Menu

Show posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

Show posts Menu

Messages - Hecter94

#16
Game discussion / Re: Steam greenlight
September 04, 2014, 05:29:19 AM
Quote from: Lurler on September 04, 2014, 02:48:27 AM
Yup. That's true. We did work with him to record voice for the game. We plan to release one of the next big versions with voice in the game.
But we want to do it when we first record a female voice as well. We've been accused of sausage fest enough times, so this time we would prefer to give people options :)
So, yeah...
Anyway, he is an awesome guy btw, and I personally like his channel.

Can we expect to see him do a couple of Void Expanse videos in honor of the partnership?
Or is that not something that was brought up?

And ya, he's a pretty cool dude, watching his video when he talked about his life brought me to tears at a couple parts.
His channel is very funny too. ^.^
#17
Game discussion / Re: Steam greenlight
September 03, 2014, 03:20:19 PM
You guys know about Cr1tikal right?

He's a Youtuber that does videos of games, recently talked about Void Expanse in one of his videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTih2AnRDDU

Said that he reached out to the devs of this game for the possibility of doing voice acting for you.
Seize this opportunity!
Connect with him!

You guys say you can get an average of 500-1,000 views from a popular youtuber with 10k subs?
Well this guy has over a million, which means 50,000 - 100,000 views if we adhere to your math.

Meet with him, talk to him, and agree to hire him and pay him a decent wage on the condition that he does a short Void Expanse mini-series.
If it works out, you get voice acting and very good publicity for a fairly cheap price.

It's only a suggestion, but it's one I would /highly/ suggest looking into as soon as possible.
#18
Mods / Re: Breaching the Core Full Mod
August 22, 2014, 10:02:22 AM
Quote from: Hammish on August 22, 2014, 08:07:58 AM
Huh.  That does seem like a new bug.  If you quit the game and then reload the save, does it reproduce?
I'll give it a try when I get home.


QuoteAnd true, with regards to the fighters not being able to engage heavy hulls.  I just wouldn't want to go much under 20, is all, because at higher levels (once the final engineer tech tree is in, with the available boosts to armor) they'd have issues engaging even light fighter/interceptor hulls.  It's actually why I had to change my rotary autocannons; I wanted them to be 20 shots/sec but the damage would have been around 10/shot which meant like 90% of the ships in the game were immune to them.  I think I have the math up on how to get them to the sweet spot you mentioned, though; I'll toss up a build later tonight or tomorrow for people to try.  Tech 1 (my v1.0) is almost set to launch, anyway.
Perhaps the solution to this is to separate fighters and bombers into separate bays?
Have a "Fighter Drone" bay with fast and agile fighters that are used to engage light targets but are almost useless against heavy armor.

and then a "Bomber Drone" bay that has powerful but slow bombers that are good against heavy targets, but almost useless against light targets.
[/quote]
#19
I thought that a log with so many hours of active playime might be somewhat useful for you guys to look at. ^.^

Glad that the crash was fixed before I even posted the log up. :P

It does run a bit slow, but it plays more or less smoothly....FPS is a bit low, but it isn't noticeable enough to cause me any inconvenience or issues.
I have not played multiplayer, no.

There is one thing I'd like you to possibly investigate though....is something I just remembered now.

Wwhen I was playing...right after jumping to the "Wascar" system for the first time....my game started having pretty bad "net lag" as in, my ship was jumping around and lagging out as though I was playing online with bad ping, while my FPS was staying the same as it had always been.
It was the first time I'd seen anything like that happen, and it did seem like an actual bug.
I flew to a nearby space station, turned in a delivery quest, then flew back to the jumpgate, jumped out...
And the issue continued to persist.
Eventually I had to save and exit and then reload before it solved itself.
It was odd.
#20
Mods / Re: Breaching the Core Full Mod
August 22, 2014, 07:53:16 AM
Quote from: Hammish on August 22, 2014, 07:40:40 AM
Actually I think that's a known bug not just in the mod but in the game, but seemingly hard to reproduce reliably.  I saw someone else had mentioned it as well in bug reports, where ships just stop taking damage except possibly from explosives (probably because of the AOE nature).
I know of a bug where, you can get the shields down, but then the hull stops taking damage and you have to let the shields regen a bit...and it seems to happen randomly.

However, this seems a bit different, as it does 0 damage to either the shields or the hull and happens every single time. It's possible the two bugs are related, but they don't seem /that/ similar.

