Weekly news #16 - Discussion

[Lurler]

Blogpost: http://atomictorch.com/Post/26

I really like our new feature this week! Target locking and homing missiles are finally implemented. It is extremely rewarding to see your weapons chasing after the enemy ships. But let me tell you how it works. First you need to equip a radar capable of inquiring a target lock. Then after pressing [R] button and pointing in general direction of where your target is you will get him into a targeting reticule. Then depending on how powerful your targeting speed and enemy ECM (electronic counter measure device) you will acquire a target lock. Usually it happens withing couple of seconds, but could take longer on some ships. So, then what? Then you can fire all missile weapons your ship has equipped (with homing capabilities of course) to bring down hell on your enemy! Of course they can do the same to you, though

What else is there this week?
 * We are almost finished with the space stations. Shops are fully working now, and other features are almost completed too.
 * Added jettison / destroy functionality for items you are carrying.
 * Improved shield collisions with objects. Now it will activate on asteroids and other static objects too.
 * Implemented new NPC scaling system that would make it much simpler for us to reuse the same enemy profiles thus enabling us to create really a lot of variations even for the same enemy types. It would make game difficulty progress more steadily throughout the game.
 * A new save system also got implemented this week. It works in an incremental way making save times almost instant. You won't even notice it in single player, and for huge multiplayer servers it could be just 100-500 milliseconds which is also perfectly okay.
 * And finally we have improved latency handling. Now in single player there is no latency at all, and in multiplayer it is perfectly okay to play even with 200-300 milliseconds lag. Most likely you won't even notice it thanks to interpolation and extrapolation algorithms that we use.

Here is also a wallpaper for you to put on your desktop. I think it looks pretty old school

[MrVoff]

depending on how powerful your targeting speed and enemy ECM (electronic counter measure device) you will acquire a target lock

ECM? How is this going to work? Can we equip one too?

[Lurler]

ECM? How is this going to work? Can we equip one too?

Yes. We plan to make it possible to equip a lot of different support items such as ECM in this case. Each of them will have different active or passive effect on your ship. For example ECM (passive) will just make it harder for other ships to target you, while let's say a miner module will allows you to mine asteroids (active).