C# Aurora v0.x Suggestions

[Jorgen_CAB]

I'm kindof in the remove agility camp at the moment, personally.

e: Not militantly so, I dont really care that much, but I can see the argument for just doing away with it.

Simply removing it and rely on speed alone is not a good solution in my opinion as that makes slow long range missiles quite unfeasible to build. You need to add some agility to these so they can actually hit something. With the fuel changes in C# I'm pretty sure this will be needed. Otherwise you would have to completely rely on multi-stage missiles which is unnecessarily complicated if you need them in all long range cases.

[Father Tim]

I'm kindof in the remove agility camp at the moment, personally.

e: Not militantly so, I dont really care that much, but I can see the argument for just doing away with it.

Simply removing it and rely on speed alone is not a good solution in my opinion as that makes slow long range missiles quite unfeasible to build. You need to add some agility to these so they can actually hit something. With the fuel changes in C# I'm pretty sure this will be needed. Otherwise you would have to completely rely on multi-stage missiles which is unnecessarily complicated if you need them in all long range cases.

It's also worth noting that this is where missiles started, and speed alone was deemed insufficient, and adding Missile Agility was the solution.

[QuakeIV]

I tend to very rarely use it because generally adding more speed has been a better use of mass in terms of increased hit chance, with only a few exceptions that I remember.  I also tend to make fairly fast longer-ranged missiles anyhow (admittedly at a cost) because the time it takes for the missiles to reach the target has been very important to the pacing of the engagement.  Generally I need to loiter around until the missiles reach the target before I can flee, or I want to save on ammo by only engaging targets that survived the previous salvo before launching the next one, meaning the faster each salvo resolves the faster I can launch the next one without wasting huge amounts of ammo (sensor missiles only help with this when the enemy is all stacked into the same place, but I do employ them to mitigate that somewhat).

[Jorgen_CAB]

I tend to very rarely use it because generally adding more speed has been a better use of mass in terms of increased hit chance, with only a few exceptions that I remember.  I also tend to make fairly fast longer-ranged missiles anyhow (admittedly at a cost) because the time it takes for the missiles to reach the target has been very important to the pacing of the engagement.  Generally I need to loiter around until the missiles reach the target before I can flee, or I want to save on ammo by only engaging targets that survived the previous salvo before launching the next one, meaning the faster each salvo resolves the faster I can launch the next one without wasting huge amounts of ammo (sensor missiles only help with this when the enemy is all stacked into the same place, but I do employ them to mitigate that somewhat).

Yes. for the most part that is true in VB6 unless you want to target FAC, fighters or other missiles.

It will change quite drastically in C# though with the change in how fuel work. You can see that in Steve's play-through that his missiles are quite allot slower and he still haven't used allot of ECM and/or ECCM or other electronics in them.
So missiles of any significant range will have to be big in order to be fuel efficient and have decent speed, and even then it probably will need to be quite a bit slower. Otherwise you will end up on the loosing side of the missile exchange in the first place... especially if you want to be able to release missile out of range of enemy active sensor range to keep your main task-forces hidden for any counter attacks.

In VB6 I certainly did make some use of agility in armoured missiles where they had less speed. It made the missiles allot cheaper but still roughly as hard to shoot down with conventional means.

[QuakeIV]

To be honest the survivability aspect of agility was never something I looked into much, because there weren't really any tools at hand to evaluate that so you would be left with very laborious trial and error.  I did encounter some slower missiles that were very difficult to hit so I presume those were probably using that.

[TMaekler]

So it would be nice to evaluate the difference between using agility or not. How can we do that?

[Father Tim]

To be honest the survivability aspect of agility was never something I looked into much. . .

Uh, there isn't one.  There's no 'dodge bonus' or anything for Agility -- it has zero effect on defense, only on chance to hit.

[Father Tim]

So it would be nice to evaluate the difference between using agility or not. How can we do that?

The oft-mentioned Excel spreadsheet (which I believe has also been published as a straight formula) calculates the optimal engine/agility ratio for a given target's speed.  It tells you whether one more point of Agility is worth losing 133 km/s versus a 5,140 km/s ship.

