Discovery Gaming Community - Skorak's Systems/NPC Development Blog

Skorak's Dev Blog

This time without EVERGREEN's Ever Given blocking all of Manchester.

I figured in the means of transparency(where it's not a spoiler) and to show off what and maybe how I'm doing things I should try making one of these Blogs.

While I might come back to explain past things I made like Pennsylvania or the Cortez PvP Zone I'll focus on things I'm working on right now. Purpose is of course to give you insight but also to collect feedback on in progress works.

Large NPC Ships

The first thing I'd like to talk about is my basic npc restoration. I've been weirdly obsessed with the old large ship names and designators for over ten years for no reason I truly understand. And now I can finally bring it back.

In the last patch we already saw the return of capital ship names, designators and symbols for at least Liberty:

Now for an upcoming update(not the next one) I restored the basic civilian transports to be proper transports again:

Goals of this:
• Part of step 1 of a bigger revolution of npcs coming back in a more meaningful way.
• Immersion restoration from vanilla. All large ships had ship names as they are having multiple people on the ship.
• Easier marking of npcs in the list(transports show up with the transport symbol, battleships have a battleships symbol etc. (looking into if we can have that for the cruisers as well)
• Making more encounters with hand made npcs that just happen in the world. Some might reward something, some might just be events that you can see happen to make the world feel more alive. Lets be honest the pathetic npcs we have right now are just kinda weird.

As you need to make a copy of every single large_ship in the game to restore this, it's not something I want to do in one wave to avoid issues.
So I picked the generic civilian ships as almost all sirian corporations use these.

If you have further feedback in regards to npcs, I'd love to hear it. Also did a great rework for the next patch that will hopefully make ambient npcs less of a bother for capital craft and large transports. So look forward to that.

This concludes my first post for this and I hope to talk about systems edits and the thought process behind them in the next post.

Pennsylvania

There's been a lot of feedback reaching me regarding Pennsylvania. Some was the sadly common enraged response that always happens whenever anything changes. But for the most part it was positive from the people who did indeed visit the system and take a look.
I will try to explain how the final design came to pass and what the thought processes were behind this.

First off the three major goals:
• Smaller system - you might have noticed that most systems are being made smaller where possible to reduce unnecessary travel times
• Representation of the system - The infocard description are fairly different than what the system actually is. But more to that later
• Transit past Erie - Erie is a dead end that is never visited. Not even briefly. I swapped Philadelphia and Erie in position to achieve some traffic. The system is no transit system so this goal is only partially achieved.

For this project, my goal was to not disrupt the lore of the stations or factions at all, to not need a rewrite/retcon and to hopefully enforce it more even.

To help understand some of the design decisions I feel like you need to know what kind of system Pennsylvania is. First off... it's not actually Liberty. That might come as a surprise but I will help you with an infocard:

Planet Erie Wrote:[...]

Most of the local Zoners reacted negatively Liberty's moves, and some even started to assemble resistance detachments in order to start a guerilla war in case Liberty will overstep its bounds. Liberty officials were witty enough to see economical benefits that the presence of Zoners provided, and avoided a conflict by declaring Pennsylvania an independent system under Liberty protectorate, which offered the Zoners economical and political freedom. Moreover, Liberty would build a system of trade lanes to allow safer and faster travels between Pennsylvania stations and New York. While the system is supervised by Liberty governor, the Zoner cities on Erie are self-governed and enjoy complete autonomy, unlike some of the Zoner space stations that have been completely taken over by Liberty corporations.

So it's a protectorate. One that is basically only supplied with the bare necessities and protected only around Liberty's direct interests. So I went to work with that.

Pennsylvania had always been split into a lawful(north) and an unlawful(south) section. So I decided to enhance this further.

You see there is a fairly obvious split between lawful shifting over to shady and then to straight up unlawful sections. This is further represented by marvellous, minimally maintained trade lanes like this:

These lanes are throwing sparks, some lights don't work at all and some aren't even looking quite safe. But they work and Liberty upkept their end of the deal.

As Bethlehem was connected to the lane network before I didn't even change its routing, still connecting to Philadelphia but also clearly in the shadier zone.
Now you might wonder about the other connection. Basically, Pennsylvania is a frontier world. One that corporations and Liberty proper are only partially interested in. Resources are there but not in abundance and the criminal element has parts of the system already firmly gripped. To represent that I checked the infocards and found Planet Hallam and the Wilkes-Barre Asteroid Field. Both have worthwhile amount of resources but are lying in pirate infested territory and aren't such a juicy opportunity that a liberty corporation would've wanted to snatch them up. To show off the wild west frontier type system I put down plenty of wrecks and failed mining operations. A station falling into the gas giant and a lane that once lead to it.

To round things off I tried to enhance patrol paths, wrecks and existing theory with further details but I'll leave some of those for you to explore.

The last thing I probably need to talk to you about is that genuinely awful lane from Planet Erie to the mining zone. You might wonder why I did it like that.
And there is an actual reason for it. The game teaches and encourages you to click and check trade lanes. It does not do that for nav buoys. And if mining helium is one of the early paths to gain money then it should be better visible. So a lane to the zone was made even though it is really not the most pleasant solution to look at.

