[quote who="Yholl" reply="146" id="3438457"]

Quoting StormingKiwi, reply 144What do you mean, vaguely defined? Don't fly so close to the sun! And I'm pretty sure there was an option to turn planetary atmospheres on so you could see a safe zone you could fly in..

 

There wasn't such an option.

And as for vaguely defined, the coronas are not based on the type of star at all. So Sigma-17 has Medium stars with a 6K corona, Omicron Gamma has a Red Dwarf with a 7K corona, other places have Medium stars with 10K coronas, etc.

Thankfully the Red Giant of Omega-11 induces such fear in people that memorising it's corona radius is done by default.

Gotta fly close to the sun to get to the things close to the sun, just pray that your course does not overlap the invisible death sphere.

 

Anyway, those particles are excellent, you've really got making these down, Wintercross! The Freelancer feel of this is really starting to come together now!

 
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Play it again Sam, there definitely was such an option. 

It tells you you're entering the corona. And then you die. IF you're on cruise and don't have time to react. If you're not on cruise, you have time to react. And I'm fairly sure there were some fairly obvious visual hints that you were about to be reduced to so much radioactive slag.

Just keep them separate for the moment, might make some overlap or something later, but I'm interested to see what you've drafted first. I like being able to set different bonuses for fighter and capital scale weaponry

Man, the Nitrous engine is going to be perfect for Freelancer... even fighters can have independently targeted turrets....

Only 1? Damn, I was hoping to have two... Well, it'll still work fine, as all the research there is somewhat related.

Heres a very vague description of what I'm working on here.... Well, kinda vague. There are many words in it, beware.

I was thinking that the research, unlike vanilla Sins, should be 80% credit based with cost, due to research grants and all that. I was considering having resource costs be based on the type of research, i.e. hull research costs a ton of metal, but there aren't a lot of things you could apply this to, and it may get somewhat unbalanced. Having ships and structures more resource based and research more credit based makes for a good economic system, I think.

Military has two windows, one dedicated to offense, one to defense. All the weapon upgrades go in the top window, and all the defensive upgrades like hull, shields, and armor will be at the bottom.

Each of the three main weapon types (Two, for Kusari) will have two damage upgrade paths each, one for fighters and one for capitals.

Below these are the non-damage upgrades for these weapons. There are three upgrades each for the two main weapons of a faction, and two upgrades for the weapon they have less experience with. The first two upgrades are fire rate and range, and the third upgrade is based on the weapon and faction as to it's function.

To provide an example, Liberty Lasers have three upgrades, one for fire rate, one for range, and the special one is also fire rate.

These non-damage upgrades, while listed horizontally, are all unlocked later ingame, probably tech 5, instead of their column-based tier. This difference can be shown by giving these upgrades the Rebellion Research Overlay.

After than are the missile researches, which I'm not sure on how to handle right now. I'll probably have a missile damage research with many levels, a torpedo damage research with many levels, and a few extra researches that improve the fire rate or range of individual missile types, like Seeker Missiles or EMP Missiles. Something like that.

The defensive trees will be interlinked, in that progressing down one tree reduces the effectiveness of the other. Researching both trees will result in an overall benefit over standard, but without the more extreme specialization that a single tech branch would provide.

To provide an example, one shield path increases shield regen and slightly decreases shield capacity, while the other increases shield capacity and slightly decreases shield regen. Both research trees also increase shield bypass blocking by a very small percentage, probably 1%. Researching a complete path will give you ships with incredible regen or capacity, and researching both will give you a moderate amount of both, and a decent amount of shield bypass blocking.

Hull paths have one that increases hull strength and armor, but slighty reduces repair rate, and another path that increases repair rate, but slightly decreases hull strength. Each research also increases mass very slightly. Researching both paths will give you moderately increased hull and regen, and a decent armor increase, but with a fair increase in mass.

The Defense window was originally going to be two windows, one for normal military R&D, and the other for top secret research, but it looks like it'll be one window, perhaps with a visible gap between them.

The main section will have all the research that unlocks ships, unlocks ship abilities and unlocks ship upgrades. This will also have the antimatter upgrade tree.

The secondary section will contain all the experimental research involving captured artifacts. Each artifact will have between one to three researches each, and those researches will act as prerequesites for further research that eventually leads to the Artifact Ship of your faction. The prerequisite researches will take a long time compared to most researches, and will also improve a related stat by a considerable amount.

Make sure to build your titan yard on an dead asteroid somewhere, surround it with mines and call it Zone 21.

I haven't thought too much ahead about the Civilian tree, but it will likely be in two sections, Contracts and Government. I might split the contracts window up into individual company windows, but only if it doesn't waste too much space. The contracts section will have all the research and upgrade projects with the various companies Liberty does business with.

Ageira Technologies will improve cruise speeds, create Jump Hole Stabilizers, supercharge cruise drives for travel between stars, long range ship scanners, and provides cruise disruption and anti-cruise disruption techs.

