RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (Full Version)

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Drybreeze -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (6/2/2016 8:48:50 AM)

Thank you for your feedback!

Yes the bunkering is annoying. Even when I make it a pre-warp tech and another tech as a higher level (0, or 1) and they're both researched, it still picks the obsolete concrete bunkering as the most up-to-date armour and clads ships and stations with it.

I have done everything I can think of to have it work properly but it's just not playing ball, so I might remove it and possibly implement it later when I've figured out what's going on there. Maybe when the reactive setting to armour setting ratio is higher it considers it a more powerful armour, so picks it. Dunno. A fight for another day.

Regarding reactors, I have doubled their fuel consumption, which works well, but I think I'll double it again. Also I've made all thrusters and hyperdrives consume more energy, so therefore fuel is burned more quickly to replenish this energy. In my opinion and the opinion of a few "ship design how to" threads I've read, solar panels don't belong on a ship anyway, which I agree with. None of my custom designs use them, except Garrison Destroyers, which I use as mobile station defenses... slow and lumbering and the solar panels prevent them from having to periodically refuel and abandon their posts.

I will adopt your idea about Hydrogen (Fusion) reactors burning more fuel than Uranium (Fission) reactors... I like that idea, thank you.

I will be releasing another significantly more refined version soon (as shown in my development spreadsheet). I will release it as a folder so that further updates are only updated graphics or text files here and there, drastically reducing the download on updates... if you're interested I'll provide the link.

Thanks again for your input!



Bingeling -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (6/2/2016 11:17:34 AM)

When it comes to energy collector, they certainly belong on my military ships.

I would suggest that you spend some time with a fully automated empire, and watch their ships. If they sit idle for a significant amount of time, they should have an energy collector to cover static cost. I seem to have noticed the civilians sitting around quite a bit. Exploration ships park when they are out of targets. But I am not quite sure if AI fleets are parked or patrolling, for instance. I seem to remember quite stationary pirates around their bases, though, which wake up when spotting enemies in the system.

If they got no energy collector and stay idle a lot, you could give the AI more fuel shortages.



Drybreeze -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (6/3/2016 6:55:46 AM)

A good point, for sure. But when it comes to the AI, it will always have a disadvantage against a human player, because a human player can adopt different ship designs (for example) to suit specific tasks.

A basic example is making two types of destroyers, one that is slow but has low fuel consumption and is an off-base defensive vessel that escorts a mining base while it's in a dangerous region, and then moves on when the region is no longer dangerous (pirates cleared, for example), while another destroyer is faster, more lightly armoured, and designed to engage and retreat, but used more fuel doing so.

Another simple example might be having escort sized vehicles which have very high thrusters and turn rates, low weapons and armour to keep weight down, while having orders to retreat the instant they're attacked. Useless as one or two in a fleet, but form a wolf pack of say 10 or 20 and they become a formidable swarm that engages an enemy with guerilla style attack and retreat; death by a thousand pin jabs (yes, ****s is censored, but you get the idea).

The AI can't think like this and relies only on the single ship design structure provided for it for each hull type, which automatically gives the player an advantage.

A thread reader who I won't name in case they wish to remain anonymous (but you're welcome to respond if you wish - for now we'll call them "Bob") sent me a private message yesterday also along the lines of human player versus AI balancing. This was regarding item #33 in my development spreadsheet which is where I plan to make the late-game highest tech hyperdrive have the ability to fold space directly between origin and destination, resulting in almost instantaneous travel between points. "Bob" raised the very valid issue (known as "double dipping") where players would be able to exploit this feature by fitting ships both with this instant hyperdrive as well as a much faster-to-engage hypderdrive onto the same vessel, thereby bypassing the warm-up time for the space-folding hyperdrive. This is because the game uses the fastest speed, the fastest launch speed, and the highest energy consumption out of multiple different hyperdrives fitted to a vessel. "Bob" makes an excellent point, however my response is also that AI vs Human thinking is already very vastly different. If a player wants to "cheat" to beat the AI (which let's face it, is pretty lame and pointless), then you might as well do it by changing a setting the difficulty settings to super easy.

