Aurora 4x
C# Aurora => Development Discussions => Topic started by: Steve Walmsley on March 16, 2016, 07:10:29 PM
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I'm created this thread to show a few screenshots of C# Aurora as I progress. I have made a lot of progress on the Tactical Map and while it isn't finished, there is enough to provide some idea of what C# Aurora will look like. Bear in mind this is only one window and this is just displaying the current database, not running a turn. However, you could run this alongside Aurora and use it to view the map (which is what I am doing now). All the various display options work so you can toggle on and off.
Also all the systems, fleets, etc are loaded in memory so the swap between systems views is now instant.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Tactical02.PNG)
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Here are some of the sidebar views. I believe they are improved on current Aurora. Clicking on any Fleet, Ship, Star, System body, etc. will centre the map on that location. The military view can be used to view the forces in the system, or all forces. This is also instant as everything is in memory.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Sidebar01.PNG)
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Sidebar02.PNG)
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Sidebar03.PNG)
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Sidebar04.PNG)
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SM Mode and Auto Turns are now shown as a crystal ball and on/off switch in the tool bar - this makes it easier to see when they are on/off.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/SMModeOff.PNG)
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/SMModeOn.PNG)
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And a couple of Sol system shots
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/SolSystem03.PNG)
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/SolSystem02.PNG)
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Wow looks so nice Steve,
How you in the future going to handle the database, you moving to a SQL platform or something else.
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That is awesome! Very happy to see things are progressing well on the C# front!
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What? Wow I thought this was abandoned. Looks great.
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Interesting. It would resolve some compatibility issues with modern windows systems. Is there are is any time frame for this and any other short-term goals beside VB to C# code convert?
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great works, Steve ! And few question about interface.
1. Sysem map can zoom by mouse wheel ?
2. System map can scroll by mouse moving with left(right) button pressed ?
3. Can mouse select any object on system map for track him (showing always in centre of screen) ?
4. Do you planning create Popup menus on any map objects with possible action to this objects ? Planet - colonize, show industres window, show detail info, Task group - set current orders, show TG window, show ordnance and etc ?
5. New system map included to 7. 20 path ? :)
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What? Wow I thought this was abandoned. Looks great.
This is a new project. I started 3-4 weeks ago so I have made more progress than I expected by this stage.
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Interesting. It would resolve some compatibility issues with modern windows systems. Is there are is any time frame for this and any other short-term goals beside VB to C# code convert?
No specific time-frame - will depend on my level of enthusiasm but I hope months, not years.
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great works, Steve ! And few question about interface.
1. Sysem map can zoom by mouse wheel ?
2. System map can scroll by mouse moving with left(right) button pressed ?
3. Can mouse select any object on system map for track him (showing always in centre of screen) ?
4. Do you planning create Popup menus on any map objects with possible action to this objects ? Planet - colonize, show industres window, show detail info, Task group - set current orders, show TG window, show ordnance and etc ?
5. New system map included to 7. 20 path ? :)
1, 2, 3 will be added, 4 probably similar to current Aurora and this version will be 7.2 functionality at least.
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thanks :)
With some global modification in mechanics and interface its no 7. 2, its 8. 0 version of Aurora:)
And. . I have a month not playing in Aurora in anticipation of the new version :).
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These all look great.
Since you are doing the graphical parts right now, I think it is the right time to make a small request.
I usually keep the events window always open and to the front, and I don't think I'm the only one. In fact, I find it invaluable and impossible to do without. That way as time goes by I see what events take place and such.
To reduce switching between windows, could we have a time-advancing button on the event window as well? So that, when there is an interrupt for something we don't want to change or don't care about, we can just press this "ok, go ahead with the same time settings" button.
Also another question. Do you think you will implement multi-core support in any way or shape? I imagine that just switching to C# will have a great impact on performance, but I am curious to know if you plan to take things further.
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Does this mean that C# Aurora's turn times take the same amount of time on turn one and turn 5813259? Does this mean that the game won't slow down the longer you play?
That is something I've always wanted the most of this game
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Steve,
What are you using to draw the System Map? Are you directly drawing onto a WPF Canvas or using some other process/component?
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Looks good...very exciting. Hoping to see substantial performance improvements :)
Any other architectural changes? SQLite or MS SQL localdb vs Access? Multi-threading things like system production?
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Looks great, can't wait!
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Looks great but the most important question is will it look ok on my 768 laptop :P ???? lol keep up the good work Steve.
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Steve,
What are you using to draw the System Map? Are you directly drawing onto a WPF Canvas or using some other process/component?
I'm using GDI on the Winform background. Simple and quick :)
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Does this mean that C# Aurora's turn times take the same amount of time on turn one and turn 5813259? Does this mean that the game won't slow down the longer you play?
That is something I've always wanted the most of this game
Later turns means more systems, ships, etc so it will run more slowly than on turn 1. However, I hope it will still be significantly faster than now.
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Looks good...very exciting. Hoping to see substantial performance improvements :)
Any other architectural changes? SQLite or MS SQL localdb vs Access? Multi-threading things like system production?
Nothing major. Still Access at the moment so I can share the same database as Aurora, although I am setting up the data access so I can swap DB later.
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Nothing major. Still Access at the moment so I can share the same database as Aurora, although I am setting up the data access so I can swap DB later.
Maybe look into SQLite. No installation on the user system of a database system. Plus you can programatically write the actual database.
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Is the C# version going to replace the current version? Ie will all future versions be released as C# architecture or will the old access stuff still be updated too?
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Is the C# version going to replace the current version? Ie will all future versions be released as C# architecture or will the old access stuff still be updated too?
Once C# is done, that will be the active version of Aurora. VB6 Aurora will probably stay at v7.2 (next release).
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That's awesome really, you mentioned months earlier but it didn't sink in. Considering how long term aurora is we would be fine waiting a year for the c version. I wonder if taking the move to c would allow dispensing with the database altogether or finding some alternative more efficient method.
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c# and c are very different things
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c# and c are very different things
Why can't you support my boycot of twitter, I'm so triggered but I can't use a hashtag to show how offended I am.
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Looks amazing, and I can't wait for processing improvement. So many things I currently deliberately forsake of the game in trade for performance. It would be a sudden jump in possibilities if that could run without too much drop.
Even if it's not too much though, the improved design is already worth it.
Why can't you support my boycot of twitter, I'm so triggered but I can't use a hashtag to show how offended I am.
(http://usefulshortcuts.com/imgs/skype-basic/emoticon-0136-giggle.gif) Skillful comeback.
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I would love to see pictures of some of these sample screens in a 1024x768 resolution, or thereabouts. Do you have a laptop or other small screen that could run the C# code for us to check out?
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Maybe look into SQLite. No installation on the user system of a database system. Plus you can programatically write the actual database.
Nice ! SQLite database make possible multiplayer - easy few clients to one world database, and simple sycronization algoritm:)
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This looks amazing! I'm kinda jealous :D
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I would love to see pictures of some of these sample screens in a 1024x768 resolution, or thereabouts. Do you have a laptop or other small screen that could run the C# code for us to check out?
I don't have a laptop but I could probably add some lines to show the resolution. At the moment, from the top of the tool bar to the the bottom of the sidebar is about 860 pixels. There will be a menu bar too, so probably about 900 high at the moment.
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Another screenshot. This is the contacts sidebar tab on the Tactical Map. The top half allows you to filter contacts on the tactical map. I've replaced the existing filter dropdown for relationship status with individual check boxes for Hostile/Neutral/Friendly/Allied/Civilian. The other check boxes are similar to existing Aurora. The Spacetime Bubble only appears in the check box list when SM Mode is on.
The lower half displays all known contacts broken down by alien race and system. This can be filtered for the current system only. I'll create a larger and more customisable version of this section for the Intelligence window.
BTW there are two race dropdowns in the sidebar. The first is always present and replaces the existing default race selection from the (now defunct) menu bar. Essentially, this dropdown changes the race view for the whole application. The second race dropdown (below systems) only appears in SM mode and contains a list of other races with knowledge of the current system. For both race dropdowns, if you select a race and it has knowledge of the current system, that system will automatically be selected for viewing.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/SidebarContacts02.PNG)
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Two more screenshots. This is the Body Info tab of the sidebar, which shows details of any selected system body. It looks a lot cleaner than the original and now includes mineral deposits as well.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/SidebarBodyInfo01.PNG) (http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/SidebarBodyInfo02.PNG)
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Looks really great! Keep up the great motivation!
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By the way: Will C# Aurora start to handle save files and database as different files when it comes?
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By the way: Will C# Aurora start to handle save files and database as different files when it comes?
Keep in mind that you have randomization and boat loads of user designed stuff.
So the best we can hope for imo is a split between Core DB which contains all the basic stuff (RP costs, etc.) and a player DB which contains the actual game data (Star Systems, Ships, Tech, etc.)
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By the way: Will C# Aurora start to handle save files and database as different files when it comes?
Yes, because everything is held in memory the game will run without accessing the database (except at the start). My plan is that there will be a Save button and the game won't save unless you press it.
Some form of auto-save would be possible, where the game saves every time a specified amount of time passes.
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Wow, that is amazing. The possible speeds. It will be unstoppable. :D
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Active Sensors and Weapon ranges are now functional on the tactical map display. I've decided to change the colours and use dashed lines so they stand out more vs. the planetary orbits.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/ActiveSensors.PNG)
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Missiles.PNG)
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Weapons.PNG)
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Oh that looks so good!
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The last set reminded me of the biggest problem I have with the display of aurora. Text tends to merge together at low zoom levels or when a lot of stuff is happening. Is it possible to make text detect if it will collide, and if so become an expandable menu kind of thing? I've noticed some things already partially have this on the maps.
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The last set reminded me of the biggest problem I have with the display of aurora. Text tends to merge together at low zoom levels or when a lot of stuff is happening. Is it possible to make text detect if it will collide, and if so become an expandable menu kind of thing? I've noticed some things already partially have this on the maps.
There is already some improvement in this area as fleets that are very close on the map will merge into one column of text. In VB6 Aurora the text of a fleet in orbit of the moon would interfere with those in orbit of Earth. In C# Aurora, they will move into a single column when you start to zoom out. The issue on the previous screenshots is for sensor text. I will take a look at this as well because I agree it is annoying.
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On that note, I'm doing an earth start w/ npr games, and there's literally too many sensor contacts to read since the list vanishes if you scroll too far up. Even with active contact grouping. It would be handy if they could sort by tonnage, or you could set specific designs to ignore, or something. :2cents:
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On that note, I'm doing an earth start w/ npr games, and there's literally too many sensor contacts to read since the list vanishes if you scroll too far up. Even with active contact grouping. It would be handy if they could sort by tonnage, or you could set specific designs to ignore, or something. :2cents:
In VB6 Aurora you can look at one race at a time if that helps, or filter by active sensors only, or remove civilians, or contacts with neutral/friendly races, or you can group by type.
Something else to consider is disabling sensors in Sol. Unless there is some reason to fight, the game will run a lot faster without the sensor phase in Sol.
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Would it help if there was an alternative option to disable sensors only for neutral or friendly contacts in a system? I think there might be significant gains to be had in that, especially if you could set this option on as default for all systems at the game start screen.
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Would it help if there was an alternative option to disable sensors only for neutral or friendly contacts in a system? I think there might be significant gains to be had in that, especially if you could set this option on as default for all systems at the game start screen.
Interesting idea, although could be an issue if a neutral alien race that you couldn't see suddenly opened fire on you :)
I hope that the sensor phase will be a lot faster in the C# version though so performance may not be a problem.
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It looks gorgeous Steve. Keep up the good work. I'm really looking forward to this ;D
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Interesting idea, although could be an issue if a neutral alien race that you couldn't see suddenly opened fire on you :)
I hope that the sensor phase will be a lot faster in the C# version though so performance may not be a problem.
The obvious fudge there is to make it so that it only hides neutral races that are actually neutral (not planning to attack, instead of simply having not hit you yet). While this does create an obvious problem in gameplay terms, we all know that 'turning sensors off' is a hack for performance reasons, and that in real life, they'd still be getting all the data. Or at least create an option to that effect. Or make it so we can choose which races we don't detect.
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Oh, this looks amazing! Would it be possible to change the colors in the map display screen perhaps? Would it be feasible to take cues from the 3DS Max UI for fitting the menus into smaller screens? What Max does is that it makes the various toolbars and menus draggable as well as organizing them into collapsible subsections, allowing the user to quickly reveal and unreveal commands they may need.
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you're in the history of great game creators. . . thx a lot for giving us a jewel called aurora.
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you're in the history of great game creators. . . thx a lot for giving us a jewel called aurora.
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you're in the history of great game creators. . . thx a lot for giving us a jewel called aurora.
Yep this smeg right here.
For me, Steve stands shoulder to shoulder with Sid Meier and other giants of serious gaming ;)
Ontopic : At the risk of sounding like a complete retard - whats the difference between C# Aurora and normal one ?
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Ontopic : At the risk of sounding like a complete retard - whats the difference between C# Aurora and normal one ?
Aurora is written in Visual Basic (VB) programming language while C# is writen in... C#.
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Its bigger than that, now it loads everything into memory and only touches the database to save the game state. It should run massively faster.
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If the rumours are true, perhaps "massively faster" is still an understatement :o
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If the rumours are true, perhaps "massively faster" is still an understatement :o
So you mean that one massive flaw Aurora has in mid-late game, will cease to exist ?
:o ;D Will i get to play it before i get old ? :P
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So you mean that one massive flaw Aurora has in mid-late game, will cease to exist ?
:o ;D Will i get to play it before i get old ? :P
No. It'll still exist. Performance will continue to fall as there are more ships, and NPC and inhabited planets to account for. How much it'll slowdown is the question. And it may still be by a lot.
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No. It'll still exist. Performance will continue to fall as there are more ships, and NPC and inhabited planets to account for. How much it'll slowdown is the question. And it may still be by a lot.
No not really. It will cease to exist for the most part for people not using potatoes. As it is now you could probably play it on a windows XP machine, maybe even a 98 without any big noticeable changes. In the new language (and memory improvements) it can actually take advantage of the power of new machines.
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No. It'll still exist. Performance will continue to fall as there are more ships, and NPC and inhabited planets to account for. How much it'll slowdown is the question. And it may still be by a lot.
Well of course there will be slowdown but the problem is the scope of it.
There is a difference between game where it gets pre-mortem spasms once more than ten systems are explored and one NPR is discovered and a game where you can have two hundred systems with seven NPR's with some slowdowns.
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You would see benefits on all machines, not just new ones. The the main problem seems to be that he is storing everything on the hard drive right now. That slows things down massively.
Any machine with RAM (which is all machines that are able to function at this point) should notice significantly improved performance due to the much faster memory lookups.
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It should be a lot faster - not only because of the switch to RAM - but also because of C# will be able to use modern CPU/GPU structure. If Steve can get it to use GPU computation power you would need a 10.000 system galaxy and several hundred NPRs to start feeling a slowdown.
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He would need to do a total rewrite specializing it to GPU computation, and it would be limited in the number of GPUs it could work on. I doubt he will be doing that.
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He would need to do a total rewrite specializing it to GPU computation, and it would be limited in the number of GPUs it could work on. I doubt he will be doing that.
You have a lot of that already built into the libraries and the compilers. Sure it is not as effective as hunting bytes in basic but it is going to be a big difference.
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Yep, there are libraries who give you that functions. But it might be a pain to realize... .
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You would see benefits on all machines, not just new ones. The the main problem seems to be that he is storing everything on the hard drive right now. That slows things down massively.
Any machine with RAM (which is all machines that are able to function at this point) should notice significantly improved performance due to the much faster memory lookups.
Steve did a pass several years ago where turn processing happens in memory, and the results are stored to DB at the end of the turn, so I don't think this is the (primary) problem. AFAIK, there are two issues:
1) Sensor detection ("is A within B's detection radius") is an N^2 algorithm (where N might even be the number of ships, not TG), and everything else is at least linear.
2) The intercept/movement algorithms are not set up to only go to smaller time steps for movers that need them. In a perfect world, the future paths of all movers would be calculated as curves in space-time that terminate when they reach their current destination. The program would then look for points where these curves pass within detection range of each other to figure out how big the next time step should be (allowing bigger time steps). If the close approach event is a non-interrupt event, none of the movers should be updated - things should just go to the next close approach point. If it is an interrupt, only those movers whose orders change should be recalculated (in terms of the curve + intersection analysis) - the rest of the movers should be left alone. This would cut down on a subtle N^2 (or possibly worse) where each event costs O(N) of processing time, and the more ships exist, the shorter the time between events. This would be VERY complicated to code up though, especially working out the math for planetary intercepts. In actuality, for each increment a time step size is chosen to be some fraction of the turn length, then analysis is performed to see if a smaller time step is needed (especially if missiles are flying).
I don't foresee either of these issues being fixed by the transition to C#. I'm not sure if/how the Pulsar crowd is handling issue #2.
OTOH, it is impossible for Steve to take advantage of multi-threading with VB6. The detection/intercept code has lots of opportunities for parallelism though, so he should be able to easily take advantage of multi-threading by e.g. using the thread pool. If Steve could use the GPU for the "is A in detection range of B" calculation, then it MIGHT also give a big boost, but that's a lot harder and more iffy.
John
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There are certain "static" things which might be calculated while the user is interacting with the game. Precomputing some things in the background. These precalculations (like positions of planets, asteroids, etc.) could then simply be used to shorten the calculation time during time forwarding.
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Those are all great ideas, but as a programmer myself I'd hate to speculate on where most of the time is spent. (Except that we know detection is a large part of it or there wouldn't be so many options for tweaking how that works :)
Profile first, then optimize.
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Is it possible that this new version will make possible to play without the need to install some libraries etc.?
As I dont have admin rights on my laptop and have like 70% of work time in business trips i would really appreciate this addition.
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There's usually a compiler setting to include all the needed libraries, I think that can really baloon an executable file though.
e: Also not sure if that would work in this context or not.
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The first screenshot of the new class design window. Class design is now working within C# Aurora and as you can see, the class window has undergone a more radical overhaul than the tactical window. The main differences are:
1) All class types are now shown on the left in a tree view, organised by hull type. You can filter obsolete and civilian designs
2) Available Components are also in a tree view, organised by component type. You can open and close sections as needed. Scrollbars will appear if needed. You add new components using this tree by double-clicking (amount based on radio-button selection).
3) You can flip between available components and components in the current design (see second screenshot). You remove components using this tree.
4) Instead of showing a line of details for each component, clicking on the component (in either Race or Class lists) shows a more detailed description in the lower centre.
5) The box to the right of the component description box is for design errors.
6) Any green text is editable, so you can change armour and deployment time, plus adjust the range bands and tracking speeds used to show the capabilities of beam weapons and beam fire controls.
7) A list of ships in the class is shown in the lower right. There will be a much more detailed list on another tab.
8) Many of the VB6 text boxes no longer exist on this view, either because they have been removed because they duplicate the main display, are no longer necessary, have been handled differently (lack of power is now a design error) or moved to a different tab (showing the crew calculation) because they are less important. This allows a much cleaner view with only the required information.
There are a few minor changes to class design.
1) Ships are no longer rounded to the nearest hull space
2) Range Modifiers are shown in full rather than a number. So in the case of this ship, a range modifier of 30,000 km means the weapon has a range of Max Damage x Range Modifier. The range was always calculated this way but not shown as obviously on the display
3) Internal HTK has been added to the display next to armour and shields
4) 'Damage Control Rating' is now DCR
5) The 'To Hit' chances (in the display) for beam fire controls are based on the Range Bands and Target Speed set on the right side of the window
6) Beam Weapon damage fall-off (in the display) is based on the selected Range Bands.
This window is still a work in progress but the design-related work is mostly complete. The results of class design (with the above exceptions) are matching VB6 Aurora. I need to add some other tabs, including fighter and ordnance assignment, more detailed component information, rank assignment, etc.. I'll post screenshots as I complete them.
One other interesting advantage of C# Aurora is that I have separated the data from the display, which means you can have multiple class design windows open at once :)
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/ClassDesign.PNG)
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/ClassDesign02.PNG)
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The best thing about this for me is that the designs get sorted after classes. My last Tau based game I abandoned because I had so many different ship types created, that after some pause I could not find my way through the naming scheme anymore. With this it should be no problem anymore.
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The best thing about this for me is that the designs get sorted after classes. My last Tau based game I abandoned because I had so many different ship types created, that after some pause I could not find my way through the naming scheme anymore. With this it should be no problem anymore.
Complete agreement.
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Very nice though I am curious about one thing. I have noticed that some of these (this latest example being a perfect one) are a blue background with white text. If that the way it will be for everyone with no alternative? I would much prefer an option to have as current a white sheet with black text.
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I don't think I really like the change to only being able to see either the current ship components or all racial components, instead of both at once. I guess with the expanded class summary being shown it might not be as important, but I think I do refer a lot to the numbers of the various components already on a design when I'm making new ships, so I'm envisioning a lot of clicking back and forth with the new system for me.
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Does this change also mean that when I Alt+Tab, I no longer have to cycle over each open Aurora window separately but that Windows will finally see it as one application?
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I don't think I really like the change to only being able to see either the current ship components or all racial components, instead of both at once. I guess with the expanded class summary being shown it might not be as important, but I think I do refer a lot to the numbers of the various components already on a design when I'm making new ships, so I'm envisioning a lot of clicking back and forth with the new system for me.
It should really be fine as the class summery is right there.
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Some components aren't actually explicitly listed on the summary though, in particular magazines. While the total magazine capacity appears, the individual breakdown doesn't. My missile ships inevitably end up with various mixtures of magazine types as I tweak things about. Magazines with high armour and low capacity, the converse, and occasionally even some in between get mixed together. Especially near the end of a design phase when I'm trying to make everything fit in a set tonnage, I need to alternate between adding and removing components a lot to see what can afford to be removed and what I can fit in with the saved space.
Anyway, this is probably all sounding somewhat contrived; I'll get used to it eventually and will keep quiet on this now.
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Some components aren't actually explicitly listed on the summary though, in particular magazines. While the total magazine capacity appears, the individual breakdown doesn't. My missile ships inevitably end up with various mixtures of magazine types as I tweak things about. Magazines with high armour and low capacity, the converse, and occasionally even some in between get mixed together. Especially near the end of a design phase when I'm trying to make everything fit in a set tonnage, I need to alternate between adding and removing components a lot to see what can afford to be removed and what I can fit in with the saved space.
Anyway, this is probably all sounding somewhat contrived; I'll get used to it eventually and will keep quiet on this now.
I'll add a hot key so you can easily switch.
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Does this change also mean that when I Alt+Tab, I no longer have to cycle over each open Aurora window separately but that Windows will finally see it as one application?
I've just opened the application and two class windows to try it. They each still seem to be separate windows.
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Looks very good to me although would agree with other that the white text and blue background might be quite hard on the eyes after a while.
Grouping by type of ship is really handy. Assume we will be able to add in our own type outside of the usual cruiser, destroyer etc that you have as the base. Would also be great to be able to delete Types we are no longer using so the list does not get too complex as it currently does once you have played a few different games.
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Will it be possible to import DBs from 7.1?
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Looks very good to me although would agree with other that the white text and blue background might be quite hard on the eyes after a while.
Grouping by type of ship is really handy. Assume we will be able to add in our own type outside of the usual cruiser, destroyer etc that you have as the base. Would also be great to be able to delete Types we are no longer using so the list does not get too complex as it currently does once you have played a few different games.
Yes, you can add your own hull types. Only hull types for which you currently have ships are shown, so it shouldn't get overcrowded.
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Will it be possible to import DBs from 7.1?
No, because the C# version is based on the unreleased v7.2,
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Looks very good to me although would agree with other that the white text and blue background might be quite hard on the eyes after a while.
Text is more of a pale yellow than white :)
I don't think it would be too difficult to add the option to change to different colour schemes. I will play around with that at some point.
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Looks very good to me although would agree with other that the white text and blue background might be quite hard on the eyes after a while.
Grouping by type of ship is really handy. Assume we will be able to add in our own type outside of the usual cruiser, destroyer etc that you have as the base. Would also be great to be able to delete Types we are no longer using so the list does not get too complex as it currently does once you have played a few different games.
We won't be able to delete types, because the NPRs are using those designations as well, but hopefully we will be able to hide types we are not now using (and do not ever intend to use).
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Text is more of a pale yellow than white :)
I don't think it would be too difficult to add the option to change to different colour schemes. I will play around with that at some point.
Try light/sky blue text on a Black(ish) translucent background.
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No, because the C# version is based on the unreleased v7.2,
Well, technically it surely is possible. Just need some translation tables for export and reimport. Is it intentional that you chose to not use such functionality? Would be nice at least to have some Import/Export Options (for example Medals) so you don't need to generate them in every single game again and again.
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Well, technically it surely is possible. Just need some translation tables for export and reimport. Is it intentional that you chose to not use such functionality? Would be nice at least to have some Import/Export Options (for example Medals) so you don't need to generate them in every single game again and again.
I think it is mainly because the database changes happen as Steve needs them to, so he converts on the fly.
There was a utility for SFA that did what you ask, I don't know if it ever got ported over to Aurora or not.
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if you have db access and you know what you are doing you can convert saves to new versions.
But I seriously would _NOT_ recommend trying. Play the old version. Start a new game for whenever the new version come out.
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So I have read elsewhere. Better not tamper with the Database... :o
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Wow this seems to have come along way very quickly im guessing there was alot of reusable code :P. Would it be possible to maybe add in some stock images for on the ship designer view? Just a suggestion
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Wow this seems to have come along way very quickly im guessing there was alot of reusable code :P. Would it be possible to maybe add in some stock images for on the ship designer view? Just a suggestion
I suspect turns are currently quite long in Steves game...
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Wow this seems to have come along way very quickly im guessing there was alot of reusable code :P. Would it be possible to maybe add in some stock images for on the ship designer view? Just a suggestion
No, C# has all been written from scratch. I've just spent quite a lot of time on it over the last few weeks. My C# has improved a lot in the process :)
Stock images are possible, although probably not on the first tab. Main problem would be finding enough images without copyright problems.
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There are plenty guys out there with 3D skills who present their works in several forums or on their websites. Asking them to use their pics might work pretty easily, because they want to spread their work (and become famous ;) ). Finding "styles" for specific ships althoug might be a more complicated task.
Free 3D Models (which would need someone to render them):
https://www.thepixellab.net/7-sites-for-free-3d-models
http://www.blender-models.com/model-downloads/space/
Free Picutres (depending on license, much stuff under Creative Commons but better check individually):
http://star-dock.deviantart.com/
http://www.blendernation.com/
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Old player here. My question is: what'd be the benefits of the C# conversion? Stability and performance, maybe?
I realize most of the game's still in the Access database, so improvement might be limited (speaking out of ignorance here). Still, what can we look forward to?