Deep Space Engineering will provide designs for new orbital structures, and two paths for ship building, one that increases speed but slightly increases resource cost, and one that decreases resource cost and slightly decreases speed. Both researches also give a very tiny credit cost reduction. Researching both paths will allow you to build ships cheaper and faster than normal, but you won't be as fast or as cheap as a single path. Orbital structures will also have a tree exactly like the ship one, so you can specialise them or upgrade them as you wish. Instead of 8 different upgrades for each path like the ones in the Military window, each path only has 3, allowing all DSE technologies to fit on two lines, despite their complexity.

Independant Miners Guild will provide several upgrades for metal mining. DSE and IMG also collaborate with one another to provide upgrades to H-Fuel gas miners.

Universal Shipping provides upgrades for trade ships value increases, as well as an upgrade that increases the hull of trade ships.

Interspace Commerce provides an upgrade that causes bounties to be placed on those who attack Liberty shipping. They also give an upgrade that decreases the cost of black market transactions a bit better than any other faction.

Cryer Pharmaceuticals provides research that increases population count and regen on all worlds, as well as population bombing resistance.

Planetform Inc. provides the research to colonize and improve the various uninhabitable planet types of the game.

Synth Foods provides research to increase population on habitable planets.

Liberty has contracts with smaller businesses and groups for other tasks, such as exploring planets, or resisting culture. When the culture resistance tree is complete, you can call Order vessels with disabled cruise drives to aid you from a culture center, provided a Nomad ship is in your current gravity well, wrecking your shit.

The Diplomacy window would be fairly similar to the vanilla, just with some changes like Luxury Liners being hired from Orbital Space and Cruise to be used as Envoy ships, etc.

The pacts I won't elaborate on at this point, as I'm not sure what your plans for them might be.

The graphical representation of this that I've been working on has been going quite slowly, so I figured I'd write this up instead of having you wait for it to be finished to get an idea of where I'm going with this. Whatcha think of it? Hopefully I typed everything correctly...

Yeah, that's a good idea.

I have an idea for one more, but it requires repurposing of some DLC content. My idea was that you repurpose one of the new unlockable planet types to be a Station planet type, which can be applied to all sorts of things, like Gas Miners, abandoned prisons, supply depots or whatever. The population of these planet types would be quite low, but the LPI has upgrades that boost their population immensely by sending prisoner work forces to live there. Liberty can get great profits by holding these planet-type stations over the other factions, due to their huge amounts of prisoners.

It's up to you if you want to do this sort of thing.

Yeah, that sounds like it fits best.

 

Thanks a lot! Now the question is... do I continue putting together my slow graphical representation, or should I go ahead and make a rough draft version ingame and send it to you to use as a base?

There is an option in the performance options - show planetary atmospheres. 

That gives a hazy cloudlike appearance to most planets, not just Manhattan.

When you are flying head long into a planet, LONG before you hit the warning or the instant death the distorted star/dust particles going past your ship changes to clouds flying past your ship. Likewise when you're flying into a star, a burn up effect begins to appear

Regardless, when the warning sounds, even on cruise, if you're paying attention it gives you enough time to kill your engine (no one ever hit anything in a stationary ship), reverse and rotate away. 

Next time you try and take the moral high ground, establish your facts, and please do so in a less arrogant manner, alright?

I'm almost ready to release the next alpha (v0.2) which will add Rheinland into the game. Just need to add in a siege and colony ship to them, and make the AI versions of Liberty and Rheinland.

I need to make AI versions of each faction as some of the abilities and techniques I am using don't play nice with the AI =P

Yes, I do intend to do this at a later point. I plan on having small maps based on a couple of systems, as well as one big sirius sector map

It is waiting for an update, thank you very much for the mod! Alpha 0.2 crashes constantly if you play on large maps and put the enemy on the complexity of the very complex. Code will be the next update? Really looking forward to!

It is waiting for the next update, I urge all modders to join the development of this mod in order to expedite the development process, because it is the best mod in my opinion, Many thanks you for your work!

Rheinland is a little incomplete... there are a few advent ships still in their shipyards that have yet to be removed... Also I haven't got voice files for all of their ships yet so some still have advent voices. Also I don't think i've done any of their icons yet and they only have the shipyard building, all the rest are still advent.

I did make some changes to grav wells, in the sense that I made the 'hyperspace' exit radious smaller than usual. This was so ships have a larger area to jump in and out of system. I suggest turning the tactical grid on =D

I'm not sure about the UI issue...

I will investigate the Liberator and asteroid thing.. but from memory it does work... just one thing to note, there is about a 30 second delay from the ability being used on the 'planet' before it comes under your control. The same for taking extractors. I felt it was weird that colonies are set up instantly hence the slight delay. (I will check it again just to be sure however)

I'm glad you like the mod so far and appreciate the feedback!

A new download seemed to fix the Ui issue. The Liberator ships are also behaving properly now, had to switch off boarding parties ability which defaults to autocast enabled, after I did that everything was ok. 

The gravity wells distances don't seem as bad as before now. Like I said something must have messed up on the download. I'll also use the tactical grid like you suggest, the typical Sins displayed gravity wells don't look very Freelancer anyway.