It's far simpler than that. There will simply be kit additions for your soldiers. Remember that marine upgrades can either increase your number of crew OR your capture percentage. Adding KADA-4 pulse rifles may increase that percentage by 10%. Then, also purchasing a sidearm upgrade could increase it by another 5%. It's nothing special or mathematically-challenging, it'd just be two or three simple outfits.

This is also because no matter how much you deck out your freighter, I don't want you overpowering the militarily trained crew of a giant warship.

Good point, I had forgotten about adding percentage rather than marines. The percentage would adjust depending on your amount of crew.

However, there is the matter of price. More crew members means you need to buy more guns. More guns means a higher price.

Dang it, I had a good idea--use the "higher mass, higher cost" system in MC/EVNEW. Unfortunately, we're not using mass here.

Speaking of EVN resources (though we weren't), I've taken up a bit of a project shuffling all my TC resources into different slots. As it stands, my rled table was an absolute horrid mess, basically just going in whatever order I created the graphics in. Ship, planet, planet, station, weapon sprite, planet, ship, planet, ship, etc. Though it'll take some time, by the end of this I hope to have reserved resource ranges for each type of item, eventually culminating in a far more solid and navigable resource table. It'll also make it easier to track each type of sprite when I'm assigning them to things, because I'll always know that if I'm looking for a weapon sprite and I'm looking in the 300 - 399 range, that's a ship sprite, not a weapon. Weapons will be in 700 - 799.

Either way, it'll also make it far easier to add further content into the final game, because it'll be fairly obvious where each resource range ends and has available slots.

I'm also considering making the ship collection a little bit smaller. Not drastically, like Nova (Fed has one destoyer, one carrier, one main fighter, etc.), but definitely pruned a little bit. In the original draft the NDC was going to have seven different Dominant class battleships. I'm thinking of cutting that down to perhaps three. I still have to create the entire Enclave fleet as well, so I don't want too much work getting in the way of producing the TC.

For HOTS, I use 200-299 for weapon sprites, 1000-1999 for various ship sprites (base, engine glows, weapon glows, etc.), 2000-2999 for stellar sprites, and 4000-4999 for various explosions. It leaves a lot of resources up for grabs, but it does what I need and those extra resources could come in handy later. I thought I'd share that in case you need some ideas for what to number what.

Also, I'm still wondering about how to handle the pricing problem regarding weapon upgrades to the player's security forces. You see, I like the idea very much and I hope you'll let me use it in HOTS, as well. However, I can't think of any way to fix that problem. I thought of one compromise where each weapon is merely one weapon the player buys for themselves and the rest of the crew simply buys their own at the same time. Cheap, a little confusing, but it's an option.

Anyone else got ideas on how to solve this?

Could it perhaps be solved by thinking of the gun upgrades not as a physical purchase, but a license allowing you to do so? For instance, what if the guns are assumed to be provided already by some government organization, but you have to purchase the rights to train your crew on them? You could even call the outfit something like "Combat Simulator", making it a one-time-purchase training program for all your crew, no matter the size of vessel.

Either that, or do some clever work with mission bits and ship purchases: purchasing and flying a "small" ship turns on tag 1, and turns off 2 and 3, making only the upgrade for small crews appear, costing 100,000; purchasing and owning a "large" ship turns off tags 1 and 2, and turns on 3, making the large-ship version appear for 1,000,000, etc.

Why not justify it as buying a certain amount of weapons, regardless of crew size. I'm sure nobody would object to having a few spare guns lying around, just in case. It's cheaper to buy in bulk rather than individually anyways. So, one outfit gives your whole crew enough, be it 200 or 2000. 2000, each guy gets one. 200, each guy gets... well... ten. A bit Jayne-esque.

Alright. Taking from Delphi's and krug's ideas, here's what I thought up: when you buy the weapons, you buy a set amount. krug has a point, extra weapons wouldn't be a bad idea, and some ships have crews so large it wouldn't be worth buying weapons for every single one of them. The effect will still be the same.

However, just buying weapons isn't enough. You need to train your crew to use their new weapons. So after buying the weapons, that unlocks a new outfit named 'Training Course' or something similar that will add maybe an extra percent to the odds of capturing a ship thanks to your crew being more familiar with the guns.

