Author Topic: A WoD dev blog  (Read 422581 times)

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Offline -Norbert-

  • 211
You can always try to get rid of that by staring into Kyubeys eyes...

/人◕‿◕人\

"Contract?"  :P

 

Offline Torchwood

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  • Mechanical Templar
You can always try to get rid of that by staring into Kyubeys eyes...

/人◕‿◕人\

"Contract?"  :P
Thanks to Madoka, I will never look at the Heart of Kandrakar the same way again.

Yeah, I think I'll stick with vivid hallucinations.
« Last Edit: February 28, 2017, 01:57:54 pm by Torchwood »

 
I dunno if I stick with them or the Hounds of Tindalos.

  
How do dog monsters that teleport through angles help?
"You need to believe in things that aren't true. How else can they become?" -DEATH, Discworld

"You can fight like a krogan, run like a leopard, but you'll never be better than Commander Shepard!"

 

Offline Torchwood

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  • Mechanical Templar
It's a good reminder that no matter how bad you think this situation is, Lovecraft can always make it worse.

 

Offline Commander Zane

  • 212
  • Spoot Knight of Anvils
I just had a very late thought after looking around and seeing the Ray MkIV and Templar again, would we see Fourth Generation strike craft from either the DD or UGC?

 

Offline Spoon

  • Moderator
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  • ヾ(´︶`♡)ノ
The 4th gen DD fighter is in the works! Finished the diffuse texture just a few days ago. No plans for the UGC 4th gen, but there's another 3rd gen UGC fighter in the works (model was just recently finished) that's gonna be quite a unique fighter to fly. I'll try do a proper blogpost about it soonish when they're both ingame. (WoD is starting to have a stupid amount of assets, of which 60% haven't actually been used in the campaign yet)

In the meantime, I wish you all a happy Spoon day. (Well, in 15 minutes from posting when the clock hits 0:00 and its 7 march) I once again turn 13 years old.
Urutorahappī!!

[02:42] <@Axem> spoon somethings wrong
[02:42] <@Axem> critically wrong
[02:42] <@Axem> im happy with these missions now
[02:44] <@Axem> well
[02:44] <@Axem> with 2 of them

 

Offline Commander Zane

  • 212
  • Spoot Knight of Anvils
The 4th gen DD fighter is in the works! Finished the diffuse texture just a few days ago. No plans for the UGC 4th gen, but there's another 3rd gen UGC fighter in the works (model was just recently finished) that's gonna be quite a unique fighter to fly.
Makes sense when I think about it. They don't need a great deal of force projection as I remember and what has been said about the UGC tells me they're much better at punching people in the wallet than having to have the latest and greatest toys. There's also the mercenary thing and that if they really went for next-gen I could see them getting a production license from the SF.

Quote
In the meantime, I wish you all a happy Spoon day. (Well, in 15 minutes from posting when the clock hits 0:00 and its 7 march) I once again turn 13 years old.
By now I'm no longer sure if this is a blessing or a terrible night for a curse.

 

Offline Jellyfish

  • 29
  • No relent
If there are 4th gen fighters, what's the need for 1st gen ones? It's like flying biplanes when there are Raptors and Lightning IIs around.
"A weapon is only as powerful as its wielder. With this weapon, you'll be but an annoyance, which would greatly dishonor it. With this weapon, I can change history. With me, this weapon can shape the universe."

 

Offline Commander Zane

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  • Spoot Knight of Anvils
Other than the first mission taking place during the time the Ray was a fresh design by the UEU, if you remember the fourth mission, it was used again because the Heralds would remember who you were the moment you showed up in a blue-painted Ray MkIII or Dragonfly.

The only other time it was brought up was in the second mission where Justice points out that it wouldn't be smart to use it, hence why the only ship options are the MkIII and Snarky.

