@coraxus, on Jan 4 2007, 11:05 PM, said in Age of the Council (AotC):

not to mention you may have some ships that you have set for stand-off attack and some small vessel or fighter tries to overrun them or something.

Actually, I tried out the stand-off flag then found myself watching a carrier 'standing off' from a disabled ship. Carrier sits there, standing off, waiting for its opponent to get closer. Disabled ship sits there being disabled. I got bored. Then I switched all the stand-off flags off.

@orcaloverbri9, on Jan 4 2007, 11:13 PM, said in Age of the Council (AotC):

Quick question: Didn't it take 400 frames for the Azdara to go from 0-100 in the original EVO?

The old recharge value there was 4 (a percentage-based recharge value). Given that a value of 30 gave a recharge rate of about 1% per second (30 frames), 4 would give 7.5% per second, so yes, almost exactly 400 frames, I think.

But, of course, the EV engine has always been heavily (and sometimes oddly) affected by processor speeds. The old value worked well when I was testing it then, the new one works well now.

This post has been edited by pac : 04 January 2007 - 06:24 PM

Note that one of Matt's biggest changes to the EV engine for Nova was to remove all dependence on frame rate. Events should now happen in the same time regardless of framerate.

Note: beams still interlink with frames, to a degree. Beams suck. Always have.

Alright, well first off, Congrats, Admiral, on your winning the contest, but now, out of pure curiosity...

Cartwright, which name(s) made a close second to your final choice on the new rocket?

What makes you think anyone else got close?

Latest project has been persuading the AI to fire a veeery slow moving unguided weapon. At 375 Speed, it didn't want to fire it, under any circumstances. At 380, it was happy to. Of course, this will probably turn out to be affected by other factors, causing it to be changed again later

Is the "don't fire at fast ships" flag checked? might have something to do with it.

I don't like normal beams. They're too processor-intensive. I prefer Qaanol's sprite-based beam fix.

@lnsu, on Jan 5 2007, 02:12 AM, said in Age of the Council (AotC):

Is the "don't fire at fast ships" flag checked? might have something to do with it.

No, that's a guided weapon flag - and that one doesn't work as documented anyway: as far as I can tell, the AI will fire any guided weapon at anything, whether that flag is set or not. But anyway, that weapon speed problem is resolved.

The real puzzler at the moment is this fighter bay one … I have ships which just don't launch all their fighters. (Except that sometimes - very rarely, in some cases - they do.)

Edit: One interesting thing about coming back to this is the changed game constants. The biggest test battles have involved about 6 capital ships of various classes on each side. Throw in the fighters, and that makes about 30 ships in the system in total. Now, back on older engines, this would have nearly filled the system, but now, I could be making each fleet twice as large …

This post has been edited by pac : 04 January 2007 - 09:42 PM

The max ships in system is 64 ships.

@pac, on Jan 5 2007, 12:22 PM, said in Age of the Council (AotC):

The old recharge value there was 4 (a percentage-based recharge value). Given that a value of 30 gave a recharge rate of about 1% per second (30 frames), 4 would give 7.5% per second, so yes, almost exactly 400 frames, I think.

Yup, a quick calculation allowed all ships in the port to have exactly the same recharge rate they originally did but the shield recharger upgrades were impossible to reproduce in exactly the same way.

@pac, on Jan 5 2007, 02:09 PM, said in Age of the Council (AotC):

Latest project has been persuading the AI to fire a veeery slow moving unguided weapon. At 375 Speed, it didn't want to fire it, under any circumstances. At 380, it was happy to. Of course, this will probably turn out to be affected by other factors, causing it to be changed again later …

Yeah, beware of similar problems with guided turn rates. Perhaps the problem with the fighters is related?

@pac, on Jan 5 2007, 03:33 PM, said in Age of the Council (AotC):

No, that's a guided weapon flag - and that one doesn't work as documented anyway: as far as I can tell, the AI will fire any guided weapon at anything, whether that flag is set or not.

Correct, that flag does not work at all under Nova.

This post has been edited by Guy : 04 January 2007 - 10:55 PM

@kauthor, on Jan 5 2007, 03:47 AM, said in Age of the Council (AotC):

The max ships in system is 64 ships.

Yes, that was exactly my point - it didn't used to be!

@guy, on Jan 5 2007, 03:51 AM, said in Age of the Council (AotC):

Yeah, beware of similar problems with guided turn rates. Perhaps the problem with the fighters is related?

To weapon Speed? Or something else? My latest theory is that it may have something to do with the mobility of the carrier ship. It tends to be the faster carriers which are affected. I need to go and investigate this one … Edit: No, false lead there. If I bring the reload time down far enough, it will launch both (but then it's behaving quite differently from the way that bay did 'historically'). Correction: when I do that it launches both more often. I'm going to have to leave this one for now. Patch for now is to cut reload time right down.

Anyway, apart from that small problem, the ship balance for the capital ship scale is done now, so I think I'm going to move on to updating systems … I may be some time.

This post has been edited by pac : 04 January 2007 - 11:34 PM

Take your time then.

Even though I've checked the data files myself, thrice, I'm still certain I've seen an Arada carrying your name a number of times, Mr. Cartwright. Possibly in a plug, but I seriously doubt that. There's no evidence to support it, but I'm positive.