QuoteAs to the rest, I'll look into those tweaks. :)  I mean, it's always going to be -similar- to flying a missileboat; the major different at the end will be that the fighter bay will allow a person to do better theoretical damage over time, whereas the missiles give a nice big boom up front.  I can stress this a bit more, though, by upping the duration as mentioned.  Damage will be tougher to work with, though; right now they're set to 20 damage per missile and going much lower than that will make them all but useless at high hull levels.  What I can do to keep it balanced, though, is increase the life of the fighters and just spread the missiles out over the lifetime.  So instead of firing a rocket every half-second they fire every second.  Less DPS from the start but the same overall damage over the course of the fighter's life.
I wouldn't see much of a problem with lvl 1 fighter drones not being able to reliably engage high level hulls.

I see these drones as being fairly fast to engage, fire many low-damage guided missiles, that are powerful against small and fast ships, then kamikaze them and die.
Whereas, lvl2 bombers could be much slower, and fire powerful unguided (or limited guidance) torpedoes that do very heavy damage but much easier to dodge.
and finally level3 could be a fighter-bomber with two powerful main guns (think semi-auto Gauss Cannons) that it uses to strafe heavy targets and small guided missiles that it uses against light targets.

all-in-all I would definitely like to see them have more "presence" on the field....and not disappear after a couple of seconds.
If that means that lvl1 drones have to be ineffective against heavy armor, so be it.
As long as there's other alternatives to use against heavy armor.
#21
Quote from: ai_enabled on August 22, 2014, 06:05:17 AM
Hello! Thanks for reporting!
Some crash issues was fixed in v0.9.8 (released today). Also crashes on exit was fixed.
Are you sure you uploaded the latest crash report? As I see, output_log.txt dated 9 august and it is for v0.9.5. Maybe game crashed without creating crash dump? Anyway, please upload "Logs" folder near game executable and all crash dumps folders created nearby (if any present, except one you already uploaded).
Regards!

Thanks, I will have to try that new version when I get home later today.
Yes, that is the latest (and only) crash report in my Void Expanse folder. Not sure why the output_log.txt is from August 9th though.
When the game crashed, it opened a dialog box telling me to upload the folder named 2014-08-21_183736 to the devs, which is what I did.
I haven't changed anything within it....so...that's odd.

This is the logs folder:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/il2jv27kfjx6m9y/Logs.rar (https://www.dropbox.com/s/il2jv27kfjx6m9y/Logs.rar)

Just to humor you:
Screenshot of the file path and all folders/documents within:
http://prntscr.com/4fbpxc (http://prntscr.com/4fbpxc)

Just in case I'm missing something
#22
So here's a crash report that happened after.....4-5 hours of continuous playtime.
Only reason I'm posting it, is that I was thinking it might help you to pinpoint the memory leak bug.

Game Version was 0.97c
This was a clean save that I had made the same day
I was running the BTC mod

System specs:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ofprn1xqwl5l6zd/DxDiag.txt (https://www.dropbox.com/s/ofprn1xqwl5l6zd/DxDiag.txt)
Crash Report:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/sshwpa4k2uoawsk/2014-08-21_183736.rar (https://www.dropbox.com/s/sshwpa4k2uoawsk/2014-08-21_183736.rar)

Just send a message if you want anything else and I'll upload it or tell you.
#23
Mods / Re: Breaching the Core Full Mod
August 21, 2014, 03:53:59 PM
This is officially the best thing ever.
I just loaded four of them on to my ship and started shooting them, I was laughing maniacally from the moment the first one launched until every enemy in my solar system had been decimated.

That was absolutely sweet.

Now you know what we need?
Carriers, that fire mini-carriers...which fire drones!
Mwahahaha
(That's a joke, don't do that.)

In seriousness though. Would it be possible to tweak the lifespan of the drones so that they last a lot longer, but increase the ammo capacity so that you can have a lot of them while also lowering the amount of damage the actual missiles do?
It feels like, to me...drones should be something that pretty much just continuously follow their target unless they kamikaze it or you lose your target lock.

Right now, it just seems like they do too much damage too quickly, whereas I would rather see them as being like....a constant harassment, slowly whittling your health down while preventing your shields from recharging.

I haven't been on the receiving end of them yet, but it just seems like they'd be almost impossible to actually defeat.

I would think that, ideally...when facing drones, you could either move away to force them to lose lock....or move in close, tank the damage and out-dps the actual main body of the Carrier before the weak but continuous damage of the drones does you in.

