Update:
Continued work on the NPC templates. Made some interesting findings - it's possible to set overlapping difficulties for multiple ships, and the game will pick one at random. This allows for a more diverse environment. Example: If the difficulty for an encounter is d13, and I've got 2 LF and 2 HF NPCs defined for that difficulty setting, the game can pick any one of these four.
I'll be using this to allow the various factions with multiple gun lines to have NPCs with one of each gun set, and mixing/matching the LFs, HFs and VHFs a little bit. On the utility side it'll allow me to define multiple ships as transports, so that Bowex could for instance have, at random, a small train, a large transport or a Percheron spawn when a transport class ship is called for. I've also figured out why the damned NPCs kept crashing the server on me previously. Loadout reference issue... figures. The simplest things.
Bretonia lawfuls are done (BAF, BPA, BMM, Bowex, Gateway, Planetform). Next: Bretonia's underbelly - Gaians and Mollies.
Wide awake in a world that sleeps, enduring thoughts, enduring scenes. The knowledge of what is yet to come.
From a time when all seems lost, from a dead man to a world, without restraint, unafraid and free.
Mostly retired Discovery member. May still visit from time to time.
Update: Still working on the NPC templates. Nearly done - just have the Order, Outcasts, Wilde and Nommies left to take care of. And then do a consistency check, for rewriting another 1.5MB of plaintext is bound to contain a typo or two. So come 4.87, if you notice something unusual in an NPC loadout, it'll probably have been an oops of mine.
We're also slowly creeping towards release. It's again taking way longer then we wanted (initially we'd hoped to release around newyears, but y'know, it wouldn't be Disco if you'd not miss a dev deadline or two). Still, there's progress. The infocarding team is also on the task from what I hear...
Wide awake in a world that sleeps, enduring thoughts, enduring scenes. The knowledge of what is yet to come.
From a time when all seems lost, from a dead man to a world, without restraint, unafraid and free.
Mostly retired Discovery member. May still visit from time to time.
Update: Busy with the Nomad assignments. After that I still got the Wilde to do, not sure what I'll do with that now they're all over the place. Probably assign them Borderworlds and CTE craft or something... Anyway. Did make a small change to the Nammu (Nomad gunboat). The two aft turrets on that thing get moved to the bottom "spikes", and given a full arc instead of aft only. Basically this means the Nammu can fire all 5 turrets forward instead of just 3. The CD hardpoint was also adjusted, I noticed it was set to have no arc, whereas it should have +/- 15. Doubt that will make much a difference however.
Wide awake in a world that sleeps, enduring thoughts, enduring scenes. The knowledge of what is yet to come.
From a time when all seems lost, from a dead man to a world, without restraint, unafraid and free.
Mostly retired Discovery member. May still visit from time to time.
Update: Done with assigning the new NPC templates. And they work quite nicely... I'm only slightly worried that they might prove a mite too heavy, but that'll have to be figured out during playtesting. Afterward I also tackled a long term annoyance of mine: That the house capital ship weapons don't have proper descriptions or names.
Next task is kind of an unexpected one. Cannon has been working on figuring out where the lag NPCs generate comes from, and it turns out that NPC projectiles in space are a major part of it. Which means that the light NPC skirmishes you sometimes see around bases (you know, BHG shooting up some pirates or vice versa) are a major source of server load. Most zones in Disco have highly relaxed density restrictions to what spawns where - I will need to go over EVERY system and add some density limitations and restrictions. Luckily, they can be set based on the type of NPC, so I don't need to reduce a trader rich zone to just a few ships - I can just set a parameter to lawful-heavy zones that there may only be one unlawful encounter active at any given time.
At the same time the ordering of encounters seems important. It appears the game MUST have the tradelane paths defined first, followed by patrol paths, base/wormhole/jumpgate local zones, field areas (roid/nebula etc) and finally the ambient background. And a background MUST exist for patrols to work. These are new restrictions that I have not been aware of before. There's also some parameters that must be set, or NPCs will simply freeze up.
Still a lot of work to do. But this will be another measure that will hopefully reduce the lag a lot, in terms of server load. Connection issues are still being worked on - permanent fix for that would probably be identifying the culprit behind the DDOS and reporting him/her to the local authorities for a few years in the real life equivalent of Newgate... (and make no misstake, we -will- be doing that if we find out who's been spoiling everyone else's fun)
Wide awake in a world that sleeps, enduring thoughts, enduring scenes. The knowledge of what is yet to come.