I was actually considering for awhile there making a special module that could be fitted to a ship which could be researched and would allow the player to fit it to their vessels. This module was going to be able to rapidly engage whatever hyperdrive they had installed... a kind of rapid trigger device... costly but clearly useful. In the end I decided not to create this component because the AI would have no way of fitting it, and this created a clear disadvantage that was actively ENCOURAGED by the SoS mod. Some players that didn't know about the double-dipping issue might use this cool new concept component and even be unaware that the AI was unable to match this ability. So... scrapped.

At the end of the day, someone that wants to cheat when playing against the computer player can do it in a number of ways that I can't control as part of the mod - for example by opening up the map editor and depriving the AI players of fuel resources on their home systems, or providing heaps of ideal planets, or making the distances between AI home worlds and nearby mining locations really large, etc.

So if a mod enables someone to alter the balance between themselves and the AI player(s) that is very different to it uncontrollably creates an imbalance... for example the concrete bunkering versus layered mass armour problem I'm having.



IFailAtGaming -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (6/3/2016 7:42:34 PM)

I thank for trying to keep me anonymous in this (seriously, how many people would do so?) and i'm very glad you're aware, and looking at your own explanation of it, I have to agree. Also your explanation also kind of exemplifies a problem with my own suggestion of varied fuel usages, while a player might have the idea of making, for instance, private ships fission powered, and possibly some fission powered escorts for convoys, while keeping their main strike force using fusion, while the AI would have no idea to do so. But again, this was a problem with the vanilla game, where to avoid fuel shortages players (at least the one I watched) would make private and public ships use different fuels, while the AI would likely use one or the other. It's something that can't really be fixed, and honestly would make the game worse by doing so. So it's probably for the best to follow your thoughts on this.



Drybreeze -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (6/4/2016 1:11:30 AM)

Oh, hi Bob. [:D]

Yes I think there's no point limiting the options available to legit players that want to challenge themselves, due to the possible actions of players that want to cheat. They'll cheat regardless. All I'm doing is adding a feature that can be used both by legit players as well as exploited by cheaters using the double-dip exploit.

Meanwhile I am fast approaching a point where I'm going to release v0.2



Drybreeze -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (6/5/2016 3:21:33 AM)

Alrighty then.

I've updated the first post of this thread to include release information. I will update this each time I've released a version. At this point in time I envision the following:

1) v0.1 (released pre-alpha)
2) v0.2 (about to be released alpha - express your interest in receiving a download link to this if you want it)
3) v0.3 (soon to be released beta - estimated delivery date some time mid to late July 2016)
4) v1.0 (not far off to be released first draft - estimated delivery date some time mid to late August 2016)
4) v2.0 (more distant improvements on the initially released mod - an as-yet unknown release date, will depend on feedback from v1.0)


Now the last thing holding me up from releasing v0.2 is bringing blank projects back into the research tree. Originally I was thinking that I'd use them to create item #73 in the Development Spreadsheet to include more phaser offshoot (new) weapons. But... more lasers... meh. Gotz heaps now. I will add more of all weapons EVENTUALLY, but for now there's a stack of lasers and phasers, so... then I thought I might as well use them to start laying the foundations of the new races I intend to develop. For now they'll be in the tree but isolated and non-functional ... expanded on in future releases.

So. Let's talk races.
Currently the mod uses the Picard Era Star Trek mod as most readers of this thread would already know.
I intend to replace all of these with my own custom races, including of course characters, ship designs, ship and base graphics, etc etc. For now I'll just consider the concepts to use the current Blank Projects as place-holders for race-specific techs.