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Faster run times, since the current version (f I remember correctly) has to read and write to the hard drive for everything as the turn progresses, which is slow as sin once the database gets more and more complex.
The new version will load the whole thing into RAM so that it can be accessed on the fly very quickly, and will be able to take advantage of multiple processors as well to help with all the calculations and such.
Someone please correct me if I am mistaken here but I think thats the short version of it.
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Faster run times, since the current version (f I remember correctly) has to read and write to the hard drive for everything as the turn progresses, which is slow as sin once the database gets more and more complex.
The new version will load the whole thing into RAM so that it can be accessed on the fly very quickly, and will be able to take advantage of multiple processors as well to help with all the calculations and such.
Someone please correct me if I am mistaken here but I think thats the short version of it.
Depends largely on how Steve has architected, if he is still directly writing to the database then things will still slow down as the database gets bigger and bigger but c# has its advantages and has ways of getting the most out of databases and stuff. If Steve has architected it differently to use RAM then there should be very little slow down at all we will all just have to remember to save our games when we are finished playing a session :P
Also i realise this isnt really a suggestions thread but there isnt any other thread for that yet. Seen as thought your working from scratch would it be possible to look at and maybe add some more depth to Ground combat? Command levels higher than Division and maybe some more ground units and other cool things like battle tactics? Possibly take some inspiration from the MOO series as they did it quite well i feel.
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Hate to be that guy but : Do we have release date ( even some rough estimate will suffice ) ??
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Old player here. My question is: what'd be the benefits of the C# conversion? Stability and performance, maybe?
I realize most of the game's still in the Access database, so improvement might be limited (speaking out of ignorance here). Still, what can we look forward to?
Performance is main advantage, although there are a few others. I've just ordered a new PC with Windows 10 (currently on 7) so time is catching up with VB6 :). Developing past the current functionality will be a lot easier in a modern language. Performance should be enhanced because everything is being loaded at start-up and the game is run entirely in RAM. So far I am loading all system bodies, survey results, ships, fleets, classes, missiles, etc into objects in less than 10 seconds. My game has 500 systems, 60,000 system bodies, 100,000 system body survey records, 2300 ships, etc. so most games will be a faster load.
Simply swapping systems in the tactical map is noticeably improved. Changing to the Alpha Centauri system in VB6 has a delay of perhaps 1-2 seconds. In C# it is instant. If you select the system dropdown and hold the down arrow, it looks like the end of Wargames :)
Because windows forms has advanced a lot since VB6, the window design is a lot cleaner and I can start from scratch in terms of deciding where to put everything, rather than squeezing more and more things into an existing layout.
Database-wise I am currently using Access so I can run the same database in both C# and VB6 to compare results. However, I have set the data access code up to allow me to easily change DBs so I will move away from Access once the program is close to completion. Probably SQL Server as I am very familiar with it. I've been considering how to handle the saving side and I am leaning toward creating complete game save files rather than updating a single file, so you will have multiple save positions in the same game.
Another advantage of C# is that it allows multi-threading, which may help with sensor updates as I can run several systems simultaneously. I won't use multi-threading just for the sake of it because I understand you can get yourself into trouble fairly easily :) but I'll play around with it and see if it makes a significant difference.
BTW For those familiar with C#, I have found one of the major advantages over VB6 (beyond the obvious advantages) is using LINQ and Lambda expressions to retrieve data from collections - very useful and powerful.
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Hate to be that guy but : Do we have release date ( even some rough estimate will suffice ) ??
Absolutely no idea :)
I have a very long way to go . Tactical Map and Class Design are pretty much done but that is a small portion. I haven't touched system generation, the sequence of play, movement (although the orders are being loaded), detection, combat, economics, production, etc.. It will get easier though as I can start to re-use code from the parts I have completed, rather than writing from scratch to match VB6, plus the foundation (in terms of organised data in the program) for a lot of the work to come is already in place.
It isn't just the amount of work though. A lot depends on how I maintain my level of enthusiasm and there are distractions ahead, like Battlefleet Gothic Armada :)
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Depends largely on how Steve has architected, if he is still directly writing to the database then things will still slow down as the database gets bigger and bigger but c# has its advantages and has ways of getting the most out of databases and stuff. If Steve has architected it differently to use RAM then there should be very little slow down at all we will all just have to remember to save our games when we are finished playing a session :P
Also i realise this isnt really a suggestions thread but there isnt any other thread for that yet. Seen as thought your working from scratch would it be possible to look at and maybe add some more depth to Ground combat? Command levels higher than Division and maybe some more ground units and other cool things like battle tactics? Possibly take some inspiration from the MOO series as they did it quite well i feel.
I will look at ground combat at some point - ideal would be actual maps like in Emperor of the Fading Suns. However, my immediate aim is to replicate the VB6 functionality in C#. Once that is done, I can look at new functionality.
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Excellent, Steve! It's the kind of foundational improvement many of us had been hoping for.
Keep up the great work and best of luck maintaining that enthusiasm. :P
I'll be following this intently.
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Performance is main advantage, although there are a few others. I've just ordered a new PC with Windows 10 (currently on 7) so time is catching up with VB6 :). Developing past the current functionality will be a lot easier in a modern language. Performance should be enhanced because everything is being loaded at start-up and the game is run entirely in RAM. So far I am loading all system bodies, survey results, ships, fleets, classes, missiles, etc into objects in less than 10 seconds. My game has 500 systems, 60,000 system bodies, 100,000 system body survey records, 2300 ships, etc. so most games will be a faster load.
Simply swapping systems in the tactical map is noticeably improved. Changing to the Alpha Centauri system in VB6 has a delay of perhaps 1-2 seconds. In C# it is instant. If you select the system dropdown and hold the down arrow, it looks like the end of Wargames :)
Because windows forms has advanced a lot since VB6, the window design is a lot cleaner and I can start from scratch in terms of deciding where to put everything, rather than squeezing more and more things into an existing layout.
Database-wise I am currently using Access so I can run the same database in both C# and VB6 to compare results. However, I have set the data access code up to allow me to easily change DBs so I will move away from Access once the program is close to completion. Probably SQL Server as I am very familiar with it. I've been considering how to handle the saving side and I am leaning toward creating complete game save files rather than updating a single file, so you will have multiple save positions in the same game.
Another advantage of C# is that it allows multi-threading, which may help with sensor updates as I can run several systems simultaneously. I won't use multi-threading just for the sake of it because I understand you can get yourself into trouble fairly easily :) but I'll play around with it and see if it makes a significant difference.
BTW For those familiar with C#, I have found one of the major advantages over VB6 (beyond the obvious advantages) is using LINQ and Lambda expressions to retrieve data from collections - very useful and powerful.
I am currently Squeeing inside like a little girl! It sounds like C# is allowing you to get around all the limitations you had with VB6 this is excellent news! So whats next after this Pausable Realtime Aurora ;)
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Stock images are possible, although probably not on the first tab. Main problem would be finding enough images without copyright problems.
I have a friend (one of the players in my multiplayer game) who's working on a procedural spacecraft image generator. He's aware of the potential interaction with Aurora, although I'm not going to volunteer his services flat-out. I can ask if you'd be interested.
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Actually wondering if Aurora C# will be real-time or turn based?
Besides that, thank you Steve :D!
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Still turn based.
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Actually wondering if Aurora C# will be real-time or turn based?
Besides that, thank you Steve :D!
It will be the same as the VB6 version.
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Another screenshot of the class design window, showing the assignment of ordnance and fighters and a more detailed component breakdown. This combines the functionality of two tabs from the VB6 version. Fighters / Ordnance is added and removed by double-clicking.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/ClassDesign03.PNG)
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I have a friend (one of the players in my multiplayer game) who's working on a procedural spacecraft image generator. He's aware of the potential interaction with Aurora, although I'm not going to volunteer his services flat-out. I can ask if you'd be interested.
If I do add images for spacecraft to the class window, I would be happy to showcase his work. Although if you have a procedural generator, it sounds like he would take a file and generate an image from it. One option would be some form of export from Aurora if that helps.
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BTW For those familiar with C#, I have found one of the major advantages over VB6 (beyond the obvious advantages) is using LINQ and Lambda expressions to retrieve data from collections - very useful and powerful.
I've recently started playing Aurora. And i'm programmer myself, and now i'm absolutely happy reading this, and watching how C# Aurora progresses. Maybe because i absolutely love C#, maybe because i really fell in love with Aurora, or most likely both.
Happy to see that you're liking it too. Also, have you considered using WPF instead of Windows Forms? It allows for much cleaner and much more flexible UI(And honestly, it just looks gorgeous). And at least for me personally it was really easy to start using it, coming from winforms with c# and winAPI for c++ before that.
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If I do add images for spacecraft to the class window, I would be happy to showcase his work. Although if you have a procedural generator, it sounds like he would take a file and generate an image from it. One option would be some form of export from Aurora if that helps.
I think that was the idea. I may ping him and let him know that if he does decide to go further, you're interested in seeing what happens.
That said, it would still be a good way to get lots of images for this window without worrying about rights. And I think he's even able to set it up for distinct styles....
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Can we get a glimpse of the Glossary tab?
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It will be the same as the VB6 version.
Ah I see! Thank you for the reply 83athom and Steve :D
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Can we get a glimpse of the Glossary tab?
At the moment it is the same text as the existing VB6 glossary tab.
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I've recently started playing Aurora. And i'm programmer myself, and now i'm absolutely happy reading this, and watching how C# Aurora progresses. Maybe because i absolutely love C#, maybe because i really fell in love with Aurora, or most likely both.
Happy to see that you're liking it too. Also, have you considered using WPF instead of Windows Forms? It allows for much cleaner and much more flexible UI(And honestly, it just looks gorgeous). And at least for me personally it was really easy to start using it, coming from winforms with c# and winAPI for c++ before that.
I started out with C++ on Windows 3.1 :). I have used WPF in the past and it is more flexible than forms. However, I am a lot more familiar with forms and Aurora doesn't need the graphical advantages of WPF, so I decided it would be easier and faster to use forms.
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The ship list tab of the class design window. I've added a variety of ways to sort the ships in the class.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/ClassDesign04.PNG)
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Pretty excited about this overall! One question: there doesn't seem to be any highlighting in the treeview showing which ship class you actually have selected - so that while on the "ships in class" or "ordnance/fighters/components" tab, it's going to be hard to tell which particular ship class one is looking at.
Would you be able to add some more UI hints (either adding a highlight of the selected class in the tree view, or some other adjustment) to make that clearer to the user? (I suppose one could flip back to the "Class design" tab if one forgot which class they were working on, which is not exactly a great hardship.)
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Still, it's the little bits of polish like this that make the game shine 8)
Definitely support UI hints and other tweaks to make things more intuitive.
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Pretty excited about this overall! One question: there doesn't seem to be any highlighting in the treeview showing which ship class you actually have selected - so that while on the "ships in class" or "ordnance/fighters/components" tab, it's going to be hard to tell which particular ship class one is looking at.
Would you be able to add some more UI hints (either adding a highlight of the selected class in the tree view, or some other adjustment) to make that clearer to the user? (I suppose one could flip back to the "Class design" tab if one forgot which class they were working on, which is not exactly a great hardship.)
Obviously they are Tribal II or Tribal-M's ;)
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Pretty excited about this overall! One question: there doesn't seem to be any highlighting in the treeview showing which ship class you actually have selected - so that while on the "ships in class" or "ordnance/fighters/components" tab, it's going to be hard to tell which particular ship class one is looking at.
Would you be able to add some more UI hints (either adding a highlight of the selected class in the tree view, or some other adjustment) to make that clearer to the user? (I suppose one could flip back to the "Class design" tab if one forgot which class they were working on, which is not exactly a great hardship.)
By default the Tree view does highlight when you click on it but loses the highlight when focus moves to another control. Fortunately, there is an option to maintain the highlight, which I have now switched on :)
BTW, another effect of moving to C# is that instead of twelve 30-day months Aurora is now using real dates, complete with leap years, etc..
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/ClassDesign05.PNG)
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I will look at ground combat at some point - ideal would be actual maps like in Emperor of the Fading Suns. However, my immediate aim is to replicate the VB6 functionality in C#. Once that is done, I can look at new functionality.
Best game ever, if Aurora was able to do that all my dreams would come at once. I racked up so many hours with this game on my Amiga or C64 I forget. I have never see its like since but always dreamed there might be.
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love the new class screen - does the Fighters thing support FACs or other parasites?
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BTW, another effect of moving to C# is that instead of twelve 30-day months Aurora is now using real dates, complete with leap years, etc..
I hope that's not hardcoded, or it could get frustrating when someone wants a different calendar. (It's a lot easier to RP aliens standardising on something that's at least half-abstract, like the old one, than Earth's orbital period.)
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Leaving the ship selected highlighted is just great. I know its a small item but its been one of those things that has bugged me for many years. Can't wait to see more and hope you can maintain this momentum.
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love the new class screen - does the Fighters thing support FACs or other parasites?
Would "other parasites" include a 10kt destroyer? Cause that's what I've got being lugged around in carriers in my current game. Maybe just allow any ship that would fit within the available hanger space to be added in the strike group as a catch all fix.
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love the new class screen - does the Fighters thing support FACs or other parasites?
I could enable that. At the moment it is restricting which classes are displayed so adding FAC or larger only involves altering the restriction. Perhaps an option to select largest ship by tonnage would be easiest.
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I've moved on to the Economics window. First difference is a long requested feature. Populations are now named separately to system bodies, so you can have several pops with different names on the same planet. Pop names will default to the system body name unless specifically changed by the player.
There is an option to show system body names in the population tree, although to make the display cleaner the system body name will only be shown alongside the pop name if they are different. Also, species names will only be shown next to pops if they are different than the default species for that race.
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I will look at ground combat at some point - ideal would be actual maps like in Emperor of the Fading Suns. However, my immediate aim is to replicate the VB6 functionality in C#. Once that is done, I can look at new functionality.
I had missed this. Oh my god. Emperor of the fading suns, probably one of my favorite games ever. So much potential - wasted because of the incompetent AIs!
If you actually do something like that for Aurora... well, I have no words :)
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All of this is awesome, I'm greatly looking forward to what this version of Aurora will allow you to do. Though I will confess I'm looking forward to how it will hopefully allow you to run your own campaign write ups on an even greater scale, without fear of lag making it impossible to carry on past a certain point, even more. Plus of course without the lag problems you can also add in new alien menaces to the game. Having a the option to have occasional Tyrannid Hive fleet analogue move into your quadrant of the galaxy and consume all life in front of them should be fun. Especially when you first see the hundreds (if not thousands) of sensor contacts popping up on the system map. ;D
BTW, another effect of moving to C# is that instead of twelve 30-day months Aurora is now using real dates, complete with leap years, etc..
Out of interest, would it be possible to change the default calendar system the game uses to reflect not starting on Earth? Such an option would be all but useless except for RP reasons, but if its not difficult to do it might be cool to have.
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Having a the option to have occasional Tyrannid Hive fleet analogue move into your quadrant of the galaxy and consume all life in front of them should be fun. Especially when you first see the hundreds (if not thousands) of sensor contacts popping up on the system map. ;D
You could just feed the star swam a load of wrecks and you'd get a similar effect.
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yeah, if you leave those damn swarm along long enough in a good system you might end up facing literally thousands of FACs :'(
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I started out with C++ on Windows 3. 1 :). I have used WPF in the past and it is more flexible than forms. However, I am a lot more familiar with forms and Aurora doesn't need the graphical advantages of WPF, so I decided it would be easier and faster to use forms.
If you wanted to be really crazy you could write the calculation-intensive sections in C++, maybe taking advantage of a GPU library to do the grunt work, as a DLL which is called by the C# GUI front end.
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You could just feed the star swam a load of wrecks and you'd get a similar effect.
True, but the swarm are always somewhat constrained by their nature and the technological level they possess. Throw in a few more larger ships, maybe have them grow techology as their hive mind grows larger and more maliciously intelligent and potentially give them ground forces to consume planet-based resources and dealing them would become a lot more challenging and less monotonous than just blasting away at Swarm FACs with lasers just outside their own weapon range.
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Well, we can only hope that one day something like this does get implemented. But for the time being, I'd be happy enough to see the current game state released under the C# architecture, let alone Aurora with new/improved content.
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I'm mostly a lurker, but I had to come out to say how excited I am by this. Whilst Aurora is definitely one of my favorite ways to enjoy my spare time, I'm always held back by knowing that eventually my game will experience heat death. So this update, combined with the general/UI enhancements will make this pretty much my favorite game of all time, and I fear for my future.
All in all - great work Steve, please keep it up!!
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If you would need some hexfield underground pictures for the ground combat, I have some left from an update we had planned for "Advanced Strategic Command" (updating the field size from 48x48 pixels to 96x96 pixels), which never took place due to time constrains of the programmer. So the game stayed with the smaller gfx. However they still exist and can be used somewhere else ;)
Here is a demopicture:
(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27328594/HexUnderground.jpg)
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Calm down guys, he hasn't even finished the refactoring yet.
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Calm down guys, he hasn't even finished the refactoring yet.
Yes :)
It will be many months before I even get close to the VB6 version.
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The only new feature I REALLY want is multi-threading.
I would never not be playing this game (even more than that is already true) if it was faster.
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The only new feature I REALLY want is multi-threading.
I would never not be playing this game (even more than that is already true) if it was faster.
It will be faster but the main reason will be minimal database access rather than multi-threading. Most of Aurora is sequential so the scope for multi-threading is limited. Detection is probably the only area where it would make a significant difference.
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Let me just say first that I'm THRILLED that Aurora's coming to the 21st century.
Now, couldn't you give each populated system it's own thread?
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Let me just say first that I'm THRILLED that Aurora's coming to the 21st century.
Now, couldn't you give each populated system it's own thread?
I am by no means a multi-threading expert :) but it seems the advantage of multi-threading is to allow the PC to perform simultaneous calculations that have no effect on each other. So multi-threading movement wouldn't work on a system level as some movement involves entering different systems and on a fleet level it wouldn't work due to the requirements of initiative etc.. There are a few things it would work for such as orbital movement, pop growth, production, etc but those are generally so fast anyway that multi-threading would make very little difference. Detection is one area that could be multi-threaded and may be improved. Perhaps another is the AI. However, I don't want to use multi-threading just for the sake of it (especially as it apparently easy to get yourself into trouble), so I'll see how the performance is once the game is mostly complete and then look at multi-threading in areas where performance is an issue,
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I am by no means a multi-threading expert :) but it seems the advantage of multi-threading is to allow the PC to perform simultaneous calculations that have no effect on each other. So multi-threading movement wouldn't work on a system level as some movement involves entering different systems and on a fleet level it wouldn't work due to the requirements of initiative etc. . There are a few things it would work for such as orbital movement, pop growth, production, etc but those are generally so fast anyway that multi-threading would make very little difference. Detection is one area that could be multi-threaded and may be improved. Perhaps another is the AI. However, I don't want to use multi-threading just for the sake of it (especially as it apparently easy to get yourself into trouble), so I'll see how the performance is once the game is mostly complete and then look at multi-threading in areas where performance is an issue,
Multithreading on a system level would only work if you could figure out which systems (or system groups) are "separate", or that will have no ships going between them during a given time pulse. Early on that would make every system its own thread, but later on there would have to be "clusters" of systems that have to belong to the same thread, and if things get interconnected enough then you wouldn't be able to do it at all. Since the later game is the part that is the problem performance-wise, it doesn't seem like this strategy would help very much.
Multithreading sensor detection would probably help quite a lot though, as I understand that it is very calculation intensive, and I don't see how resolving different signature detections would interfere with each other. I could be wrong though.
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Well as long as the thread creation overhead isn't too bad, it still seems like it might be useful. Surely not every system would be in the same cluster every time interval. Ships don't jump THAT often.
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Surely not every system would be in the same cluster every time interval. Ships don't jump THAT often.
Imagine a game where there are 5 different empires at war with each other with each having several war fleets. During wartime, any given fleet would take 5 days between system transits (give or take). With these fleets, they have support fleets behind them a jump waiting for the war fleets to need them, with empty support ships going back for reload while fresh ones come up. Now lets add civilians who automatically trade between your own systems (between colonies) that can number in the hundreds at times, and your other ships such as scouts/survey ships going around doing deep recon to find new paths, finding new empires that will on their own will now build and explore.
Granted outside of wartime, there would be a lot less jumps, but there would still be a lot.
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Well as long as the thread creation overhead isn't too bad, it still seems like it might be useful. Surely not every system would be in the same cluster every time interval. Ships don't jump THAT often.
The problem is that working out which systems fit in which cluster is not trivial for several reasons. First, it's possible that a ship could cross multiple systems in a single full step, so you'd have to recompute for every substep. Second, what happens when clusters collide? You initially have one empty system between two clusters. During the turn, ships jump into it from both clusters. Thus, to a first approximation you'd need two unoccupied systems between each cluster. Early game, when that might happen, performance is good enough as-is. Later on, it won't.
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I've not posted any screenshots in a while as I have been working on loading and calculating all the data for the economics window (plus I have been back at work after some time off). When this is done it will lay a lot of foundation for the 5-day intervals.
One interesting item has popped up. Due to the new Low Gravity Infrastructure (now LG Infrastructure, not AG - thanks for the suggestion), comets can be colonised. However, their colony cost will change over time depending on their distance from the sun, which may lead to some interesting situations. If this works out OK in practice, it would open up the possibility to use elliptical planetary orbits and have changing colony cost over time for planets/moons and asteroids.
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Huh, that could be interesting. I would guess that colony management would need some adjustments to get that to work. Some way to either cap population, or automatically terraform to maintain a certain temperature. Maybe swap between nitrogen and greenhouse gas and back? It would make fixed terraforming installations a lot more popular in some cases.
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My concern there would be the potential for serious problems due to the civilian shipping sector if the colony sees big temperature swings. If it gets closer to ideal at one point and they pile people on, you could end up with serious problems as the temperature falls/rises again.
One way to deal with this might be to look at capping the colony costs for temperature extremes. I'm not sure that a very cold world without atmosphere would be much worse than a temperate world without atmosphere. Heat is a bit more problematic. For that matter, it doesn't make that much sense that a world with slightly too little oxygen in an otherwise-breathable atmosphere (which should be manageable with a simple rebreather) is just as bad as a world with no atmosphere at all, where you need a space suit to go outside.
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My concern there would be the potential for serious problems due to the civilian shipping sector if the colony sees big temperature swings. If it gets closer to ideal at one point and they pile people on, you could end up with serious problems as the temperature falls/rises again.
One way to deal with this might be to look at capping the colony costs for temperature extremes. I'm not sure that a very cold world without atmosphere would be much worse than a temperate world without atmosphere. Heat is a bit more problematic. For that matter, it doesn't make that much sense that a world with slightly too little oxygen in an otherwise-breathable atmosphere (which should be manageable with a simple rebreather) is just as bad as a world with no atmosphere at all, where you need a space suit to go outside.
I would probably handle it by having a min, max and current colony cost with civilian shipping only using the max. It's a long way off yet though so I'll look at this once I see how comets work out.
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I've not posted any screenshots in a while as I have been working on loading and calculating all the data for the economics window (plus I have been back at work after some time off). When this is done it will lay a lot of foundation for the 5-day intervals.
One interesting item has popped up. Due to the new Low Gravity Infrastructure (now LG Infrastructure, not AG - thanks for the suggestion), comets can be colonised. However, their colony cost will change over time depending on their distance from the sun, which may lead to some interesting situations. If this works out OK in practice, it would open up the possibility to use elliptical planetary orbits and have changing colony cost over time for planets/moons and asteroids.
I have a related idea. Given variable colony costs, should moons have or cause tides? For terrestrial planets like Earth, obviously the answer is no, tides simply aren't large enough to matter. But tidal forces are very important for gas giant moons. Encelaedus and Europa both have liquid oceans beneath the ice thanks to heating tidal friction. In-game, maybe this should raise their temperature? Right now, it's impossible to get the gas giant moons to 0 col cost, you just can't cram enough greenhouse gases on them and still be within the livable pressure range. But given some additional heat from the tides, maybe you could?
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If we're getting into terraforming, can we add water cycle? Or at least make it so that to reach cost 0, there has to be a water source on the object. Or make it possible for terraformers to add water on a planet in a way that would be noticed by the F9 screen. I have a tendency to RP my terraforming so that it creates as Earth-like planets as possible and it bugs me that lot of places are seemingly devoid of water.
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If we're getting into terraforming, can we add water cycle? Or at least make it so that to reach cost 0, there has to be a water source on the object. Or make it possible for terraformers to add water on a planet in a way that would be noticed by the F9 screen. I have a tendency to RP my terraforming so that it creates as Earth-like planets as possible and it bugs me that lot of places are seemingly devoid of water.
You could add Hydrogen to the atmosphere and RP that every home has a water collector that takes the Hydrogen and Oxygen from the atmosphere and makes water out of it.
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Basically a moisture vaporator? Have any special kind of story in mind for that? :D
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You could add Hydrogen to the atmosphere and RP that every home has a water collector that takes the Hydrogen and Oxygen from the atmosphere and makes water out of it.
Hey, I know! We don't have enough water, so let's release hydrogen and oxygen into the atmosphere, and have people combine it on-site! And then, after the entire atmosphere explodes as soon as someone lights a match, we can ship in replacement colonists to take advantage of the water!
The flammability limit for hydrogen is 4% by volume, which translates to something like 0.3% by weight. And that's not very effective in terms of water processing. Even at that limit, you'd need to process something like 30 cubic meters of air for every liter of water you want. That's not as much as I thought, but I presume you'd want to stay well below the flammability limit. (All of this ignores loss of hydrogen into space, which is significant on geological timescales, but not, I think, on human/game ones.)
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Since 'water vapour' is one of the available terraforming gasses, I just pump that into atmospheres. But I too would love the ability to add or subtract a planet's hydrosphere, even if only in SM mod and the to no game mechanical purpose. It just bugs me to terraform a world to 0.0 but never be able to give it a hydrosphere.
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Steve, how would you measure the current progress of converting Aurora to C# in percentage?
I am still hyperexcited for it's release.
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Does this mean that C# Aurora's turn times take the same amount of time on turn one and turn 5813259? Does this mean that the game won't slow down the longer you play?
That is something I've always wanted the most of this game
pretty confident the answer to this is always going to be no
however later turns will have much less slow down
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pretty confident the answer to this is always going to be no
however later turns will have much less slow down
Steve answered my question long time ago fam so you're quite a bit late to the train
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Steve, how would you measure the current progress of converting Aurora to C# in percentage?
I am still hyperexcited for it's release.
5-10% maybe. Tactical Map and Class Design done. Working on economics at the moment, mainly for the pop window but this also helps the 5-day increment code as well.
Still a long way to go and my initial burst was due to 10 days off work. Still progressing when I can but free time is limited once again.