@u-e--admiral, on Jan 7 2007, 02:26 AM, said in Age of the Council (AotC):

Even though I've checked the data files myself, thrice, I'm still certain I've seen an Arada carrying your name a number of times, Mr. Cartwright. Possibly in a plug, but I seriously doubt that. There's no evidence to support it, but I'm positive.

There is no such animal, trust me. I have never put my name on an EV ship. Someone else may have, I suppose, but it's never been there in default Override. (And if I had, it wouldn't have been on an Arada. ;))

As a little update, I'm mostly working through updating systems/spobs at the moment. 'History' is spreading out slowly across the galaxy.

This post has been edited by pac : 06 January 2007 - 10:04 PM

@joshtigerheart, on Jan 4 2007, 04:39 PM, said in Age of the Council (AotC):

Ultimate Anhiliation Rocket of Total Global Extermination

I vote we rename the Needle Missle to this.

@pipeline, on Jan 4 2007, 07:05 PM, said in Age of the Council (AotC):

Note that one of Matt's biggest changes to the EV engine for Nova was to remove all dependence on frame rate. Events should now happen in the same time regardless of framerate.

Note: beams still interlink with frames, to a degree. Beams suck. Always have.

One thing that goes by frames rather than realtime is either the "short delay" before a mission ship jumps in or the DeathDelay for a ship to die. I'm not sure which. In my Booster plug-in (see LNSU's "challenge" thread) when you fire the Booster Weapon it kills a missionship. OnShipDone that mission aborts itself, grants an outfit that makes you recharge quickly and makes your radar screen go 100% fuzzy, and starts a second mission. That second mission makes a 0-armor ship jump in and promptly die. OnShipDone that mission aborts itself and removes the outfit. The Booster weapon has a Reload of 180 or so, and is exclusive firing. In my tests, with good framerate the ship stops recharging and the radar comes back online at almost the same time you're able to resume firing weapons. When I get lots of Ravens onscreen the framerate drops (if they're firing CPLs it hits 1 or 0) and then the radar stays fuzzy and the ship keeps recharging long after weapons are again able to fire. The goal was to make the booster render you invincible but impotent, yet with the lag problem there are times you can be both invincible and deadly. I can't say for certain whether it's the wait for the ship to jump in or for it to die, though I could easily test the DeathDelay side of it to know for sure.

Maybe it would have been best just to keep all dependance on framerate. Another example is the race demo plug I made where you race an AI ship around a track. It was tuned to my computer so that it all worked smoothly but run it on another computer and the AI ship would crash and burn.

Qaanol, why do you want the delay between when you abort the mission and when the booster kicks in? Why not have it activate immediately?

Quick update: everything has been going smoothly, because I've been doing fairly straight-forward, repetitive things: updating systems, adding/removing/updating spobs, revising the outfit list (straight-forward except for the Classic crashes, anyway :(), and so on.

I've set myself a kind of quota of updating five systems every day, and am trying to exceed it whenever possible. However, I've been a bit sneaky so far, mostly doing boring systems where there's no fighting, and empty ones, which are much simpler to change and check.

Even so, everything remains on schedule for now!

Mr. Cartwright, I have a quick question: Is AotC going to have a website?

Just curious.

@warlord-mike, on Jan 13 2007, 01:36 AM, said in Age of the Council (AotC):

Mr. Cartwright, I have a quick question: Is AotC going to have a website?

It may have pages where project info is organised, but not a public website, no (or at least, not before release). IMO, time spent updating websites is time not spent working on the product itself.

Edit: In other news, I've just created my first functioning cron trick!

(Or at least, I haven't found its bugs yet …)

This post has been edited by pac : 12 January 2007 - 08:59 PM

Observation: the 'plunder' AI is nuts. (I'm sure this has been noted before.)

I've just been watching two groups of Xenophobic plundering ships of the same government try to shoot each other. 'Try' because their shots just go through one another.

One plundering ship is boarding the target trader, while the other is closing in still wanting to shoot at the same trader. The first ship captures the trader. The second ship doesn't register this change in government, and fires on the former trader, its shots passing through it. The former trader reacts to this 'attack' and fires back - with equally little effect. The first ship just sits there, seemingly as confused as I am. More ships of the government roll up and - presumably noticing an ally under 'attack' - get involved in the 'fight'. How they pick which side to join is a mystery to me.

I've also noticed 'plunder' ships sometimes just drift off aimlessly towards the edge of the system, as if they're chasing something they can't reach, or just have no idea what to do next. Eventually, they seem to pick a new target, but it takes a while.

Oh for the days when pirates just blew things up and the plundering was 'assumed'.

Pac: That's hilarious. I've never seen it before.

@guy, on Jan 10 2007, 04:50 PM, said in Age of the Council (AotC):

Qaanol, why do you want the delay between when you abort the mission and when the booster kicks in? Why not have it activate immediately?

It does activate immediately, with no delay. The delay is between the start of the second mission and the end of the second mission. OnStart you get the Booster, OnEnd it's taken away. Download the plug and try it. The delay dictates how long the booster keeps working. That delay depends on framerate. The delay after firing the weapon when "exclusive firing" renders your ship unable to attack is independent of framerate. I was trying to make them match up. But regardless, Inflight Abilities is much nicer.