Initial race ideas (your input at this point is very welcome):
1) Relateable ... as in... we as humans can relate to the technology. Not necessarily humanoid although most likely. It'd be nice to do something a bit different though. This is the race that I've been developing so far. All components and research in the current mod is based around this race. Some of it will be shared with other races.
2) Biotechnological. This race will be one of the first truly alien races that I develop. It will have base technologies that are "upgraded" or "evolved" throughout the tech tree. These evolutions will be expensive to cater for the fact that the humanoid techs will have more options to evolve (at least, to begin with). Weapons will focus on torpedos of living projectiles of hull-devouring miniature creatures, area weapons of telekinesis (based on graviton weapons) and ion weapons... including an inbuilt natural immunity to ion weapons due to their organic as opposed to metallic structure.
3) God-like race of not-quite-physical beings based on the biblical references of "Nephilim" who were supposedly the fathers of giants and heros of old by interbreeding with humans. Don't worry, that's as much of a biblical reference as it will have... the focus will be on their mastery of controlling the physical world with power of thought and belief... envisioning changes and technologies in an almost magical way. Power of the mind, effectively. Weapons will focus on area weapons and beam weapons, defenses will focus on the disruption of other races' technologies such as highly reactive armor and powerful shields and point defense weapons.
4)Machine race representing a single integrated organism with many individual aspects all serving the same consciousness. Think Borg minus the enslavement factor. Like Borg, this race will encompass both mechanical and organic aspects, however these aspects are all created internally from base components, as opposed to augmenting and enslaving other living creatures. Instead other living creatures are broken down into their constituent parts such as proteins, and recombined into other "useful" components. This race's weapons will focus on lasers, phasers, missiles, and beams, with very little focus on wasteful area weapons. I want the tech to look really extremely advanced but at the same time have a really mechanical look and feel to it. Not all dark and tubes and such like Borg, more structure and well-designed use of physical space. More compact and high-tech.

Any ideas are welcome and will be credited to the author in the final mod release.
This is the really exciting part for me. I'm very much looking forward to bringing this aspect to reality in the Beta version 0.3 which I expect to be able to release some time around mid-July to August, depending on how I go with graphics production which I expect to be the most time-consuming part of it.



LordMM -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (6/5/2016 6:22:17 AM)

Great ideas, am looking forward for this incredible mod



Drybreeze -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (6/5/2016 10:51:33 AM)

Thanks LordMM. I'm uploading version 0.2 right now... I expect it to be online tomorrow. Anyone wanting a link please let me know... this one is much more refined than v0.1...

[image]http://i.imgur.com/ITQNn6c.png[/image]

I'm now working no version 0.3 while v0.2 is live and being tested by anyone interested.
Version 0.3 works on the functional mod by replacing all the races with the base-release races. I might make others in the future, but for now I'm going to focus on the few I mention above.

The first two I'm working on are the humanoid one and the biological/parasite one.

I've started with the biological one's race and character images, and then I'll move to make their custom technology which is already in v0.2's research tree in a very basic and locked place-holder form. It will be expanded significantly in v0.3 of course.

So far I've got the race image and several character images.

I've decided to call the race the Sedt'at, after a similar alien race I created in a short-story series I released a few years back called the Malreichi Events, on a private forum which I have since taken offline. The images I'm using sourced from various online sources. In the release game Sea of Stars all images will be custom-created for the game, but for the sake of this not-for-profit mod I am using public-domain images.

Some of the character images (might adjust roles assigned to each) are as follows:

[img]http://i.imgur.com/YlaNDh9.png[/img]
Main racial image.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/BHQX3YT.png[/img]
Colony Governer image.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/hAC6cWE.png[/img]
Troop General image.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/SFIHHny.png[/img]
Scientist image.

These guys will have carapaced organic looking ships that fire tracking projectiles that are small drone creatures that chase down and impact the hull of their target, and then bore their way into the hull and detonate in an acidic explosion that destroys whatever it has bored into. The entire race is a great hoste of creatures all representing "limbs" of a single organism. They will have powerful armor and unique shields that are swarms of intercepting "suicide" creatures which intercept incoming weapons from enemy vessels, taking the brunt of the impact before their host vessel does.

Ships will have strong EMP weapons which are electrical discharges from Electrocytic Organs just like an electric eel but on a much grander scale. Conversely their own susceptibility to Ion weapons will be very small due to the make-up of their bodies not being anywhere near as conductive as metal technology is to electromagnetic pulses...

They will also use some limited projectile weapons which represent huge caustic shells fired through enemy shields to directly impact the vessel (it will use Rail Gun weapon settings).

Additionally they will employ telekinetic blasts that rupture and shatter enemy vessels and bypass all shields and armour. These weapons will have great range but will (until evolved during mid-to-late game) be quite weak. They will, of course, use the Graviton weapon settings).

They will have long-range boarding capabilities also, sending larger versions of the acid-exploding hull-borers, which don't blow up once they're inside the ship but instead move through the vessel consuming and slaughtering the crews until the vessel is brought under control of the Sedt'at by having their troops operate the vessel by parasitically controlling the crews' bodies and therefore the interface with their vessel.

