clear favorite ship as of this rebalance is... strangely enough... the Pirate Fighter. I currently have the ammunition loads balanced out to be perfectly "fair" (more on this below), and the Pirate Fighter, which previously couldn't make use of the higher-end guns... can now do so, if the pilot is careful about ammo. consumption.

5. The ammo system as of right now is perfectly "fair". Basically, this is how it works: each ship gets 3000 units of Energy per gun that it can mount (with one exception). So the Starflier gets 18000, the Pirate Fighter gets 12000, and the Police Fighter and the Startracker get 6000. Both Freighters (the Rhino and Mule) get 24000 apiece.

Basically, Mk. 1s use 10 Energy per shot, which works out to 3000 rounds of ammo per gun, or 30 seconds of shooting, which is quite a bit more than their RL counterparts. Mk. 2s use 20, Mk. 3s use 30, with corresponding effects on the total number of shots you're carrying- an aircraft carrying all Mk. 3s can shoot for just 10 seconds, iow... pretty pricy, but hopefully fair (once I've worked out damage to my satisfaction, of course).

6. The hitpoints have been re-adjusted, and so has the damage. I went online and did some reading about actual hits/kill for real-world weapons from this time period, did some calculations, and then stirred things around a bit.

Mk. 1s do 200 per hit. The Energy damage is now 0, because (except for the possibility of Missions where goofy things with shields might show up) Energy damage on ships without Shields actually eats up Energy reserves, and that's lame. Not to mention that eventually, I'm going to have my Armor system in place for things that are immune to air-to-air weapons, and now the guns are all set.

Mk. 2s do 350 per hit. Notice that this isn't a 1:1 correlation with the doubled Energy use...

Mk. 3s do 450 per hit. So Mk. 3s do 2.5 times as much damage as Mk. 1s, at 3X Energy cost.

7. Lastly, I have tweaked the gun projectiles a little bit, so that they're more clearly visible when you shoot. I think players will appreciate the effect, because it makes it easier to correct your aim (and makes for better screenies too hehe).

Thus far, this seems to be roughly balanced, although I'm open to some minor tweaking around the edges- just like in the previous version, picking which gun to use sort've depends on the job you're intending to do- for long Escort missions (with other players), you might want Mk. 1s, so you have plenty of ammo (16.6 seconds is a very long time in combat). In PvP duels, Mk 3s are the way to go. And Mk 2s are probably the most "efficient" in terms of their damage/energy usage, so they're a good choice when you can't make up your mind.

This has had some noticable side-effects, and I'm still mulling things over. Hit points have been reduced for everybody but the freighters, in some cases by as much as 25%. This fits with the game design model now in place, which is aiming for a little more realism (the Starflier, being the toughest ship, now takes 15 Mk. 1 shots to kill, so another Starflier can kill them with one burst in PvP).

But I'm not at all sure it's balanced yet, and I'm going to have to keep thinking about it, and I'll keep playing it as I get the Alpha Island fixed up and decide whether it's time to release the next Alpha.

It's definately a different balance than last time, where the Police Fighter seemed to be everybody's preferred ride- now it's much more of a tossup. The Pirate Fighter is probably the best all-round fighter, but the Starflier is much more well-rounded, and the Police Fighter doesn't suck. The Startracker is pretty weak, despite being very fast and manueverable... it's probably Death on a Stick for PvP dueling, where it's all about turning radii, but against the AI it has trouble.

I'm going to try to get it as tight as possible, and hopefully the end result will be superior to Alpha 3, which felt like it had some serious issues with overall balance, but was still very fun to play. But it's taking awhile to get the gun/ammo/damage issues really tight, which should be expected- after all, I've more-or-less turned my main game design on its head here. Still, unless a disaster occurs, I'll be releasing Alpha 4 in a day or two, no longer.

Edited by - Argh on 11/23/2004 3:16:48 AM

Edited by - Argh on 11/23/2004 8:36:21 PM

Argh, this really is damned impressive stuff. I will check it out this weekend, as I can barely believe the screenies!

Really looking forward to it

Glad you like what you're seeing, Chips... and it's getting better every day- the next Alpha will be kewl

The next version will include a revamped Ocean... I dumped the current version, which had too many polys and not enough benefits... for a new one that should be higher-performance and have a higher-resolution texture for the surface (I cut the number of textures down, so this one should hurt FPS less than the last one, which at least on my rig was hardly noticable to begin with).

Alpha Island: the Non-Crappy Version... is almost done. I think everybody will be suitably impressed. It has far fewer "I don't believe it" moments... you *can* still crash into a *few* areas that look like they're still in the "sky", but you have to get really super-close to it now, trust me. And it looks waaaaay better than the first version...

Now if I could get my question about changing the game's version number and speed display hack answered (hint, hint... it's in the Newbie Questions area)... I might just be able to release it with a new version, so that server ops might even bite

Edited by - Argh on 11/24/2004 1:26:12 AM

Woot! I have Bombs working!

And I've discovered that yes... shots *can* have an object associated with them... and YES, it can render out to whatever distance you want... which leads to all sorts of interesting uses... starting with bombs that you can watch falling the whole way down.

What I haven't figured out, though, is how damage scaling for explosions works. It's very obviously *not* like what I expected, and I'm going to have to figure it out pretty soon. But the Starflier will be armed with "Alpha Bombs", and so will the two Freighters... and I think it's safe to say that... bombs are... hmmm... tricky... to use, which actually is kind've cool

Thanks to Parabolix, I have multi-gun weapons that actually make sound in the game! So the bomber turret is not only a custom weapon... but it has two barrels... that fire two shots... and it sounds nasty and efficient. Mmmm... bombers have teeth now...

Last challenge: getting the new Alpha Island fully sorted out. Getting very close now... it won't be long before I release Alpha 4

Oh yeah... and I've found a stop-gap measure that has apparantly fixed up my bombs, which were working quite well in terms of their dynamics (translation: they're hard to use) but weren't doing damage properly. Now they do. So bombs are "go". And since I've figured out custom weapons, I'm very tempted to make a custom weapon for low-level Ships... but I'm going to restrain myself. That can wait as I move towards Beta 1, which should be the next release (assuming that the Alpha isn't full of horrible things going wrong, of course).

Alpha Island: new, improved... with 100% less suck



90% to release, folks... stay tuned. The last things I have to do are (relatively) minor- I need to build two new ships for ship encounters, and to give you two new toys to play with... the only remaining really icky technical problem remaining (that I know of, at any rate) is that I don't have animated propellers working yet... but that's going to have to wait for Beta 1, I think- I just haven't had the time to crack such a difficult technical challenge yet. The custom turrets for aircraft, etc. are looking kewl... now I just need those two ships... and we're set for Alpha 4. Gonna see if I can't get them done... right now

If I was allowed to swear, there would be expletives abundance in here

Did you check newbie questions? Need any more help? let me know, as I could just email it to you instead.....