(07-21-2017, 10:48 PM)Ikarus_Hagen Wrote: Alaska cannot change since it is the Area 51 of Liberty, imagine that America opens it's 51 to everybody... will never happen (maybe in the next 30-80 years).
" Area 51 " yet nobody stops ships in there anymore
We just don't have the numbers, but inrp it is impossible to enter Alaska when you are not in the Navy/LSF.
Alaska is pretty hard to enter, even without you guarding it. The only way trespassers could enter and not have to dodge or have Capital Ship Shields is to use the New Hampshire Jump Hole, which is pretty out of the way as it is.
(07-21-2017, 11:21 PM)Checkov Wrote: Official research? I'm on board. Let's see some more RP with that Dark Matter Storm! Forget Alaska, if we can get some RP in Alberta again, then I'll be happy.
Our recruitment is open and we welcome new members, especially those interested in science and research RP, just like you. Or just contact us when you see Ageira~ in game.
Making the Nav-Map unavailable is not possible. The systems we know that had that feature in Vanilla had that hardcoded. There is a deactivated plug-in for Discovery that sort of disables Nav-Map, but it's buggy and deactivated for a reason. There are ways to simulate "no Navmap" but they all are rather sub-optimal.
I was going to write a very long, image-supported excourse about level design in casual games and how we have to rethink it in Discovery specificly, to explain issues with some of the suggested alterations, or why Omicron Chi in the current form is a very badly placed and even with all the cool features found in Chi, a badly designed system. I'll spare it for you now and just add the explanation to my work-in-progress system development/level design tutorial, that should be up in a few weeks.
To come back to the topic: Alberta is perfect as it is. It would be really bad to turn it into something else. It would be good to give it a bit more detail, though. Many systems in Discovery have a certain layout issue, as the three available dimensions aren't used in an optimized way. Best example for that is Omicron Alpha, which is just half of a system. Basically, however, you need to think of what you want the system to be: Interaction area, passage area or exploration area? Every system and it's own areas can be classified by each of those areas, as New York for example is an interaction system containing all three areas to a certain degree, while Texas for example is half passage, half exploration but no interaction area. Each area has it's own reasons to be interesting. Interaction areas are self-explanatory, those areas are in Discovery to have a high chance of a player encounter even without the use of the player list. Passage areas are fulfilling their destiny by being visited to traverse somewhere else. Exploration areas usually reward players for their curiousity, either with very cool things to look at, like Omicron Sigma and the black hole, or they offer wrecks, Skorak-PoBs, mining zones or other stuff.
Depending on what of those things you want the system to be, you have to choose a system layout. There are some classic stereotypes for each system type, some are good, some are bad (from a level design perspective, mind you). New York for example is very classical casual gaming system.
Because of New York being the ultimate central point, it has the benefit of being able to be a bit of everything. It is a start-out area, with Penny being right next to the system. It is the cyber hotspot with Manhattan Orbit, so it has interaction areas, while the system is so big - 250k from left to right, twice the size of independent systems - it has a good trade lane network with four very hot crossroads. The crossroads are interaction areas, the lanes are passage areas, while S-21, the Badlands, the many debris fields and the Scylla-Cloud are a good example of how to fill a system with exploration elements. It's almost as if Digital Anvil put much thought in this, which I believe to be more of a fortunate accident, looking at how they ***** up Kusari and Rheinland and how Discovery made those houses even worse, for example castrating Honshu with the destruction of Osaka. Story progression is cool, but the entire lower half of Honshu is empty. Omicron Alpha 2.0.
So, we have New York as a good example of an interaction system. Another good example of those are Omicron Delta in its current state, New London and - oh, well. Only those three systems. New London, for example, has a very fortunate layout which puts interaction areas at Kensington and New London Orbit, partially even Southampton because of the very well placed Leeds jump hole and Trafalgar, while the connection to Newcastle doesn't really matter that much. That is a dead lane.