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Just fired up a new computer. Main display is 3440 x 1440 and secondary is 2560 x 1440. This is not going to help the quest for laptop play :)
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Laptops be damned, playing on three screens here. Now if you are able to fix the negative coordinates on window location I shall be a happy man!
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Maybe you can release a special version for NASA Control Center Houston. 32x5 Monitors, each with a 4K Display. ;) Just to be able to see everything...
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Laptops be damned, playing on three screens here. Now if you are able to fix the negative coordinates on window location I shall be a happy man!
That will be fixed in the C# version. It is a VB6 issue.
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Just fired up a new computer. Main display is 3440 x 1440 and secondary is 2560 x 1440. This is not going to help the quest for laptop play :)
Just remember most common Laptop resolution now is 1366x768
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Just posting to say that I'm super-excited for this, Steve--thank you so much for your time, effort, and interest! :)
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Quick Update. I now have the VB6 IDE (and VB6 Aurora) working on Windows 10 after a lot of messing about, so I should be back working on C# shortly. Development has been on hold lately due to getting the new PC up and running, plus work/social commitments.
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Quick Update. I now have the VB6 IDE (and VB6 Aurora) working on Windows 10 after a lot of messing about, so I should be back working on C# shortly. Development has been on hold lately due to getting the new PC up and running, plus work/social commitments.
Nice. And that's another reason I really like this c# rewrite. I'm always worried that modern OS won't run Aurora and old games/programs in general :P
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The first screenshot of the new Economics window. I've done quite a lot of work on the backend for this window but not much of the UI yet. Here is the summary tab - still a work in progress but enough to provide a good idea of the final version.
There are quite a few additional items of information, particularly in the new third column.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Economics01.PNG)
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Just remember most common Laptop resolution now is 1366x768
Also remember 20pixels is the taskbar and another dozen or so is the window title bar. So USABLE height for windows is closer to 740 pixels. All windows need to be able to be shrunk to this much on screen space. Having them scrollable to display more is great. But their on screen limit should support those numbers
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Also remember 20pixels is the taskbar and another dozen or so is the window title bar. So USABLE height for windows is closer to 740 pixels. All windows need to be able to be shrunk to this much on screen space. Having them scrollable to display more is great. But their on screen limit should support those numbers
The initial windows will be larger, probably around 1440x900. However, it will be a lot easier to create smaller alternative windows in C# than in VB6. My desktop (both monitors) is 6000x1440 so tiny windows would look very odd. I'll get the initial desktop version running first, then look at moving the controls around for smaller windows.
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Scrollable windows would do the job and not require things like the reduced height windows, I would imagine that to be less troublesome in C#
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Scrollable views would work perfectly. I dont care if i have to scroll. Right now anything off screen is just outright inaccessible though. And strangely enough the "Infinite Screen" utility seems to work on everything EXCEPT Aurora. Aurora windows just stand still while everything else shifts.
While not supporting such low resolution is an annoyance the game _IS_ outstanding in all other regards. I dont want to sound too negative =-)
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Sounds like you need to run infinite screen with admin privileges, that should fix it.
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Sounds like you need to run infinite screen with admin privileges, that should fix it.
UAC is disabled so that shouldnt be an issue. Will try it when I get a chance but thankfully for now I was given a friends damaged laptop and fixed it up. Now got a screen that supports the reduced window height mode (but still not full size). I can play properly at least.
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Been nearly a month since the last update.
Anything new and exciting?
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I hear he will have time to resume work soon, or something.
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I hear he will have time to resume work soontm, or something.
FTFY ;)
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Been nearly a month since the last update.
Anything new and exciting?
Not much - been working a little on industrial projects so I will put up a screenshot of that soon, probably this weekend. Progress has been slow due to work. I have a week off soon so should make more progress then.
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It's been awhile since I've been around here, but this C# version is to replace the VB6 branch, correct?
I imagine this'll make development quite a lot easier in the long term.
Although I won't lie, I had a nostalgic liking for the old school VB6 look :).
Best of luck to you Steve!
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Yeah, its going to replace it.
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It's been awhile since I've been around here, but this C# version is to replace the VB6 branch, correct?
I imagine this'll make development quite a lot easier in the long term.
Although I won't lie, I had a nostalgic liking for the old school VB6 look :).
Best of luck to you Steve!
Yes, it will replace and it will make development a lot easier. Each new window version makes it harder to continue with VB6.
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The Industry tab of the economics window. It's similar to the original except I have removed the fuel production and will add it to a different tab. I may also add an option here to see all production, not just for the selected pop.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Industry.PNG)
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I just found out about this yesterday, and I'm ecstatic, to put it frankly. This game has a lot of potential, and a version of it that's not written in VB6 is something to look forward to, indeed!
I have a question - Is the C# version going to take over for the VB6 version, and if that's the case, are you going to release the source code for the VB6 version?
Fixed my question so it wasn't redundant.
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I just found out about this yesterday, and I'm ecstatic, to put it frankly. This game has a lot of potential, and a version of it that's not written in VB6 is something to look forward to, indeed!
I have a question - Is the C# version going to take over for the VB6 version, and if that's the case, are you going to release the source code for the VB6 version?
look up 2 messages before yours
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look up 2 messages before yours
Whoopsie. Fixed my question.
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I just found out about this yesterday, and I'm ecstatic, to put it frankly. This game has a lot of potential, and a version of it that's not written in VB6 is something to look forward to, indeed!
I have a question - Is the C# version going to take over for the VB6 version, and if that's the case, are you going to release the source code for the VB6 version?
Fixed my question so it wasn't redundant.
No, I won't be releasing the VB6 source code.
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Can bright text/dark background be inverted?
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Can bright text/dark background be inverted?
Not at the moment but I should be able to add that as an option later.
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No, I won't be releasing the VB6 source code.
How many times have you been asked that? ;)
If only you got a dollar every time someone did...
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No screenshot but worth an update. I've now run a successful construction phase for industry, including producing installations, ordnance and fighters. This includes all factors affecting production, such as manufacturing efficiency (workers vs factories), economic modifiers such as wealth, availability of minerals and fuel, political status and unrest, radiation, etc.. It also includes assignment of fighters to fleets and carriers, allocation of ordnance, use of wealth, etc.. Also added is everything required to create new ships, including setting up all the ship values, determining fleet speeds, setting up NPR default orders, providing crew and calculating grade, etc, which will make things a lot faster once I get to shipyard production.
Next I'm going to add PDC and Orbital habitat construction then move on to mining and shipyards. More screenshots after that.
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Awesome.
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Will PDC's be changed or will they remain the same?
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Will PDC's be changed or will they remain the same?
For now, they are the same. If there are any major changes, I am going to wait until the rewrite is mainly done. That is, apart from anything fundamental. For example, I am already working with the assumption that populations are not tied to system bodies.
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For now, they are the same. If there are any major changes, I am going to wait until the rewrite is mainly done. That is, apart from anything fundamental. For example, I am already working with the assumption that populations are not tied to system bodies.
Does this mean that it would be possible to have deep space colonies, or orbital construction?
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Does this mean that it would be possible to have deep space colonies, or orbital construction?
Ultimately yes. They probably won't be in the first release but I trying to make sure they aren't difficult to add later.
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Ultimately yes. They probably won't be in the first release but I trying to make sure they aren't difficult to add later.
YAY! This means I can finally start working on trying to dyson swarm the Sol system instead of just rabidly colonizing everything.
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First screenshot of the Shipyard tab. Similar in function to the VB6 equivalent but with a lot more room to display the shipyard list. I've tried to be more space conscious for the upgrade and shipyard task sections, which allows for the extra room. The blank button on the bottom is a disabled "Refit Details" button. I'll show another screenshot where it is enabled.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Shipyards01.PNG)
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Another shipyard screenshot, this time with an Upgrade task selected.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Shipyards02.PNG)
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This shipyard tab screenshot shows the refit details section activated. This is toggled on/off by the Refit Details button and displays a breakdown of a proposed refit task.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Shipyards03.PNG)
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The new, much simpler, Select Names window. You can now select a name from any of the available Name Themes in a number of places within the program. The Class names and System names from the old Racial Themes are included as individual categories.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/SelectNames.PNG)
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Shipyard Tasks tab. Similar to VB6 version except more screen space due to new font and wider window. I've also adjusted the columns to move progress further to the right and used left justification for most columns to make it more readable
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/ShipyardTasks.PNG)
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I find these new screenshots very interesting. I like the improved usability and the additional informations they provide, especially the part about refits.
In my opinion, UI improvements are in the fact the things Aurora most needs to be more accessible and streamlined. So I'm very excited about this ;D
This is particularly true about TF. I think the TF screen could be hugely improved by having a way to see ALL the TF that are present in an empire. Maybe with a side panel filled on the left of the screen where they are listed?
Ideally, in this side panel they could be sorted either by function (all the military TF, all the fuel harvesters TF etc etc) and/or by command structure (HQ they are under). Maybe even by system? It would be cool to have all three and be able to switch between how they are sorted.
I think this would be invaluable in seeing at first glance all the TFs in a system, all the military TFs etc etc. A real usability improvement.
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The new, much simpler, Select Names window. You can now select a name from any of the available Name Themes in a number of places within the program. The Class names and System names from the old Racial Themes are included as individual categories.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/SelectNames.PNG)
Be really cool to be able to add names to themes right here :)
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A search box would be cool too.
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Be really cool to be able to add names to themes right here :)
And maybe add themes as well.
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Be really cool to be able to add names to themes right here :)
And maybe add themes as well.
I agree with both of these.
That said, these screenshots are gorgeous. This is absolutely wonderful, Steve.
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I just noticed that "Modifiers" tab, what's that for?
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I just noticed that "Modifiers" tab, what's that for?
Work in progress. I am thinking I might show all modifiers that apply to mines, factories, etc. I already have something similar on the Mining tab showing which modifiers apply to (separately) Mines, AM, CMC and orbital mines and their effect on mining rate.
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A milestone achieved !
Aurora C# just launched the first new ship from a shipyard as part of the normal construction phase. The ship can't move, shoot anything or use sensors but it does exist (at least until I close the program because saving isn't enabled yet) :)
Even so, this means everything that goes into ship construction in terms of production is now working. All the various modifiers (such as commanders, racial wealth, unrest, radiation, available workers, etc), the resources requirements plus fuel, supplies, ordnance are all accounted for, the crew from the available pool, putting into the correct fleet, changing speeds, etc.. Plus a portion of the construction phase is working; in fact, shipyard tasks (construction, repair, refit and scrapping), shipyard upgrades, industrial production and pop growth are all working properly now.
Getting there slowly but steadily :)
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As always, your work and effort are very much appreciated steve :)
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Shipbuilding Changes
I'm using this post as a placeholder to post any shipbuilding changes. So far the changes are:
1) You can't refit a damaged ship.
I am curious as to why you can no longer refit a damaged ship. In the wet navy it was a fairly common practice. Is it an accounting or programming reason?
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I guess to force you to fix it first, to avoid player getting "free" repair when refitting.
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I guess to force you to fix it first, to avoid player getting "free" repair when refitting.
Yes, that is the reason.
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Yes, that is the reason.
Honestly was it a free repair? I naively assumed the damaged system was junked for no return and the new upgraded system paid for in the refit. If other damaged systems are not replaced but repaired in the refit cannot the cost of their repair be added to the refit? It seems strange to repair a ship then refit it, or are you saying that damaged systems can be replaced in the refit but other damage remain untouched? Which seems fair.
Ian
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I've just replied to this on another thread where someone made the point it was be unrealistic to repair something before you replaced it. Perhaps it might be better to allow the refit but not repair any damage to components that remain in the new ship. Alternatively I could have a Refit & Repair task which combines the two.
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I guess a "refit and repair" would be best. Just have the game repair the ship first in the background, then refit directly. I mean, I know this is Aurora and all, but micro for micro's sake ain't good. :p
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I also vote for "refit and repair". The cost being of course the sum of the repair and the refit.
Having to do one then the other is really pointless micro...
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I also vote for "refit and repair". The cost being of course the sum of the repair and the refit.
Having to do one then the other is really pointless micro...
Ditto
Ian
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Seems like a good idea.
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Stupid question incoming : Is it possible to include SOUNDS in the C#Aurora ? You know like units acknowledge orders, warnings about detected missiles etc ?
That would be fun.
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I think having to repair the components before refitting them is such a rare case that it's not worth worrying about. I'd just go with whatever was simplest to code, myself ;)
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Stupid question incoming : Is it possible to include SOUNDS in the C#Aurora ? You know like units acknowledge orders, warnings about detected missiles etc ?
That would be fun.
Steve used to have the ability to play a *.wav file (particular to the officer) whenever an ship with an officer would get a command in SA. Not sure why he took it out - I always liked it, especially the "By your command" one.
John
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Steve used to have the ability to play a *.wav file (particular to the officer) whenever an ship with an officer would get a command in SA. Not sure why he took it out - I always liked it, especially the "By your command" one.
John
I can't even remember why I removed it. I also used to have a theme associated with each race that played when you selected it or opened the Race Details window. Wouldn't be difficult to add back in.
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Screenshots of the ground units tab. This first pair show the Japanese forces in 'population' view and then 'all units' view. Note the drop down next to the Transfer Local button. You can directly transfer ground units to other populations on the same planet, ground bases or ships in orbit. In this case a troop transport is top of the list and is showing its available capacity. if you try to move too many units, it will be loaded to capacity and the rest will not move.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/GroundCombat01.PNG)
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/GroundCombat02.PNG)
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These screenshots demonstrate the new multiple ground unit selection option in C# Aurora. This can be used for transferring units to other population or ships but will mainly be used to reassign units to new HQs. When assigning multiple units to an HQ, Aurora will work out the best arrangement (see the Changes List for more detail). In this case, one brigade HQ with four attached units is selected, a standalone brigade HQ and five standalone units. The Transfer button is pressed to transfer them all to the Division HQ. As part of the transfer process, Aurora attaches any standalone units to any available slots under a brigade HQ within the division (including HQ that are part of the same transfer). The second screenshot shows the result of the button click. One unit was not transferred because there were no available slots.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/GroundCombat03.PNG)
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/GroundCombat04.PNG)
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This is the new Ground Unit Training tab. While the layout is a little different, the main change is that units can be named before the task is created and renamed while the task is in progress. Also, low tech units will no longer be displayed as an option once mobile infantry has been researched.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/GUTraining.PNG)
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This is the new Ground Unit Training tab. While the layout is a little different, the main change is that units can be named before the task is created and renamed while the task is in progress. Also, low tech units will no longer be displayed as an option once mobile infantry has been researched.
Can we at least be allowed to build cadres directly? Or be able to convert existing TN units to cadres?
I still personally use low-tech units even after trans-newtonian ones are discovered, because they allow me to build the first few of a newly researched unit more quickly, and allow me to forego a lot of the production time and the decision of the type of a unit to a future date, when I'll need them.
Might also be worth making a cadre the size of a Marine Company for easy transport too.
Would be unfortunate to no longer be able to utilize cadres, honestly :(
If neither is considered, I'll probably just do Conventional Start games and make more low tech ground units than I'll ever need before researching TN units, I guess.
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Can we at least be allowed to build cadres directly? Or be able to convert existing TN units to cadres?
I still personally use low-tech units even after trans-newtonian ones are discovered, because they allow me to build the first few of a newly researched unit more quickly, and allow me to forego a lot of the production time and the decision of the type of a unit to a future date, when I'll need them.
Might also be worth making a cadre the size of a Marine Company for easy transport too.
Would be unfortunate to no longer be able to utilize cadres, honestly :(
If neither is considered, I'll probably just do Conventional Start games and make more low tech ground units than I'll ever need before researching TN units, I guess.
You will still be able to convert existing low tech units to cadres - you just won't be able to build new low tech units.
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I've updated the industry tab to include fuel refineries and maintenance facilities. The mineral requirements and maintained ships will be covered in a different tab.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/IndustryNew02.PNG)
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First screenshots of the mining tab. The major change is the addition of a detailed breakdown of mineral usage, plus I have included the modifiers for the different types of mining.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Mining01.PNG)
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Mining02.PNG)
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Is that monthly consumption?
e: Its worth noting I never figured out how to properly interpret usage in the previous versions either.
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Is that monthly consumption?
e: Its worth noting I never figured out how to properly interpret usage in the previous versions either.
It is all items in queues plus annual maintenance of ships in orbit.
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You will still be able to convert existing low tech units to cadres - you just won't be able to build new low tech units.
So if I have no more low-tech units, I will be unable to have any more cadres, in spite of the benefits associated? That's unfortunate :(
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This is the new Ground Unit Training tab. While the layout is a little different, the main change is that units can be named before the task is created and renamed while the task is in progress. Also, low tech units will no longer be displayed as an option once mobile infantry has been researched.
That's too bad; sometimes I keep building Low-Tech for RP reasons. (I did a planetary invasion with them once; it was really something. Technically twice but by the time that was over there were Transnewtonian Armor Divisions all over the place and Fiannese was a language for the most part spoken in hell. The world-ocean froze over, even.)
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So if I have no more low-tech units, I will be unable to have any more cadres, in spite of the benefits associated? That's unfortunate :(
What are the benefits? It costs 50% more to build low tech units than the build bonus from the cadre. It is faster and less expensive to just build the HT unit than build a LT unit, create a cadre and then build the HT unit.
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You can stockpile cadres before unlocking a new TN unit and then quickly produce a bunch of those units once you have the tech.
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You can stockpile cadres before unlocking a new TN unit and then quickly produce a bunch of those units once you have the tech.
Ah OK- so what you really need is not low tech units but an ability to part-build units before deciding how they will eventually be equipped?
It would be more realistic if I allow cadre production, as a way of partially training new units before equipping them with new technology.
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Exactly. Basically, preparing soldiers before you finish building the new exosuits.
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Ah OK- so what you really need is not low tech units but an ability to part-build units before deciding how they will eventually be equipped?
It would be more realistic if I allow cadre production, as a way of partially training new units before equipping them with new technology.
Please do so. It would be nice to have.
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Feel free to keep Conventional Division construction as an option, mind.
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No more screenshots but some progress. Mining (including civilian with tax / cost), fuel production, harvesters and maintenance production all working in the construction phase. Another few inches forward :)
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No more screenshots but some progress. Mining (including civilian with tax / cost), fuel production, harvesters and maintenance production all working in the construction phase. Another few inches forward :)
As they say, slow and steady wins the race :). I'm happy every time I see an update.
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The Wealth & Trade tab. Essentially identical to VB6 Aurora.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/WealthTrade.PNG)
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Is there an explanation of the details behind this somewhere? I never understood why "annual surplus" and "available for export" sometime differs and sometime not.
Also, it could be neat to link "Civilian Transport" to Civies ship construction somehow.
Edit: Never mind, I figured it out. The amount available for export/required for import increase each increment up to the annual level, and decrease when trade goods are received.
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I don't have a laptop but I could probably add some lines to show the resolution. At the moment, from the top of the tool bar to the the bottom of the sidebar is about 860 pixels. There will be a menu bar too, so probably about 900 high at the moment.
Now that its C#, you could always do some dynamic resizing of some elements, its especially useful for treeviews and charts.
Also, any chance we'll see some context menu stuff, eg. right click ground unit, go to assign, in the submenu (Which only lists divisions/battalions that are available to assign to) and click to assign
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I am playing around with colour themes. Here is an example of a black and white theme instead of the default dark blue / pale yellow. For now I just wanted to check how easy this was but I will add full functionality for different colour themes before release
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Theme01.PNG)
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Theme02.PNG)
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IMHO, this look much better and clearer too.
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Just for interest, this is a screenshot of the tactical map on my main monitor - 3440 x 1440 ultra widescreen. The screenshot may have a horizontal scrollbar in lower resolutions.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Ultrawide01.PNG)
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I am playing around with colour themes. Here is an example of a black and white theme instead of the default dark blue / pale yellow. For now I just wanted to check how easy this was but I will add full functionality for different colour themes before release
Is this just color functionality, or can we change those pictures at the top of the screen as well?
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Is this just color functionality, or can we change those pictures at the top of the screen as well?
Most likely just the color themes. But you never know, Steve may have multiple picture themes.
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I'm wondering the same myself, i had a thought about perhaps being able to set a background image inside different frames, obviously you wouldn't want something with high contrast that would interfere with text, but even a dull repeated texture might look better than a blank space. But maybe even actual pictures might look good.
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Oooh, the lighter themes seem much better. Though, if i may ask, could you do a theme of black and tan, like VB6 aurora? I've really come to love the aesthetic it bears.
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Like the black on white colour scheme. That is one hell of a lot of desktop real estate you have there Steve, may have to change my current triple monitor set up if you are going to make use of it!
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And I thought finally I can play aurora properly having just bought a full HD laptop, but now I need a couple of pairs of 8k monitors .
:P
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Nthing liking the white on black color scheme more.
Also, if anything ever gets me to buy a second monitor, it will probably be Aurora ;D
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First screenshot of the Research tab. The main improvements is integrating the research queue into the same list as the current research projects. I've also included more information on each project, such as the total modifier from scientist bonuses (including specialisation) and any research anomalies. Not all of the buttons will be enabled in every situation but I have left them enabled here just for the screenshot.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Research01.PNG)
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What happens if you have a project freeing some, but not enough labs? Could we have it so new labs go to a project in the queue even if it doesn't have enough labs to staff it fully? You could just display it as (Number of Current Lab)/(Assigned Number of Lab)/(Max Lab for Scientist) for each project.
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What happens if you have a project freeing some, but not enough labs? Could we have it so new labs go to a project in the queue even if it doesn't have enough labs to staff it fully? You could just display it as (Number of Current Lab)/(Assigned Number of Lab)/(Max Lab for Scientist) for each project.
The functionality is the same as VB6 Aurora. You choose a current project and a new tech. When that current project finishes, the same scientist takes on the new project with the same labs. In effect, you have a separate research queue for each scientist. Any adjustment in labs for the current project will be carried forward to the next project.
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I usually mete out research labs by tech category, so this is absolutely perfect for me. It will be so much easier to schedule development programs now. So hype.
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I noticed that current projects list the completion date while the queued projects list completion time instead. Perhaps it would be better to make them consistent, and add the option to display either the completion date or time until completion, depending on user preference.
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Having completion date for the project that haven't started yet would be hard since it'd depend on the project before them completing. Not sure it's worth it.
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The latest screenshot shows (estimated) completion times for queued projects already, so to convert it to completion date you would just add that time to the completion date for the first project that gives you your required number of labs.
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The latest screenshot shows (estimated) completion times for queued projects already, so to convert it to completion date you would just add that time to the completion date for the first project that gives you your required number of labs.
Might not be worth it looking so far ahead datewise, as growing research capacity, dying scientists, etc can make that very turbulent, at least in my opinion.
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I disagree completely, and hadn't noticed the lack of dates. It would help me a lot to have that.
I don't see why the information would be turbulent at all, unless you tried to look thirty years ahead or something. Generally my pool of scientists and labs is relatively stable over the course of any given decade. Labs get added to the pool yes, but showing completion dates would just help me hand them out so that all parts of the big grand project get completed at the same time. That coupled with the fact that scientists often last a good fifty years and my developmental programs last ten at most means it would be the best thing ever for me.
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Might not be worth it looking so far ahead datewise, as growing research capacity, dying scientists, etc can make that very turbulent, at least in my opinion.
Make clear that those dates are estimates, then? Just add an (est. ) to the end of the date?
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I wonder how soon can we see new weapon system. Currently I totally abandoned beam weapon tech and went for big missile ship who can launch 200 missiles in one salvo, or a fleet launch literally thousands of missiles in one broadside.
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Make clear that those dates are estimates, then? Just add an (est. ) to the end of the date?
If this was going to happen, every single completion date would have to be an estimate, as a million things can change the production rate of anything (minerals missing, improved construction rates, new governor, et cetera).
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Hello,
I didn't come around here for a long time. I played it on Windows when i was dualbooting, but now for almost 2 years i think, i'm using only Linux.
Will it work with Linux with the re-coded version ?
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Will it work with Linux with the re-coded version ?
The issue is that you'll need to have a Linux .NET environment, which I think is Mono. I haven't paid close attention to this, but looking at the Wikipedia page for Mono, it looks like it currently only goes up to .NET 4.0. Since Steve is probably on VS 2015 (which is at 4.6.1), there's a good chance that the Mono level won't be high enough. In addition, everyone I've ever talked to (admittedly not many) who's tried to run .NET apps on a flavor of unix has said the port isn't that robust.
So I'd be skeptical about it working on Linux. First, the .NET version Steve is using probably isn't supported. Second, I suspect the Linux libraries are going to be buggy.
John
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If this was going to happen, every single completion date would have to be an estimate, as a million things can change the production rate of anything (minerals missing, improved construction rates, new governor, et cetera).
I don't see the issue. That's how completion dates are calculated right now
Having a completion date, even as an estimate, for an entire production or research queue would be quite handy.
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I don't see the issue. That's how completion dates are calculated right now
Having a completion date, even as an estimate, for an entire production or research queue would be quite handy.
I'm not saying it's a problem to do it, I'm saying it's a waste of time to label it as an estimate, because all the completion dates are estimates.
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There's some ideas about improving battle performance, reducing micro-managing and making NPR more challenging.
What's the problem?
1.NPR don't know how to make "effective" missile design. Their missile tend to have fast fire rate (which means no alpha strike) and very long range (which means slow speed). So their ASM can't penetrate our defence, their AAM are only good at anti-ship work. And sometimes player will make beehive-like missile ship and launch thousands of missile, that do cause performance problem.
2.Beam weapon is crap. Their short range and uselessness against atmosphere made them almost completely useless, unless you both run out of missile.
3.Too much micro-managing in design, build and battle. It's annoying to arrange hundreds of missile launchers and magazines on big ships. It's even worse when you have to calculate how many components you should build in factory. It's terrible to arrange target in battle when you want to see the firework.
What's my solution? My idea is somehow WWII-like.
1. Make missile bigger and force NPR to use alpha strike. Think about WWII torpedo, a typical DD carries 4-8 launch tubes that can launch only once or twice (need half an hour to reload), a torpedo bomber carries one, and one torpedo is enough to sink CL or break DD into half. To make fewer and bigger missile effective, we have to remake point-defence mechanic, but I have no idea how.
2. I may prefer Legend of the Galactic Heroes style battle. Beam weapon could have much longer range (100-200m), lock on and fire at a battlegroup rather than a single ship , like what happens when you shoot bird flock with shotgun. Steve could introduce random distribution to decide which ship is hit. However, to avoid kiting with long range weapon, beam weapon range should not differ too much, and huge cannon need a long charge time. New tech could improve damage distribution or atmosphere penetration.
With random distribution of hit, shield will be very valuable, as we can't simply focusing all firepower on one ship to overcome it. But to avoid impenetratable shield, shield may not recharge in battle, or only recharge when turned off.
I thought Steve once said some problem in simulating beam more than 5-second. I can accept missile mechanic.
