A good starting point would be, if the devs were a little more creative with the starspheres. Often, they are copied from old systems. I think about something like this: http://www.moddb.com/mods/crossfire/images...phere2#imagebox
(From Crossfire)
The Cayman system looks like it's going in the right direction. More psychedelic colors please:P
' Wrote:A good starting point would be, if the devs were a little more creative with the starspheres.
A good starting point would be if devs actually started doing starspheres. Especially since now there's a *working* 3ds max explorer for it.
' Wrote:Virginia has also nice background but the quality of the system itself is much worse than that of Cayman.
Cayman was done by two brilliant modders who happen to also be leading the RoS. They know how to model, texture, system edit and more. That's why Cayman is so great.
Now tell me, where did I do wrong with Virginia? How can I improve it?
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Mephistoles
Quality does need to be increased, more over, player-limit needs to be increased. But I don't want the mod to have too much extra content, I play Discovery over Crossfire because it still feels like I'm in the Freelancer world. I can't stand how alien Crossfire feels.
Still, the new Systems really need to feel worth exploring. Right now it's just "same old" with every new System.
For me it seems that one has the option to go exploring/trading forever alone or staying in the core or other populated areas. I trade in Liberty, plotting my route where the pirates are, being sure doing it on an ID that's hostile to all of them. But it's good to know that such nice scenery exists out there. I think I've never been in at least half if not 3/4 of the systems.
I have to agree with the last part of the first post.
There are a lot of really beautiful things in the mod, but there are also a lot of things that break immersion although they could be fixed with a bit of more work. The next updates/versions should concentrate on quality, not add more quantity.
I'll give a few examples of what I mean:
-A lot of bases, some of which are in really nice looking systems, are just clones of bases that existed elsewhere, with the bar characters labeled like characters from other vanilla bases. For example a base in omicron 81 has the same bar as ruiz in omicron beta, and the research station in Virgina has bar characters that appear to be from Cortez or Texas. When you explore and you see a base that has great potential for looking interesting, you land and you see that it's just a clone of another base, it gives you the trong feeling that the shell in shiny and polished, but when you look inside its hollow and without substance. That's kind of a huge let down.
-Some npcs in some places really dont fit, or are just annoying. They get stuck in gates and you have to either shoot them or fly away 5k and try your luck again. Or some npcs are on constant suicide attacks on bases, and the base is under attack EVERY time by suicidal npcs, when you have the feeling that there it doesnt make sense that there should be som many npcs shooting each other all the time. Its like the whole sector is jsut total npc chaos with no or few "normal" places. That also breaks immersion, apart from being annoying. I think with some work you could just take the npcs away from gates so they dont get stick all the time, take the npcs that always attack the bases way (or at least 80% of them), and take those capitol ship away that always crash into planets or snubcraft that die in minefields and bounty hutners that ask navy npcs to drop pilots and start shooring each other, as if 90% of pilots in Sirius are total imbeciles. It may take some work, but these npcs give a very irrealistic atmosphere all the time and a bad impression of the mod.
-Tradelanes and gates are hostile and shoot you, but they still let you dock. That makes no sense. I understand you would make life hard for pirates if you didnt let the use those, but to make things less unrealistic and strange, why not make all gates and lanes neutral faction (I think that can easily be doen with a script that goes through the system database?) so that they dont shoot you with their useless guns and then let you dock with them at the same time.
I dont want to diminish your achievements, there are really great things in the mod, but I think for the next update you should focus on fixing these things, to improve quality, instead of adding more quantity.
' Wrote:The the research station in Virgina has bar characters that appear to be from Cortez or Texas.
The characters themselves are unique, if you haven't noticed. The problem is that they use the same rumors as characters from Cortez, Texas or whatever. Which sucks, I agree. I was going to give them unique rumors and stuff, but unfortunately I suck at writing and no-one else was willing to write them.
About NPCs:
NPC spawns are basically either zones, or paths. They can crash the game if used carelessly.
Zones are much easier to make, but you get the weird behavior you described above. Paths might be better, but they're really jerky, and are known for causing game crashes. It also takes a long time to make them, so modders would rather use their time on other stuff.
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Mephistoles
I did notice that the names seemed unique (I think one was a Janitor) but the infocards cloned. For the infocards... maybe if they just repeated basically one aspect of what the station infocard said ( I ont actually remember what it said atm, but I'm speaking generally) together with a bit of personal feelings added, you already would have a systematic approach for writing them.
For the npcs, those are probably not easy too, but the examples I gave, I would already be happy if you just removed the npcs (no other paths or zones, just remove one path or one zone) near gates, cap ships near planets, and so on.
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