Anyways. Thanks for reading or at least looking at the pictures. I'll gladly receive your feedback and some tiny changes are still coming to the system to round it off.

The Ring

I've actually had the base version of this in the drawer for a very long time. I just never got around to finish it properly and there were some other issues that needed sorting out.
But it's finally done. The Ring is supposed to show off Rheinland's prowess as an industrial superpower. Almost a megastructure and with that the only human one. So clearly a statement of skill in terms of constructions and engineering. It being an amalgamation of various industrial parts and storages should make clear what Rheinland's focus on the intersystem playground is.

With that massive construction we also have Bonn Station moving to the now freed up space. That was done both for consistency, since these stations are always at the capital for good reason, as well as to fill the empty space there. Now you might wonder if the orbit isn't full enough yet and you are right of course but that is all clearly wrapped around the planet. There needed to be something opposite and Bonn has the proper size to provide some counter weight.

The Ring itself has been designed look like it's one consistent functional structure. Clearly there is a few more details in the front as it cannot actually rotate ingame. But the back of the planet still has all the details to make it believable. I moved the dockable parts of the Ring to the left and the Oder Shipyard segment is on the right, showing off considerable shipyards to feed Rheinland's military with much needed replacements.

A few docked vessels round off the representation of Rheinland as the definite centre of industry for all houses.

Stationary NPCs

In addition to bigger systems work, I've done some more npc experiments. This time I made 'stationary' ones. Simply put, they're npcs without an engine or something akin to a station. Yet they spawn dynamically without being a hand placed solar. This also means they're destructible.

So for example after the destruction of Fort Riley, a stationary dreadnought can spawn near it. Some of these are pretty much the same as the normal npcs just tankier to make up for the lack of movement. And others are entirely unique encounters. There's at least one more in this patch. The goal is to both provide some more dynamic/creative encounters to see and find in the game world but also to give some vanilla campaign feeling back for some other things. Please give me plenty of feedback on these so I can improve them or do entirely different things with them.

World Enhancements

I'm always trying to make environments more immersive and putting more decorative elements there. Another thing I also try to do more is showing instead of telling. If something can be made clear through the game world instead of merely describing that in an infocard, I want that.

Texas has received a bit of that treatment as have others and more will still. Thanks to for the massive help and providing of a lot of content for us/me to use.

The Independent Worlds

The maps being empty beyond the infrastructure is intentional as I was asked to keep some mystery about system changes intact. I'll go through what changed here and why and leave the details for you to look at and hopefully appreciate. First of you'll notice that both systems were rotated by 90°. That was a continuity fix to match them to the sector map. If you see Magellan and Cortez' layouts, they're the same.

Let's talk about Bering first. That system has received many complaints in the past, so I tried my best to keep its identity intact, asteroid wise and colour wise but enhancing it. There is now massive gaps between each rock and there's larger rocks in between small ones. You could probably cap fight here, though I didn't test that. I also put a lot more wrecks on paths and along the old path the Separatists took during the scouring of Bering. Then with the addition of Bristol and the canonisation of the clean up etc. more wrecks and action here to show that. In the end I was quite satisfied with Bering's looks and it was fun to fly around here.

The wish with Hudson was to make it less of a pass through system. Bering has that by the merit of it being longer, angled and having stuff to explore. With Hudson, the added infrastructure makes it bigger and gives it a bit of scale that way. A few details were tweaked as well but not anywhere as many as Bering.

And now we come to one thing that brings them both together. You might have noticed Hamburg missing a lane. Until Hamburg gets its smaller rework that's the solution to make:
Hudson the shorter route and Bering the longer one. Bering is now considerably longer. But Bering is safer. Why the choice was made like that will become apparent another time. For now though, Hudson has a higher chance for npc lane interruptions and those interruptions have a chance to spawn a level 19(fully equipped npcs) bomber+fighter patrol. If you afk trade through Hudson, you will die. Bering also still has interruptions but just the usual strength. So it's not a time saver to go through Bering on the account of no interruptions either.

So tldr; Hudson faster-Dangerous, Bering slower-Safer

NPCs

Finally I got to what I'd promised in my second blog post: Making the basic transports into large_ships again. that means Trains and Transports used by npcs will get a ship name and a tag identifier. I've only went with these ships for now for technical reasons I hope to resolve in a future patch. All in all I'm super happy to have these npcs be more varied and I have a lot more ships to convert and encounters to make. For now I added one more, hopefully fun encounter in addition to the two bomber lane disruptions. Happy hunting.

World Enhancements

One thing I'm not sure if people care about I tried when I made the Bristol npcs.I can apparently tweak the ranks npcs get according to level. So Xenos and Bristol npcs currently operate on a 16, 19 setting. Meaning every npc until level 16 is a Rookie, until 19, a Veteran and 19 and beyond are Aces. For Bristol the same. Ens. Cpl. Cmdr.
If this is appreciated it's easy if not a little tedious to apply to all npc factions.

Beyond that I finished adding the nebula loadout to all sirian lanes. Or rather to be precise: to every first lane ring in a nebula. The idea here is that this helps finding the lane entrance in a nebula and feedback with the test lanes in NY, S-13 and Kepler has been positive so far.