When I was playing just then, the playstyle I was using felt far too similar to the same playstyle I always use with any missile carrier. So a drone carrier should be tweaked a bit to give it a different feel and playstyle.

Just my two cents, though...and I can't stress enough how effin awesome this is as a proof of concept.

-EDIT-
Seems I have a bug to report.
This is a bit of an odd one, to be honest.

I was using the Experimental Hephaestus Hull, with two energy torpedoes and one CRB-X1.
Energy torpedoes were working great for a quite a long time, then.....all of a sudden...I noticed that they weren't doing any damage to Boomerang hulls or shields.
So I started destroying those with the drones, and kept playing.
A little while later, they stopped dealing damage to Avalanche hulls, then Fang hulls etc. etc.
Until they weren't dealing any damage to anything.

I can upload a log file if you point me to where I should look.
#24
Mods / Re: Breaching the Core Full Mod
August 21, 2014, 02:27:37 PM
Quote from: Hammish on August 21, 2014, 12:35:03 PM
Well, realistically you'd want them to be limited to carrier-based hulls anyway... so it'd probably be easiest to just set that attribute on the hull and have it check, anyway.  Even with fixed-mount launchers they still look a little odd, so for an actual dedicated carrier you'd want to alter the model a bit to put the physical bay on it.
True, that seems like the best overall solution...very very good as a "proof of concept" weapon.

QuoteAs for tracking drones, it depends on how you handle them.  I did it the easy way I mentioned and just made them projectiles of the launcher that then fire scattering submunions at regular intervals.  With a situation like that, they're always going to rely on your targeting, so with the way I have them in now they fly out straight for two seconds like doing a launch sequence and -then- start tracking your current locked target.  The missiles they fire also will track your lock.
Oh, that's fine then. From the way you worded your post, I was under the impression that they had no tracking at all and just flew in a straight line. The way you just described it is perfect for drones.

QuoteIn order to get them to pick their own targets, though, you'd have to go the device-and-script route that BeLugh mentioned, so far as I know, and actually spawn the drones as NPCs with their own AI prioritizing.  (And devices with abilities to control their target, ect)
Maybe something like that for the future, but for now....as a proof of concept, they already work very well.

QuoteSince you gave a picture of the battleship from RA3 the other day (Yamato, right?)
No, the Shogun Battleship. The Yamato was the Battlecruiser from Starcraft.
The Shogun battleship was the basis for my battleship design, wheras the Yamato cannon from the Battlecruiser in Starcraft greatly resembles the mining laser on my Planetcracker.

Quoteit bears mentioning that these drones strongly resemble the Allies' carrier attack from that game; pick a target and they will engage that target, but very limited AI when not directly aimed via locking.
I see, yes...that's a very apt analogy.
#25
Mods / Re: Breaching the Core Full Mod
August 21, 2014, 12:10:41 PM
Quote from: Hammish on August 21, 2014, 10:45:28 AM
Cool beans.  Granted it's not balanced or anything, but I kinda like how it turned out.  I realized after I thought about it that to represent drones... you could just use an existing ship model and scale them down.  So currently that bay launches tiny little Avalanche clones that spit missiles.  They look hilarious when you get like 6 going at once, too.

I even figured I'd go for a bit of realism, so after you fire them (their launch sequence) they have no arming or tracking and just fly straight out.  On ships with fixed missile points like the new missile cruiser it looks pretty decent; not so much on ships with twistable launchers.
Oh? I would think that, realistically....drones should be able to track their target, shouldn't they?
And if it doesn't look very well on ships with twistable launchers...then couldn't you restrict them to ships with only fixed launchers?
Something like....find every hull with fixed missile mounts and give them an effect called "fixed_mounts:true"
Then have the CRB-X1 require "Fixed Missile Mounts:OK"

Actually, couldn't you actually make it so that equipping the weapon applies an effect that reduces tracking angle to 0?
I know that there is an effect that lets you increase or decrease the tracking angle of a weapon, but I don't know if:

a) Weapons can apply effects on equip that modify the hull.
b) tracking angle effect can be limited to missile weapons only

Now, if that won't work. I'm almost certain you could do it with a booster.
Have a booster named like...."Drone Replicator" which gives two effects:

allow_drone:true
tracking_angle:=0

Then set the CRB-X1 to require "Allow Drones: OK"

