Author Topic: Feedback thread  (Read 2757 times)

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Offline Stormtrooper (OP)

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Feedback thread
« on: January 25, 2021, 09:22:16 AM »
Hi everyone,

This is the thread for commentss, reviews, wishes, complaints etc etc for my AAR. Feel free to say whatever you want.

Any feedback welcome, but especially critical opinions - those matter the most for me because I want to improve this thing so would love if people would poin out what they don't like in my AAR so I could potentially work on fixing this.

Thank you
 

Offline Black

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Re: Feedback thread
« Reply #1 on: January 25, 2021, 10:50:20 AM »
One thing I missed when I started reading your story is some kind of intro to the changes to how things work in your universe. Interstellar travel and terraforming were most noticeable to me.
 

Offline Stormtrooper (OP)

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Re: Feedback thread
« Reply #2 on: January 25, 2021, 11:11:09 AM »
Okay, so we have two things here:

1.Interstellar travel - it was never meant to be stated during intro because this AAR starts with Earth as known today (short of reduced population and conspiracy theories turning out to be true, of course). There couldn't be any mention of FTL travel at the start because at the start of the story such thing doesn't exist, so who could've said how this will look like back in 2021?

But as for how this works? Well, I thought I explained this, but I can do it once again if you find this insufficient:

a) First four systems explored were by interstellar sub-light, conventional probes. Of course gameplay-wise I started jumping with jump-capable ship, but for the story I wanted more smooth transition from solar to interstellar scale.
b) In the story so far there are two means to go superluminal:
-alcubierre drive - this is a theoretically proposed warp drive, you can find some info online, there's some science for it to be found so it's not pure fiction hence I went with that as the "most realistic FTL drive theory to date". Works by enclosing the ship within a bubble of regular space and then pushes it through by contracting the space in front and expanding behind, effectively shortening the road. I'm not a physicists, so in the AAR preferred to just leave it saying "it works".

Of course with warp drive you can go wherever you want which clashes with aurora lore of jump points, but as you've probably noticed, I don't like aurora lore hence I threw it all away, replaced with different stuff. So while gameplay wise I'm still limited to jump network, however story-wise I just go with "it just happened that this is where humanity chose to go next", no jump points involved.

Another thing are stable jps, these could easily be translated into creating wormholes to link stars and having wormhole network as an alternate mean of FTL travel. So stablising jps in this AAR is simply building a wormhole for instant travel between the stars without a warp drive.

2. Terraforming - if I remember correctly I explained it on Mars' example - installations sucking out CO2 to bearable levels, greenhouse gasses to melt ice sheets and pumping some more water vapour to keep liquid water spreading (so pretty much standard aurora stuff execpt wihout the magic of Aether gasses and all that high-fantasy weirdness), then there was introduction of first species and establishing a magnetic field (plus waiting for the absorbed radiation to cleanse after protection from magnetic field was in place). I decided that Mars alone will do and later didn't bother with going into details for each world as for each world it'd be the same - atmosphere setup and warming or cooling, liquid water and first species introduction, magnetic field establishment if needed.

Also, a small tl;dr: regarding intro how my universe works: at the start of the game it works like real world with the only exceptions of decimated population, world government, mircochips and Nibiru aka Planet X. There's nothing more to it at the start. It's the history of humanity. New things are discovered as human race pushes forward and only then it'll be explained. Interstellar travel is irrelevant before first human vessels reach other systems.
« Last Edit: January 25, 2021, 11:17:21 AM by Stormtrooper »
 

Offline Black

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Re: Feedback thread
« Reply #3 on: January 25, 2021, 11:27:01 AM »
I was thinking about some kind of authors note as an intro not necessarily explanation as part of the story, so basically what you posted above.

As for the terraforming, I suppose I should have been more specific. Planet X or Nibiru is normally so far away that no terraforming would make it close to habitable. So I was wondering how you make it work, if it is only storytelling not represented in the game.
 

Offline Stormtrooper (OP)

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Re: Feedback thread
« Reply #4 on: January 25, 2021, 11:34:12 AM »
How I make this work, you say?... The truth? I don't. This aar is also my first and only campaign. I've never played anything of aurora besides this single campaing. So when I was setting to terraform Nibiru I thought: "phew I have 4 atm it's only -250, on Europa I raised temp for over 100 degrees with less than 1 atm of Aesthusium", I didn't know that distance from sun pays a role in how much 1 atm is going to mean in terms of temperature change, let alone that greenhouse effect has its cap.

So gameplay-wise I'm stuck with automated mines on it, story wise I just have to roll with it and pretend this noob overestimation of heating capabilities never happened.
 

