Author Topic: A WoD dev blog  (Read 421353 times)

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Offline Torchwood

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Good eye, the new and improved Celestial now has 6 medium primaries instead of the anemic 4 you may have seen during Dawn's dreams. And the placement has been much improved.

Sorry, but it will not be featured in Emerald Dreams. Can't be stealing all of Spoon's thunder now can I?

Nonetheless, the other Cyrvan strikecraft are more than formidable as is. You'll never find a more fun bomber to fly than the Verian. Except for Delta 1's suped up Rhea, maybe.
« Last Edit: April 03, 2017, 11:21:28 pm by Torchwood »

 

Offline Commander Zane

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I'll leave it to the campaign experience before making that decision. There will be a Cyrvan bias to deal with.

 
You made a fighter called the DD Berkut and it doesn't even have inverted wings? Spoon, I am disappoint.
[19:31] <MatthTheGeek> you all high up on your mointain looking down at everyone who doesn't beam everything on insane blindfolded

 

Offline Commander Zane

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I thought about this and have a question now, if there's a bar-style shield gauge on the HUD, does this mean shields will now be single-section instead of a quadrant shield? Or does the bar display its relative strength by total points, as in 0/150/150/250 of 1,000 is a 55% filled bar?

There's also about four hours until the second anniversary by the release post's timestamp, so here's to more awesome WoD development.

 

Offline Axem

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It's based off of total shield energy. But there's a script that auto balances the player's shields (which can be toggled with Alt+Q), so its like only the player has a single segment shield. Everything else has normal shield quad mechanics.

If you turn off the auto equalization and a shield quad goes below 5%, the shield bar sort of hollows out letting you know that "yo dude, shields may not be effective".

 

Offline Lorric

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Clever. :)

 
With how low TTK is in WoD I don't think you'll have too much time to check your shield strength gauge before you just die when you **** up and let someone get behind you. Though it's still a pretty cool addition and a bar-type indicator is much more readable than the opacity-based quadrant strength in the default HUD.
[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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Depends on what you're flying. In the test runs, I've found that MCWS are remarkably survivable if you take advantage of your slide controls. Better still, the Zervium and Verian have hitscan beam weapons so no amount of lateral maneuvering can throw off your aim - just point them directly at the enemy and shoot.

 
The Zervium does lose a turnfight against a Ray3 though, if only slightly. So it's possible to simply stay out of its firing line. And yes, by manoeuvring you can make yourself dodge pretty much any non-hitscan primary.

Though you can still get from full health + full shields to dead in 4.7 seconds against 6 banks of the VK01N and no secondaries. Get hit by some point-blank darts or DRPs and that can easily go under 3 seconds.
« Last Edit: April 04, 2017, 01:48:01 pm by FrikgFeek »
[19:31] <MatthTheGeek> you all high up on your mointain looking down at everyone who doesn't beam everything on insane blindfolded

 

Offline Spoon

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Well, the UGC Vulture is in game, with the dubious honor of being the first and probably the only fighter that has thruster bitmaps for rotating and strafing and the like. And boy, what a ride that turned out to be. You see, the way these $Thrusters are defined in the tables did not exactly align with what I considered to be... logical.

From the wiki:

$Thruster:
+Used For:
    Defines the maneuver that triggers the maneuvering thruster
    List of maneuvers: Bank right, Bank left, Pitch up, Pitch down, Roll right, Roll left, Slide right, Slide left, Slide up, Slide down, Forward, Reverse
    Syntax: ("String" "String")

This seems easy enough right? Now, let's get a picture from the interwebs so we're all on the same page:


Now :v: in their infinite wisdom thought a bit differently about how these terms are used. The Roll keys are labeled as Bank in the FS2 control keyconfig. While Yawing is Turn.
So okay, weird, but this is the same developer that labeled the biggest capitalship as destroyers and the smallest ones as cruisers, while the inbetween is a frigate and a corvette. So hey, not the first time terms are used a bit differently from the norm.

So I got started with assigning the rcs thrusters in the table entry. The thruster on the top right and bottom left should fire if the ship rolls right, so I'd assign 'Roll right' to these. Now if the ship would slide to the right, I would want the thrusters on the left to engage. When the ship turns right... that would be banking, right? So the thrusters on the left would fire if the ship Banks right.