Omicron Delta doesn't have trade lanes, but a very well system connection. It is a gateway to Rheinland, to the lower Omicrons, to the deeper Omicrons and to a pure exploration zone, Omicron Lost. Delta is a very good passage system, and the placement of Freeport 11 is in fact so incredibly good, it managed to generate an interaction zone in the pure wilderness. That paired with the placement of Yaren and Lichtenfelde, which almost encircle Freeport 11 by being on the opposite sides of each other, makes Freeport 11 the absolute center of the system, and this is even more rewarded by the beautiful Omicron Delta yellow sun with a ring containing a small asteroid belt. The details of this scenery are pretty impressive, with Vaitupu in the distance giving the scene itself more depth and dimension, and with the recent updates, including the HD texture of the gas giant and the HD textures of the Omicron Delta Edge Nebula, however excluding the change of the Kiribati Asteroid Field to weirdly unfitting Ice Spear asteroids, make the system worth every single visit. Not only that, but the fact that the Omicron Delta Edge Nebula contains something to explore, makes it even better.
And then we have pure passage systems. Take any system that has at least two connections. More connections however don't necessarily make a system better. It works very well with Omicron Delta. It does not work well with Newcastle or Omicron Gamma, tho. Omicron Delta is a very delta, being the end of a path where players are thrown into the ultimate wilderness of the untamed Omicrons. Passage systems benefit from two things: Their connections and how beautiful they are. The more connections a system has, the bigger it needs to be. The more connections a system has, the more difficult it is to make each specific route interesting to look at from each perspective. Here is a hint: Nebulae are boring to look at from the inside. Omicron Delta offers something nice to look at, no matter from where you come and where you go. It is simply a masterpiece in terms of aesthetics and level design. Probably by accident, otherwise we would have more systems where people actually put thought into the design. ;3
Omicron Gamma for example is bad. In the current version, it is a bottleneck, but it is the most boring to look at bottleneck you could ever have. It has one (!!) single jump hole that is not in a nebula. Four (!!) are in the horrible Malvada Cloud, which makes you never even see the outside world in some cases. That's not good! That's like collecting TriForce Shards in Windwaker, nothing more than a stretch with long travel sections. The only thing to ease the pain in Gamma is the fact that corridors have been added, exclusion zones to ensure battleships are able to fly from A to B without getting stuck all the time. Omicron Gamma also suffers from a very boring to look at color palette. The background is green all over the place. The Malvada cloud is green, being half of the system. The red dwarf, Tripoli, Crete and Cella Dor and the Gredos Cloud are yellow, orange and brown. With other words, Omicron Gamma is a composition of poop and vomit. Of course you can't turn every single system into something beautiful, but I'd rather have bottlenecked Omicron Kappa in the original version or even in the current one instead of Gamma. Gamma is that way a good example of how to not make an interesting passage system. Crete could have a interaction area if the four jump holes weren't in the Malvada cloud. One or two, yes, but not four. Gamma also doesn't offer anything to explore.
The Texas system is by the way a very nice mix of passage and exploration. Texas is another very big system, 250k from one end to the other. Technically, Houston would be a good interaction area, however given how close Texas is to New York, people are rather at Manhattan Orbit than at Houston. However, the trade lane transit from the New York gate to the Hudson gate is very well done. Texas got a decent amount of detail. For example, take a ship to Houston. That planet has a moon called Abilene, the moon is sort of infront of Houston and thus would throw a shadow in the direction of Houston as it is between the planet and the Medium White. However, the level designer of Texas actually kept in mind that Houston has a bright surface and reflects light. Thus, Abilene receives light from a light source placed between Houston and Abilene, creating the illusion of reflected light. That is a very nice little detail, something that made me smile when I saw it. Also, when you move from New York to Houston, you usually look to the right and see the North Dallas Debris Field, where you can see Chisos in the background, probably the very first planet you see that has lava visible from space. It's pretty cool to look at. It automatically makes you look in that direction, and you see the Dark Matter clouds in the background, as well as debris. Actually, the composition used for the Pequena Negra cloud is pretty cool. A very dense debris field, almost black, radioactive, tight, but also rewarding as you can get Premium Scrap there, or stuff from wrecks. The entire left half of Texas is worth exploring, although the removal of the Puerto Rico Jump Hole massively damaged the system traffic and I do hope this will get reverted to how it was before. Having the Puerto Rico - Texas - California route was making the lower half of the left side pretty interesting. And then you have the passage way on the other side. The routes to Bering and Virginia are sort of unimportant, as those systems are sort of dead ends with the current connections. Nothing really makes you go there, as other ways are faster. If Rheinland would have anything worth visiting it, Texas would be very interesting for pirates, too. Maybe Rochester should ready itself for another wave of refugees from Nuremberg? ;3
When it comes to systems that are pure exploration areas, the first guesses should be very obvious: Lost, Iota, Major, Psi. Right?