They will have no access to energy beam weapons or lasers or phasers. I just don't see how these weapons could be achieved realistically by a biological entity.

The Sedt'at are highly aggressive, very intelligent, and their main goal is to spread, dominate, consume, and control. Their racial goals and technological options reflect this.

In short, these guys will be a scary bunch of dudes. It is recommended to eradicate them as soon as you find them, because otherwise you can count on them doing it to you.



Hanekem -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (6/5/2016 2:58:54 PM)

quote:



They do consume fuel, but very very slowly.
Fuel is either Uranium or Hydrogen (or Nitrogen in the really super-advanced reactor late-game), for Fission (nuclear) and Fusion reactors respectively. They produce large amounts of energy from a single unit of fuel, to make it a bit more realistic from a scientifically accurate point of view. Nuclear reactors on naval vessels can burn their fuel for years at a time without needing to be refueled.

I have found that I am still refueling fleets reasonably often - probably about every 3 game years... and that is for 8 units of Uranium per ship... The problem is that the fuel to energy ratio is so small that the research tree shows it as 0, as your screen shot shows. However it is still burning it at the rate I've set in the game. Play for say 10 game years and you'll see your fleets need refueling once or twice in that time.

I do however agree that the fuel rate for both impulse and hyperdrive engines needs to be increased... maybe doubled. I'll test it out and see if it is better.

The early constructor ship is a ship design that needs improvement. Wack another fission reactor or two on it in the designs menu and its warp speed is much higher. I'll do that in the designs for the next release.




I have a problem with this, while a nuclear reactor needs little in the way of refueling, the Newtonian nature of the engines means they do need an additional fuel: Reaction mass.
Sure, the game engine is not capable of differentiating between both, but perhaps it would be better to shorten the refuel cycles to emulate the need to resupply reaction mass



Hanekem -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (6/5/2016 3:02:55 PM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: Drybreeze

Thank you for your feedback!

Yes the bunkering is annoying. Even when I make it a pre-warp tech and another tech as a higher level (0, or 1) and they're both researched, it still picks the obsolete concrete bunkering as the most up-to-date armour and clads ships and stations with it.

I have done everything I can think of to have it work properly but it's just not playing ball, so I might remove it and possibly implement it later when I've figured out what's going on there. Maybe when the reactive setting to armour setting ratio is higher it considers it a more powerful armour, so picks it. Dunno. A fight for another day.

Regarding reactors, I have doubled their fuel consumption, which works well, but I think I'll double it again. Also I've made all thrusters and hyperdrives consume more energy, so therefore fuel is burned more quickly to replenish this energy. In my opinion and the opinion of a few "ship design how to" threads I've read, solar panels don't belong on a ship anyway, which I agree with. None of my custom designs use them, except Garrison Destroyers, which I use as mobile station defenses... slow and lumbering and the solar panels prevent them from having to periodically refuel and abandon their posts.

I will adopt your idea about Hydrogen (Fusion) reactors burning more fuel than Uranium (Fission) reactors... I like that idea, thank you.

I will be releasing another significantly more refined version soon (as shown in my development spreadsheet). I will release it as a folder so that further updates are only updated graphics or text files here and there, drastically reducing the download on updates... if you're interested I'll provide the link.

Thanks again for your input!


On the Concrete Bunkering (CB) issue, perhaps the solution would be to make armor techs unlock metal and CB at the samwe tech level (reasoning, the reinforcing of the concrete would be dependent of metallurgic technology) that way you have two components born out of the same research and might be enough to trick the AI.
Of course, the problem is that we don't know how the AI evaluates components and the problem might be there (and if so, probably unsolvable without touching the engine beyond what modding can do)



Drybreeze -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (6/6/2016 3:22:20 AM)

Hi Hanekem. You are correct regarding the chemical fuel consumption in the solid fuel rockets. The game does not allow consumption of more than one type of fuel... sadly. If it did, I'd have ships consume Uranium, Oxygen, Water, Solid Fuel, Food, and a bunch of other things representing general maintenance and repairs and consumption.