From a time when all seems lost, from a dead man to a world, without restraint, unafraid and free.
Mostly retired Discovery member. May still visit from time to time.
Update: Handled setting encounter density and density restrictions on all areas. General rule of thumb: Few NPCs when not around anything, more lawfuls around jumpgates then unlawfuls. More unlawfuls around holes then lawfuls. Base perimiters at most 1 group of hostiles active (usually means that if hostiles visit, they'll be wiped out pretty quick). To all of you who enjoy getting swarmed by NPCs: This is an anti-lag measure. The amount of projectiles in space is causing server load, which is a problem.
Also checked and edited all the encounter files and pruned a few obsolete ones. Not sure who thought it a good idea to give the FA and Hessians their own encounters, but it appears those were never used, and frankly, superfluous. I've changed the battleship ones so that they no longer have cruisers which follow them around and get caught in the crossfire - instead, a battleship either has 4 gunboats, or 2 gunboats and 4 fighters as an escort wing which will all break away and invididually engage hostiles. Trust me, that's a lot nastier and a little easier on the server at the same time (gunboat projectiles don't stick around as long as cruiser ones).
What else? Added the Pirate small transport turret and Civilian small transport turret. These are meant mainly for players not aligned with any house faction, lawful or unlawful. Think Pirate ID, or Interspace, or Outcast. Pirate turret has a red projectile, the Civvy one a white one similar to those used on stations. I've put them up for sale on a number of bases - shouldn't be hard to find.
Wide awake in a world that sleeps, enduring thoughts, enduring scenes. The knowledge of what is yet to come.
From a time when all seems lost, from a dead man to a world, without restraint, unafraid and free.
Mostly retired Discovery member. May still visit from time to time.
Update:
- Looks like Cannon got the "undock a battleship from a planet" working using the proper moorings. Big ships reverse out of a planet's mooring spoke rather then trying the docking ring, should prevent them from colliding with the atmosphere upon undock. This may have been fixed for a while now, I only just noticed it today. This should fix the "Battleship explodes when undocking from a planet" issue.
- Adjusted the "onhit" effect damage tresholds for all ships. Should reduce screenshake when a capship pilot is swarmed by a few fighters.
Fighters/freighters: Light 0-300, Mid 300-600, Heavy 600+
Transport/Gunboats: Light 0-900, Mid 900-1800, Heavy 1800+
Liners/Cruisers: Light 0-1800, Mid 1800-10000, Heavy 10000+
BCs/Battleships/Barge: Light 0-10000, Mid 10000-100000, Heavy 100000+
- I may catch some flak from Blodo for this for bypassing Balance Central - but I'm tired of waiting. I went ahead and converted the Cruiser and Battleship razors (including the Gallic variants) into heavy beam weapons. That changes slightly how they function:
* Beam weapons MUST align the target with the turret's nozzle. The turret turns slowly, so this may be challenging.
* The turret has been modified to be able to fire up 75 dgr, and down -5 dgr. Normal turrets have a 0 to 45 degree swing. Station turrets typically 0 to 90.
* The weapon fires an invisible projectile that travels very fast (1600m/s for the cruiser, 2000m/s for the battleship). The "flash" of the weapon fires the beam effect, which is massive.
* While the beam visual effect may pierce a target and penetrate a second, the invisible projectile does not. The visual effect does not stop if the projectile hits something.
* NPCs will benefit from this change since they always assume force_ori to be set. NPC cruisers and battleships will have a much wider arc on their battlerazors now...
To compensate bombers for the improved range and accuracy on the Razor, the SNAC range has been improved slightly (by lengthening projectile lifetime). It outranges the new razor, but only slightly - if you come in at a bad angle, the Razor will be able to hit first. Naturally, the Nova FAR outranges the Razor. Never understood why the SNAC was made shortrange personally...
Damage is unaltered. Basically it's a turret that is designed to specialise the capital ship carrying it in the short range role. I'll be working on the Mining Turret and the Solaris (including gunboat) guns next. Fighter guns are problematic - there are no fighter weapons with a high enough speed or low enough range that beams will work properly on them. I may need to make a short range gun for this purpose, but am worried that'd become a "too easy" weapon.
Beam weapons in action (Ship posted is a newly modeled Aqulion):
Wide awake in a world that sleeps, enduring thoughts, enduring scenes. The knowledge of what is yet to come.
From a time when all seems lost, from a dead man to a world, without restraint, unafraid and free.
Mostly retired Discovery member. May still visit from time to time.
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