Progress update 2020-10-08
Build 113 is up, with the following changes:
- NPRs don't attempt to fire non-meson beam weapons in heavy atmosphere, which would shorten the increment time
- NPRs don't attempt to fire mesons at illegal targets such as ground units, which would shorten the increment time
- Don't consider a fleet to be within firing range (which would shorten the increment time) if current conditions prevent its weapons from firing
- Fixed an AI desired-distance-to-target calculation that caused this above scenario to happen in the first place
- Fixed a couple instances where subpulse times were shortened but not the increment times
- Fixed 2 crashes
I found the above issues by running a 5-NPR game for about 14 game years. Since then I've run the game to 39 game years with no further issues other being a bit slow, which is to be expected because I've yet to do an optimization pass on the AI and pathfinding.
Now that my NPR QA testers aren't finding any more crashes or obvious issues, I've cautiously removed the "early look" part of the title on this thread and upgraded the game's status from Prototype to In Development on Itch. I've updated the top post in this thread with the current state of the game. I do have a lot more things to review on my to-do list, but they are pretty obscure. For example, the next one on my list is "make sure warp point links are reset if the SM deletes their linked systems." So I believe I'm ready to start fielding bug reports if anyone is feeling brave enough, and I've created a new bug report thread for that purpose.
The reigning champion in that 5 NPR game, in terms of naval tonnage, are the Commonwealth of Aldertaine:
Off-Topic: aldertaine galactic map • show They have lived a fairly peaceful life. The most activity, which isn't much, is in Sapporo where they are monitoring the goings-on of other races on neutral terms, vaguely wondering why they're so interested in a nebula system
(Map is zoomed all the way out to get the text to line up nicely) The Aldertaine look the most favorably upon the mysterious Sol Aliens encountered in the thirteenth year of history, who for some reason have not left the third planet in their system.
The Aldertaine greatly approve of these apparently AFK aliens staying put in their own home system. Nevertheless, Popopoyotl and their crew dutifully keep an eye on these suspiciously idle beings.
The Empire of Mizunami cautiously approves of Aldertaine operations, allowing them trade access but little else:
Unfortunately the Aldertaine have not reciprocated any favor, as Mizunami have apparently lost all their shipyards. Indeed, the Mizunami home system has been ravaged by unknown hostile beings:
This wasteland is surprisingly not due to the most xenophobic and warlike of the five empires, the Chippewacree:
They have been engaged in a decades long battle in the Aziz system:
With the abhorrent Abolhassan Aliens:
Who are in fact the Owl Clan and know this System as Smolensk
Which happens to be next door to their home system, unfortunately for the xenophobic Chippees.
Off-Topic: chippewacree galaxy map • show Off-Topic: tiryns galaxy map • show Off-Topic: mizunami galaxy map • show (Large portions of this story were generated while I was mowing the lawn)
Kyle, I know we have to be strictly close to cloning VB6, however, I wonder if you are considering to change the Geological Sensors to the military tech as they supposed to have been from start.
I checked some old posts by Steve, and I'm deciding to stick with the one where he says Gravs are typically brought into unknown and possibly dangerous territory, whereas Geos are typically more for systems in your own, theoretically safe, domain. In the future I'll probably ask for the citation
nevertheless it's easily moddable, in fact I wrote a mod that does just that and is included with the base game as a general modding example:
It's disabled by default. The advantage of this over a database mod is it can be mixed and matched with other database mods and added to databases with an existing game. I plan to add more api calls, documentation, and examples soon. It's pretty much next on my list when I'm not fixing issues, since it will lead naturally into the automation and modular AI I had planned.
Oh, and I did this awhile ago, I just keep forgetting to mention it:
Theres also a setting you can turn on to enable zooming relative to the mouse cursor.
That's all for now. From here out I'm most likely going to start a new "patch notes" thread so be sure to check there for the smaller news tidbits. Fixes, optimization, and mod-related things are on the short list, depending on which I feel like working on at the time!