So the only solution is exactly as you suggest... have it approximated by increasing fuel useage of the main reactor. I've done this by having the solid fuel rockets a much higher consumption rate than they were... about eight times as much actually. Also I've doubled the energy output of reactors so that a ship isn't bogged down by having dozens of reactors to meet the output. They have the same charge capacity as well as the same fuel-to-charge rate, so the end result is that they burn fuel much faster as well as the thrusters. The overall effect is that ships now use fuel much more quickly than they did in v0.1. Due to solving a higher-than-necessary fuel cell capacity, I have also nailed down an issue that was creating drastic fuel shortages in early-to-mid game when a player begins to really start pumping out ships and stations.

The concrete bunkering I tried exactly as you said and it still kept favouring the concrete bunkering. In the end I did a hybrid option, where the armour was put in preference to the other armour in tech level, however I replaced it with a new type of armour called Plate Steel armour... it is basically just solid steel. Basic. Simple. Expensive as hell if you want to produce a lot of ships and stations clad in it. It is easily and quickly replaced by the update of Heavy Alloy armour, and then gets into the previous version of Layered Mass armour which starts to diversify the resource requirement and begins to produce some really efficient armour results.

It doesn't do quite what I was trying to achieve by introducing Concrete Bunkering (ie: use concrete resource instead of steel resource, and free steel demand up for other applications instead) but it will do. A player will find that their steel demand quickly sky-rockets unless they research a replacement for Plate Steel armour early in the game.

I'm fairly happy with this end result, and it is included in the v0.2 update which is being released now.



Hanekem -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (6/6/2016 1:58:50 PM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: Drybreeze

Hi Hanekem. You are correct regarding the chemical fuel consumption in the solid fuel rockets. The game does not allow consumption of more than one type of fuel... sadly. If it did, I'd have ships consume Uranium, Oxygen, Water, Solid Fuel, Food, and a bunch of other things representing general maintenance and repairs and consumption.


I think that much detail would be a nightmare, even if possible

quote:


So the only solution is exactly as you suggest... have it approximated by increasing fuel useage of the main reactor. I've done this by having the solid fuel rockets a much higher consumption rate than they were... about eight times as much actually. Also I've doubled the energy output of reactors so that a ship isn't bogged down by having dozens of reactors to meet the output. They have the same charge capacity as well as the same fuel-to-charge rate, so the end result is that they burn fuel much faster as well as the thrusters. The overall effect is that ships now use fuel much more quickly than they did in v0.1. Due to solving a higher-than-necessary fuel cell capacity, I have also nailed down an issue that was creating drastic fuel shortages in early-to-mid game when a player begins to really start pumping out ships and stations.


That is an interesting change. I think refuel needs to be something periodic, otherwise the resupply ship is completely useless (actually I've never used it in vanilla)

quote:


The concrete bunkering I tried exactly as you said and it still kept favouring the concrete bunkering. In the end I did a hybrid option, where the armour was put in preference to the other armour in tech level, however I replaced it with a new type of armour called Plate Steel armour... it is basically just solid steel. Basic. Simple. Expensive as hell if you want to produce a lot of ships and stations clad in it. It is easily and quickly replaced by the update of Heavy Alloy armour, and then gets into the previous version of Layered Mass armour which starts to diversify the resource requirement and begins to produce some really efficient armour results.

It doesn't do quite what I was trying to achieve by introducing Concrete Bunkering (ie: use concrete resource instead of steel resource, and free steel demand up for other applications instead) but it will do. A player will find that their steel demand quickly sky-rockets unless they research a replacement for Plate Steel armour early in the game.

I'm fairly happy with this end result, and it is included in the v0.2 update which is being released now.


So, given that there is only one armor at the time in the base game, odds are the AI isn't prepared to choose armor by any other factor than its Armor Factor.
So, by that assumption, the AI will probably only be able to use one armor option at the time.

If you are still having issues with Steel demand, perhaps the solution could be in making the resource more abundant, both in quantity of sites and percentage.


About the aliens you wrote, they sound interesting, but I am not a fan of super bio-tech. Not because it can't be interesting or varied, but because to get high end performance you need to redefine Biological, at last as we understand it, and end up with something that looks biological, or has a biological coat, while it performs like non organic materials (Had enough to be compared to metallic alloys, or generate enough electricity to compete with a fission reactor, and superconductive materials to make it all possible)
Spacebugs are a trope of the SF setting, yes, but I personally prefer the bugs to be tool users, because otherwise we need to do a lot of mental gymnastics.