Offline Black

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Re: Feedback thread
« Reply #5 on: January 25, 2021, 12:16:07 PM »
Thanks for your replies, if it works as far as storytelling goes, I don't see a problem with it.
 

Offline DaedalusPrime

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Re: Feedback thread
« Reply #6 on: January 25, 2021, 06:07:11 PM »
Just wanted to pop in and thank you personally for writing your story OP, it is very entertaining and I am enjoying it immensely.

If you wanted critical feedback, besides the occasional typo and rare repeated sentence, I am enjoying the pacing and presentation of the story.   It's informal enough to be able to follow easily but packed with enough detail to enjoy your style of playing Aurora and how you report on your adventure.

If I were to offer any suggestions, I might only suggest breaking up the different threads of the story a little better formatting wise, maybe a more obvious break to the paragraphs besides a timestamp would make it easier to tell this was a new event and not a continuation of the previous event.  It's not even a big enough issue tbh, i seem to follow the story just fine, but sometimes i notice myself re-reading a part due to that confusion.  Just my . 02isk

Thanks again Stormtrooper!  Looking forward to the next installments!
 

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Re: Feedback thread
« Reply #7 on: January 26, 2021, 09:32:17 AM »
Neat idea to use images from No Man's Sky to illustrate how the planets look.
 

Online Zap0

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Re: Feedback thread
« Reply #8 on: January 26, 2021, 02:41:06 PM »
Random minor thing:

In this post you described NN 3753 as a bright blue star, but it's given class is shown as D4-VII - a white dwarf. Bright blue stars would be O or B types, white dwarves are ex-stars.

I've played some Elite Dangerous in the past and had to learn the types, so it stood out to me :D
 

Offline Stormtrooper (OP)

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Re: Feedback thread
« Reply #9 on: January 27, 2021, 11:31:42 AM »
Just wanted to pop in and thank you personally for writing your story OP, it is very entertaining and I am enjoying it immensely.

If you wanted critical feedback, besides the occasional typo and rare repeated sentence, I am enjoying the pacing and presentation of the story.   It's informal enough to be able to follow easily but packed with enough detail to enjoy your style of playing Aurora and how you report on your adventure.

If I were to offer any suggestions, I might only suggest breaking up the different threads of the story a little better formatting wise, maybe a more obvious break to the paragraphs besides a timestamp would make it easier to tell this was a new event and not a continuation of the previous event.  It's not even a big enough issue tbh, i seem to follow the story just fine, but sometimes i notice myself re-reading a part due to that confusion.  Just my . 02isk

Thanks again Stormtrooper!  Looking forward to the next installments!

Thanks, as for typos and such, well, English is not my native language, so might happen especially given it's writing a wall of text at once on a keyboard, even more prone to errors.
As I'll have next batch ready I'll just try to put extra line of spacing between entires describing different stuff (that are now merged together if they're like 1-2 sentences long), but I'm afraid I'm too lazy to fix what's already there.
 

Offline Stormtrooper (OP)

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Re: Feedback thread
« Reply #10 on: January 27, 2021, 11:35:50 AM »
Neat idea to use images from No Man's Sky to illustrate how the planets look.

At first I decided I'll just browse for images from no mans sky or elite dangerous, but that'd be waaaaaaay too many pictures (I feel like there are already too many given how I post detailed screenshots of every system+system browser window with literally every body except comets and asteroids), so I needed to reserve them for "special" cases. And a young, binary system with 3 habitable planets, one even with 0 colony cost, smegload of celestial bodies giving hopes for huge mineral amounts, it seems once inhabited by an npr long removed from db because performance issues, was definitely special enough.
 
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Offline Stormtrooper (OP)

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Re: Feedback thread
« Reply #11 on: January 27, 2021, 11:38:02 AM »
Random minor thing:

In this post you described NN 3753 as a bright blue star, but it's given class is shown as D4-VII - a white dwarf. Bright blue stars would be O or B types, white dwarves are ex-stars.

I've played some Elite Dangerous in the past and had to learn the types, so it stood out to me :D

Damn it, it's fixed now, really should've looked at the type. But I didn't, all I saw was a bright blue star - that's what color it has in game, maybe white dwarfs could use some sort of light grey tone or something to be easily distinguishable visually - and I thought "oh ok it's one of those big-ass hot bright main sequence stars".
 

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Re: Feedback thread
« Reply #12 on: April 02, 2021, 03:56:39 PM »
To everyone interested: due to the massive scrolling time needed to go from the top to the bottom of the second page of the main thread, I splitted what I wanted to post into more replies. Because of all the screenshots scrolling on page 3 is already looooong, but hopefully this should alleviate the problem since by splitting replies less content will fit on one page.