3. If Steve can't improve weapon system now, please at least do this. We do need a "weapon array" mechanic to pack fire control, launcher and magazine as one, and to pack all ship components as one. One weapon array will be like "1 missile fire control, 50 missile launchers, 5 missiles for each launcher" or "1 beam fire control, 6 laser cannon, 2 reactor". It will greatly benefit designers. Component package would have similar effect.
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2.Beam weapon is crap. Their short range and uselessness against atmosphere made them almost completely useless, unless you both run out of missile.
Disagreed there. The choice between missile and beam should not be made on purely tactical grounds, and it's a question that has plagued the designers of both real life aircraft and ships. For example, USAF fielded the F-102 Delta Dagger which had only missile armament. During Vietnam war, it was discovered that air-to-air combat still required an element of dog fighting and USAF pilots found to their horror that they often encountered situations where they would have need a gun. Similarly, almost all military ships include some sort of cannon or gun onboard, regardless of the reality of airplanes and missiles dominating naval combat for decades now.
So the choice is not only of tactical matters, but also of strategic and logistical ones. For missiles, you need supply ships and ordnance factories producing said missiles. For beams combatants, their logistic tail is much smaller - and regardless of the tactical situation, they will never run out of ammunition.
3.Too much micro-managing in design, build and battle. It's annoying to arrange hundreds of missile launchers and magazines on big ships. It's even worse when you have to calculate how many components you should build in factory. It's terrible to arrange target in battle when you want to see the firework.
You do not need to build any components in factories. If you want to maximize your output, you don't get to complain that there is too much micro-management involved. The shipyards will happily built your ships from scratch - if you want to speed up that process, then calculate the components required. If you don't want to calculate such things, then let the SYs do their job and accept the longer build times.
As for battle, you only need to assign missiles, weapons and fire controls once - they will remain as they were set up forever. Unless battle damage or the player changes them. There are buttons to copy assignments across a TG or even your entire race.
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As for battle, you only need to assign missiles, weapons and fire controls once - they will remain as they were set up forever. Unless battle damage or the player changes them. There are buttons to copy assignments across a TG or even your entire race.
I mean assign target. Imagine that you both have 100 ships in battle and then imagine how many fire controls you must control. For my typical design (100 launchers on ship, 4 mfc), there will be 400, and I can't simply use auto target as some mfcs would not be assigned correctly.
If you like micromanaging that much, it's personal. I don't.
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So the choice is not only of tactical matters, but also of strategic and logistical ones. For missiles, you need supply ships and ordnance factories producing said missiles. For beams combatants, their logistic tail is much smaller - and regardless of the tactical situation, they will never run out of ammunition.
While that is true, it does pose a major problem for NPR competitiveness as the AI is currently designed. Perhaps we can come up with a few tactics the AI could be programmed with to improve its "logistics war"? Achievable strategies that I can think of would include:
- sending obsolete warships ahead of the main fleet to use up missiles.
- damage sinks to be included with AI fleets, but might be tricky to get the AI to build the right balance of sinks to actual war ships?
- more use of raiders targeting resupply ships. Perhaps the AI could create stealthy ships to move behind enemy lines that only attack individual ships without active sensors? Again may be difficult to stop the aI wasting resources throwing ships against traveling warships or jump pickets.
- aggressive targeting of fuel harvesters wherever possible. It should at least be easy to guess where fuel harvesters are likely to be, but again problem is getting raiders past jump gate pickets.
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I mean assign target. Imagine that you both have 100 ships in battle and then imagine how many fire controls you must control. For my typical design (100 launchers on ship, 4 mfc), there will be 400, and I can't simply use auto target as some mfcs would not be assigned correctly.
If you like micromanaging that much, it's personal. I don't.
Splitting the fleet up into TGs can help a lot with that. Set up one ship of each class in each TG as the 'master', and manually set the FCs on it, then copy them over to the other ships in the TG.
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No specific time-frame - will depend on my level of enthusiasm but I hope months, not years.
Wb Steve!!!!
am really happy and hungry for news!
C-Aurora its like as "fresh beer cup"...:d am waitin for "C+JustDownload"..:D
;D
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No screenshots but a short update.
Research progress in the construction phase is done, as is auto-sharing of tech due to treaties, trade, etc..
Orbital Movement is virtually done. I ran a timed test for my current game, moving all system bodies, including moons, asteroids, etc (60,000 objects in 500 systems), plus moving all associated fleets, contacts, etc in orbit. It took slightly less than 0.1 seconds :)
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Steve
That sounds very promising on performance. Any sense on how long the same process was taking under vb6?
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No screenshots but a short update.
Research progress in the construction phase is done, as is auto-sharing of tech due to treaties, trade, etc..
Orbital Movement is virtually done. I ran a timed test for my current game, moving all system bodies, including moons, asteroids, etc (60,000 objects in 500 systems), plus moving all associated fleets, contacts, etc in orbit. It took slightly less than 0.1 seconds :)
For reference, how long would that take in VB Aurora?
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Woo, progress!
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Steve
That sounds very promising on performance. Any sense on how long the same process was taking under vb6?
I've switched asteroids on in the equivalent VB6 game and run the same portion of code. It required three minutes, 20 seconds :)
However, despite C# being 2000x faster for this section, it isn't just due to execution speed and holding everything in memory. Part of the reason is that I've coded it differently so that I keep track of what fleets/missiles/contacts I will need to move ahead of time, rather than checking it during orbital movement. When I originally wrote Aurora, I didn't realise how large it would eventually become so I didn't emphasis performance while coding. Now I am considering performance from the start and that alone makes a big difference.
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The future is looking bright for Aurora, I wonder what amazing new features could be added to slow the game back down again, anyone got some ideas?
More thoughtful AI perhaps? Realtime 3D graphics? Shaders? Er, maybe not.
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The future is looking bright for Aurora, I wonder what amazing new features could be added to slow the game back down again, anyone got some ideas?
More thoughtful AI perhaps? Realtime 3D graphics? Shaders? Er, maybe not.
More indepth economics and internal politics.
Battalions consisting of real soldiers which are recruited from the population. How many can be recruited is based of pop size, laws, government type, etc
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More indepth economics and internal politics.
Battalions consisting of real soldiers which are recruited from the population. How many can be recruited is based of pop size, laws, government type, etc
Absolutely needs name generation for every individual soldier.
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Absolutely needs name generation for every individual soldier.
No joke, I'd genuinely love that. Detailed casualty reports, watching individual notable soldiers rise up and so forth. Completely useless and overkill in anything other than a role play sense, but I'd still love it.
At the least though I would enjoy seeing pops depleted to accommodate military construction. Doesn't have to be 1-1, you can make the pop drained much higher than the battalion's actual combat force is, to account for the significant number of military non-combat positions behind the scenes in each unit.
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Absolutely needs name generation for every individual soldier.
YES! And every piece of equipement with its own stats and custom named. Not to mention the soldiers family tree which needs to be fully simulated.
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When I originally wrote Aurora, I didn't realise how large it would eventually become so I didn't emphasis performance while coding. Now I am considering performance from the start and that alone makes a big difference.
Sounds like the codebase was long overdue for some rewriting / refactoring! Awesome!
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That seems like an amazing speed improvement, especially given how large that test game must be by now. Seems like you will need to factor in some sort of delay functionality so that when you hit auto turns the game does not run away from you.
Seems to me that you could switch to one second ticks now and bring in a whole new range of fast firing weapons to take advantage of it....
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I wonder if one-second tick would boost or nerf energy weapons. Higher firing rate would be nice and helps against missiles, but then the range would be even more ridiculous.
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This is the Event Window. I am still playing around with it but the final window will look like something along these lines. It is very similar to the existing window. You can change the event colours and hide event types. The functionality is a little different as you can now just click any event and hide that type rather than scrolling through the list. You can override the hide flag by clicking the Show All Events checkbox. The colours are ones I just setup for the screenshot - you can use whatever colours you like for each event type and these are set by each race.
Rather than a number of events, you set the number of days into the past for which you wish to see events.
Also, there is a new dropdown for Event Category, which groups events into Production, Mining, Environment, Ships, Commanders, etc. so you can filter the view.
Events for the last two increments are taking place as I advance time in C# Aurora (as a lot of the population-related production/research code is complete). Everything earlier happening in VB6. The addition of this window will make the next stages easier as I can see what is happening in the game, rather than having to step through code.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/EventWindow02.PNG)
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Here is a quick update on what is complete so far
Tactical Map Display
Class Design
Class Window
Events Window
Select Names Window
Orbital Movement
Harvester Production
Wealth Production
Population Growth
Mining
Production by Construction Factories
Production by Ordnance Factories
Production by Fighter Factories
Ground Unit Training
Shipyard Upgrades
Shipyard Tasks
Fuel Production
Research
Maintenance Production
Trade Updates
Still a long way to go (not even started on movement, detection, system generation, AI, Fleet & Ship Windows, Commanders, etc.) but starting to make a noticeable dent in the task and I have laid a lot of ground work for some of the work ahead. Finding the time is still the greatest problem.
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Here is a quick update on what is complete so far
...
Still a long way to go (not even started on movement, detection, system generation, AI, Fleet & Ship Windows, Commanders, etc.) but starting to make a noticeable dent in the task and I have laid a lot of ground work for some of the work ahead. Finding the time is still the greatest problem.
Happy to see you active and passionate...:D
See ya in Facebook,old friend.
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Please enjoy a celebratory, imaginary beer on me in thanks of all your hard work so far.
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This looks great! Are you planning to add an option for resolutions here, because at the moment I need to hook up my laptop to my tv screen to enjoy this game ;D
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This is the first screenshot from the new Naval Organisation window. This window will replace the VB6 Task Group and Ship windows, plus several minor windows used for reporting of fuel, maintenance, etc. It is a work in progress but the screenshot below shows the sidebar plus the Ship List tab of the Fleets tab.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Fleets03.PNG)
Sidebar
Instead of the Task Forces and Task Groups in VB6 Aurora, C# Aurora takes an approach similar to the optional functionality of the VB6 Naval Organisation tab, albeit with much easier and more flexible UI. There are four primary components of Naval Organisation; Admin Commands, Fleets (VB6 Task Groups), Sub-Fleets and Ships. The Admin Commands in green and the sub-fleets in light blue are purely administrative constructs and don't appear on the tactical map.
Every race starts with a single top level Admin Command (which can't be deleted but can be renamed). All other Admin Commands descend in a tree from this one. You can only attach an Admin Command to another Admin Command but you can have an unlimited number of levels in the Admin Command hierarchy.
Fleets can only be attached to Admin Commands. Many fleets can be attached to a single Admin Command but each fleet can only be attached to one Admin Command
Sub-Fleets can only be attached to a Fleet, or to another sub-fleet. You can have an unlimited number of levels within the sub-fleet hierarchy. These are used to organise the ships within the larger fleets. Sub-fleets have no on-map function and all ships within the sub-fleet hierarchy move within the parent fleet.
A Ship can be attached to a Fleet or to a sub-fleet. When attached to a sub-fleet, it is still a member of the parent Fleet at the top of the sub-fleet hierarchy.
The sidebar tree has full drag and drop functionality so you can move Admin Commands, Fleets, Sub-Fleets and Ships around as long as the above rules are followed. You can also drag ships and sub-fleets between different fleets as long as they are in the same physical location. Entire sections of the tree can be moved with a single drag-drop. Also, you can open up multiple Fleet windows and drag and drop between the trees in two different windows.
You can detach a sub-fleet with a single click, at which point it becomes a full fleet in its own right. Any sub-fleets further down the sub-fleet hierarchy become sub-fleets of this new fleet.
I will create a 'join as sub-fleet' order so when one fleet joins another, its ships will automatically form a sub-fleet within the joined fleet, allowing them to subsequently detach as a whole unit.
There is still more work to do in this area, one item of which is to include a visual cue for when a fleet is out of range of its admin command. I will also add the option to display parasites, ground units or cargo within the tree.
Fleet Summary
When the Fleets tab is selected, the top portion displays a Fleet Summary, which in function is similar to the Class or Ship summaries. The current location and any orders are displayed on the top line, while the fleet commander and his bonuses are on line two. Line three displays any useful information for the fleet, such as speed (and max speed if moving more slowly), the protection value, weapon and sensor ranges, plus any special capabilities such as survey strength, mining, terraforming or fuel harvesting. These will only appear if their value is greater than zero. Line four shows capacity-related information, such as fuel storage, cargo storage, troop transport capacity, etc. plus the total size of the military hulls in the fleet. Line five shows default and conditional orders.
Ship List
The ship list that was previously show in the upper right of the VB6 Task Group window now has its own tab. With more space, more ships can be displayed and the individual ship commanders are shown in the right-most column (the fleet commander is shown in green). Ranks now have an associated abbreviation which can be changed by the player.
When a ship has a potential issue, such as low fuel, maintenance supplies or ordnance or shields are active but depleted or the deployment time has been exceeded, that rating for the ship is highlighted in either orange or red depending on severity. For example, when fuel falls below 40% capacity, it is highlighted in orange. Below 20% is highlighted in red.
Here are some more screenshots to demonstrate the Fleet Summary section. Note the detailed information on the first line regarding location and orders.When an object is referenced for location purposes, that will be the nearest jump point or planet.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Fleets04.PNG)
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Fleets05.PNG)
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Fleets06.PNG)
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Fleets07.PNG)
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This looks great! Are you planning to add an option for resolutions here, because at the moment I need to hook up my laptop to my tv screen to enjoy this game ;D
Initially it will be 1440 x 900 but it is a lot easier in C# than VB6 to create some smaller versions of windows, so I will tackle that once the game is otherwise complete.
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No joke, I'd genuinely love that. Detailed casualty reports, watching individual notable soldiers rise up and so forth. Completely useless and overkill in anything other than a role play sense, but I'd still love it.
At the least though I would enjoy seeing pops depleted to accommodate military construction. Doesn't have to be 1-1, you can make the pop drained much higher than the battalion's actual combat force is, to account for the significant number of military non-combat positions behind the scenes in each unit.
The population drain would be negligible anyway. Modern day army divisions (low-tech divisions in-game) only number about 10000 troops and it's stated that TN battalions are 10 times smaller than that and make up for lack of numbers with really fancy guns.
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Just to make sure, can you shift/control - click multiple ships to drag and drop the whole group at once? One of the main issues with my fighter based games was trying to organise hundreds of fighters across my multiple carriers in the naval organisation tab so that I could dock/undock them easily.
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As a side question: Are you using Forms or WPF (or something else)?
Thanks,
John
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Just to make sure, can you shift/control - click multiple ships to drag and drop the whole group at once? One of the main issues with my fighter based games was trying to organise hundreds of fighters across my multiple carriers in the naval organisation tab so that I could dock/undock them easily.
You can move individual nodes. If that node has a hierarchy below it, that will move too. So you could arrange fighters in sub-fleets (which you name squadrons) and then drag the whole sub-fleet at once. If you move a single admin command, you could be moving hundreds of ships in different fleets and sub-fleets. The issue with allowing ctrl-clicking is dealing with the complexities when you click multiple branches in multiple locations and include admin commands, fleets and ships. You still should be able to achieve what you need with the new system though.
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As a side question: Are you using Forms or WPF (or something else)?
Thanks,
John
Windows Forms. I have used WPF in the past and it is more flexible. However, Forms does everything I need and I am a lot more familiar with it. I'm always happy to go with the least complex solution that does the job :)
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Oh wow, the new naval organization system looks awesome! I used to organize my ships by squadrons; say, have a group consisting of Cruiser squadron 1 and destroyer squadrons 2 and 3, to make best use of jump ships supporting multiple non-jump ships; but that proved to be more trouble than it was worth. This looks like it would work perfectly for something like that. Any chance for a "squadron jump by sub-fleet" order or similar functionality?
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Oh wow, the new naval organization system looks awesome! I used to organize my ships by squadrons; say, have a group consisting of Cruiser squadron 1 and destroyer squadrons 2 and 3, to make best use of jump ships supporting multiple non-jump ships; but that proved to be more trouble than it was worth. This looks like it would work perfectly for something like that. Any chance for a "squadron jump by sub-fleet" order or similar functionality?
That shouldn't be too difficult and sounds like a good idea. They would emerge as separate fleets though because the jump would scatter the sub-fleets.
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Windows Forms. I have used WPF in the past and it is more flexible. However, Forms does everything I need and I am a lot more familiar with it. I'm always happy to go with the least complex solution that does the job :)
Thanks Steve. Yeah - the data binding stuff in WPF totally rocks, but I'm growing to hate XAML more and more as time goes by (difficult to debug when you get the syntax wrong, not well documented as to how the syntax works, and seems to favor hard-wired compile-time bindings rather than auto-generated bindings).
I was asking because I didn't remember seeing a tab control in Forms, but I just looked and there it was!
John
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Question on component features, are you planning for the more obscure/buried components to exist or otherwise hold placeholding entries in the C# version? For instance, absorption shields, hyperdrives, particle torpedoes, etc.
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Question on component features, are you planning for the more obscure/buried components to exist or otherwise hold placeholding entries in the C# version? For instance, absorption shields, hyperdrives, particle torpedoes, etc.
At the moment they are in the code but may not appear in the UI. Once the C# version is in place it will a lot easier to make changes than in VB6 so I will likely add more tech and more variety of aliens.
For example, I have a new concept in mind for the invaders. Rather than being wormholes and random ships, the Invaders will send several huge Base Ships, which act as the anchors for interstellar jump gates. The invasion will be conducted via these Base Ship locations using pre-planned waves (defenders, scouts, construction ships, warships, dreadnoughts, etc. ) and you will be able to end the invasion by destroying the Base Ships.
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For example, I have a new concept in mind for the invaders. Rather than being wormholes and random ships, the Invaders will send several huge Base Ships, which act as the anchors for interstellar jump gates. The invasion will be conducted via these Base Ship locations using pre-planned waves (defenders, scouts, construction ships, warships, dreadnoughts, etc. ) and you will be able to end the invasion by destroying the Base Ships.
That sounds good, however some mechanism should be in place to prevent cheap tactics, considering they are static targets. For example, very strong PD is a must to avoid cheap missile spam that overwhelms PD and just kills the bases with no or little effort. Same for fighters.
Said bases should be hard to kill no matter what the tactic and weapon used.
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That sounds good, however some mechanism should be in place to prevent cheap tactics, considering they are static targets. For example, very strong PD is a must to avoid cheap missile spam that overwhelms PD and just kills the bases with no or little effort. Same for fighters.
Said bases should be hard to kill no matter what the tactic and weapon used.
I do think I've made a suggestion that's oriented around protecting against massive salvos of unarmored missiles in one post or another..
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That shouldn't be too difficult and sounds like a good idea. They would emerge as separate fleets though because the jump would scatter the sub-fleets.
That would be great and would make big JP invasions easier to do for the player.
Also, that new OOB screenshot(s) made me salivate. The command structures that I will be creating!
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I still think the best way would be to have a limit on the number of (unguided?) missiles than can be handled by a fire control.
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Oh wow, the new naval organization system looks awesome! I used to organize my ships by squadrons; say, have a group consisting of Cruiser squadron 1 and destroyer squadrons 2 and 3, to make best use of jump ships supporting multiple non-jump ships; but that proved to be more trouble than it was worth. This looks like it would work perfectly for something like that. Any chance for a "squadron jump by sub-fleet" order or similar functionality?
That's exactly my problem, I have the same "doctrine", but moving such a fleet (and managing PD ships, that I like to keep as a separate task group, so no "final defense" option) quickly became a logistics nightmare. This looks like a great solution that allows to keep a relatively small base squadron size (I like 3 or 4 bigger ships, or up to 6 smaller) while being able to attach and detach them from a proper fleet on the fly. Will the PD in final defense configuration also extend to the whole fleet?
(BTW hello everyone, I've been lurking the forums for some time looking for answers and strategies, I just registered, also to say thanks to Steve, the game is really awesome!! Can't wait to play the new version! :D)
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That's exactly my problem, I have the same "doctrine", but moving such a fleet (and managing PD ships, that I like to keep as a separate task group, so no "final defense" option) quickly became a logistics nightmare. This looks like a great solution that allows to keep a relatively small base squadron size (I like 3 or 4 bigger ships, or up to 6 smaller) while being able to attach and detach them from a proper fleet on the fly. Will the PD in final defense configuration also extend to the whole fleet?
(BTW hello everyone, I've been lurking the forums for some time looking for answers and strategies, I just registered, also to say thanks to Steve, the game is really awesome!! Can't wait to play the new version! :D)
I haven't checked, recently, but in VB6 Aurora should have final fire apply from all PD ships to all targets that share a location.
I think i've also seen some comments here and there that suggest that it also allows final-fire to engage missiles that are engaging on ships within BFC and weapon range of the PD platform without sharing the location, though at diminished accuracy due to the range.
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I haven't checked, recently, but in VB6 Aurora should have final fire apply from all PD ships to all targets that share a location.
I think i've also seen some comments here and there that suggest that it also allows final-fire to engage missiles that are engaging on ships within BFC and weapon range of the PD platform without sharing the location, though at diminished accuracy due to the range.
I thought final fire was for that ship only. Sort of a last-ditch attempt. @Steve Walmsley?
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I thought final fire was for that ship only. Sort of a last-ditch attempt. @Steve Walmsley?
I remember there being an area PD mode, a Task Group wide PD mode, and a point blank self protect PD mode. Don't really have any warships in my only running game right now so can't confirm at the moment.
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Area Defence shoots at any missile inside BFC range if they "stop" in that increment - if they just pass through the area inside the 5 seconds, then they are ignored.
Final Fire shoots at all missiles about to hit any ship in the same location.
Final Fire (self) shoots only at missiles about to hit the shooting ship itself.
So if you have PD ships with very long range lasers, they can be used in Area Defence mode. Most PD is best to be kept at FF mode. If you have some PD in high value targets, those might be worth it to keep on FF(self) so that they save their shots to defend themselves.
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I thought final fire was for that ship only. Sort of a last-ditch attempt. @Steve Walmsley?
As said above, Ship-Only was Final Fire (Self) mode.
I was mainly positing that the mode which protected all ships on the same location (Final Fire) might've been able to behave similar to very close ships, based on conjecture i've heard around the forums, but I may be mistaken.
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As said above, Ship-Only was Final Fire (Self) mode.
I was mainly positing that the mode which protected all ships on the same location (Final Fire) might've been able to behave similar to very close ships, based on conjecture i've heard around the forums, but I may be mistaken.
I believe I've seen that (final PD apply for ships in a different location than the PD ships but still in their FC range) happen, although it's been a while since that fight.
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Area Defence shoots at any missile inside BFC range if they "stop" in that increment - if they just pass through the area inside the 5 seconds, then they are ignored.
Final Fire shoots at all missiles about to hit any ship in the same location.
Final Fire (self) shoots only at missiles about to hit the shooting ship itself.
So if you have PD ships with very long range lasers, they can be used in Area Defence mode. Most PD is best to be kept at FF mode. If you have some PD in high value targets, those might be worth it to keep on FF(self) so that they save their shots to defend themselves.
This is correct, except that Final Fire shoots at all missiles about to hit any ship within the range you specify (limited by the max range of the PD weapons).
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This is correct, except that Final Fire shoots at all missiles about to hit any ship within the range you specify (limited by the max range of the PD weapons).
Confirmed!
Makes long range point defense on the moon mildly tempting.
I know deferring things into anything but super-stacks of shooty doom is disadvantageous, but i still like the idea of how we can still get some protection from fire when we're not stacking everything into a indiscrete bunch.
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No screenshot but a big milestone.
The first successful movement order in C# Aurora was just completed. A small Argentine survey ship, the Rio Quequen, was assigned an order, moved across the 58 Eridani system, arrived at the correct destination and consumed fuel en route.
With the orders framework now in place (including the whole of the order creation process on the naval organisation window), I am working through the execution code for the various order types. While there is still a huge distance to go, I am getting closer to the point where it will be possible to start a test game.
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The Fleets Orders tab within the Fleets tab on the Naval Organization window. The first screenshot is a basic view showing the Sol system with the default settings. In VB6, all the various movement options, such as order delay, how many items to load, whether to load sub-units of HQs, were displayed all the time. In C# Aurora, those will appear along the bottom of the window only when needed for the specific order type. There are three potential views for the left-hand column - the normal destination view, a list of auto-route destinations (where the orders are calculated automatically) and Order Templates, which are sets of orders you create and store. These are all in VB6 Aurora but not displayed in this way.
With regards to auto-route destination, in VB6 these are restricted to populations, but I will add the option to have auto-route waypoints as well (you will see a list of populations, plus all auto-route waypoints you have established). This code isn't written yet so no screenshot.
BTW I've spotted the missing space in Remove Last but I am too lazy to recreate all these screenshots :)
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Orders01.PNG)
One of the odd things in VB6 Aurora was that when you show moons in the destination list, they can appear next to the wrong planet because planets with populations are excluded from the system body list. In C# Aurora, they are greyed out instead of not appearing, which makes things much clearer
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Orders02.PNG)
This screenshot shows planets turned off and fleets turned on. Fleets are now prefixed by FLT: to make the list easier to read. Civilian harvesters are also displayed (prefixed by CIV: ) so you can use them to refuel.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Orders03.PNG)
Here is a fleet that has received orders. The order list now shows the destination followed by the order. Any transits are shown in orange.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Orders04.PNG)
A fleet with troop transports picking up ground units. The whole third list is now replaced by the potential selections and will disappear once you use Add Move. Ground forces are shown with their formations to make selection easier.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Orders05.PNG)
There are no longer separate orders for each installation type. Instead, there is a Load Installation order that allows you to select which installation to pick up and also shows you the current number of installations. I have setup the code in C# Aurora to make it a lot easier to add new installation types and this new order is part of that process.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Orders06.PNG)
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Keep up the good work.
Despite all these years, there still hasn't been even an announcement of a game that could even begin to rival yours.
There's "Distant Worlds" but it's just a caricatyre, it doesn't allow anywhere near the freedom of design you would have in Aurora.
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I think it's about time for some more screenshots soon. How about an early Christmas gift for us in the form of a few Screenshots or update? :)
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I think it's about time for some more screenshots soon. How about an early Christmas gift for us in the form of a few Screenshots or update? :)
I've been working on mainly back-end code, movement orders and system generation recently. I've successfully tested the exploration of an unexplored jump point, although full system generation isn't done yet. Should be finished over Xmas though.
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"Sir the planets in this system are randomly popping in and out of existence"
"Ah smeg, guess the universe is still down for maintenance, everyone back to Sol"
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Hi Steve, just a simple question?
Is there any chance to see some graphic improvement on the ship icons on the map? For example, different icons for destroyers, battleship, cruiser... etc etc. instead of simple circles.
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Hi Steve, just a simple question?
Is there any chance to see some graphic improvement on the ship icons on the map? For example, different icons for destroyers, battleship, cruiser... etc etc. instead of simple circles.