Drybreeze -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (6/8/2016 2:43:06 AM)

I will do my best to "suspend disbelief" in the player by providing lore and clear cut common-sense explanations of all items in all races.

An entirely biological solution to technology is not a new concept. With our current leaps and bounds in our own understanding of biology, it is entirely plausible that within the next 10 or 20 years we will have engineered entirely unique man-made organisms. Already we have managed to strip a cell's DNA down to the bare minimum required to live. Soon we'll be engineering genes and tinkering with their placement until we produce not just splices but entirely ground-up artificial living things. It's only a matter of time until those things replace non-renewable resources such as metals and plastics in the creation of technological solutions.

Below is a picture of the characters and race-images I've created for the mechanical race of "Cydracites" and the biological race of "Sedt'at".

The species will all have lore and also specific rules relating to how their technology works, their units and characters are named, and their own sound effects. I don't think DW:U allows me to be able to make music race-dependant (I read in some other thread awhile back) but I'll see what I can do... perhaps some folders that can be moved around to player preference client-side.... something like that.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/0YOMTQg.jpg[/img]

I'll work on the humanoid race next, and then move into the graphics for both the components of the above two races as well as the ship designs for each of the new races.



Drybreeze -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (6/9/2016 9:09:21 AM)

[image]http://i.imgur.com/ITQNn6c.png[/image]

Version 0.2 alpha is now released.

Link can be found at the bottom of the first post in this thread, as well as a version history which will be updated from time to time. There's also a link at the bottom of this post.

I decided to publicly release this alpha because it is in a FAIRLY playable state. The release information describes what it includes and doesn't include.

Please let me know what you think, what doesn't work, what does work, what to improve, etc.

Please also remember that this is NOT a complete mod (yet). There's so much more I want to do with this.
However, technically, it COULD be a complete mod if I didn't have any further things to do... it really is basically complete. I expect there to be a few things I've missed - your help pointing them out would be very much appreciated.

Thanks so much for your patience, and I look forward to hearing what you think.
Meanwhile, I'll keep working on version 0.3 which will have all the new races included, including characters, technologies, custom components... and my personal favorite is that each race will have quite different resource hungers. So if you know your enemy you have the edge because you can move to cut off their resources and starve them into extinction mwhahahahhaaaa! Also this will have some interesting dynamics on the inter-species trading dynamic... I'm looking forward to seeing what happens there actually.

Thanks again folks and ENJOY!

v0.2 alpha - shared zip file
DOWNLOAD NOW AVAILABLE
Release includes:
Revised research tree to ensure all upgrades are upgrades.
Revised component weights and outputs.
Revised resources distributions.
Revised costs for components.
Various race inclusions at a basic level (some research inclusions are currently locked).
Faults and incompletions include:
Races, characters, and race-specific technology will be worked on for next release.
Ship graphics are yet to be worked on.
Planet view graphics are yet to be worked on.
Sound effects are yet to be worked on.
Music is yet to be worked on.



Drybreeze -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (6/13/2016 4:03:20 AM)

[image]http://i.imgur.com/ITQNn6c.png[/image]

I am having some great success introducing new races to the game.
I have included Sedt'at, and given them their basic technology in the research tree, and made their technology trees and those of other races mutually exclusive.

The Sedt'at have armour "Carapace" which primarily uses the resources of Biomass, Oxygen, Hydrocarbons, Methane, and water to "grow". In higher tech versions this armour will include steel as a component (directly competing with other steel-hungry races in late game just as it becomes a very valuable commodity, forcing rivalry and conflict).

They have no shields at all at the start of the game, (however their early-game Carapace is quite tough, countering this apparent weakness). Later in game they will be able to develop something similar to the Humanoid shield "Active Nanite Cloud" where they have a swarm of smaller suicidal creatures that intercept incoming fire before it can impact the host vessel. Both these techs will eventually get a shield graphics replacement ultimately, assuming the game allows it.

The Sedt'at's primary weapon begins as a missile weapon - something called a Seeker which is launched from a Seeker Hive mounted on vessels... it is a small stunted clone of the parent vessel which homes in on a target, bypassing the shields and grinding its way into the hull, exploding and damaging the target. They are small and numerous, and quite hard to defend.

The Sedt'at also have an omnidirectional electrical discharge which acts as an ion weapon, as well as a natural non-conductive biology which makes them resistant to ion attacks.