* Sombs smirks for a moment, shaking the head.
Omicron Lost is a pure exploration system. In every single state of the system, it was unique, and I sort of miss the times where Lost was nothing more than three suns, Moros and the abandoned Crayter satellite. The system was a juxtaposition of experiences. It felt horribly empty, yet horribly mysterious while the three suns actually filled major parts of the system. It was good to RP in a silent area. In fact, I believe Omicron Lost got with every patch worse, however, story progress is more important. The system was altered, it got a starsphere which was more fitting to the actual position of Lost on the star map, and out of the nowhere, three asteroid fields showed up. A big arc rock was added, and soon the mysterious Lost changed into a Iridium Rush system where lolwuts from all over Sirius came over to mine Iridium Ore. And then the biggest mistake was done: Depot FP07 was turned into a station neutral to anyone, as Gammu after months of zero activity managed to get their hands on that station. Suddenly, the dangerous wild west system Lost got a thousand times safer, as every lolwut can now run to Secundus and dock. Oh boi. A step into the right direction? Yes, if you want to walk into the Abyss. Did it help Gammu to get more activity?
* Sombs shakes the head again.
I can only hope something gets done about this station, be it part of the storyline for the Omicrons that the Core or the Nomads try to remove the station or that Gammu moves the station to another place in the system or even somewhere else. Maybe through the jump hole to place it B2 in Delta. Or make it Gammu Guard? Why would Gammu allow every Hans and Franz do dock there? Maybe generally rework the AI docking rights to No-Dock with most factions, after all they want to harvest you, your ship and your mother. Secundus pretty much corrupted Lost by the final bit, looking at it from the technical side. Returning to the topic, however, Omicron Lost lost its exploration value by adding stuff. Less was more. Now there are three asteroid fields, identical, without explanation, and only one actually contains something. By the way, Omicron Lost is 80k from A to H, which is the optimal size for a small system with nothing to explore. To explain that: Most ship classes travel at cruise speed with 350 M/s (M, not m, unless you really want to talk about meters in Freelancer) That means, every ten seconds, you fly 3.5 K (K, not km), meaning you fly 21 K per minute, meaning you travel from the Iridium Ore mining zone to Secundus in around two minutes. It would be 2.5x the time if you'd have to travel to Freeport 11 in Delta to reach the next safe spot. Let's say you're in a combat situation with an ALG Uruz (because ALG totally moves to that spot to mine Iridium for whatever reason). No cruise, thrust speed is 150 M/s I believe, I stay incorrected. With Turret Steering and good manouvering you may progress with 100 M/s in the direction of Secundus, meaning you only have to stay alive for 50 K, which is at 100 M/s in the direction around 8 minutes and a bit more. That's pretty much the same amount of time you'd need to reach the next base from any other mining spot in any other system. Meaning Omicron Lost is not more dangerous than any other mining spot. Meaning *****. It used to be more dangerous and could have been made more rewarding. But that's my personal opinion.
Some of you already know I am working on a revamp of Omicron Lost, although with admittedly only slow progress due to the fact I'm spending my time with many progressing projects while I actually dare to still actively play the game and stuff. The idea on the revamp is not to remove anything that is currently part of Lost, but make it worth the exploration while answering where the hell the asteroids are coming from. Since Lost is unique in many aspects, it pretty much allows unique design elements.
The Nomad Omicrons are also pretty unique. Most of us probably remember the easter egg system from Vanilla which is currently not there anymore. A clone of that system is Omicron Psi. That system is a desaster, it used to be a very cool system in previous versions. What changed, though? Currently, only lolwuts enter that system.
This video shows one of the very typical encounter you get as a nomad in Psi. The only things you get to see in this system are zero-RP pure-lolwut battleships. Ranseurs, Osirises, Gebs, Nephilims, really just the ships you see being used by people I can't title in an adequate way in this post. What they come for? Marduk-hunt. Is that good?