As icons on map usually represent whole fleets and not just single ships id prefer to set icon type in fleet window.
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As icons on map usually represent whole fleets and not just single ships id prefer to set icon type in fleet window.
Being given the option to set ship icons for displaying in ship and task group overviews would be really nifty though.
For instance, showing the set icon in Class Design for a class, and displaying it in a task group overview in a corner somewhere as a block of icons of ships in the group.
Speaking of things, though, fighter wings would need their defined icons too as they break from TGs often.
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Being given the option to set ship icons for displaying in ship and task group overviews would be really nifty though.
For instance, showing the set icon in Class Design for a class, and displaying it in a task group overview in a corner somewhere as a block of icons of ships in the group.
Speaking of things, though, fighter wings would need their defined icons too as they break from TGs often.
A few years ago, when I made the first attempt to rewrite in C# (which didn't get very far), I added NATO icons for the fleets. When you zoomed out you couldn't really tell locations very well.
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=3011.msg29849#msg29849
Having said that, the planetary icons looked a lot better in that version :) I might revisit, although that was in WPF and this time I am in Forms (which is why I have made a lot more progress).
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A few years ago, when I made the first attempt to rewrite in C# (which didn't get very far), I added NATO icons for the fleets. When you zoomed out you couldn't really tell locations very well.
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=3011.msg29849#msg29849
Having said that, the planetary icons looked a lot better in that version :) I might revisit, although that was in WPF and this time I am in Forms (which is why I have made a lot more progress).
I was thinking just to small and simple icons which represents the "type" of task force (landing TF, transport, fighters, bombard TF etc etc).
It would also help the player to fast distinguish the TF on the map.
Also, planets and stars icons with different styles would be great.
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although that was in WPF and this time I am in Forms (which is why I have made a lot more progress).
LOL - my experience with WPF exactly!!!
I love the idea and implementation of binding automation behind WPF, but I always end up bogging down trying to reverse engineer syntax and/or debug the XAML. The fundamental problem I have is that it's magic code that the application executes on startup and that I don't have a way to step through in the debugger.
The last time (~6 months ago), I set up a system (from scratch) to automagically wrap "command" objects in javascript function calls by using reflection in 21 hours (I'd coded such a thing up previously in C++, so I knew the ideas to implement. That being said, the C++ implementation had taken months (I had to write a reflection engine in C++)) I then bogged down for a couple of days simply trying to open a WPF window from a non-WPF main application, at which point I got tired of the project and started playing Rule the Waves :) It seems like this always happens when I try to use WPF - the XAML is set up to make all the decisions at compile time, and if I try to make run time bindings (i.e. non-cut/paste coding), the system fights me.
John
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Here is the first screenshot of the new System View window. It isn't quite finished yet but given recent discussions on terraforming, max capacity and tide-locked planets, I think it is worth showing a progress update. This is a non-SM view. There are quite a few differences between this and the existing window, including:
1) You can select races as well as systems. If you change race, the same system will be displayed if the new race is aware of it
2) The current survey status is shown at the right-centre top.
3) The Star information lists the different types of system bodies associated with that star. Habitable is less than colony cost 2.0. Near Habitable is between colony cost 2.0 and 3.0 and is split between normal and low-grav.
4) There are no longer different tabs for different stars. You select a star to show its planetary system
5) The system body information has been changed to show all the key data without scrolling. Max population capacity is shown in the right-hand column.
6) Many more bodies can be colonised due to the new low-gravity infrastructure rules. Bodies with low gravity have LG after the colony cost.
7) Populations can be given names that are different to the system body (although that isn't on this screenshot because the Commonwealth pop hasn't been renamed).
8) Jump points are shown in the bottom left. You no longer have to visit a different tab.
9) The colony cost factors for the selected system body now include water availability, a modifier for low gravity and a flag for if the body can retain an atmosphere.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/SystemView01.PNG)
The second screenshot shows Sol in SM mode with Ceres selected. The various SM options are available, including exploring or modifying jump points, changing minerals or survey status and generating new systems. Every button you can see is functional with all the code behind it. System Generation is complete for both movement orders and for this window, except for generating new races. The Create Race button has not been added to this window yet for the same reason.
With Ceres selected you can see the colony cost for Acceptable Gravity of 1.00 LG. This means that even if you were to create perfectly habitable conditions the colony cost would never fall below 1.00 and you would need low gravity infrastructure to compensate. Although in this case the Atmosphere Retention is flagged as 'No' so you wouldn't be able to terraform it anyway. I'll post the updated terraforming rules separately once completed.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/SystemView02.PNG)
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Might be better if you remove the Atmosphere column and instead have it provide the atmospheric composition in a box down at the bottom next to the minerals box.You could also add the progress of any terraforming within that same box, if any is taking place. Or replace it with a smaller column that just provides a check/symbol if the atmosphere is breathable with the current species, not breathable, or no atmosphere present. I just think it might get a bit annoying if you have 5 or so planets with 4 to 8 different gasses present for whatever reason.
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Might be better if you remove the Atmosphere column and instead have it provide the atmospheric composition in a box down at the bottom next to the minerals box. You could also add the progress of any terraforming within that same box, if any is taking place. Or replace it with a smaller column that just provides a check/symbol if the atmosphere is breathable with the current species, not breathable, or no atmosphere present. I just think it might get a bit annoying if you have 5 or so planets with 4 to 8 different gasses present for whatever reason.
I'd basically agree - it might be better to use that screen real estate for something a bit more valuable to the player at a glance and have the full list of gasses somewhere else. Are tooltips a thing in this version? If so, you could have the gas mix readout showing in a tooltip.
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2 notes/suggestions:
- There appears to be no way to check at a glance if a planet has been surveyed (it is either "M" for mineral deposits or nothing, in the latter case it may be either surveyed or unsurveyed? not sure if I'm reading that correctly, but I see no "S" for surveyed as currently in VB6 Aurora)
- I'd really appreciate a way to tell if team-survey has been performed on a planet from this screen (either a button that hides those already team-surveyed or a simple addition to the survey column in form of a plus i.e. M+/S+ for planets both ship-surveyed and team-surveyed
Thanks for the great job you're doing! :)
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Might be better if you remove the Atmosphere column and instead have it provide the atmospheric composition in a box down at the bottom next to the minerals box.You could also add the progress of any terraforming within that same box, if any is taking place. Or replace it with a smaller column that just provides a check/symbol if the atmosphere is breathable with the current species, not breathable, or no atmosphere present. I just think it might get a bit annoying if you have 5 or so planets with 4 to 8 different gasses present for whatever reason.
I think I disagree. For me the mix of gases is one of the most important factors for picking colones. There's a huge difference in terraforming time based on exactly what you have in the atmosphere. I suppose a compromise might be abbreviating the gasses and putting them on the same line (so for Earth it could be N 79%, O (0.2) 20%, Ar 1%, AG 0.02%)? Or maybe a consolidated summary showing Oxygen pressure and Toxic pressure after the overall pressure?
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Might be better if you remove the Atmosphere column and instead have it provide the atmospheric composition in a box down at the bottom next to the minerals box.You could also add the progress of any terraforming within that same box, if any is taking place. Or replace it with a smaller column that just provides a check/symbol if the atmosphere is breathable with the current species, not breathable, or no atmosphere present. I just think it might get a bit annoying if you have 5 or so planets with 4 to 8 different gasses present for whatever reason.
I agree that the gases are not an ideal use of space. I tried putting it on one line using just the chemical symbols instead of the full name but it didn't look right. However, your suggestion made me realise that all you really need to know is the general mix of gases and the oxygen (breathable gas) content. So maybe there is a single line with two most common gases plus the oxygen atm. There is already a separate pressure column. For example, nitrogen-oxygen (0.06). For non-breathable atmospheres it could be nitrogen-methane for example, or maybe for certain worlds just a description, such as 'Venusian' for the high-pressure runaway greenhouse worlds. Then, as you suggested, the detail of exact percentages and any other gases could be shown below, along with the terraforming selection and the temperature calculation (essentially the environment information from the VB6 population window).
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2 notes/suggestions:
- There appears to be no way to check at a glance if a planet has been surveyed (it is either "M" for mineral deposits or nothing, in the latter case it may be either surveyed or unsurveyed? not sure if I'm reading that correctly, but I see no "S" for surveyed as currently in VB6 Aurora)
- I'd really appreciate a way to tell if team-survey has been performed on a planet from this screen (either a button that hides those already team-surveyed or a simple addition to the survey column in form of a plus i.e. M+/S+ for planets both ship-surveyed and team-surveyed
I can add an option to display 'U' for unsurveyed and an option to display 'T' for worlds that have been surveyed by a team ('MT' if they find minerals).
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I've made some changes to the system view based on feedback.
1) There are more options regarding flagging body surveys. You have the option to display 'U' for unsurveyed and an option to display 'T' for worlds that have been surveyed by a team ('MT' if they find minerals).
2) I've rearranged the colony cost, population and atmosphere columns to put pressure next to atmosphere.
3) The atmosphere column no longer shows details of each gas, with one gas per line. Instead, the basic type of atmosphere is shown on a single line. This display is either the main two gases, the main gas and oxygen (if oxygen is present and not the main gas) or 'Venusian' for those high pressure, high temperature worlds with a runaway greenhouse effect and a combination of carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide (open to suggestions for a different term than 'Venusian'). If oxygen is present, the oxygen pressure is shown.
4) Clicking on a body shows detailed atmospheric composition at the bottom of the window.
5) This section also shows the factors for the temperature calculation ( Surface Temperature (K) = Base Temp (K) * Greenhouse Factor * Albedo ) plus the base temp and surface temp in Kelvin and Celsius.
BTW for some reason the windows forms Listview control insists on changing the text colour of any selected row to the default for the control (see Mars below). This remove the indication colour (blue = habitable, etc) until that row is no longer selected. Very annoying and wasting a lot of time trying to fix it :). Any suggestions welcome.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/SystemView04.PNG)
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Another system view screenshot, this time showing Alpha Centauri. This demonstrates just how much more real estate is now available for colonization. Note in the star listing that Alpha Centauri-A has 2 habitable bodies (less than 2.0 CC) and 142 near-habitable (between 2.0 and 3.0 CC), many of which are asteroids. Colonisation is no longer about finding potential colony sites but rather judging which of the many options is most suitable. With the new capacity rules, there are likely to be more colonies, but smaller ones.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/SystemView06.PNG)
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Looks rather good.
However I do have one suggestion, one to help us "filter" possible colonies. Now that LG worlds are a thing, the list of possible planets to colonize is very long. So I would have one suggestion. Since most of those planets have extremely low population capacity, it would be nice to have a filter to only show possible colonies with population cap above a certain limit.
I don't know, 25 millions? 10 millions? Because when I see a planet with a max population capacity of 0.05, I'm not really interested in colonizing that. Except in extremely rare cases.
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it would be nice to have a filter to only show possible colonies with population cap above a certain limit.
How about a button with a text box, enter a number and all bodies with less than that max population are hidden, leave it blank and it just sorts every body based on max pop?
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How about a button with a text box, enter a number and all bodies with less than that max population are hidden, leave it blank and it just sorts every body based on max pop?
That is a possibility as well, just, there's not much space left on that screen so I'm not sure where it should be put.
Steve, a question if I may. I'm not knowledgeable in these things but... I can't help but notice how MANY of those bodies in the Alpha Centauri screenshot are tidal locked. Is that normal, or just a chance event? I thought it was a much more rare condition than that.
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Most of the shown objects in Alpha Centauri screen are moons. Most of the moons are tidally locked to their planet. I believe in Sol all large moons are tidally locked.
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Most of the shown objects in Alpha Centauri screen are moons. Most of the moons are tidally locked to their planet. I believe in Sol all large moons are tidally locked.
I was probably not clear in explaining, so sorry for that. I'm really not an expert in these things. I just documented myself on wikipedia and it says:
Most significant moons in the Solar System are tidally locked with their primaries, because they orbit very closely and tidal force increases rapidly (as a cubic function) with decreasing distance. Notable exceptions are the irregular outer satellites of the gas giants, which orbit much farther away than the large well-known moons.
So, since in that Alpha Centauri screenshot we have 4 moons orbiting over 8m kilomenters away from their gas giant and they're all tidal locked, I was wondering if it was just a chance thing or not.
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BTW for some reason the windows forms Listview control insists on changing the text colour of any selected row to the default for the control (see Mars below). This remove the indication colour (blue = habitable, etc) until that row is no longer selected. Very annoying and wasting a lot of time trying to fix it :). Any suggestions welcome.
I'm only just getting into VB myself, but is it possible to make the indicator a selection box instead of highlighting?
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Looks rather good.
However I do have one suggestion, one to help us "filter" possible colonies. Now that LG worlds are a thing, the list of possible planets to colonize is very long. So I would have one suggestion. Since most of those planets have extremely low population capacity, it would be nice to have a filter to only show possible colonies with population cap above a certain limit.
I don't know, 25 millions? 10 millions? Because when I see a planet with a max population capacity of 0.05, I'm not really interested in colonizing that. Except in extremely rare cases.
Something that would probably help a LOT would be to allow sorting on the columns. I would recommend the way Rule the Waves (and many others) do it - If you sort on column A, then column B, then column C, ties in C are resolved by keeping the previous "B" order; if "B" is also tied then they're resolved by the "A" order etc. This would allow you to e.g. allow you to sort on atmosphere type (Venusian vs oxy-nitro) with a sub-sort of population capacity. Note that this is helped a lot if the columns are arranged so that many of them have discrete values (e.g. Venusian vs oxy-nitro) as opposed to continuous "double" values. So for this to work well, the "(0.1)" in the atmosphere column should maybe be in a separate column, so that all oxy-nitros are tied.
Another game to play here would be to allow filtering of the list - select a bunch of rows and then push a button and everything else goes into a "hidden" state. That would let you hone in on optimal ranges on several "double" columns, e.g. first hide all low population cap bodies, then hide high pressure, then ....
John
John
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BTW for some reason the windows forms Listview control insists on changing the text colour of any selected row to the default for the control (see Mars below). This remove the indication colour (blue = habitable, etc) until that row is no longer selected. Very annoying and wasting a lot of time trying to fix it :). Any suggestions welcome.
parameterListView.Items[0].UseItemStyleForSubItems = false;
parameterListView.Items[0].SubItems[1].ForeColor = Color.Red;
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One thought on the gas mixture. It might be a good idea to fill the second gas slot with anything toxic instead of just the second gas.
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parameterListView.Items[0].UseItemStyleForSubItems = false;
parameterListView.Items[0].SubItems[1].ForeColor = Color.Red;
Yeah!! Thank you!
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LOL, its first time I see Belorusian spam-bot.
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LOL, its first time I see Belorusian spam-bot.
I assume that one of the spam posts that I deleted was in this thread. 'Cuz I don't think Steve has been taken over by a Belorussian spam version of skynet :)
John
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I assume that one of the spam posts that I deleted was in this thread. 'Cuz I don't think Steve has been taken over by a Belorussian spam version of skynet :)
John
Yep.
Smileys, Non-Unicode characters, and a pic of a building with Cyrillic signage.
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The Create New Race window. This is accessed via the System View window and allows you to create a brand new empire based on a selected system body. Compared to the VB6 version, there is a lot more information on the new race, the primary species and the starting population. The race parameters are generated randomly and the details are displayed on the window. All of the fields are editable and can be used to modify the racial setup. Flags and Images can be altered before the race is created. The Random Name button is used to generate random values for the race name and title.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/CreateRace001.PNG)
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I have an idea. In the current version of Aurora you need to activate designer mode in order to modify pregenerated races. If you want custom races at the start of a game you need to start with no races then add more after galaxy setup is complete.
However in most 4x games you can define AI races before game start, would it be possible to make the race details editable before galaxy generation?
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I have an idea. In the current version of Aurora you need to activate designer mode in order to modify pregenerated races. If you want custom races at the start of a game you need to start with no races then add more after galaxy setup is complete.
However in most 4x games you can define AI races before game start, would it be possible to make the race details editable before galaxy generation?
The problem will be that the species element of a new race is based on the home world. Without a home world, that element is unavailable.
What I will be adding though for C# Aurora is a lot of species with preset characteristics for a Grand Crusade style campaign, which can be generated on any planet within their habitable range. In the Grand Crusade scenario, the galaxy has been without jump points for a long period, so cut-off colonies have grown into major worlds. The same species will be found in multiple Empires, which may cooperate or fight with each other depending on the species. You will be able to flag those for inclusion in any player campaign.
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government type presets are kaput?
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government type presets are kaput?
For the moment. They adjusted the starting balance of various industrial installations and the species characteristics. I intend to add variety in other areas to replace that.
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For the moment. They adjusted the starting balance of various industrial installations and the species characteristics. I intend to add variety in other areas to replace that.
How will this affect an Earth based start with multiple NPRs on the home wolrd? I use the different government types to make a (small) difference between the NPRs on Earth. If they are all one starting race will all the NPRs on Earth be identical?
Ian
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How will this affect an Earth based start with multiple NPRs on the home wolrd? I use the different government types to make a (small) difference between the NPRs on Earth. If they are all one starting race will all the NPRs on Earth be identical?
Ian
The gov types just modified the species characteristics and balance between different installations. You have more flexibility now as you can modify these values directly.
In addition, they can now have differences in pop density, research rates, production rates, growth rates, etc. which were not available before. I also plan to add some species specialization for research. There will be other additions too once I start planning campaigns. In all, there should be a lot more diversity than before, not less.
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One possibly interesting racial characteristic that might be interesting could be crew 'size' and crew 'efficiency', for lack of better words.
Taking a current 'standard' race (so 100% crew size, 100% crew efficiency), lets say a ship takes 300 crew, and needs 1000 tons in crew quarters for this (totally arbitary numbers).
A race with 90% crew size would only need 900 tons in crew quarters, instead of the 1000 tons.
A race with 90% crew efficiency would need 333 crew instead of the 300.
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Along that note, it has always slightly bothered me that Aurora refers to "crew" and to population generally as if every unit was an individual. Sometimes I roleplay a blob with no real individual parts.
I'd prefer a term like "humanmass equivalents" or something.
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i'd like to specify all the gender pronouns my population uses. i am thinking about 20, maybe 24 to be on the safe side.
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Could it also please toast bread and paint my house?
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How about do my homework and chores?
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Can we please get back on topic?
I really want to hear how it is gonna clean my windows without leaving streaks.
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Birds arent going to like that.
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One possibly interesting racial characteristic that might be interesting could be crew 'size' and crew 'efficiency', for lack of better words.
Taking a current 'standard' race (so 100% crew size, 100% crew efficiency), lets say a ship takes 300 crew, and needs 1000 tons in crew quarters for this (totally arbitary numbers).
A race with 90% crew size would only need 900 tons in crew quarters, instead of the 1000 tons.
A race with 90% crew efficiency would need 333 crew instead of the 300.
I would prefer if this was technology dependent instead.
A modern Zumwalt class warship of ~15000 tons have a crew of 140 ( 1 man per 107 ton )
A WW2 Pensacola class warship of ~12000 tons had a crew of 1200 ( 1 man per 10 ton )
And I'm pretty sure our "race" has not evolved that much during the last 70 years in terms of efficiency, or what standards of crew compartments we except. Rather the other way around a crewman today probably expects alot better quarters and facilities then one did back during WW2.
Why not have a separate technology line called "crew automation", or even have specific automation techs reducing crew needs of each research area, by offloading administrative or repetitive work to computers/automation?
It could also be interesting to swap between 2, 3 and 4 shift (12,8 or 6 hours per day "on duty" station respectively), since this would impact morale and crew needed.
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Hell I would like to see the option to have crewless ships completely. (Granted I just fluffed all my ships as being crewless anyway, even though the game forced me to have crews)
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I would prefer if this was technology dependent instead.
A modern Zumwalt class warship of ~15000 tons have a crew of 140 ( 1 man per 107 ton )
A WW2 Pensacola class warship of ~12000 tons had a crew of 1200 ( 1 man per 10 ton )
And I'm pretty sure our "race" has not evolved that much during the last 70 years in terms of efficiency, or what standards of crew compartments we except. Rather the other way around a crewman today probably expects alot better quarters and facilities then one did back during WW2.
Why not have a separate technology line called "crew automation", or even have specific automation techs reducing crew needs of each research area, by offloading administrative or repetitive work to computers/automation?
It could also be interesting to swap between 2, 3 and 4 shift (12,8 or 6 hours per day "on duty" station respectively), since this would impact morale and crew needed.
Except that the Pensacola and Zumwalt classes don't necessarily assign different amounts of space per crewman. The crew quarters stat provided in Aurora is specifically about how much space/weight of the ship is dedicated to the crew's comfort. The order of a magnitude difference between weight available to each crewman is a deceptive one and should be taken instead as various bits of ship equipment taking up comparatively more weight and space due to increased size of the weapon systems and other equipment while improved automation and control systems means less need for manual handling of equipment and that the ship can be controlled with fewer people.
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I'd agree, would be great to see a tech line that reduced the crew requirements of weapon systems and equipment etc. Perhaps have it as a drop down option in the design screen with a corresponding adjustment to costs of that piece of kit. Can then way up having ships with small crew but expensive v larger crews to manage and train but cheaper.
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Hell I would like to see the option to have crewless ships completely. (Granted I just fluffed all my ships as being crewless anyway, even though the game forced me to have crews)
Maybe even haivng a "robotic/computer" species where the ship is the crew. Bonuses would be not needing crew, and by extension deployment time is largely irrelevant. Drawbacks would be maintenance and repair/damage control is far more difficult as there is no crew (except some repair droids and whatnot).
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I would prefer if this was technology dependent instead.
A modern Zumwalt class warship of ~15000 tons have a crew of 140 ( 1 man per 107 ton )
A WW2 Pensacola class warship of ~12000 tons had a crew of 1200 ( 1 man per 10 ton )
And I'm pretty sure our "race" has not evolved that much during the last 70 years in terms of efficiency, or what standards of crew compartments we except. Rather the other way around a crewman today probably expects alot better quarters and facilities then one did back during WW2.
Why not have a separate technology line called "crew automation", or even have specific automation techs reducing crew needs of each research area, by offloading administrative or repetitive work to computers/automation?
It could also be interesting to swap between 2, 3 and 4 shift (12,8 or 6 hours per day "on duty" station respectively), since this would impact morale and crew needed.
I doubt Aurora ships start at WW2 levels of automation or that every bunk always has somebody sleeping in for 8 hours. And most of the crew's likely already people watching over automated systems and maintaining them rather than manual control.
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there's been numerous space-1889 style playthroughs, where TN materials are discovered with relatively primitive technology. And Steve's C# aurora campaign seems to be warhammer-40k. Lots of reasons for poorly automated ships :^)
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So my battleships built and launched in 2025 are going to need thousand slaves to load in railgun shells and thousands doing calculations by hand before my empire discovers basic mechanics and electronics? That's not exactly appreciable.
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So my battleships built and launched in 2025 are going to need thousand slaves to load in railgun shells and thousands doing calculations by hand before my empire discovers basic mechanics and electronics? That's not exactly appreciable.
Hush now. Back onto the engine hand crank you go.
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You have not prayed to the omnisiah hard enough.
Remember that the crew module stats are not just only volume and mass for comfort and recreation but also food and potable drinking water life support, toilet paper
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One should never enter combat without the requisite amount of loo roll onboard.
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Ffs, back in my day we didn't even have artificial gravity toilets. We had to make do with a plastic bag with a single finger glove built into it.
-Buzz Aldrin 2025 (That guy's still alive? Holy frakk)
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I doubt Aurora ships start at WW2 levels of automation or that every bunk always has somebody sleeping in for 8 hours. And most of the crew's likely already people watching over automated systems and maintaining them rather than manual control.
I never claimed it would. It was intended to show a trend that automation keeps increasing.
Why do you think this trend would suddenly end? With more advanced technology more and more things can be offloaded and automated.
Some Sci-fi games like Eve online even have a single person piloting a Battleship or a Titan alone...
Spaceships do have alot in common with submarines ( where even the most modern ones have shared bunks ), so I tend to imagine shared bunks are used at least on my Spaceships on <1 year missions.
Perhaps have it as a drop down option in the design screen with a corresponding adjustment to costs of that piece of kit. Can then way up having ships with small crew but expensive v larger crews to manage and train but cheaper.
That would be pretty awesome. Have the automation and reduced crew increase cost, so that it's a trade-off. Brilliant!
Remember that the crew module stats are not just only volume and mass for comfort and recreation but also food and potable drinking water life support, toilet paper
Well more advanced technology also means that such things can be miniaturized and be made more efficient. Say for example a Star Trek food replicator seems way more efficient then refrigeration of tons of food for long duration missions.
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I never claimed it would. It was intended to show a trend that automation keeps increasing.
Why do you think this trend would suddenly end? With more advanced technology more and more things can be offloaded and automated.
Some Sci-fi games like Eve online even have a single person piloting a Battleship or a Titan alone...
Actually? No they don't. While Capsuleers greatly decrease crew requirements it's only about 10%, so even those tiny frigates require crew beyond the Capsuleer.
Spaceships do have alot in common with submarines ( where even the most modern ones have shared bunks ), so I tend to imagine shared bunks are used at least on my Spaceships on <1 year missions.
That would be pretty awesome. Have the automation and reduced crew increase cost, so that it's a trade-off. Brilliant!
This would only really work out if you are required to pay for your crew. You don't. You pay upkeep for your ground units but ships in travel expend only fuel. There is a ship maintenance header under the wealth tab, but that's for operating your maintenance facilities. Crew and officers are not actually paid, directly or otherwise. You could also increase mineral cost and weight of parts that are working with greater automation, but in that case you are basically creating the same ships at a premium for automation, losing capabilities that could otherwise be used.
Well more advanced technology also means that such things can be miniaturized and be made more efficient. Say for example a Star Trek food replicator seems way more efficient then refrigeration of tons of food for long duration missions.
Depends on required feedstock and energy efficiency.
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I never claimed it would. It was intended to show a trend that automation keeps increasing.
Why do you think this trend would suddenly end? With more advanced technology more and more things can be offloaded and automated.
I never claimed this trend would end either. And as I said, most of the crew on an Aurora ship's probably already more involved into making sure everything runs fine rather than running things themselves. You can't just get rid of that kind of people and hope no problem ever arises.
Some Sci-fi games like Eve online even have a single person piloting a Battleship or a Titan alone...
Only special ops frigates and shuttles are actually only piloted by the capsuleer alone. Even T1 frigates have a small crew ontop of the capsuleer, while battleships have several thousands in crew and titans have several dozens thousands in crew. And that's with a capsuleer, ships without need even more.
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Interesting thought along the automation/crew reduction line of thought - cost was brought up as one factor, but another interesting impact of having more 'hands on deck' as it were (ie either reduced automation or deliberate overcrewing) would be boarding resistance, and could also be some kind of modifier to damage control. On the other hand, automated vessels would probably be more susceptible to microwave weapons, or even electronic attack/cyberwarfare...