All of these things will have upgrades, improvements, and off-shoots which can be researched by the Sedt'at.

I have yet to begin working on the Cydracitics weapons.

v0.2 release is the humanoid weapons. I have also altered the race familes to be Anthropological (humanoid), Biomorphic (Sedt'at and Shakuri), Synthetic (Cydracitics and Mechanoids), Pseudophysical (the Nephilim) and I'm toying with the idea of having Energetic (high temperature organisms), Amoebic, and possibly a completely non-sentient Fungal family... although I'll have to see if this works well with all game features such as trade, etc.

I'm a bit dissapointed that nobody has made any comment about the public alpha release of v0.2... nobody has any thoughts on it...?



dejagore -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (6/13/2016 7:50:00 PM)

Drybreeze - kudos to all the hard work You're doing in here [&o] The mod scope and vision is amazing! I'll try with the version 0.2 and check the game play.

Are there any specific starting conditions that are more suitable for this mod ? I usually play with very expensive research, disabled techtrading, lowest colony prevalence and pre-warp start.



Hattori Hanzo -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (6/13/2016 9:57:14 PM)

hello DryBreeze, the v.02 alpha release is a great improvement over the previous version: I love your Sea of Stars mod [&o][&o][&o]




dejagore -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (6/13/2016 11:58:20 PM)

@DryBreeze
Ok. After first hour playing as Son'a I found following issues:
- Default Construction ship design larger than I can build (553) - propably the same for AI so they won't build those at the start which might actually make them stay in prewarp
- Ship design screen - there's missing txt for two values
- Issues with sprint speed in standard designs - for instance medium freighter has Cruise speed 25 and Sprint 2

Apart for that - I was confused with all those new resources. But in general - the whole overhaul idea looks very promising. Keep up the good work! Cheers [sm=00000436.gif]



Drybreeze -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (6/14/2016 8:35:01 AM)

Thanks folks for yer feedback!

@Hattori:
It has had a lot of changes to it, and the current introduction of races and their race-specific tech alters it a LOT more.
It won't be until it's v1.0 that I would consider it to be a complete mod. It's still alpha.

@dejagore:
I am going to make sure that it works for all game types, but most of the time when I'm testing it I go classic era, with independants abundant and research costs normal.

I have yet to produce proper designs and development paths, because these two things require the techs to be settled into a final version first, so yes the construction ship is one of a few ship issues I've found. It is mostly overcome by manually editing designs - the AI eventually researches ship sizes which allows it to catch up. Some races are better than others due to weapon focuses and weights. It is a high priority for v0.3 alpha, but for now I want to introduce at least two new races and their tech.

Thank you very much for your input!



Drybreeze -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (6/16/2016 12:38:37 PM)

[image]http://i.imgur.com/ITQNn6c.png[/image]
After creating the three unique races that I said I was creating earlier in the thread, I deleted all other races.

The launcher does a pretty good job of detecting errors, and announcing in the DW_Crashdump.txt file what the problem is and where. However deleting races causes an issue only when I get to the races screen of the game setup screen...

So I thought "Ok maybe I've reduced it to too few and it needs to have more than my three plus the Shakturi and Mechanoid" (I figure they need to stay in there in case people choose the background story options in the game start up).

So I went back to my latest backup, restored it, and then created twice as many races.

So now I've got:
Humanity (Anthropological)
Cydracitics (Synthetic)
Sedt'at (Biomorphic)
Nephilim (Psuedophysical)
Amoebus (Amoebic)
Kelvinic (Energetic)
Fibrum (Fungal)
Shakturi (Biomorphic)
Mechanoid (Synthetic)

Re-launch. Same thing. As I type.
Bugger.

It doesn't tell me what the problem is in DW_CrashDump.txt, it just says there's a handling exception error and asks if I want to continue or quit. Continuing just repeats the error until the end of time, so really let's just quit already.

So I'm back to single-edit launch trial-and-error modding. Le YAWN.

I'll figure out what the issue is, but it's got me a bit stumped at the moment and I'd much rather be creating techs and components for new races than battling some unknown box.

EDIT > Racebias.txt, RaceFamily.txt, and RaceFamilyBias.txt have current and correct races reflected in them, and I'm pretty sure no typos. I'm going cross-eyed I checked so much.