[hostergaard]

Some manner of multiplayer support

Or something to make the life of a space master easier when making community games


Best possible would be a way to set up a server or have people being able to access the same save game, but perhaps only being able to see and control a particular race except their own (except the spacemaster). The game would largely played like normal (although, perhaps give the space master some ability to control what a player can see and do, during play or game setup) except the passage of time could either be controlled by the space master or by some maner of player voting. Like, have the speed be the highest possible that all agree on.

 If adding server support or something else to enable live multiplayer is too much to ask, maybe a way to split and integrate save games of the same game. So saves can be passed on to all involved, they can give their orders and return it to the space master who integrate the games and let time pass to let the orders and actions resolve. Just so we don't have to pass one save game around and wait for everyone to their thing one at the time.

And maybe make space masters able to open multible windows, one for each player race so I could possibly stream each view to a person or a group of person. That way I could enable live space battles.

I mean, some maner of multiplayer support would be awesome. 


Might have been suggested or implemented before and I am sorry if it have, I could not locate anything at a glance, so I figured I would throw it in there.

[hostergaard]

Mod Supopport

Steve, lets have a little talk, you are apparently weirdly against open sourcing things (according to one of your latest posts. I wasn't thinking of it before but your posts made me think of it. Tough, I stil don't know why, despite the name the posts did not really explain it), and that is okay, its your game and its your decision alone what to do with it, but maybe consider having parts of the code open to enable moders and alike to work with your game? You should look at the guys doing CDDA and Dwarf Fortress, they done so quite successful and it benefited their games tremendously. If you did, I might be able to say, make a client of my own to enable other players to take control of things during a live stream of space battles. It could be really great fun, to assemble a bunch of people, have some act as generals, others a ship pilots and have them all able to act and make decisions on their own. Or whatever else, please do consider it. Sharing is caring!

Also, stay healthy! Wont want you do die from Corona before releasing C# ;p

[Father Tim]

Some manner of multiplayer support

Or something to make the life of a space master easier when making community games


Best possible would be a way to set up a server or have people being able to access the same save game, but perhaps only being able to see and control a particular race except their own (except the spacemaster). The game would largely played like normal (although, perhaps give the space master some ability to control what a player can see and do, during play or game setup) except the passage of time could either be controlled by the space master or by some maner of player voting. Like, have the speed be the highest possible that all agree on.

<snip>

There's a password for Space Master functions (if left blank Aurora treats this as 'no password').  You can lock each race behind its own password.

I can't remember if the current version supports locking time advance behind the SM password, but you can instruct your players that only the SM will advance time.

Now you can email the database to each player in turn (or use some sort of virtual drive and versioning support) and 'run' multiplayer Aurora.

(Note, however, that when two (or more) players start fighting each other the game is going to bog down to an epic degree.  It can take days or even weeks for players A & B to finish a three-Aurora-hour fight during which players C through H can do nothing.)

[Steve Walmsley]

Mod Supopport

Steve, lets have a little talk, you are apparently weirdly against open sourcing things (according to one of your latest posts. I wasn't thinking of it before but your posts made me think of it. Tough, I stil don't know why, despite the name the posts did not really explain it), and that is okay, its your game and its your decision alone what to do with it, but maybe consider having parts of the code open to enable moders and alike to work with your game? You should look at the guys doing CDDA and Dwarf Fortress, they done so quite successful and it benefited their games tremendously. If you did, I might be able to say, make a client of my own to enable other players to take control of things during a live stream of space battles. It could be really great fun, to assemble a bunch of people, have some act as generals, others a ship pilots and have them all able to act and make decisions on their own. Or whatever else, please do consider it. Sharing is caring!

Also, stay healthy! Wont want you do die from Corona before releasing C# ;p

I'm not sure how I could have made it clearer

As stated in the FAQ entry, I have zero interest in project managing a group of developers or trying to integrate someone else's code. I'm not interested in Aurora having the best possible code or the best possible architecture or debating what that might look like. I simply want to have fun programming and playing.  I do not want to share the actual code, which represents thousands of hours of work on my part. I don't want to waste time on bug reports caused by someone else hacking around and I don't want multiple potentially competing versions of Aurora. In simple terms, I want to maintain control over my creation.

Now it might seem 'weird' to you that I am not prepared to hand over my work to everyone and that's fine. I'm not trying to defend my stance on this, I am simply stating it so there is no confusion.