An optional idea to add to the above would be a variety of weapons the player can choose from. More expensive guns would give a higher percent rate of capture, but the player would have to buy those again when they get a new ship. Cheaper weapons might not give as high a percent boost, but would stay with the player until they sold them. Players can only have one type of weapon upgrade at a time. Some weapons might even grant special advantages to the player's ship somehow. Maybe one type of rifle is good at dispelling ion radiation somehow, thus boosting the player's deionization when their crew uses the guns to do just that.

Thoughts?

So I've been shopping a bit, and I think it's time that I upgraded my copy of Photoshop, to at least CS4. I figured CS1 would be enough for the simple stuff that I'm doing, but then I learned that CS4 has this extremely interesting little feature that lets you paint right onto 3D models, and apparently it works especially well with OBJ format, the one that SketchUp produces. I'm going to give the trial a shot, see how it works, and then possibly adopt Blender as my rendering software, as texturing won't be so archaic as it was the first time I tried to do it.

Supposedly there's even some plug-ins that help you produce UV maps and normal maps with just the click of a button. I'll be looking into it.

Blender's UV and normal mapping, while somewhat a little screwy at first, is actually fairly simple. I haven't had time to play with the 2.5 alpha yet, which I hear is supposed to be much more intuitive.

2.5 is still in alpha?

I made a REALLY big stellar object. In an attempt to really put impact on the lasting effects of the Orion War, I actually created an 800 x 800 rled of leftover stellar matter still aglow from when the Kiev star exploded violently.

Here's a screenshot (1440 x 900).

O_O

I just found a new desktop image for my computer.

Yeah, 2.5 is on alpha 2, and has been since the beginning of March. Beta 1 should be out soon. The stable release is supposed to come out with the Durian film festival this summer.

@Delphi: does the extremely large rleD take up a lot of space? I've had this idea before to put nebula perspective shots in-system, but I was afraid it would suck up a lot of resource space.

QUOTE (krugeruwsp @ Apr 21 2010, 08:35 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yeah, 2.5 is on alpha 2, and has been since the beginning of March. Beta 1 should be out soon. The stable release is supposed to come out with the Durian film festival this summer.

@Delphi: does the extremely large rleD take up a lot of space? I've had this idea before to put nebula perspective shots in-system, but I was afraid it would suck up a lot of resource space.

Tons. I wouldn't recommend using more than maybe two in an entire TC. That one alone is about 2.1 MB. Of course, you can always make your distribution method better at handling large files, like by delivering it by torrent like I will, or just make a version of the plug with larger graphics; a "premium" version, if you will.

QUOTE (Delphi @ Apr 21 2010, 12:07 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Tons. I wouldn't recommend using more than maybe two in an entire TC. That one alone is about 2.1 MB. Of course, you can always make your distribution method better at handling large files, like by delivering it by torrent like I will, or just make a version of the plug with larger graphics; a "premium" version, if you will.

Torrent sucks. I can't ever get it to work properly.

Darn, I was hoping maybe you found some way to make it more efficient. At any rate, I do have one crazy idea that's so odd it just might be okay. Do you think we could talk the moderators into allowing us to post an ISO file with the necessary resource files? ISOs transfer well over the web, virtually everyone could burn them to a CD/DVD, and then you only have to ship one disk image. I'm not sure how much can be crammed into a zip archive. Sending it out over torrent works well too, though.

I know that torrents can be a pain for some, so I'm also going to see if I can just segment the files enough and upload them to my own personal webspace, though downloading would be just about as slow/fast as a torrent anyway.

I personally recommend Vuze (formerly Azureus). It's very streamlined and easy to operate.

I recommend Dropbox. Yes, I know I've mentioned it several times before, but it's just that awesome! You can get around 2.25GB for free and, if you follow a few extra steps, you can get an extra 250MB still for free. By extra steps, this is what I mean:

• Take the Dropbox tour
• Install Dropbox on your computer
• Put files in your Dropbox folder
• Install Dropbox on other computers you use
• Share a folder with friends or colleagues
• Invite some friends to join Dropbox

Complete any five of those steps to get the extra 250MB. And by 'free', I mean 100% free, not a cent spent on it.

... I gotta tone down my inner spokesman...

And a swing to a different thing now! More in-universe. Delphi, I have to ask, how goes the progress on non-NDC ships? Like the Enclave and that other really powerful group that I should remember but don't?