 

Offline Spoon

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Volition your countermeasure code is assbackwards.
A tale of missiles and countermeasures

Boy, there are a lot of things you have to start taking into account when making a standalone like WoD. There's this plethora of customizable things that I dont always take the time to think about. They simply get lost in all of the other things, like texturing, drawing, modeling, mission design, writing, interface design and so forth. These take up the majority of my brain cycles.
Things like ship behavior, that is of course at the absolute core of the gameplay, have a lot of variables going for them. Like: What kind of damp values should ship have? A universal value or for ship specific? What about the rotational damp? Banking constant? What kind of speed values should the ship have for each direction, its engine overclock value, its afterburner speed, burn time and recovery rate. The list goes on.

The most recent example that I've been running into are Countermeasures. For the longest of time, this has been extremely low on my priority list. Freespace 2's countermeasure system is extremely simple really. Every ship, every race, all use the same 'Type one' countermeasure. It has the default effective radius of 300 meters and a default effectiveness of 1 for heat and aspect seekers.
I was content with this for a long time, you hear a beep and a yellow triangle shows up on your hud, you press the CM button until the beeping stops. Simple!
Then at some point during development, Dragon made a bunch of custom effects for species specific CM (like the cool flares that Terran ships use). I included them, but I still wasn't really aware just what kind of stinkyhole the underlying countermeasure system was, until the scp coders stumbled upon its dark secrets.

So what exactly smells about the CM system you may wonder, allow me to explain:
As I currently understand it, countermeasures are active for exactly 2 frames. You drop one, it checks if it can spoof anything in those 2 frames, it goes inactive. Until any new CM is dropped. Then every CM currently in the mission becomes active again for 2 frames.
What the poopoo, right?

So in addition to the retail code just being silly, the WoD build with multilock code had an additional issue with heatseekers, if there was a CM in sight, they'd 100% go for the CM instead of any other target, even if the CM wasn't active or in effective radius. I blogged about this issue earlier, but bring it up again because after many months and asking three different coders, Dahblount has totally fixedz0red the issue. Many jubiliations.
Now of course, there is still that dumb 2 frame active behavior. But thanks to this feature that AdmiralRalwood has added, it's possible to set 'pulse intervals' for countermeasures. Making CM behave in a sane way, a way you'd actually expect them to behave from the start.

So now I'm looking into how to balance and rebalance missile seeker strength vs the various countermeasures. And how to make the CM's of various species unique in their behavior, giving the player some more loadout considerations to make. For example making Nordera CM's good against aspect seekers but bad against Heatseekers because their ships produce a lot of heat with all their mechanical moving parts and so forth. There's also the possibility of turning CM's into straight up mines, since they are technically just weapons with an additional flag.
There's a lot of unexplored ground in countermeasure country!
Urutorahappī!!

[02:42] <@Axem> spoon somethings wrong
[02:42] <@Axem> critically wrong
[02:42] <@Axem> im happy with these missions now
[02:44] <@Axem> well
[02:44] <@Axem> with 2 of them

 
Woo, indirect heatseeker buff. This is nice because heatseekers are awesome. They are even more awesome in WoD because the Dart is tabled to fly lead pursuit instead of the standard heatseeker lag curve.

There's also the possibility of turning CM's into straight up mines

Plsno. I am scared of WoD mines.  :shaking:
[19:31] <MatthTheGeek> you all high up on your mointain looking down at everyone who doesn't beam everything on insane blindfolded

 

Offline Torchwood

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  • Mechanical Templar
Even with all the bugs, I do like the custom countermeasures in Wings of Dawn. Those flares look damn impressive. Looking forward to see the revised version.

 

Offline Dragon

  • Citation needed
  • 212
  • The sky is the limit.
Someone remembered that the flares were originally my idea. :) I only vaguely remember the time I was doing stuff for WoD (other than an amusing "Fura'ngle detergent" typo I found in one of the briefings :)), but the CMs were one of the highlights. IIRC, the first iteration of was actually a crazy cluster flare spam in an "atmospheric flight" mod I was working on back in the day (sort of what BP uses now in a few places, though theirs probably isn't a direct a derivative). I had no idea that the CM system was so bizarre, only that it was extremely limited even after the first improvements that SCP made to it.