So... I'll re-load all former races and try deleting one only and see if that changes things.

EDIT2> It seems as though a minimum number of races the game will accept is 12? All mods I have looked at have this as a minimum... can anyone confirm any mods that have less? And if so how many? If this is true then I'll have to rethink how I'm going to do this... I might make sects of each primary race... for example the Sedt'at might have a couple of variations which have different degrees of aggressiveness and resource focus. The Humanity might have a splinter group that the others despise because it is in league with the Sedt'at... in this way I can minimise the number of race-specific tech trees I need to add, but can still meet the minimum number of races.



IFailAtGaming -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (6/20/2016 1:34:39 PM)

There's at least one obvious improvement for me in early game, the fuel use increase means that my stl scouts are no longer trying to slow-boat to another system.



Drybreeze -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (6/21/2016 2:52:11 AM)

Yes most feedback I've had indicates that players are not custom editing ship designs. So it's clear that I need to male ship designs work for every race as part of any release.



Twigster -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (6/21/2016 7:19:03 PM)

quote:

Yes most feedback I've had indicates that players are not custom editing ship designs. So it's clear that I need to male ship designs work for every race as part of any release.


Seriously? Editing ship designs is one of my favorite things to do! [:D]



Drybreeze -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (6/23/2016 12:44:18 PM)

@Twigster

I agree, setting up ship designs is half the game. However the mod will need to cater for this NOT being necessary to function for two key reasons:
1) Some players don't enjoy it or do it for whatever reason, and
2) AI players of course can ONLY work from mod/game-designed ship designs, and therefore if they don't function off the bat then the AI empires are completely ineffective.... and there's little fun in playing against a crippled and ineffective opponent, let's face it.

So I really need to ensure that ship designs function WITHOUT requiring editing by the player ahead of time.

[image]http://i.imgur.com/ITQNn6c.png[/image]

I have taken a little bit of time away from editing the mod to focus on things necessary to launch the game itself... which as some readers of this thread would know is the ultimate end-game of this entire project.

So the very first thing I've done is discovered that Sea of Stars is in fact already taken... sort of. Turns out that it's a chapter in a current game called Infinite Space.... Infinite Space III: Sea of Stars. Well, great.

So after a lot of tantrums in the board room, throwing pencils into the ceiling insulation bats, kicking kittens and generally being unhappy with the situation, we decided that rather than figure out our legal standing regarding a game name and a chapter name it would be a lot simpler to simply re-name the game. Fine.

So... brain storming time.

Synonyms for Sea on left column.
Synonyms for Stars on the right column.

See what the best match-up alternative would be.

Turns out it's Puddle of ****s. (Censored by the auto-censor - but it's what happens if you stick yourself with a pin...)

Not exactly what we're after... so we went for "Sea of Suns" instead.
Still conveys what the game itself is about, just... differently slightly.

So we've now set up a Facebook page (like in signature) which will have more game-specific updates on it.

This thread will remain largely mod-specific, which is one of several key steps in the development of the game itself.
If you're interested in the game Sea of Suns and how it develops, including graphics previews and such, feel free to subscribe to the Facebook page by clicking on the link in my signature below, and "liking" our page.

Regarding the mod itself, I'm still working on races, and have made good progress but nothing substantial enough to boast about. I'll keep you informed of course. :)



Twigster -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (6/24/2016 6:41:07 PM)

Understood. Really looking forward to this!



Hattori Hanzo -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (7/15/2016 5:39:33 PM)

any news here ?



Drybreeze -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (7/15/2016 10:33:23 PM)

Yes this is still active.
Slower than I'd have liked due to personal things (we're in the process of selling and building) but still active.

I'm in the process of creating race factions, so that there are the key races but they have factions that are different, therefore filling out what seems to be the minimum number of required races for the game to work.

I want to ensure that the next release is completely self-sufficient and does not rely on players editing their own ship designs and so on.



Shogouki -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (8/18/2016 9:19:52 PM)

Hope things are going smoothly at home for you and I can't wait to see your next release!



Twigster -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (8/21/2016 1:00:31 AM)

+1



Nen -> RE: Sea Of Stars - development thread (9/1/2016 3:56:10 AM)

Looks interesting. I love mods that adds more resources. Good luck with your mod. [:)]



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