[Angelus]

The new pics are awesome!!!

The first pic from the Colonial Gauntlet is frakking cool!
Is the sun a bitmap or is it a animated?

btw if you guys need more testers drop me a pm



i know, i know. That part is covered

[Mr.Ferret]

That sun is frakki'n HUGE!!! looks amazing.

Hope that hud gets a bit of change before release lol (of course it would)

also whilst on that, are you guys gonna add a cockpit? that is a HUGE part of the immersion to me at least, a space sim without a cockpit view just aint worth it imo

[karajorma]

The HUD is the standard FS2 one and will be changed.

Cockpits are also being worked on as we speak.

[Fish]

Cool Thanks Shade!

Nice skyboxes, of course . The star one is quite terrifying... (While I think of it, you know that glare effect when you look directly at the star in regular open-space missions? I was wondering whether a 360-degree form of that could be used to help replicate the star cluster from 'The Passage', presuming a mission for that episode is planned?)

Good to see a great selection of ships! Colonial Cylotron Mk IX, Viper Mk II, Viper Mk IV, Viper Mk VII, Viper Mk VIIe, Combat Raptor, Gemeni Freighter, and another dark, shrouded capital ship I couldn't identify? Plus the Cyclon Raider and Heavy Raider. Whoa! Possibly 8 ship choices for multiplayer! The Cyclotron is going to be flyable, right?



But the Cylon Raider doesn't seem to have a ship icon yet



I liked Shade's in-game realisation that you can just fly between the cargo containers in a Viper, haha.

I can't quite tell, but is the issue fixed where background stars show through a skybox planet?

In addition to posting pics (that serve to show what you've done), do you reckon the dev blog could be updated with some of the more technical learnings from the multi match? It'd be an interesting insight to see just what remains to be fixed, i.e. that you had a weird bug where X happened, or that you found that ship Y was way out of balance, etc etc.

Keep up the good work!

[Angelus]

The dark shrouded ship looks more like a space dock, or you mean the colonial Bolitho.
It's one of the capsships that come with R1.

Hm, would be cool to see some pics with the capships in MP action in the near future...

[Fish]

Ooh, space dock. And I forgot about the Bolitho being in R1! I'm so used to capships being nothing but a tease for the future in BtRL

I also forgot that the Mk IV was already announced as being included... see above comment, haha. Apparently there will be 10 player-flyable ships (including the regular Raptor and Blackbird) according to the earlier blog post, plus the AI Cylotron and the capships. Sweeet.

[Mr.Ferret]

The HUD is the standard FS2 one and will be changed.

Cockpits are also being worked on as we speak.

Very happy to hear that Karajorma, keep up the amazing work

[Lt.Cannonfodder]

The HUD is the standard FS2 one and will be changed.

To what degree it will be changed is still under debate, but expect at least similar level of changes you saw in BtRL demo.

But the Cylon Raider doesn't seem to have a ship icon yet

All ships will get their proper icons in due time, everything you've seen so far are placeholders.

I can't quite tell, but is the issue fixed where background stars show through a skybox planet?

That still happens as far as I know, but it's not going to be a problem since we disable the regular FS2 legacy stars in our missions anyway in favor of the textured skybox.

[karajorma]

Whoa! Possibly 8 ship choices for multiplayer! The Cyclotron is going to be flyable, right?

Don't be greedy.

We haven't made a final decision about the Cyclotron. It wasn't flyable in BtRL though and making it flyable in Diaspora would require someone spent time making a cockpit for it which would probably be better spent elsewhere.

But the Cylon Raider doesn't seem to have a ship icon yet

Which shows the value of these multiplayer sessions. Having multiple people in the game at the same time tends to make it easier to spot problems. That said all the icons are being automatically generated at the moment. What will happen regarding them in the finished game is again something that will be decided later.

In addition to posting pics (that serve to show what you've done), do you reckon the dev blog could be updated with some of the more technical learnings from the multi match? It'd be an interesting insight to see just what remains to be fixed, i.e. that you had a weird bug where X happened, or that you found that ship Y was way out of balance, etc etc.

Well right now we're playing with a mix of placeholders and nearly finished models so the list of what needs to be done would be pretty long. I don't think any ship can be considered properly balanced yet as that will take a lot of playtesting in both SP and MP modes.

Might be worth doing once the game is much closer to completion and the sessions like this are only turning up a few issues though.

[Mr.Ferret]

Speaking on cockpits again.

How would you make the raiders cockpit...i mean just having the eye slot would be a bit of a disadvantage hahah!

[Meleardil]

If you have seen any of the Terminator movies, you can have the general idea.

[karajorma]

Well that's one possible idea. Another is simply to allow the player to see the wings and nothing more. After all you don't see the inside of your skull.

We'll need a different cockpit for Raiders flown by humans of course though.

[Mr.Ferret]

Terminator idea is cool.

That wings idea i like a lot tho actually that makes of sense

With the cylon drop ship you could almost do it based off the base star, have like the red strips in it and the water n stuff, im sure you guys will think of somethink.


Keep it up!

[A2597]

Ohh...please tell me there will be 3D cockpits for the vipers! That would kick ass!

[karajorma]

I think we've already stated that the player flyable ships will be cockpitted (If not I just have! ) The only discussion now is what to do about ships like the Cylon Raider which only have a cockpit when they aren't actually being flown by the Cylon Raider.

[A2597]

in that case, I second wingtips.

[Angelus]

The terminator view isn't bad, but what about the Centurion view from Razor?

There could be 3 or 4 Raiders with different cockpit layouts, like the BtRL one, one that is used if a human is flying the Raider, one with the "true" cylon view ( Razor style, Terminator style, whatever )...

I'm not sure which one is better ( the BtRL one is cool but is imo human view, the Razor one look odd - due to my non-existent Photoshop skills  ) so i'm courious which one the DEVs will use.

[Thaeris]

Here's a good question...

Certainly we will have the option of 3D cockpits, but what about working instrumentation in the cockpits? Instead of relying on the HUD to gather situational awareness on the flight situation, would it be possible to "map" those functions onto fixed displays (which would be customized to properly represent the actual cockpit instrumentation)?

-Thaeris

[Enki]

I love the idea of full working cockpits from an immersion standpoint. Speaking from experience though, taking away HUD info and teaching a pilot to scan inside when the action is outside is counterproductive.  The entire march of aviation technology has been to put the head outside the cockpit where the action is.  Even in my low and slow helo's we added a HUD to our NVGs so we wouldn't have to scan inside and break our focus from a virtual infinite focus to a three foot focus and adapt from green screen to gawds-awful NVG compatible blue light.  Keep all the critical information in the HUD.

And yes I am in the group who think there HAS to be a Colonial helmet mounted HUD, there isn't any way other that than that they could shoot, they don't even have iron sights!

That said, should things get to the point the HUD can be a killable subsystem, it might be interesting to have working instrumentation and tactical readouts accessible via visual scan and try to stay in the fight or at least fight on until you can run away. 

[Mr.Ferret]

...speaking of subsystems haha.

One thing that annyoed me in btrl is that you could have 1% of your hull left and the only thing different would be a bit of smoke coming out the back.

I want lights flashing sirens wailing, smoke fire, hud failing life support systems going down, engines failing guns jamming the whole deal.

If you've ever played a WW2 flight simulator you will know EXACLY what im talking about, i wanna hit the deck on galactica after a hard mission with a smoking crate of a viper

More subsystem damage!!!