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Spaceships do have alot in common with submarines ( where even the most modern ones have shared bunks ), so I tend to imagine shared bunks are used at least on my Spaceships on <1 year missions.
There's one very important thing they don't have in common with submarines. A submarine has to have the same density as water. A spaceship does not. This is a major volume constraint on the submarine.
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There's one very important thing they don't have in common with submarines. A submarine has to have the same density as water. A spaceship does not. This is a major volume constraint on the submarine.
Also, submarines can crack water through electrolysis for more water, spaceships can't do that unless they harvest it from things like comets or gas giants or such. Or the occasional planet that has water/ice.
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Actually? No they don't. While Capsuleers greatly decrease crew requirements it's only about 10%, so even those tiny frigates require crew beyond the Capsuleer.
Only special ops frigates and shuttles are actually only piloted by the capsuleer alone. Even T1 frigates have a small crew ontop of the capsuleer, while battleships have several thousands in crew and titans have several dozens thousands in crew. And that's with a capsuleer, ships without need even more.
My point was that you control the Battleship or Titan 100% yourself. The crew is irrelevant and only "tacked on" as story fluff to explain away why your ships have tons of atmospheric looking windows and and give you some feeling of the battles being more epic...
Game mechanic wise, the crew don't control a single function of the ship, you as the player control all of it yourself, you don't give any orders and wait for them to be carried out, all is controlled via your interface directly with the ship. Not even damage control is boosted by your "crew" but by nano robots that repair your ships...
The crew in Eve is not important, hadly even mentioned anywhere. You never interact with them or manage them in any way at all, you don't pay them anything either, nor do they take casualties that need to be replaced when your ship take damage. The game basicaly ignores crew to such a degree that 90% of the players that didn't bother to read lore in depth didn't even realize there is a crew. :P
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My point was that you control the Battleship or Titan 100% yourself. The crew is irrelevant and only "tacked on" as story fluff to explain away why your ships have tons of atmospheric looking windows and and give you some feeling of the battles being more epic...
Game mechanic wise, the crew don't control a single function of the ship, you as the player control all of it yourself, you don't give any orders and wait for them to be carried out, all is controlled via your interface directly with the ship. Not even damage control is boosted by your "crew" but by nano robots that repair your ships...
The crew in Eve is not important, hadly even mentioned anywhere. You never interact with them or manage them in any way at all, you don't pay them anything either, nor do they take casualties that need to be replaced when your ship take damage. The game basicaly ignores crew to such a degree that 90% of the players that didn't bother to read lore in depth didn't even realize there is a crew. :P
That's very much an irrelevant non-point as I alone order my ships to fire in Aurora, too, the crew is irrelevant in this, so are the all the officers. They're fancy little bonuses, just like tacking modules on an EvE ship.
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My point was that you control the Battleship or Titan 100% yourself. The crew is irrelevant and only "tacked on" as story fluff to explain away why your ships have tons of atmospheric looking windows and and give you some feeling of the battles being more epic...
Game mechanic wise, the crew don't control a single function of the ship, you as the player control all of it yourself, you don't give any orders and wait for them to be carried out, all is controlled via your interface directly with the ship. Not even damage control is boosted by your "crew" but by nano robots that repair your ships...
The crew in Eve is not important, hadly even mentioned anywhere. You never interact with them or manage them in any way at all, you don't pay them anything either, nor do they take casualties that need to be replaced when your ship take damage. The game basicaly ignores crew to such a degree that 90% of the players that didn't bother to read lore in depth didn't even realize there is a crew. :P
Man those ships in World of Warships are well automated. I can do everything I need to do for the game from the interface and there's not a single shred of otherwise necessary management that would not improve my enjoyment of the game in evidence.
I've no idea where all those lengthy lists of casualties in naval battles come from for the First and Second World War, since the ships are self evidently not crewed at all.
/sarcasm.
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That's very much an irrelevant non-point as I alone order my ships to fire in Aurora, too, the crew is irrelevant in this
An interesting point. What if the crew was not only tracked, but casualties beyond certain points make systems start loosing efficiency and losses beyond other points make other systems useless as they're unmanned. When out of combat (repaired via damage control) you could spread your remaining crew out to man all the systems (or all essential systems excluding weapons/FC) at the cost of much higher maintenance failure chances. Maybe a way to track this is to have crew types (gunners, engineers, general, etc).
so are the all the officers.
Not completely true. While Aurora doesn't track second officers, engineering chiefs, etc, the main officers do have purposes in providing those slight bonuses to get that extra little edge out of your ships.
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That's very much an irrelevant non-point as I alone order my ships to fire in Aurora, too, the crew is irrelevant in this, so are the all the officers. They're fancy little bonuses, just like tacking modules on an EvE ship.
You should try a ship in Aurora with 0/500 crew alive then... Let me know how well it works out for you!!!
Man those ships in World of Warships are well automated
No, that's just an arcade game, very much unlike Aurora or Eve which both strife to be "realistic" (within Sci-Fi bounds), so the manner of control is totally irrelevant.
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Also, submarines can crack water through electrolysis for more water, spaceships can't do that unless they harvest it from things like comets or gas giants or such. Or the occasional planet that has water/ice.
They don't crack water through electrolysis for water, they do it for oxygen. (Well, nuke boats do. Diesel boats don't.) There are lots of differences between the two, and I could go on at length about them. I was just pointing out why submarines usually use hot-bunking and spaceships shouldn't be expected to.
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There's one very important thing they don't have in common with submarines. A submarine has to have the same density as water. A spaceship does not. This is a major volume constraint on the submarine.
Density isn't really a constraint on the volume of a submaring- ballast is relatively cheap and easy to put into the design. The constraint on volume in that case is the cost and practicality of designing and manufacturing the pressure vessel holding it all. In a (real) spaceship, the constraint on volume is the mass of the structure containing it and the fuel necessary to accelerate the whole shebang, along with the engines needed to produce the required acceleration.
Mike
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Having crew automation levels vary by tech sounds like it adds complexity to the system without much in the way of appreciable gameplay benefit.
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Or difference. I suppose it would make you less susceptible to meson weapons.
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Density isn't really a constraint on the volume of a submaring- ballast is relatively cheap and easy to put into the design. The constraint on volume in that case is the cost and practicality of designing and manufacturing the pressure vessel holding it all. In a (real) spaceship, the constraint on volume is the mass of the structure containing it and the fuel necessary to accelerate the whole shebang, along with the engines needed to produce the required acceleration.
Mike
It very much is a constraint, as any book which even tangentially touches on submarine design will tell you. Making the submarine bigger makes it slower, noisier, and more expensive. A submarine's resistance is volume-dominated, in a way that a surface ship's isn't. There is a definite reason why submarines still hot-bunk and surface warships don't.
Spacecraft volume is much cheaper to add relative to submarines, because the structure is much lighter, and doesn't add extra resistance on top of that. I'd be surprised to see hot-bunking on spacecraft.
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It very much is a constraint, as any book which even tangentially touches on submarine design will tell you. Making the submarine bigger makes it slower, noisier, and more expensive. A submarine's resistance is volume-dominated, in a way that a surface ship's isn't. There is a definite reason why submarines still hot-bunk and surface warships don't.
Spacecraft volume is much cheaper to add relative to submarines, because the structure is much lighter, and doesn't add extra resistance on top of that. I'd be surprised to see hot-bunking on spacecraft.
While I generally agree with you Byron I see a few qualifications. The main one is that in Aurora at least jump drives create hard (if artificial) limits on mass. In those terms volume isn't an issue, but mass is. In fact if you're a ship designer with a strict mass limit (to match fleet jump drives) then you're going to have to be very strict on unnecessary items like extra beds that might force you to leave that extra shield generator off the design.
The other is that heavy armor plating in Aurora is quite expensive, and that scales with volume. I suppose the same is true for surface ships but they can at least use belt armor rather full armor, something I don't think you could do on a star ship. So I could see lightly armored carriers having plenty of space for extravagant crew quarters, but a massively armored jump cruiser hot-bunking.
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you could do belt armor on a space ship. You would need to orient yourself so that your armor belt is perpendicular to who is shooting at you. This sucks if you're facing fires from multiple vectors. Though that would suck without Belt armor too.
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They don't crack water through electrolysis for water, they do it for oxygen. (Well, nuke boats do. Diesel boats don't. ) There are lots of differences between the two, and I could go on at length about them. I was just pointing out why submarines usually use hot-bunking and spaceships shouldn't be expected to.
Thank you, I meant oxygen, yes.
It very much is a constraint, as any book which even tangentially touches on submarine design will tell you. Making the submarine bigger makes it slower, noisier, and more expensive. A submarine's resistance is volume-dominated, in a way that a surface ship's isn't. There is a definite reason why submarines still hot-bunk and surface warships don't.
Spacecraft volume is much cheaper to add relative to submarines, because the structure is much lighter, and doesn't add extra resistance on top of that. I'd be surprised to see hot-bunking on spacecraft.
I agree resistance isn't necessarily a factor for spaceships, however I'd still expect spaceships to hot-bunk on military ships, at least for the lowest ranking. Besides tradition. Simply put, regardless of how advanced, military ships are going to devote as little cubage and mass as possible to crew in order to devote as much as possible to the rest of the bits that make a warship a warship. Not to say that as miniaturization doesn't improve there isn't room to make it more comfortable, but in order to maximize possible usefulness it is not the highest priority.
More cubage (volume) means more exterior area to protect (armor/shields), makes it more visible (easier to see on sensors), and provides more surface to impact (easier to hit). More cubage often translates to some amount of more mass as well, which makes a ship harder to accelerate and maneuver.
That said, of course more commercially oriented spaceships will devote more of that to crew needs, it's the nature of things. More need to keep the crew happy (or they quit, at least in the real world rather than a game), a small amount of additional volume and mass are relatively inconsequential for a ship that's already very large (think freighter, tanker, etc).
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Interestingly enough, game mechanics screw around with this. There's a standard amount of space every crewmember can expect depending on how long the design is meant to be deployed, and it grows fast enough that there's no way that you won't eventually end up with full on separate rules for each crewmember as length of expected deployment increases.
But this doesn't matter for civilian designs. Who check length of deployment and how this affects crew morale, yes, but do not get drawbacks for exceeding it. So you can leave them with an absolute minimum of deployment time, but if you try that with your military ships you get issues.
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While I generally agree with you Byron I see a few qualifications. The main one is that in Aurora at least jump drives create hard (if artificial) limits on mass. In those terms volume isn't an issue, but mass is. In fact if you're a ship designer with a strict mass limit (to match fleet jump drives) then you're going to have to be very strict on unnecessary items like extra beds that might force you to leave that extra shield generator off the design.
Even on the most constrained of the treaty battleships (built under rules quite similar to the ones you see in Aurora), the SoDaks, they didn't hot bunk during the war, and that was with a lot more crew than they designed for. They did put hammocks everywhere, but there was enough space to avoid the problem. And those ships are seriously cramped. I was rather startled by how small Alabama felt compared to Iowa. They'll find the mass if it improves crew performance enough.
The other is that heavy armor plating in Aurora is quite expensive, and that scales with volume. I suppose the same is true for surface ships but they can at least use belt armor rather full armor, something I don't think you could do on a star ship. So I could see lightly armored carriers having plenty of space for extravagant crew quarters, but a massively armored jump cruiser hot-bunking.
This is more a quirk of the Aurora armor model than anything. If the model was more sophisticated, you could only armor the bits that are important to fighting the ship, not the crew quarters.
(The belt is only part of a battleship armor scheme, and not the most important one by the end of that era. The actual phrase you're looking for is all-or-nothing armor (http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-070.htm).)
you could do belt armor on a space ship. You would need to orient yourself so that your armor belt is perpendicular to who is shooting at you. This sucks if you're facing fires from multiple vectors. Though that would suck without Belt armor too.
I'd use 'faceplate armor' to describe that, and expect it will exist in space. Mass is too precious to armor everything. This was also true of battleships (see link above).
I agree resistance isn't necessarily a factor for spaceships, however I'd still expect spaceships to hot-bunk on military ships, at least for the lowest ranking. Besides tradition.
What tradition? Traditionally, submariners hot-bunk, but nobody else does, except maybe on small boats.
Simply put, regardless of how advanced, military ships are going to devote as little cubage and mass as possible to crew in order to devote as much as possible to the rest of the bits that make a warship a warship. Not to say that as miniaturization doesn't improve there isn't room to make it more comfortable, but in order to maximize possible usefulness it is not the highest priority.
This fails the history test. Nobody during the age of treaty battleships (when the British and Americans, at least, were nearly as mass-limited as we are in Aurora) made the crew hot-bunk to save space and weight. Hot-bunking does carry morale penalties, and for everything except submarines, they're just not worth it.
(Also, I personally expect spaceships to be much more automated than Aurora portrays them as, so the cost of crew is pretty low relative to the whole ship.)
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I'd use 'faceplate armor' to describe that, and expect it will exist in space. Mass is too precious to armor everything. This was also true of battleships.
Maybe "front-load armor" would be an even better term/description.
Also, I personally expect spaceships to be much more automated than Aurora portrays them as, so the cost of crew is pretty low relative to the whole ship.
Agreed. However, you could also argue that the increased crew count also takes into account mechanics, mission specialists, and system specialists that come aboard and not just the crewmen, gunners, commanders, and engineers.
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Maybe "front-load armor" would be an even better term/description.
Faceplate is the standard in the hard space warfare community.
Agreed. However, you could also argue that the increased crew count also takes into account mechanics, mission specialists, and system specialists that come aboard and not just the crewmen, gunners, commanders, and engineers.
No, even counting them, I think that Aurora ships are over-crewed. Modern wet navy ships have big crews because of damage control requirements. But fires in space are pretty easy to control (hint: let all the air out) and spacecraft don't sink. The prime job of real-life damage control is not to put the ship back in action, but to keep it from sinking. That doesn't apply in space.
The fact that you have a large crew means you need to keep them busy. That means that lots of things which would be pretty trivial to automate haven't been automated, although this is changing. Also, it's not really feasible to have someone run around tightening bolts on a fusion rocket. The place where you're most likely to have problems is the life-support system. Reduce the crew, reduce the amount of life-support needed, and the number of crewmen needed to keep it working.
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This is more a quirk of the Aurora armor model than anything. If the model was more sophisticated, you could only armor the bits that are important to fighting the ship, not the crew quarters.
(The belt is only part of a battleship armor scheme, and not the most important one by the end of that era. The actual phrase you're looking for is all-or-nothing armor. )
Yes and no. With spaceships you can get fire coming from basically any angle, possibly. Yes, some is more likely than others, but then we need to consider _where_ the crew quarters and other such low armor areas are physically located on the ship, as well as what's on either side and if that needs to be armored up heavily. And what happens if the crew quarters is penetrated, explosives can cause over-pressure so now you need to heavily armor the bulkheads and other such interior above what you might need to rather than having (relatively) even all or nothing armor around the outside of the ship.
Then we also need to consider, are the engines/exhaust such that they can't be armored, or armored as heavily? How can we protect them?
For the sake of a game. . . generally, not something to be modeled. Unless you're very masochistic.
What tradition? Traditionally, submariners hot-bunk, but nobody else does, except maybe on small boats.
So, I think I was mixing some (aside from submarines) thoughts in my head with 4-high bunk stacks vs hot-bunking. The former is common, even on larger ships (although the largest may not be quite so bad), while the later is either emergency or extremely small vessels/submarines.
Going back to the armor, unless something produces impenetrable bands (e. g. Honorverse), then armor probably needs to be all-or-nothing. Maybe concentrating somewhat forward instead of aft if you have a nimble vessel with forward oriented weaponry (say, spinal weapons). But now we need to take into account positioning of weapons, armor, impact of weapons fire (as well as type), ability to turn quickly (or not) of the vessel, etc.
As I said, generally not something in most games I'd be concerned with. It's fun to discuss and imagine though :)
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Then we also need to consider, are the engines/exhaust such that they can't be armored, or armored as heavily? How can we protect them?
There are types of engines that can be completely internal as they are reactionless. One example is gravity based drives (almost a spot on equivalent to the one in Aurora). Another is a magnetically based one, and another is a non-ftl warp drive. Some sci-fi universes go really weird with quantum entangled drives and whatnot. The point is that not all engines need an exhaust to propel the ship in space.
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Uh, sorry if sound a bit rude but... this 4 pages long discussion on crew reduction and armor bands, wouldn't it be better to move it to its own thread? Rather than the screenshots comment thread.
Because it has nothing to do, directly, with screenshots...
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Yes and no. With spaceships you can get fire coming from basically any angle, possibly.
Yes, and I expect that different types of ships would have different armoring schemes to deal with that possibility. For instance, the belt armor of battleships was designed based on a 90 degree target angle (shooter is directly abeam) while that of cruisers was based on a 60 degree target angle (shooter is 30 degrees fore or aft of abeam). This meant that cruisers had relatively lighter belt armor, because of the increased obliquity of their belts in the analysis. The Aurora equivalent would be a scout with armor only directly aft vs a cruiser with armor both aft and forward, and maybe a bit on the sides.
Yes, some is more likely than others, but then we need to consider _where_ the crew quarters and other such low armor areas are physically located on the ship, as well as what's on either side and if that needs to be armored up heavily. And what happens if the crew quarters is penetrated, explosives can cause over-pressure so now you need to heavily armor the bulkheads and other such interior above what you might need to rather than having (relatively) even all or nothing armor around the outside of the ship.
Unlikely, but possible. The exact sizes of the various parts are going to play a big role in this.
For the sake of a game. . . generally, not something to be modeled. Unless you're very masochistic.
I'm an engineer who reads textbooks on warship design for fun. Yes, I am that masochistic.
So, I think I was mixing some (aside from submarines) thoughts in my head with 4-high bunk stacks vs hot-bunking. The former is common, even on larger ships (although the largest may not be quite so bad), while the later is either emergency or extremely small vessels/submarines.
Most racks these days are 3-high coffin racks. If the deck isn't that tall, then they remove the coffin lockers and give the occupants more stand-up lockers instead. But at least on Iowa, all of the non-chief enlisted quarters have 3-highs. (They're more comfortable than you think, although tricky to get in and out of. Also, if you aren't paying attention, it's easy to gash your head.)
Going back to the armor, unless something produces impenetrable bands (e. g. Honorverse), then armor probably needs to be all-or-nothing. Maybe concentrating somewhat forward instead of aft if you have a nimble vessel with forward oriented weaponry (say, spinal weapons). But now we need to take into account positioning of weapons, armor, impact of weapons fire (as well as type), ability to turn quickly (or not) of the vessel, etc.
All-or-nothing isn't quite the same as having directionalized armor, but I generally agree with you.
Uh, sorry if sound a bit rude but... this 4 pages long discussion on crew reduction and armor bands, wouldn't it be better to move it to its own thread? Rather than the screenshots comment thread.
Because it has nothing to do, directly, with screenshots...
The admins may or may not bother. This happens a lot here.
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Uh, sorry if sound a bit rude but... this 4 pages long discussion on crew reduction and armor bands, wouldn't it be better to move it to its own thread? Rather than the screenshots comment thread.
Because it has nothing to do, directly, with screenshots...
The admins may or may not bother. This happens a lot here.
I'm pretty sure that Zincat was trying to politely call "thread drift/hijack" - he's been on the board enough to know that "This happens a lot here".
On "The admins may or may not bother", two things:
1) I (and I suspect Erik) try to defer to the community and wait until someone actually requests a thread split rather than unilaterally doing it.
2) It's a pain in the rear to do the split, and I'm always worried that I'll end up deleting someone's (or all of the) content, so it's not something I'm real keen to do. It would be much better for me (and I suspect Erik) if the community managed the issue itself.
So here's a request/proposal for everyone:
When you see yourself getting ready to contribute to a drifting/hijacked thread (for example after 4-5 posts on a topic), please unilaterally open up a new thread with cross reference - something like "I've noticed this thread is starting to drift, so I've started a new one [link]" (and a corresponding link at the start of the new thread).
Given the number of times that Zincat's post has already been thanked and the fact that this happens a lot, I think a lot of people will appreciate this, myself (and I suspect Erik :) ) included.
As for this thread, frankly I quail at the prospect of going through and splitting this one out. If someone really wants me to I'll do it, but for the moment I'd rather be lazy and leave it as it is :)
Thanks,
John
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Technically this long line of discussion did branch out from a change to C# aurora. It just evolved rapidly.
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It very much is a constraint, as any book which even tangentially touches on submarine design will tell you. Making the submarine bigger makes it slower, noisier, and more expensive. A submarine's resistance is volume-dominated, in a way that a surface ship's isn't. There is a definite reason why submarines still hot-bunk and surface warships don't.
Spacecraft volume is much cheaper to add relative to submarines, because the structure is much lighter, and doesn't add extra resistance on top of that. I'd be surprised to see hot-bunking on spacecraft.
There seems to be some miscommunication here - I never said that volume wasn't a constraint on submarine design. I said that DENSITY (or mass, to be more precise) wasn't a constraint upon that volume, since it is relatively easy to adjust the overall mass by the addition or removal of ballast to ensure that the mass falls within the required range. Submarine internal fittings aren't generally built to save mass, and doing so would allow mass to be reduced, while adding ballast would both increase density and allow the design "trim" to be fine tuned as necessary.
By the way, you don't see hot bunking on spacecraft, but that is probably more due to the fact that they don't have bunks - there isn't room because they can't afford the mass or volume. Mercury, Gemini and Apollo crews slept at their duty stations. In the ISS, crewmembers use sleeping bags strapped to various surfaces throughout the station.
Mike
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There seems to be some miscommunication here - I never said that volume wasn't a constraint on submarine design. I said that DENSITY (or mass, to be more precise) wasn't a constraint upon that volume, since it is relatively easy to adjust the overall mass by the addition or removal of ballast to ensure that the mass falls within the required range. Submarine internal fittings aren't generally built to save mass, and doing so would allow mass to be reduced, while adding ballast would both increase density and allow the design "trim" to be fine tuned as necessary.
By the way, you don't see hot bunking on spacecraft, but that is probably more due to the fact that they don't have bunks - there isn't room because they can't afford the mass or volume. Mercury, Gemini and Apollo crews slept at their duty stations. In the ISS, crewmembers use sleeping bags strapped to various surfaces throughout the station.
Mike
Remember even the RN WW1 BBs did not use bunks but hammocks so did not use hot bunking and I am not sure the KGV class didn't use hammocks. The Whitby class frigates used hammocks in some messes at least until their 1968 refit and the County class GMD Fife when refitted as a training ship had one mess using hammocks.
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There seems to be some miscommunication here - I never said that volume wasn't a constraint on submarine design. I said that DENSITY (or mass, to be more precise) wasn't a constraint upon that volume, since it is relatively easy to adjust the overall mass by the addition or removal of ballast to ensure that the mass falls within the required range.
I'm slightly confused here. Yes, ballast is helpful, but it's weight and volume you're spending money on and hauling around that you don't strictly need. In practice, ballast is mostly there to provide margin for future systems to be installed.
Submarine internal fittings aren't generally built to save mass, and doing so would allow mass to be reduced, while adding ballast would both increase density and allow the design "trim" to be fine tuned as necessary.
Of course submarine fittings aren't built to reduce mass. There's no particular reason to do that. So long as the lightweight bunk and the normal bunk are the same size, spending extra money on the lightweight bunk just buys you a tiny bit of extra margin for future growth. It doesn't make the submarine smaller or lighter.
By the way, you don't see hot bunking on spacecraft, but that is probably more due to the fact that they don't have bunks - there isn't room because they can't afford the mass or volume. Mercury, Gemini and Apollo crews slept at their duty stations. In the ISS, crewmembers use sleeping bags strapped to various surfaces throughout the station.
This isn't particularly relevant. Modern spacecraft are horribly mass-limited. The ones in Aurora aren't. And having some degree of privacy is very important to long-term psychological health. NASA recognizes this, and planned Mars missions usually have much better crew quarters than ISS. (Which was originally supposed to have private rooms, but that module was cancelled.)
Remember even the RN WW1 BBs did not use bunks but hammocks so did not use hot bunking and I am not sure the KGV class didn't use hammocks. The Whitby class frigates used hammocks in some messes at least until their 1968 refit and the County class GMD Fife when refitted as a training ship had one mess using hammocks.
The RN was at least 30 years behind the USN in shipboard habitability during that era. They came up with justifications for it, but in practice, it was just them being stubborn. Hammocks may not technically be hot-bunking, but if one watch takes their hammocks down, and another puts theirs up on the same hooks a few minutes later, it comes to the same thing. The space is re-used, even if the bedding isn't.
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The RN was at least 30 years behind the USN in shipboard habitability during that era. They came up with justifications for it, but in practice, it was just them being stubborn. Hammocks may not technically be hot-bunking, but if one watch takes their hammocks down, and another puts theirs up on the same hooks a few minutes later, it comes to the same thing. The space is re-used, even if the bedding isn't.
Everyone I have talked to who have used hammocks said they were much more comfortable in rough weather than a bunk. The principle problem was getting into them if one had visited the local hostelries that evening. ;D From a spacecraft perspective a netting hammock makes sense if your mess is in a weightless part of the ship. It would also allow the mess to be repurposed easily and quickly. Thus it depends on your tech, if you have artificial gravity its probably bunks, if its centrifugal force it can be both, if your ship has no way of generating artificial gravity then the hammock is preferable (see international space station).
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Everyone I have talked to who have used hammocks said they were much more comfortable in rough weather than a bunk. The principle problem was getting into them if one had visited the local hostelries that evening. ;D From a spacecraft perspective a netting hammock makes sense if your mess is in a weightless part of the ship. It would also allow the mess to be repurposed easily and quickly. Thus it depends on your tech, if you have artificial gravity its probably bunks, if its centrifugal force it can be both, if your ship has no way of generating artificial gravity then the hammock is preferable (see international space station).
It's not just hammocks vs bunks that was the issue. The use of the mess decks for birthing is a bad idea, which the RN has dropped, and the USN dropped pre-WWI. It's also a social space, and where people eat their meals. This is not particularly good, as when you have weird watch schedules, you have multiple people in the same space at the same time doing different things. The RN's galley facilities weren't as good, either, and in some classes (I believe the Flowers were prominent among their number) the mess was separated by an open walkway from the galley. That meant the food was soaked with freezing seawater before it got to the men. That would have been totally unacceptable to the USN. USN sanitary facilities were likewise much better. Give people birthing separate from the mess, regardless of what sort of things they're sleeping in.
(Also, we're in space, so rough weather doesn't exist.)
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It's not just hammocks vs bunks that was the issue. The use of the mess decks for birthing is a bad idea
I think I would definitely agree with you here, although this could be more of problem now mixed crews are more prevalent :)
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I think I would definitely agree with you here, although this could be more of problem now mixed crews are more prevalent :)
I think if you told the RN of WW2 about the idea of sending women aboard warships, they'd probably have died of heart attacks.