It seems like it would be possible, and might actually help with balancing. ie: In order to launch drones, you have to downgrade your weapon mounts to fixed hardpoints.
Which seems like a fair drawback as you'll be relying primarily on drones as your weapons anyways.
#26
Mods / Re: Breaching the Core Full Mod
August 21, 2014, 09:48:10 AM
Quote from: Hammish on August 21, 2014, 09:02:08 AM
https://www.dropbox.com/s/bj1mjuduxlnu67m/btc093.zip

BTC 0.93.  Just a few minor tweaks, the new pilot tree, and a new weapon system to play around with as a proof of concept.  Let me know what you think, Hecter; it's currently in the main shop as the CRB-X1.  (CRB being the model name for the Carrier Bay.) :D
Ooooh, now this I simply /must/ see.
I'll try it out as soon as I get home and let you know what I think of it.
#27
Quote from: Hammish on August 20, 2014, 05:57:53 AM
Targeting at least should be fairly simple on the 'beam' option, and doesn't even require the javascript; just need to change the target filter in the .xml, and if the target doesn't meet the criteria then the script doesn't even execute.
Easy as pie then, assuming...as Belugh says, negative damage modifiers actually work to heal.

QuoteOne thing that would be neat is if you actually made it a 'welding beam', if you will, and in the script put a check for friendly, neutral or hostile.  If friendly or neutral, heals the target for some hull.  If hostile, instead does a minor amount of damage to the target as it burns off a little armor.
Now that IS neat, though you'd have to find a way for it to prioritize healing friendly targets over dealing minor amounts of damage to an enemy.
(Also, would it work against shields? Since you can't really "weld" energy)

QuoteAlso, to toss it out there, this kind of idea is begging for a ship-repair subsection of engineering to make support roles viable when MP is more active.  One could even take a bit of a cue from EVE and make it not just hull repair but with the option mounting shield repair or even energy transfusions (I'm looking at you over there, Osprey.)
For a game that's calling itself a mini-mmo in each server, it really is missing ships that fit into a support role.
A Carrier could fill it for the really late-game, but other smaller ships should probably have ways of supporting his allies too.
#28
Quote from: Hammish on August 20, 2014, 02:13:50 AM
Does negative damage actually work to heal?  I've never actually tried that.  It seems the engine can handle some negative values but not others; for instance, you can't use a negative value for projectile drag in order to make a shot that speeds up after launch.

Quick question, though: how would you go from an actual weapon slot to a controllable object in space?  For some reason I thought scripting was linked/locked to just module-type slots and that you couldn't really link one to a weapon or a projectile fired by a weapon.  That's the leap I wasn't able to make in my head; with the 'kamikaze drones' I can see how it'd be easily doable, since you only have one projectile that is dispensing other projectiles, but for actual controllable fighters you'd need to have that launcher spawning actual in-game, ID'd assets (which I assume is part of what the array would handle, keeping track of IDs in addition to current states)

Also, might I add, it's nice to have a large collaboration of ideas (design and coding/technical) flowing here, even if we are rapidly approaching the limits of my javascript ability and understanding. ;)
While I do know Javascript, and can code in it....I already do that at work so I don't feel like going home and doing it for a game too.
I can certainly supply you with design ideas, though...and take a couple of stabs at how the jscript might work, even though it doesn't seem similar to the base Jscript I work with.

So, even if the negative damage doesn't work, the initial idea of a device which simply applies a structure_repair effect when used.
The only thing to do would be to figure out how to code it so that device can be used when targeting another ship or structure.

Of course, the idea of an actual....physical repair drone that flies around targeting allies with a "heal" beam seems to be the more cool solution, though it does take some control away from the player which could be frustrating.
(Choosing to heal a random merchant passing by instead of your nearly-dead friend resulting in his death)

Hell, the "ideal" solution might even be both, have an actual launchable AI-controlled drone for passive repairs, but also a activated "repair drone" device that acts as a rechargeable consumable.
Heals a large amount fairly quickly to a target you're able to manually specify but takes a long time to cool down.
#29
Quote from: BeLugh on August 19, 2014, 02:06:09 PM
I was thinking that the capital ship should be equipped with that laser.
If it is possible for ai-controlled drones.... then we already have repair drones including the animation ;)
That would be perfect, then.

AI-Controlled drones with a negative damage laser which is set to only target allies.

Healing, support and coolness all in one convenient flying package.
#30
Quote from: BeLugh on August 19, 2014, 12:34:40 PM
You will need to wait for later versions of miners heaven :D this week i got no time for modding, but in a few months you will be able to play that ship, just wait ;)
AWESOME!

I'm totally hyped for that now.
Get in mah belly, you yummy yummy asteroids.