[Kristover]

Mod Supopport

Steve, lets have a little talk, you are apparently weirdly against open sourcing things (according to one of your latest posts. I wasn't thinking of it before but your posts made me think of it. Tough, I stil don't know why, despite the name the posts did not really explain it), and that is okay, its your game and its your decision alone what to do with it, but maybe consider having parts of the code open to enable moders and alike to work with your game? You should look at the guys doing CDDA and Dwarf Fortress, they done so quite successful and it benefited their games tremendously. If you did, I might be able to say, make a client of my own to enable other players to take control of things during a live stream of space battles. It could be really great fun, to assemble a bunch of people, have some act as generals, others a ship pilots and have them all able to act and make decisions on their own. Or whatever else, please do consider it. Sharing is caring!

Also, stay healthy! Wont want you do die from Corona before releasing C# ;p

I'm not sure how I could have made it clearer

As stated in the FAQ entry, I have zero interest in project managing a group of developers or trying to integrate someone else's code. I'm not interested in Aurora having the best possible code or the best possible architecture or debating what that might look like. I simply want to have fun programming and playing.  I do not want to share the actual code, which represents thousands of hours of work on my part. I don't want to waste time on bug reports caused by someone else hacking around and I don't want multiple potentially competing versions of Aurora. In simple terms, I want to maintain control over my creation.

Now it might seem 'weird' to you that I am not prepared to hand over my work to everyone and that's fine. I'm not trying to defend my stance on this, I am simply stating it so there is no confusion.

Couple of points - In the original posters comment, he mentions the open source nature of Catalysm DDA.  Now, I'm a huge fan of CDDA and I have several long running games on it and the community has brought many really interesting ideas to the game....but as a long time CDDA player, the game is always a huge damn mess and several times some member of the community has made a change on an experimental version which has completely ruined a run for me.  Add on to it, CDDA has ALWAYS suffered from competing visions some of which has created huge rifts in that community resulting in branch versions, drama, and hurt feelings.  CDDA is a joy to play but it is also rife with lots of frustration because of it.  None of this means that CDDA isn't worth playing, quite the contrary.  But I in no way want CDDA's design anarchy to be ported over to Aurora.  Given the amount of work I put into a single Aurora game exceeds that which I put into literally dozens of CDDA runs, I would quickly abandoned Aurora.

At the end of the day, Steve has chosen to share his hobby with us.  I'm thankful.  If he ever wanted to make this an actual product, I would gladly play $100 - back in my tabletop war gaming days, I easily dropped $100 on a really good Avalon Hill game.  BUT, I would expect for my $100 for Aurora to work EXACTLY as advertised out of the box and if a game bug cropped up, I would expect Steve to fix it quickly and not six months later when he had time.  We are getting a guy's hobby project.  Because he seems to find merit in sharing his hobby with us, I have no problem making suggestions and asking for features that I think would benefit - but I don't have any expectation the guy will add them and don't get irritated if he doesn't.  I not paying for it after all.  I think at the end of the day, the man has flat out said what he is going to provide to the community and on what terms he will do it.  I think a bit of respect and civility - and leave the hectoring tone at the door - is in order.

[Inglonias]

Hey.  Just thought I would post what I want for Christmas, so to speak.

It would be nice to be able to press a button and rename as many solar system bodies as possible according to a theme, either chosen randomly or just going down the naming theme list as you go down the list of system bodies. I say "as possible" because I know that having two system bodies with the same name is a bad thing in VB6 (makes it throw errors) so if the theme runs out of names before you run out of bodies to name, the operation would halt to avoid duplicate names.

[Garfunkel]

Mod Supopport

I'm not sure how I could have made it clearer

Couple of points - In the original posters comment, he mentions the open source nature of Catalysm DDA

And to add from Dwarf Fortress, the mods can be great fun but they are also a massive headache. A vast amount of bug reports and complaint posts on the Bay12 forum are from modded games. At least DF has thousands of experienced players who act as a filter between the sole developer and the community. Aurora doesn't. Not to mention that I can't even imagine how frustrating it is for modder A to have people complain about stuff because of modder B due to players mix'n'matching stuff that isn't compatible. We know from every modding community that players do stupid stuff like that all the time.