I did do some reading on the issue, and D.K. Brown, in Nelson to Vanguard, is not complimentary towards the British. On bunks v hammocks:
It was also claimed that hammocks were more comfortable than bunks in rough weather, though there was no obvious desire amongst officers, most of whom had used hammocks, to give up their bunks
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I think if you told the RN of WW2 about the idea of sending women aboard warships, they'd probably have died of heart attacks.
I was referring to 'birthing vs 'berthing' :)
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I was referring to 'birthing vs 'berthing' :)
They must resist the pelvic sorcery for the greater good.
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A minor update to the Fleet window tree view. Each Admin command now displays the required rank to be assigned to that command. The required rank is one rank higher than the most senior subordinate fleet commander or the most senior officer running a subordinate admin command. You can check the officers in the subordinate fleets by clicking on them.
For example, one of the colony fleets assigned to Colony Command has a Commander (CMDR) as it's C.O. so the Admin Command requires a Captain (CPT). Frontier Fleet requires a Rear-Admiral, as one of its subordinate fleets is commanded by a Commodore, which means the Battle Fleet (which is a higher Admin Command) needs a Vice-Admiral and the highest Admin Command (Commonwealth Navy) needs an Admiral.
With this requirement in mind, I will be creating the ability to assign minimum and maximum ranks for every ship (so you can ensure freighters are only commanded by the lowest rank for example). This should lead to much more realistic command structures.
I haven't completely decided on how the admin commands will work but at the moment I am leaning towards:
- Admin Commands will have a type, that will allow that Admin Command to share certain bonuses from its commander (Survey from a Survey Admin Command, Logistics from a Logistics Admin Command, etc.)
- There will be a new installation called Naval Command Headquarters (or something similar) which can have levels in the same way as a Sector Command. These will be transportable by freighters.
- Each Admin Command will be assigned to a population with an NCH and its reach will be dependent on the level of that NCH (same rules as sector commands - probably with bonuses for certain Admin Command types such as Survey)
- If the physical building is destroyed, there will be a chance for any officers running Admin Commands from its location to be killed. The Admin Commands themselves will have to relocate.
- The reach will be counted in transits and every subordinate fleet or admin command in reach will be given the benefit from that command
- The benefit will likely be on the lines of a sector command, so providing one quarter of the Admin Command C.O.'s bonus.
- This can stack, so a survey ship would get a quarter of the bonus from the immediate superior admin command and a sixteenth of the bonus from the one above that.
- If two Admin Commands are providing bonuses, the immediate superior command would have to be in range of the ship and the higher command would have to be in range of the lower command. This will create an administrative network reaching out from fleet headquarters and will require defences to protect the administrative nodes.
However, all of this is optional and not using Admin Commands will not cause any issues (beyond the loss of the potential bonuses).
This type of complex hierarchy for providing bonuses and realistic command structures is a benefit of C# and the much faster execution speed.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/AdminCommands.PNG)
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Is there an easy possibility to rank the Admin Commands in priority for which ones will have COs assigned? For example I'd want the Battle Fleet to have the best captains and commanders (per ship priority) than the Home fleet that's still half in dry-dock.
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Did you explain this new command structure earlier, Steve? I think I did not grasp the idea from your last post - so would love to read a more detailed explanation.
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Could we get Admin Command modules for ships, as well as the ashore commands? It would be nice if, for instance, I was able to put my survey headquarters aboard a mobile platform, instead of having to haul it around in freighters.
Also, it would be very helpful to be able to make ships accept commanders that didn't have crew training as an option. Freighters, tankers, and the like should be able to pull COs based on logistics bonus instead of crew training.
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Did you explain this new command structure earlier, Steve? I think I did not grasp the idea from your last post - so would love to read a more detailed explanation.
It is in the C# Changes List:
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg97344#msg97344
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Could we get Admin Command modules for ships, as well as the ashore commands? It would be nice if, for instance, I was able to put my survey headquarters aboard a mobile platform, instead of having to haul it around in freighters.
Also, it would be very helpful to be able to make ships accept commanders that didn't have crew training as an option. Freighters, tankers, and the like should be able to pull COs based on logistics bonus instead of crew training.
The module is trickier as it can change systems during an increment (although I guess that is also true for the ships that benefit), plus I wanted to represent a major HQ with associated infrastructure. At the moment I plan to set admin command bonuses at the start of each increment rather than re-calculate everything at any point it is needed. That is much simpler and faster, without much downside in realism.
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Is there an easy possibility to rank the Admin Commands in priority for which ones will have COs assigned? For example I'd want the Battle Fleet to have the best captains and commanders (per ship priority) than the Home fleet that's still half in dry-dock.
Do you mean, set an admin command with a flag so that any ships in fleets subordinate to that admin command have a lower priority for commander assignment?
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The module is trickier as it can change systems during an increment (although I guess that is also true for the ships that benefit), plus I wanted to represent a major HQ with associated infrastructure. At the moment I plan to set admin command bonuses at the start of each increment rather than re-calculate everything at any point it is needed. That is much simpler and faster, without much downside in realism.
So just assume that the bonuses are persistent during the increment, which solves the moving ship problem entirely. The HQ did the planning for the whole increment, so it makes sense for it to stick even if the ship moves out of range.
As for the size of the facility, I was thinking of something more like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Blue_Ridge_%28LCC-19%29 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Blue_Ridge_%28LCC-19%29) than the current flag bridges. Almost everything can be built in space-based form in C#, and it seems weird that fleet command facilities would be an exception.
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You could do a lot of things with an elite formation marker. Better crew. Maintenance priority. Fueling priority (?). First priority on munitions if you reload a mixed group....
Or vice versa, a slovenly reserve formation whose ships have a 50/50 chance of leaving orbit... :P
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The module is trickier as it can change systems during an increment (although I guess that is also true for the ships that benefit), plus I wanted to represent a major HQ with associated infrastructure. At the moment I plan to set admin command bonuses at the start of each increment rather than re-calculate everything at any point it is needed. That is much simpler and faster, without much downside in realism.
Have you considered recalculating the admin command bonuses only when they are changed?
Unless I am missing something it sounds like recalculating the command bonuses on each increment will most of the time result in same bonus as from the previous increment. This is of course still a lot better then computing the bonus from scratch when ever it is needed (potentially many times in an increment) but it still seems to be doing a lot of redundant work.
Is there a reason that bonuses can't just be updated when their inputs are changed (i.e. ship changes system, officer assignment is changed or officer has skill set revised)?
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Have you considered recalculating the admin command bonuses only when they are changed?
Unless I am missing something it sounds like recalculating the command bonuses on each increment will most of the time result in same bonus as from the previous increment. This is of course still a lot better then computing the bonus from scratch when ever it is needed (potentially many times in an increment) but it still seems to be doing a lot of redundant work.
Is there a reason that bonuses can't just be updated when their inputs are changed (i.e. ship changes system, officer assignment is changed or officer has skill set revised)?
I need to compute the bonus benefit for the ships/commands in range, not the parent admin command itself. This is likely to change very often. Given there could be a lot of ships in range, it will probably be easier to apply the bonuses automatically than to check when they need to be changed. It will be fast either way though - all this is happening in memory.
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Do you mean, set an admin command with a flag so that any ships in fleets subordinate to that admin command have a lower priority for commander assignment?
Yes or another number rank number like on ship classes. Just a thought to save officer assignment effort. Not mission critical.
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Is there an easy possibility to rank the Admin Commands in priority for which ones will have COs assigned? For example I'd want the Battle Fleet to have the best captains and commanders (per ship priority) than the Home fleet that's still half in dry-dock.
Given that different officers have different bonuses, perhaps set preferred bonus types for different Classes of ships? And then each Command in the hierarchy can have a different priority for each type of bonus. So GeoSurvey and GravSurvey ships have a preference for officers with Survey bonus, and if separated into 2 different Commands you can have GeoSurvey Command have a higher priority for the higher Survey bonuses for those ships.
Likewise for scouting/raiding forces, that Command can have priority for officers with Speed bonuses, while Battle Fleet has priority for officers with higher Fire Rate and Damage bonuses. And the sub-fleets under Battle Fleet can have their own priorities of officers assigned to Battle Fleet. So if 1st Fleet is the premiere fleet that is used for the biggest punch, prioritize damage bonuses or damage avoidance bonuses, while a Troop Transport escort fleet can get whatever is left over. Or something like that.
I need to compute the bonus benefit for the ships/commands in range, not the parent admin command itself. This is likely to change very often. Given there could be a lot of ships in range, it will probably be easier to apply the bonuses automatically than to check when they need to be changed. It will be fast either way though - all this is happening in memory.
While I don't want to push for premature optimization, just because it's in memory doesn't mean it's free speed :) Just a heck of a lot faster than before. If you have to do it for 10K ships. . . well, simply iterating through that list of ships might be time consuming. Of course perhaps this could be a place where a large list is split up into sub-lists which is parallelized? Or only when a bonus is needed do you do a lookup to see what the bonus is based on what is in range?
Please, don't let my attempts at premature optimization seem like a critique, I don't really know how the code is architected, so my concern might be totally moot.
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Could we get Admin Command modules for ships, as well as the ashore commands? It would be nice if, for instance, I was able to put my survey headquarters aboard a mobile platform, instead of having to haul it around in freighters.
Also, it would be very helpful to be able to make ships accept commanders that didn't have crew training as an option. Freighters, tankers, and the like should be able to pull COs based on logistics bonus instead of crew training.
what would the difference be for this compared to a flag bridge?
Further such a thing i think would be better restricted to space stations with hab modules
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what would the difference be for this compared to a flag bridge?
Further such a thing i think would be better restricted to space stations with hab modules
It would be much bigger. The size of things like maintenance modules. I want full-fledged command ships, not just ordinary ships with flag bridges.
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The first screenshots of the new Commanders window. There may still be some minor changes and a few extra buttons but the major elements of the window are all there. The major changes compared to VB6 are as follows:
1) Ranks have been moved into a tree view format. Scientists 'ranks' are their research fields while Administrators are arranged by admin rating.
2) The available assignment section shows the actual required rank now instead of the rank number. Greyed out ships already have assigned commanders. You filter those out by using the 'Available Only' option.
3) The history is more prominent and I have added some code (for future events) to remove the unnecessary 'relieve' events where they are followed by an assignment event without any time differential.
4) The search function allows you to specify four different bonuses and the list of the commanders will be sorted by those four bonuses left to right. Duplicates in the bonuses options are ignored. This section now also shows rank and current assignment.
In general, there is more information available and should allow for easier allocation of assignments.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Commanders01.PNG)
The second screenshot shows a civilian administrator selected and a search based on administrator bonuses.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Commanders02.PNG)
The third screenshot is back to naval commanders and shows the new assignment categories. In the search section, the duplicate espionage sort criterion is ignored.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Commanders03.PNG)
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Will the rank abbreviations be editable?
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Yes, and the rank name. Currently you can click a rank and rename it. I need to add a second input for the abbreviation. If no abbreviation has been set for a rank by the player, the abbreviation will be R#, where # is the order of the rank from highest to lowest.
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Do the personality traits have a function or still rp-only? Would nice to have atleast some, even tiny effect.
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Do the personality traits have a function or still rp-only? Would nice to have atleast some, even tiny effect.
Just RP at the moment.
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How do the new modules provide potential roles for junior commanders if all of them need officers above the lowest rank?
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How do the new modules provide potential roles for junior commanders if all of them need officers above the lowest rank?
The text states (for example): "Auxiliary control is 1 HS and 15 BP. Allows the assignment of an Executive Officer to the ship who will apply his full Crew Training Bonus. Minimum rank for the ship commander is one above the racial minimum."
That means that for a ship to have an Auxiliary control, the Ship Commander needs to be one above the minimum rank, while the exec can be the minimum rank. I probably should have added the rank differentials for the new officers as well.
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Will we be able to add rules for Auto Assignment? Would be nice for planetary governors to be able to define a rule as to what kind of attributes you want the local governor to have and then let the auto assign do that job for you... .
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Will we be able to add rules for Auto Assignment? Would be nice for planetary governors to be able to define a rule as to what kind of attributes you want the local governor to have and then let the auto assign do that job for you... .
VB6 Aurora doesn't handle auto-assignment for planetary governors, although I am considering it for C# Aurora. I'm not sure rules would work as you intend though. It would probably be easier to use the search functionality and choose your governor than set rules for each individual population. There is also a lot more intelligence required in terms of assessing the weight of different bonuses compared to the needs of each pop.
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It would be nice for auto assigning of governors of any type to any colony as I tend to just assign anyone, regardless of skill set, to any planet/moon large enough to warrant an A2 or better.
On/Off would be a hoot ^.^
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Also having an option not to "scrap" unused officers when you do Auto-Assign would be nice ;-)
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After playing some STO... It would be nice if the officer positions could be filled by the same person. I.E. Medical and science are filled by one person. Probably at some reduced effectiveness.
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All looks great, being able to mess around with hierarchies/command to get the best result is something that I've always enjoyed immensely.
A few questions/thoughts:
Will there be negatives as well as bonuses? It'd be nice to have to weigh up the pros and cons rather than just choose whoever has the highest score.
Will there be task group/fleet bonuses even if they're not in an admin command? It'd be good to have small bonuses even if you haven't set that all up.
I'd also feel that top level commands should have stronger bonuses/negatives for everyone under their command. So if Ship A gets 1/3 bonuses from a direct superior and 1/16th for ones above that, the top level command should provide say 1/10th (or similar). This would sort of simulate that without solid top level leadership everything else struggles to work.
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The new Create Research Project window. Very similar in function to the VB6 version but laid out slightly differently.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Projects01.PNG)
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Projects02.PNG)
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Might you consider adding a way to influence the specialty of scientists graduating from the academies?
Some ideas:
- Have the number of research labs assigned to a specific branch of technology influence the specialists graduating from the academies.
- Add an adjustable starting salary for each branch of technology that encourages budding scientists and affects research expenditures.
- Allow construction of different types of academies or even the ability to design academies as a research project.
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- Have the number of research labs assigned to a specific branch of technology influence the specialists graduating from the academies.
I like this one - it has a nice nuanced positive feedback effect where a decision to focus on a particular branch of research causes the empire to only be good at doing that kind of research, but to be very good at it. I'd devote a significant fraction e.g. 50% - 80% to the this current research fraction.
John
PS - If you wanted to do a time average to smooth the data out over the recent past, an easy method is X_t+dt = (dt/DecayTime)*X_current + (1-(dt/DecayTime))*X_t where X is the percentage (or count) for a particular research type.
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- Have the number of research labs assigned to a specific branch of technology influence the specialists graduating from the academies.
I really like this one. It makes sense (you're going to have more PhD students where the money is) and it provides nice feedback. And it gives you some reason to tailor your lab setup to the distribution of fields you want, rather than the distribution of talent you have.
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The new missile design window. Very similar in principle to the VB6 version, although I have added a company name option and an instant research option. This design displayed includes a missile engine designed with the new fuel consumption rules and a thermal sensor with the new passive sensor model. As you can see, passive-seeking missiles are going to be far more effective in C# Aurora.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/MissileDesign.PNG)
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The new Turret Design window. Very similar in function to the VB6 version but with the addition of the company name option and instant research option. Both this window and the missile design window can be accessed via the Create Project Window (as in VB6) and via the main toolbar on the tactical map window.
Note that the changes to turret design, especially with regard to correcting the armour bug, result in this turret being significantly smaller than the VB6 equivalent. For comparison, the same twin turret with armour strength 2 in VB6 is 24.27 HS and 194 BP.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Turret02.PNG)
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Note that the changes to turret design, especially with regard to correcting the armour bug, result in this turret being significantly smaller than the VB6 equivalent.
Do you mean armour tech level will now be considered for turret armour, together with multiweapon turrets offering higher reductions (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg103323#msg103323)?
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Do you mean armour tech level will now be considered for turret armour, together with multiweapon turrets offering higher reductions (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg103323#msg103323)?
Armour tech level was considered in VB6 Aurora. However, there was a bug that resulted in 4x more armour being used than was necessary.
Essentially turrets are treated as small ships for armour. So a 500 ton turret and a 500 ton fighter with the same armour level should use the same amount of armour. The difference is in the damage model. Rather than being marked off as damage in the same way as a ship, for a turret the number of weapons * armour level is added to the HTK.
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Armour tech level was considered in VB6 Aurora. However, there was a bug that resulted in 4x more armour being used than was necessary.
Essentially turrets are treated as small ships for armour. So a 500 ton turret and a 500 ton fighter with the same armour level should use the same amount of armour. The difference is in the damage model. Rather than being marked off as damage in the same way as a ship, for a turret the number of weapons * armour level is added to the HTK.
So do you pay for armour twice then for turrets. Ie you have the incremental armour for the tonnage of the turret added to the overall ship tonnage where you calculate the cross section of the ship and number of armour columns needed but which will also include the tonnage dedicated to the actual armour of the turret?
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So do you pay for armour twice then for turrets. Ie you have the incremental armour for the tonnage of the turret added to the overall ship tonnage where you calculate the cross section of the ship and number of armour columns needed but which will also include the tonnage dedicated to the actual armour of the turret?
Yes, you need to use more ship armour for armoured turrets because they are bigger. But they will also have more HTK so it is OK. You can even put more layers of armour on them than just one.
Example: you can put more vases into a van if you put only vases in it. But if you pack each vase into a box, they will be a bit bulkier but better protected.
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So do you pay for armour twice then for turrets. Ie you have the incremental armour for the tonnage of the turret added to the overall ship tonnage where you calculate the cross section of the ship and number of armour columns needed but which will also include the tonnage dedicated to the actual armour of the turret?
That is how all armor work AFAIK, the tonnage need for each extra layer increase to cover all layers of armor underneath.
And for turrets it's not an issue to increase total armor since the ship armor layer ( counter intuitively ) also protects the turrets.
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It's not that counter intuitive. Turret armour is extra hardening of the turret, armour in Aurora is all ablative anyway.
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It's not that counter intuitive. Turret armour is extra hardening of the turret, armour in Aurora is all ablative anyway.
It's counter intuitive that the turrets which are external and outside of any armor belt, citadel or protection on all real warships is put underneath it in Aurora.
It's counter intuitive that the same identical turret design when I put it on my battleship with 15+ armor layers is super hard to knock out while if I put it on my unarmored scout it is super easy to knock out.
I realize that it's a simplification, but I still would love to see some more detail with separate ablative armor boxes for turrets, for outer hull and for inner thicker armored citadel ( I don't care about my crew quarters or fuel storage, but might want the engine, powerplants and ammunition under extra layers of ablative armor ).
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I realize that it's a simplification, but I still would love to see some more detail with separate ablative armor boxes for turrets, for outer hull and for inner thicker armored citadel ( I don't care about my crew quarters or fuel storage, but might want the engine, powerplants and ammunition under extra layers of ablative armor ).
I think the extra HTK options are supposed to represent that, perhaps that system could be extended to all components, but at an exponentially increasing cost? I guess I'd want to encourage overall hull armor (to prevent a micro-management nightmare) will giving a little more flexibility for players to armor critical systems.
Tricky to balance though. I'd hate for the game to push me to have to individually armor every component in an unarmored hull, ship design is already pretty complicated.
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I think the extra HTK options are supposed to represent that, perhaps that system could be extended to all components, but at an exponentially increasing cost? I guess I'd want to encourage overall hull armor (to prevent a micro-management nightmare) will giving a little more flexibility for players to armor critical systems.
Tricky to balance though. I'd hate for the game to push me to have to individually armor every component in an unarmored hull, ship design is already pretty complicated.
Well, there is going to be that shiparmour = 0 option in next version. And you surely don't _have to_ "armor every component", only some of them could offer that option (power plant, fuel storage, turrets... but not damage control or sensors) and mostly only for military ships.
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Well, there is going to be that shiparmour = 0 option in next version. And you surely don't _have to_ "armor every component", only some of them could offer that option (power plant, fuel storage, turrets... but not damage control or sensors) and mostly only for military ships.
I was more meaning that I don't want to have to choose whether to armor or not armor every component. And its hard to justify why should I be able to armor power plants but not the bridge/ECCM/fire control etc.
What I really don't think adds anything is having to try and juggle individual armor allocations for half a dozen or more different systems for maximum efficiency, ie trying to avoid "If a take two layers of hull armor off then I can can add 4 layers of bridge and engine armor, and 3 layers of fire control armor. Or maybe 3 of bridge and 2 of fire control so I can add an extra layer to the missile launchers, etc etc"
But on the flip side I can see how being able to tick a box saying "Make it an armored foo and add 1 HTK" could provide a simple solution for people.
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I think that armoring individual components - in addition to the already present general hull armor - would be a welcome addition. Defensive play is fun, and could use the buff. I'd love the added element of deciding which parts of my ships are more worth protecting. I'd even extend this idea to shields, where you could actively strengthen shielding over certain parts of a ship in the middle of a fight - at the expense of diverting shields from other parts.
Defense needs to be more interactive. It's a common problem in most games - and Aurora seems to be not much of an exception so far - where defense is reduced simply to a flat damage reduction to all attacks without any real way to tweak it or interact with it beyond a flat increase or decrease, and with no defensive decision making during fights. Aurora is a bit ahead of the curve already thanks to the point defense system, where you sometimes have to decide to fire all your PD at once or save some up in case of rapid volleys. Otherwise, defensive decision making (including stealth play) is mostly just about positioning, currently.
I'd suggest something a little different, though. What I'd suggest is having ships be split into different sections - bow, stern, port, starboard, above, and below might be good to start with. Each component from here on out would be placed into a section of the ship rather than some nondescript spot. Different sections could even be bonused for different types of components if we wanted, perhaps with accompanying research tech around ship chassis designs. There might be a tech line that boosts engine power or fuel efficiency for engines placed in a ship's rear section, for instance. Might need a new research branch for this, or you could just put ship chassis/frame stuff under construction/production. This change is important because it opens up a number of what should be (in my opinion) really fun new strategies and tactics.
In addition to the more nuanced ship designs, we could also buff shields by allowing ship captains (the player) to assign stronger shielding to one section of a ship at the expense of another. This could look like a little shield percentage adjuster in the ship screen, or possibly at the task group level, where you can adjust shield distribution by changing percentages over each section of your ship. So, 50% shields over "bow" to protect my guns, and the remaining 50% split across the rest of the ship. These figures could then be adjusted on the fly, perhaps with a small crew-skill-based delay. I'd recommend a button to easily assign a configuration to all ships of the same class. This is awesome because it adds a layer of defensive decision making during combat. I can reinforce shielding over port and starboard (where my guns are), my rear (engines) in case positioning is all-important, or below (life support or whatever else,) or try to evenly protect all of them.
Of course, it also opens up the ability to attempt to target specific sections of a ship. If I want to focus fire on my enemy's rear sections in hopes of knocking out their engines, I can. This also places additional importance on espionage, as the value of stolen ship designs would increase because they'll tell you exactly where to shoot. I'd recommend some sort of accuracy penalty for targeting specific sections, perhaps mitigated with a new type of fire-control tech.
This would also be a stealth buff to boarding parties, as it'd be possible to specifically target enemy engines to disable a ship, rather than just shooting in the general direction and hoping to get lucky.
I think sections would make it a little less complicated for the player than having to individually consider each component, plus it lets us do all of that cool targeting, ship design, and shield management stuff.
Overall I think adding more defensive decision making is one of the better ideas I've heard for Aurora.
With regards to interior/exterior components, I agree that most weaponry, as well as some other components like gas harvesters, hangars, and terraforming modules, should by default exist outside of the armor layer of a ship. To simulate external components, I'd just put an "external" tag on a component and any component with that tag would have a chance to be hit *before* ship section armor is taken into account. The bigger the external component, the more likely it is to be hit instead of armor. If you wanted, you could then add a research line to make some components interior that are normally exterior-only. For instance, with a "Adjustable Missile Tube Armor Plate" tech it'd be possible to remove the external tag from standard or reduced-size missile launchers under the pretext that the tube is placed inside the ship and the ship's armor is placed over it, likely with a sliding plate door of some kind that covers the aperture like a lens cap.
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For my own enjoyment, I would love to see a more granular ship design breakdown (though aurora is already fairly impressive), but if you are going to move to six sided ships, you then have to keep track of 3 axis rotation for every ship, and what each of those sides can "see". Can't be having the port side guns shooting at ships on the starboard side now could we? Well, I guess if we all use Mason beams and missile...
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For my own enjoyment, I would love to see a more granular ship design breakdown (though aurora is already fairly impressive), but if you are going to move to six sided ships, you then have to keep track of 3 axis rotation for every ship, and what each of those sides can "see". Can't be having the port side guns shooting at ships on the starboard side now could we? Well, I guess if we all use Mason beams and missile...
Nah, there's no need to get that deep. Just because you can swing a sword in D&D doesn't mean you have to track the exact angle and velocity of the blade. You just generalize it with a die roll, which I believe is exactly what I suggested.
A ship is 100 hull size in total. If 50 of that hull size is located in the rear of the ship (engines) then any incoming attacks (that aren't specifically targeted at a section) would have a 50% chance of applying their damage to the rear of the ship. Likewise, if the "above" section only has 10 hull size worth of components - mostly crew quarters, say - that'd be a 10% chance for the damage to be applied there. I'd even go so far as to suggest that when a section takes enough damage it might be torn off entirely (kinda like shock damage, but a bit different,) but this is already a whopper of a suggestion as it is. Feature creep is real.
EDIT: Well, you could get that deep into it if you really wanted. But Aurora is pretty clearly not in any position to start handling 3D space, so unless someone comes up with something tricky it's probably best to just stick with an abstracted version (ie: roll a weighted percentage die and then look at the table to see which section you hit.)
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Below is the Combat section of the Naval Organization window. This replaces the combat overview window.
This new version is much cleaner and more user-friendly than the VB6 equivalent, with most functions handled via drag and drop. You can drag and drop weapons, targets, ECCM systems and point defence modes directly on to fire controls. Missiles are dragged on to missile launchers. Any assigned targets and point defence modes are listed below the fire control, before the assigned weapons. If you click 'Drag All', dragging a single weapon will drag all weapons of that type in the same location to the new location. Similarly, dragging a single missile will equip all launchers under the same fire control. You can also drag to and from Unassigned Weapons and Unassigned ECCM.
Potential targets are listed by alien race.
The Assign buttons on the right allow you to copy the complete combat setup for the selected ship to all other ships of the same class, or just those within the same sub-fleet, fleet or system.
There are also buttons for activating sensors, raising & lowering shields and firing using either a single fire control or all of them.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Combat01.PNG)
This screenshot shows a more developed naval organization on the left. On the right, note that when a fire control is given the order to fire it is displayed as Orange instead of Green.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Combat02.PNG)
A couple more to show different layouts
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Combat03.PNG)
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Combat05.PNG)
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Hey Steve,
Two things I'd like to see.