 
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As I currently understand it, countermeasures are active for exactly 2 frames.

* -Joshua- makes plans to replay the FS2 campaign on insanity with VSync turned off.

 

Offline Torchwood

  • 27
  • Mechanical Templar
I've recently tried my hand making my own countermeasures. As it turns out, things that move slowly (capital ships) or not at all are pretty helpless against massed fire from aspect missiles. Standards CMs can make an aspect seeker lose tracking, but that doesn't help the unfortunate target if the missile can still hit with its heading by the time it's spoofed.

The solution is creating a CM that has the "pulls aspect seekers" flag. Many thanks to SCP for that one, by the way. If you time its deployment right, you can create a very cool looking effect where the missiles veer off into space wildly at the last moment. You could use that to make very anime looking ECM jamming effects or give capital ships another defense against guided missiles besides shooting them down - which is not viable against an Itano circus-ful of incoming swarm missiles.

 

Offline niffiwan

  • 211
  • Eluder Class
You can also set the "die on lost lock" flag on aspect missiles to help save slow moving targets, certainly not a pretty as pulls-aspect-seekers though.
Creating a fs2_open.log | Red Alert Bug = Hex Edit | MediaVPs 2014: Bigger HUD gauges | 32bit libs for 64bit Ubuntu
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Debian Packages (testing/unstable): Freespace2 | wxLauncher
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m|m: I think I'm suffering from Stockholm syndrome. Bmpman is starting to make sense and it's actually written reasonably well...

 

Offline Spoon

  • Moderator
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  • ヾ(´︶`♡)ノ
And it has been 2 years since release. To celebrate, please enjoy the cool stories that Enioch will be posting.

In other development news, Axem has updated the HUD and also added health and shield gauges.

Everyday we stray further from Freespace's simulation light.
But I embrace the age of arcade dark.
Don't link the fire, Seraphim one.


Also added to the game is the last 4th generation medium fighter. That's one more thing off the to-do list.


The highly maneuverable DD Berkut. With 4 light and 2 heavy mounts, it's not as heavily armed or armored as the Ray MkIV but it comes with reverse afterburner, glide, strafe and it's engine can be overclocked to a high degree. A very dangerous fighter in the hands of a skilled pilot.
Modelled by Hades

Also in the works is the UGCR Vulture (formerly called Leopard), if my idea for it actually ends up working well ingame (that's always a if with Freespace), you'll see why Vulture will be a very fitting name for it.

2 heavy and 8 medium guns make this the heaviest medium fighter, though it doesn't come with any secondary banks. These fighters are primarily deployed as fleet defenders by the UGCR, and don't really have the endurance to be doing any kind of long range missions.
Modelled by Axem


Episode 2 is still totally slated to be released sometime this year though.
Urutorahappī!!

[02:42] <@Axem> spoon somethings wrong
[02:42] <@Axem> critically wrong
[02:42] <@Axem> im happy with these missions now
[02:44] <@Axem> well
[02:44] <@Axem> with 2 of them

 

Offline niffiwan

  • 211
  • Eluder Class
Nice fighters, huzzah for the UGCR Vulture  ;7
Creating a fs2_open.log | Red Alert Bug = Hex Edit | MediaVPs 2014: Bigger HUD gauges | 32bit libs for 64bit Ubuntu
----
Debian Packages (testing/unstable): Freespace2 | wxLauncher
----
m|m: I think I'm suffering from Stockholm syndrome. Bmpman is starting to make sense and it's actually written reasonably well...

 

Offline Commander Zane

  • 212
  • Spoot Knight of Anvils
Is that also a new Celestial? Can't quite tell.

The other ships and HUD update, ermegerd.