Not in the current form. Nomad battleship remains are one of the best things Discovery has to offer. Finite ressources! We should have more of those, and I really, really, really, really hope @Alex. or some other FLHook wizard manages to upgrade the PoB plugin to make both PoBs and more finite ressources interesting. Back to the topic, though. Currently, there are only three ways to get Battleship Remains. Either by doing missions in Omicron Delta, which got nerfed in the latest versions IIRC, with Marduks suddenly not spawning anymore in missions (due to Yaren not offering missions that are 40+) or by moving to Psi or Major. (AFAIK there is a Marduk spawning area in Iota as well with the latest versions.) In Major, the entire atmosphere spawns Marduks en masse, which is good. Major should be the last place any human should want to be. However, Psi is the weakest link when it is about Marduk-farming. The Omicron Phi connection is very bad. I'd get rid of that and connect Phi with Chi instead. Psi however should be sort of a dead-end and be an exploration system. With the latest updates, an asteroid field got added, which many people didn't even notice. It looks prety nice and give Psi a tiny bit of something to explore. However, it's nothing more. Skorak could hide a PoB there and nobody would ever find it. Omicron Psi has the potential of being a dungeon system like it was in previous versions, where people had to group up, move to Psi and HOPE for a Marduk and not for swarms of Nammus and Irras to spawn. So that they would get Battleship Remains. Mind you, the old Omicron Major had no Marduk spawns, so Delta and Psi were the only options, while the Marduks in Delta spawned in a big group, the ones in Psi only as single Marduks. Right now, the Marduks only spawn in the Ravine fart cloud, by the way.
What I'd chance about Psi: Remove the Phi connection. Psi should be a dead end, apart from the gate to Major. Add some more detail to Psi, make it a 3D system, give it some nomad infrastructure but no nomad lanes. Nomad lanes are bad. Move the Marduk spawn area to the edge of the system, buff the single marduk to a normal spawning boss NPC and give it multiple battleship remains to drop. And no, no Ish'tar NPC spawn. With this set-up, Psi would be a very good example of a very rewarding exploration system.
Omicron Iota is a... let's say, it's former version was more impressive than the current one.
The old Omicron Iota was some of the really good shit. It was mysterious, dense, encircling. The event "Ensnared" pretty much names how the feeling of entering Iota was back then. You don't have that with the current one. The current version of Iota is naked and quick, like being 14 and having sex for the first time. The two problems are: The nebulae are too small and light. The old Omicron Iota nebulae were perfect, just glowing enough to not be dark. You didn't mind flying around in those nebulae for a few minutes because they were incredibly beautiful. Flying in those nebulae was also pretty intense, as you never knew when the nomad players would find you. You don't have that with the current version. The nebulae are small and not worthy to enter. I can't say I don't like the new version of Dur Shurrikun, but it feels a lot smaller. The bubble around the old Dur-Shurrikun was way bigger, I think, and the entire defensive perimeter around it was pretty impressive. Mines, weapon platforms, shield generators and the old K'hara jump gate PoBs. And then there were things hidden in the nebula around Dur-Shurrikun. And in the other nebula on the other side of the system. The old Iota simply had more charme, structure and exploration value. The other problem are the nomad lanes. Undisruptable, leading from A to B with a very good connection. Sadly, that's not good for a system that is so unique and mysterious as Iota. With other words, the current Iota is a perfect example of how you can take away the discovery of Discovery by making everything quicker.
So, to sum it up:
Interaction areas are crossroads, very depending on system layout and mostly to be found in central systems or sytems that are bottlenecks. New York, New London, Omicron Delta.
Passage areas are to connect systems need a good layout and distance between jump holes and gates. Never stuff a nebula with more than two jump holes, make sure the passages have something appealing to the eye on the way, so you're not dying of boredom.
Exploration areas are outer systems and areas. They either get your attention by travelling through a passage area or by leading into the very outskirts of a region and reward you with beautiful sights, wrecks, anomalies, rare NPCs or mining areas or other stuff. Passage and exploration can go hand in hand, but there needs to be a clear cut between it, for example like in Texas. Exploration to the left, passage to the right.
Make the dark matter storm in Alberta go 1/2 on the planet... Would look cool and there would spring up rp around how it is effecting the planet and population if any exist
Thanks for explaining that, @"Sombra Hookier". You might want to put that whole post in a Tutorial thread called "How System design works" or something like that. Thanks for all the feedback folks! I can't believe a lolwut thread about changing systems turned out so well.