1. Next to the potential target list, can we get a range to target from the selected ship or task group. Accurate to two decimal places would be enough for me.
2. In the Point Defence section, I cannot see where you would put the distance to engage.
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A few suggestions:
1) Color code possible targets Red/Yellow/Green for Hostile/Neutral/Allied, plus pop an "are you sure" dialog if firing on neutral or allied.
2) Facilitate bulk/batch assignments with highlight:
a) allow multi-selections of the same type (e.g. launchers); if any from a group are dragged to a fire control, then all are added to that fire control. Ditto for fire controls dragged to a target, PD modes dragged to a fire control, etc.
b) generalizing this, allow multi-selections of both dragged items and drag targets simultaneously, e.g. select 8 launchers and 2 fire controls, then hit a "assign uniformly" button that will assign 4 launchers each.
c) add buttons to add all items of a type to the current selection, e.g. all fire controls or all launchers or all targets (probably requires a selection of a nationality or Task Group) see below. Idea is to be able assign all launchers to all fire controls in 3 clicks if it makes sense.
3) Range and/or Task Group identification and/or grouping on target list will probably be VERY useful. I assume right now the target list shows everything in the system, even if it's way out of range. Probably good to have them sorted by range (from currently selected TG), and have highlighting based on in or out of range for various weapons to make range filtering easy.
4) I would be great to be able to save configurations (bindings of launchers to fire controls and/or bindings of missiles to launchers) on a per-ship or per-class level (probably per-class). That way you only need to configure these things once, then you can just worry about which FC aims at which target. If you did this, a lot of the stuff above drops in priority, because these bindings will be changed/created infrequently.
That's all I can think of for now. Overall it looks great!!
John
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Looks very good, a few more suggestions
In the target list, being able to sort by range, name or size would be helpful.
On the fire control and the own ship list having a highlight or some other marker to show that a target had already been allocated to a fire control / ship would help to quickly show which ships still need targets allocating
On the area defence, having a minimum as well as a maximum engagement distance for missiles would really help avoid the micro management of a layered defence.
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Although this is not a view of a new screen, it is a development milestone.
Racial Design Philosophy (used by NPRs) and Automated Design (used by NPRs and Shipping Lines) are both complete. Below is a computer-created design for a missile cruiser, using a random design philosophy. This uses all the new rules for sensors, shields, missiles, command & control, etc.. The automated design process includes designing missiles and allocating them to the class. The second screenshot is for a beam-armed destroyer, created using the same tech but a different design philosophy.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/AutoDesign01.PNG)
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/AutoDesign02.PNG)
Note there is a small display bug in the missile range which I fixed after creating the screenshot.
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Another update.
The Detection code is now complete. I actually finished it a week ago but had a performance bug that took some time to pin down. It isn't really possible to do a direct comparison to VB6 as VB6 loads everything into memory at the start of each increment while C# already has everything in memory. However, if we compare a single sub-pulse within a 5-day increment from the start of actual detection (i.e. everything already loaded into memory in both versions), then C# seems to be about 10-20x faster.
The worst situation for VB6 in terms of comparison is a single 5 second increment, as VB6 Aurora has to load everything before running a turn. In my current campaign (23 races, 500 systems, 2300 ships, 345 populations, 46 shipping lines) with detection switched off in Sol, it takes VB6 52 seconds to run a 5 second increment (and this is why I am now rewriting in C# :) ). C# Aurora isn't using AI yet and not all movement orders are operational, plus a few other items aren't running. However, it is running full detection and it runs the whole 5 second increment in 0.7 seconds, which is very encouraging.
To make it a little more interesting, if I let C# Aurora run a full construction cycle during that 5 second increment, which includes orbital movement, harvesters, terraforming, mining, pop growth, factory production, shipbuilding and shipyard upgrades, ground unit training, new shipping line ships, civilian mining, research, genetic conversion, refining, maintenance, wealth calculation and trade, then the increment takes 2.6 seconds.
Even though there is still a lot of work to do, I think it is safe to say at this stage that there will be a substantial increase in performance for C# Aurora.
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Will NPR ships still have infinite fuel and maintenance in C#?
What about ammo?
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Will NPR ships still have infinite fuel and maintenance in C#?
What about ammo?
They won't have infinite ammo (same as VB6)
They probably won't have infinite fuel, although they may have some type of ability to move slowly without fuel.
At the moment, they won't suffer maintenance failures, although they won't have infinite maintenance supplies (for repairs).
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However, it is running full detection and it runs the whole 5 second increment in 0.7 seconds, which is very encouraging.
To make it a little more interesting, if I let C# Aurora run a full construction cycle during that 5 second increment, ... , then the increment takes 2.6 seconds.
Heh, then maybe ingame time can run bit faster than the real one even on short increments, for a change.
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Another update.
The Detection code is now complete. I actually finished it a week ago but had a performance bug that took some time to pin down. It isn't really possible to do a direct comparison to VB6 as VB6 loads everything into memory at the start of each increment while C# already has everything in memory. However, if we compare a single sub-pulse within a 5-day increment from the start of actual detection (i.e. everything already loaded into memory in both versions), then C# seems to be about 10-20x faster.
The worst situation for VB6 in terms of comparison is a single 5 second increment, as VB6 Aurora has to load everything before running a turn. In my current campaign (23 races, 500 systems, 2300 ships, 345 populations, 46 shipping lines) with detection switched off in Sol, it takes VB6 52 seconds to run a 5 second increment (and this is why I am now rewriting in C# :) ). C# Aurora isn't using AI yet and not all movement orders are operational, plus a few other items aren't running. However, it is running full detection and it runs the whole 5 second increment in 0.7 seconds, which is very encouraging.
To make it a little more interesting, if I let C# Aurora run a full construction cycle during that 5 second increment, which includes orbital movement, harvesters, terraforming, mining, pop growth, factory production, shipbuilding and shipyard upgrades, ground unit training, new shipping line ships, civilian mining, research, genetic conversion, refining, maintenance, wealth calculation and trade, then the increment takes 2.6 seconds.
Even though there is still a lot of work to do, I think it is safe to say at this stage that there will be a substantial increase in performance for C# Aurora.
This is great news. I hope once you get the first version ready to release, you can put some Stopwatches around each of those major activities in the full construction cycle and see if any of them are big time sinks. Performance optimizations are something I work on a lot and it is always fun seeing big gains like this. They are out there you just have to go looking.
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This is great news. I hope once you get the first version ready to release, you can put some Stopwatches around each of those major activities in the full construction cycle and see if any of them are big time sinks. Performance optimizations are something I work on a lot and it is always fun seeing big gains like this. They are out there you just have to go looking.
I'm already using the stopwatch functionality in Visual Studio 2015. As you step through the code, you see the step time in milliseconds, plus a log of past steps. I found the performance issue with detection because you can take snapshots of exactly what is stored in the heap at different points in the program, right down to the number of objects and memory use for each object type. I easily spotted I was continually duplicating one particular object by accident, which led to a quick fix.
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The updated Admin Command functionality (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg103849#msg103849) has been added to the sidebar display on the Tactical Map. Only those admin commands relevant to the fleets in the system are displayed (unless the player uses the options to show fleets from all systems).
There is also an option to show civilian ships in the system, in which case all shipping lines with ships present are listed as Admin Commands with the prefix SPL.
Clicking on any fleet in the sidebar view, including civilians, will centre the map on that fleet.
Also, the Tactical map can now be zoomed using the mouse wheel and dragged by holding the left-mouse button. One other minor change since the last Tactical Map screenshot is the addition of missile design and turret design buttons in the centre of the toolbar.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Tactical03.PNG)
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Dude that is so sweet, the map sounds way nicer to use now.
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Why Barnard Star A III and A IV painted outside orbital circle ?
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Mouse wheel scrolls and click-dragging navigation? Steve mate, you're too good to us. . .
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@Steve "Also, the Tactical map can now be zoomed using the mouse wheel and dragged by holding the left-mouse button. One other minor change since the last Tactical Map screenshot is the addition of missile design and turret design buttons in the centre of the toolbar."
;D
Thanks God,Steve. You save thousands navy Commanders now..:)
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Why Barnard Star A III and A IV painted outside orbital circle ?
Graphical glitch - will figure it out eventually :)
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Holy damn that looks so good compared to the current GUI! Is it going to be out soon or?
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Holy damn that looks so good compared to the current GUI! Is it going to be out soon or?
I suspect it'll be announce, about half hour after its avaiable to download.
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Holy damn that looks so good compared to the current GUI! Is it going to be out soon or?
I can state with a certain level of confidence that it will be out sometime before the next century.
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The first screenshots of the C# Aurora Galactic Map. It is very similar in overall function to the VB6 Galactic Map, but with a cleaner look and a few additions. The screenshot is 3400x1400 so you may have to scroll to see the full width.
1) The system icons are larger, mainly because the number of low cost worlds is much higher now due to the low gravity options and I need room for the numbers. You can see that from the second screenshot
2) The yellow dashed circles with large dashes identify the locations of Admin Commands.
3) The dashed circles with small dashes are the locations of alien contacts. You can filter this option on the contacts tab to independently show allied, friendly, neutral, hostile or civilian. The colour used for the dashed circle will be the most threatening contact in the system (hostile, then neutral, etc.).
4) The contacts and naval forces tab replicate those tabs from the tactical map.
5) The toolbar buttons all have the same function as the identical buttons on the tactical map, so you can run the Empire from this window if desired. Clicking on SM mode or Auto-turns on the galactic or tactical map will also highlight the equivalent button on the other window.
6) Clicking in open space and dragging will move the map. Clicking on a system and dragging will move only that system. Unlike VB6, the map and the system move with the mouse rather than moving only when you release the button.
7) A whole new set of more modern hull icons are available and you can change the racial icon from this window. You can also choose a space station icon to represent shipyard locations.
8) The flag icons are displayed much more cleanly than in VB6.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/GalacticMap01.png)
This second screenshot has the low gravity colony cost 2.00 - 2.99 option checked, which demonstrates the huge number of potential colony sites in C# Aurora. Alpha Centauri for example has 144 bodies in this category. Vega has 215. When an asteroid belt, or a gas giant with a lot of moons, is in the habitable zone, a lot of potential colony cites are available. More fleet icons are visible in this shot because the 'All Fleets' option is selected, whereas the first screenshot only showed warships.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/GalacticMap02.png)
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Holy damn that looks so good compared to the current GUI! Is it going to be out soon or?
Not soon, although I am starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel. My target for now is to get to a state where I can run a test game, probably without AI. As usual, progress depends on the availability of my free time.
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I was wondering whether it would be possible to select and move a group of system nodes. This would be useful for when new systems are discovered that require rearranging the previously explored arms on the system map.
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I was wondering whether it would be possible to select and move a group of system nodes. This would be useful for when new systems are discovered that require rearranging the previously explored arms on the system map.
You can select multiple nodes by either selecting them individually using Ctrl-click or drawing a box around a group using shift-click-drag (or a combination). If multiple systems are selected, using click-drag will move only the selected systems instead of all systems. You can deselect multiple systems with by clicking any system.
I've also added some buttons to the toolbar for saving system positions or resetting them. Until you press the Save System Positions icon, clicking the Undo icon will return all systems to their last saved positions.
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Absolutely needs name generation for every individual soldier.
I had an idea. If you add the option to draw the name pool from viewers on twitch, you could boost the popularity of this game as well. (plus it's kinda neat)
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Here are three updated Galactic Map screenshots. Labels have been added plus three icons have been changed to provide the following functionality:
1) Saving changes to system positions
2) Undoing any system position changes since the last save
3) Lining up systems in a grid.
All these functions exist in VB6 Aurora, although now they should be easier to use.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/GalacticMap03.png)
Thsi screenshot shows the Map Labels tab, which allows you to create, delete or change labels, or copying existing labels (to retain the colour and font). Labels are moved around the map by clicking and dragging and are saved in the same way as system positions.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/GalacticMap04.png)
This screenshot shows the Naval Forces tab, which can display all naval forces or only those within the selected system. In the latter case, only Admin Commands relevant to that system are displayed.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/GalacticMap05.png)
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One more Galactic Map Screenshot, this time showing the overview tab, which displays a summary of the planetary bodies and the jump points in the system.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/GalacticMap06.png)
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One gripe I had with the VB6 galaxy map was that the current position/zoom level of the map wasn't saved after leaving it. It would be quite nice to have this convenience implemented (and it should be a fairly easy change too). Other features that might be nice for the galaxy map would be a way to bookmark a specific location, or search for a system name on the map to centre the view on.
And as always, keep up the good work Steve
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Other features that might be nice for the galaxy map would be ... or search for a system name on the map to centre the view on.
In the top left corner of F11 Galaxy Map there are two buttons, "Minimise Sidebar" and ""Find System". Try to use the second one :P
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Hello here, finally made myself register, and happy to report that ever since i found your gem of a game, i love all the effort you put into it. however. . . the only little pet-peeve of mine. . . please make the system map background color as changeable as the galaxy map.
also like what you have accomplished in C# well done on the programming! it's gonna be faster more detailed better looking and working stable(we hope) so props for all that! also for putting the screenshots for us to salive to something is rare from small devs. . . so i wish you as much sucess as i wish for my game dev trio. and maybe we'll cross paths sometime.
keep being awesome!
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What I'd like to see is the grid being visible when dragging a system around on the galaxy map.
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In the top left corner of F11 Galaxy Map there are two buttons, "Minimise Sidebar" and ""Find System". Try to use the second one :P
Hah, my bad. Let's try to rephrase that bit then: more functionality for the find system button, so that you aren't limited to exact match searches (maybe an autocomplete/suggestions dropdown?)
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What I'd like is to be able to actually draw on the map
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Is the combat portion of Aurora C# done (a very small unimportant part of the game ;D ), as I don't remember having seen a screenshot of the target assignments and etc. ?
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What I'd like is to be able to actually draw on the map
You can add text to the galactic map.
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Is there any updates to this project? The last post is quit old.
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LOL not sure what your looking at Steve posted today, and post regularly. I think you need to recheck.
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LOL not sure what your looking at Steve posted today, and post regularly. I think you need to recheck.
There was a problem with the forum a week or so ago and some of the posts were not showing up. Steve and Erik seem to have recovered most of Steve's posts. See Announcements and Forum Issues for details.
John
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There was a problem with the forum a week or so ago and some of the posts were not showing up. Steve and Erik seem to have recovered most of Steve's posts. See Announcements and Forum Issues for details.
John
One thread is not recovered yet because I am leaving that as an example for the SMF pros to look at.
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Not had a screenshot for a while, so here is the Standing Orders sub-tab of the Fleet tab on the Naval Organization window. This isn't the final list of order types and conditions but is sufficient to show the layout.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/StandingOrders.PNG)
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Screenshots below show the new Waypoint functionality described in the following changes post:
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg106845#msg106845
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Waypoints001.PNG)
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Waypoints002.PNG)
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These are screenshots of the Ship view on the Naval Organization window. This will replace the Ship window, which is no longer separate. The section at the top will list all ship officers (up to 6), while the four panels below show various information about the ship.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Ship001.PNG)
The fourth panel shows any ordnance or cargo carried by the ship
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Ship002.PNG)
The narrow panel just above the ship summary shows information relevant to the ship. In the first two screenshots, this was target speed and range band information as both ships had energy weapons. For this ship, a tanker, the auto-refuel options are shown. Colliers will have auto-ordnance transfer options, etc.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Ship003.PNG)
The armour display is similar to VB6
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Ship004.PNG)
Except that the size of the boxes changes to show the whole armour layout for larger ships - no more horizontal scrolling required.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Ship005.PNG)
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The first screenshots of the Intelligence and Foreign Relations window. This has very similar functionality to the VB6 equivalent, although the layout is quite different.
At the top left, the first race is viewing and the second race is the alien race (from the viewing race perspective). The Alien Race Treaties section of the first box in the top row shows the treaties granted by the alien race to the viewing race, while the second box has the diplomatic options available to the viewing race. In this case, simply choosing between hostile and neutral. With higher diplomatic rating, additional options appear (Friendly, Allied, Allow Trade, Share Geological Data, Share Gravitational Data, Share Research Data). I may expand the diplomatic options for C# Aurora and will add those as appropriate.
The third box has a dropdown with the known species of the alien race and the attributes of that species (if known). The remaining boxes in the top row show a picture of the dominant species, the alien ship design and the alien flag
The first three boxes in the second row shows the known technology of the alien race (based on salvage), the systems in which an alien ship or population has been detected and the alien ship classes identified by the viewing race's sensors.
Clicking on a Alien class will show what information is known about that class, based on sensor readings, plus any weapons, sensor or technology known to be part of that alien class design. To the right is a list of known members of the class and their last known location. If the alien class summary is available, it will be shown in the bottom right box.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Intelligence001.PNG)
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Intelligence002.PNG)
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Intelligence003.PNG)
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A few things:
1. Is the line directly below the weapon systems the active sensors known?
2. Is the maximum armour penetrated mean the highest damage against a non-damaged target without seeing escaping air?
3. Is active sensor signature consider cloaking devices at all?
4. The hull description of the Mersin class is classified as a destroyer, despite having a hanger and no known weapons. Are we able to change that or does the computer do that?
5. Does the ship screen also show loaded parasites?
Some suggestions:
1. When you select a known system, there could appear (similar to selecting load specific unit in VB6) a list of known planets with populations or passive contacts.
2. Have estimates for tracking/FC speed.
3. Have estimates on total population.
4. Have estimates on armour based on size of ship, thickness observed and damage absorbed by armour.
5. Have a list of all known ships in class, including destroyed ones.
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1. Is the line directly below the weapon systems the active sensors known?
Yes. There will be a line for each weapon, sensor or known tech for the ship.
2. Is the maximum armour penetrated mean the highest damage against a non-damaged target without seeing escaping air?
The highest armour thickness penetrated in terms of layers of armour, not total damage.
3. Is active sensor signature consider cloaking devices at all?
Yes, this is the signature detected by the sensors, not the actual size of ship.
4. The hull description of the Mersin class is classified as a destroyer, despite having a hanger and no known weapons. Are we able to change that or does the computer do that?
There is a button at the bottom of the screen (Set Class Hull) that allows you to change it.
5. Does the ship screen also show loaded parasites?
No, as your sensors can't detect those.
Some suggestions:
1. When you select a known system, there could appear (similar to selecting load specific unit in VB6) a list of known planets with populations or passive contacts.
2. Have estimates for tracking/FC speed.
3. Have estimates on total population.
4. Have estimates on armour based on size of ship, thickness observed and damage absorbed by armour.
5. Have a list of all known ships in class, including destroyed ones.
1) On the system view there is a list of contacts in the sidebar, including populations.
2) Tracking speed for a ship can be determined by learning its tech (usually via salvage).
3) There is no way for your sensors to determine that based on thermal or EM because a lot of different things can contribute to the signatures.
4) Armour thickness is tracked above. I could also track max damage taken by the ship.
5) That is already included above (destroyed are flagged).
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I've been waiting about two years for this screenshot :)
The interception worked as intended for both AMMs and short-range point defence. Another step forward.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/MissileIntercept.PNG)
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5. Have a list of all known ships in class, including destroyed ones.
5) That is already included above (destroyed are flagged).
Well, you don't have any examples showing that flagged status, but also - Huh? I'd been guessing that the lower number of Last Locations compared to Number of Units was because they'd seen some destroyed, and had intended to suggest that knowing where those ships were killed could sometimes be important, but... Is the Number of Units peeking at the alien race's database, then? Otherwise how does it determine number of ships built as opposed to the number of individual ships seen, which is the information you'd expect to see in this context.
Edit: Another potentially useful distinction just occured to me: dead ships could be flagged differently depending on whether you found a wreck or saw it blow up - which would affect the implications of the dates attached to the sighting.
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Well, you don't have any examples showing that flagged status, but also - Huh? I'd been guessing that the lower number of Last Locations compared to Number of Units was because they'd seen some destroyed, and had intended to suggest that knowing where those ships were killed could sometimes be important, but... Is the Number of Units peeking at the alien race's database, then? Otherwise how does it determine number of ships built as opposed to the number of individual ships seen, which is the information you'd expect to see in this context.
Edit: Another potentially useful distinction just occured to me: dead ships could be flagged differently depending on whether you found a wreck or saw it blow up - which would affect the implications of the dates attached to the sighting.
The difference in number of units vs ship list is a VB6 problem that (I hope) is corrected by C#. In VB6, when a ship is destroyed the intelligence display can no longer reference it. In C#, the alien ship records should be maintained independently. I'll keep an eye on it during play test.
There is already a 'Flag Destroyed' button, so I could add some extra information to be provided there.
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The difference in number of units vs ship list is a VB6 problem that (I hope) is corrected by C#. In VB6, when a ship is destroyed the intelligence display can no longer reference it. In C#, the alien ship records should be maintained independently. I'll keep an eye on it during play test.
I'm assuming DIT_grue saw the same thing I did, and want to make sure you (Steve) are seeing and referring to it too. In the first screen shot, in the "Selected Class Observed Attributes" panel it says 6 units are known. In the "Last Location for ..." panel it has names for 5 ships. In the second screen shot it's even worse: 14 units known, but only 3 in the location panel. Since this is a C# screen shot, it appears that this is either experimental evidence that the VB6 bug has not been corrected or there's an intentional discrepancy between the counts in the two panels.
If it's not simply a bug, then it seems like knowing the name of a ship (i.e. being able to identify the instance/unit, not just the (ship, not C# :) ) class) is a higher level of information - for some contacts the player will know the unit, for others the player will only know the class, while (presumably) for others the player might only know the owning empire. My concern (and I suspect DIT_grue's) is that there should be a way to see the last location of all Sao Paulo destroyers, not just the ones that are individually identifiable. I that case, I think:
1) It seems like the "Last Location ..." panel should be "Most Recent Sightings of Class Members" and include generic Sao Paulo contacts as well. For example in the 1st screen shot there would be an additional "Sao Paulo 6" listing.
2) This leads to the problem that the same (class-only) ship could produce multiple "most recent sightings" (e.g. if a contact is lost momentarily then seen again). My inclination would be to go ahead and let the intel system "cheat" and auto-prune these extras completely based on the true identity of the contact (from the database). Barring that, the player should have an easy way to prune the contacts himself.
3) For destroyed ships, I would add an extra line "Number destroyed" to the "Selected Class" panel. As someone said, destroyed ships could show up in the location panel in red - (I think this is what you mean by "flagged").
John
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Sorry, I wasn't very clear :)
All the data in the current C# database is from the Starfire.mdb used for the VB6 Colonial Wars campaign (although modified and ported to SQLite).
While C# should retain the destroyed ship data on this window, the current discrepancy exists because the data being displayed in the screenshots was created using the VB6 code. Once a C# campaign is up and running, the number of units and the known ship list should match (with some of the ship list potentially being listed as destroyed). I can't retrospectively fix the Colonial Wars data as it doesn't exist any more.
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No, as your sensors can't detect those.
Sorry, I should of been more clear. I was looking at this image.
(http://www.pentarch.org/steve/Screenshots/Ship002.PNG)
I was wondering where the loaded parasites will be displayed?
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No specific time-frame - will depend on my level of enthusiasm but I hope months, not years.
Above post from March 2016. Optimistic as ever.
Although if I had realised just how much work was involved in the rewrite it would probably never have started :)
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Glad I am to hear to you did not know how much work would be involved.
And to be honest, any one man project is going to take a long time at best.
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Above post from March 2016. Optimistic as ever.
Although if I had realised just how much work was involved in the rewrite it would probably never have started :)
To be honest this has been much more then a simple rewrite though?
Judging from the information you have made improvements or optimizations to almost every mechanic you come across, in some situations like ground combat, logistics or command & control greatly expanding the scope of game.
If you spent the time working on the old Aurora code base it wouldn't have been a simple task to add all new features, probably have taken half the time of the rewrite at least, and some of the improvements ( like optimizations ) would be impossible to do without a rewrite.
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Yeah, Visual Basic is just so hopelessly outdated that you're actually getting a lot more done so much faster with C# than with VB if you'd had sticked to upgrading it.
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To be honest this has been much more then a simple rewrite though?
Judging from the information you have made improvements or optimizations to almost every mechanic you come across, in some situations like ground combat, logistics or command & control greatly expanding the scope of game.
If you spent the time working on the old Aurora code base it wouldn't have been a simple task to add all new features, probably have taken half the time of the rewrite at least, and some of the improvements ( like optimizations ) would be impossible to do without a rewrite.
Very true - I hadn't thought about it from that perspective.
On those lines, I'm taking a different approach to the AI and how NPRs will function. I hope that will they will provide a better and more varied challenge. This would not have been possible in the VB6 version.
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On those lines, I'm taking a different approach to the AI and how NPRs will function. I hope that will they will provide a better and more varied challenge. This would not have been possible in the VB6 version.
Sounds cool. Just a small reminder that some suggestions & discussions about AI/NPR were made in the VB6 suggestion forum before a new suggestion thread in this forum was opened:
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=9550.0
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Sounds cool. Just a small reminder that some suggestions & discussions about AI/NPR were made in the VB6 suggestion forum before a new suggestion thread in this forum was opened:
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=9550.0
Thanks, will take a look.
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@Steve Walmsley have you tried or even played MANO (Modern Air Naval Operations) to see how they deal with the display of unit names and vectors? It can be very rapidly a mess, display wise and I think they did a few things right to de-obfuscate/unscramble display. I'm basing my observations on some screenshots, I did not play the game. But for example at a certain zoom level, individuals ships are replaced by a TF icon, and you can tooltip it. Will Aurora C# supports tooltip on the main map?
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Hi Steve, this is looking great! Very excited about everything here, particularly the naval org rework.
Small question, is there any possibility that in the future, colonies might possess unique environmental traits, particularly on those worlds that are potentially habitable (or have been terraformed)? For example a warm ocean world might be home to native Sea-dwelling Megafauna, enhancing Luxury Food output. Meanwhile, a newly-terraformed Mars might suffer from severe storms due to rapid climate change, slowing production capacity by a certain percentage. Other worlds might be the home of semi-sentient beasts, viral outbreaks, aggressively hostile alien ecosystems, etc.
Just a thought.
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@Steve Walmsley have you tried or even played MANO (Modern Air Naval Operations) to see how they deal with the display of unit names and vectors? It can be very rapidly a mess, display wise and I think they did a few things right to de-obfuscate/unscramble display. I'm basing my observations on some screenshots, I did not play the game. But for example at a certain zoom level, individuals ships are replaced by a TF icon, and you can tooltip it. Will Aurora C# supports tooltip on the main map?
This would be a good idea, you might want to be able to select a display icon for each task group, with that and 3 or 4 letter abbreviation either selectable or based on the makup of the taskgroup displayed instead of the full name.
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Perhaps when the rest is done? But that would be useful that's sure...