Ha! Joke is on me. None of these were true.
Cause you see. Banking is rolling. Rolling is turning. Slide right is actually Slide left. But then 'Roll right' and 'Roll left' don't follow that reverse logic of the Slide.


Makes perfect sense right? When none of the terms in the tables actually correspond to their actual movement and directions are reversed willy nilly. And the only real way to figure it out involves trial and error. Edit table, start up game, see what actually works, edit table, start up game. Rinse and repeat.
So boy, was I bamboozled trying to make any sense of this.

Good times.

But hey, here it is ingame:

Shooting so many guns at once feels good though.
The ship has a unique way of shielding that sets it apart from other fighters. Its shield mesh only covers the front end. The back and sides are completely unshielded. So the pilot has to keep facing its opponent at all times to keep its strong frontal shield to the incoming fire. (The AI is remarkably good at this, with the right ai profile) It's afterburner only provides a short 2 second speed burst and overclocking the engine doesn't give you that much of a boost.

The Zervium does lose a turnfight against a Ray3 though, if only slightly. So it's possible to simply stay out of its firing line. And yes, by manoeuvring you can make yourself dodge pretty much any non-hitscan primary.

Though you can still get from full health + full shields to dead in 4.7 seconds against 6 banks of the VK01N and no secondaries. Get hit by some point-blank darts or DRPs and that can easily go under 3 seconds.
The Ray3 rotates 2.9 2.9 2.9 vs 2.4 2.4 3.0 of the Zervium, if the Zervium loses this turnfight, its on the pilot!

I'll take a look at the TTK and tweak if necessary, those numbers you say seem a bit on the low end for what I want the player's survival time to be.
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

 
My numbers are on the low end because I am good at this game so I tweaked both the ai-profiles.tbm and ai.tbl to make the TTK lower.
With the release version a wingman-average Ray3 with 6 VK01Ns would need 7.01 seconds to 100-0 you because it has a 1.2 fire delay scale and the player has a 0.8 damage scale. I momentarily forgot that my version is edited since I did that over a year ago.

Realistic TTK with missiles involved should be around 6 seconds which seems long enough. The player's TTK is around 3 seconds against most Terran fighters, it seemed only fair that the AI should be able to do the same to you.

The Ray3 rotates 2.9 2.9 2.9 vs 2.4 2.4 3.0 of the Zervium, if the Zervium loses this turnfight, its on the pilot!

Whoops, my bad. I think I must've been looking at the Verian when I checked the turn times since it's right under the Zervium and rotates just slighty slower than the Ray3.


Uhmm.... yeahh. If the Zervium rotates faster too then there should be almost no reason it should ever lose to a Ray3 unless its piloted by a complete noob.
« Last Edit: April 08, 2017, 11:22:08 am by FrikgFeek »
[19:31] <MatthTheGeek> you all high up on your mointain looking down at everyone who doesn't beam everything on insane blindfolded

 

Offline Commander Zane

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Sounds like the Vulture was made to fly like Descent's Pyro, that's pretty cool.

 

Offline Hades

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To dust off the thread and to make my first real post here as a WoD team member guy, I present the Kaze MK2.

More heavily armed and armored, the Kaze Mark 2 can also make use of a special booster package to go, like, double fast or something.

The coloring is just materials at the moment but it's the way that the textures will be done on the basic level.
[22:29] <sigtau> Hello, #hard-light?  I'm trying to tell a girl she looks really good for someone who doesn't exercise.  How do I word that non-offensively?
[22:29] <RangerKarl|AtWork> "you look like a big tasty muffin"
----
<batwota> wouldn’t that mean that it’s prepared to kiss your ass if you flank it :p
<batwota> wow
<batwota> KILL

 

Offline QuakeIV

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Exciting!

 
More heavily armed and armoured and it's red so it goes like three times faster.

So... what's the catch? It's rotation times, right? The great holy trinity of numbers to rule all numbers in Freespace fighter evaluation.

Also those x-wings are super sexy.
[19:31] <MatthTheGeek> you all high up on your mointain looking down at everyone who doesn't beam everything on insane blindfolded

 

Offline Lorric

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While I wasn't particularly a fan of flying it in old WoD, I always really liked the Kaze's design. It's nice to see it getting some love here. I'll probably like flying it more upgraded, and it looks great in that colour scheme too. :)

 
Yeah, in old wod anything but the Ray3 was kinda pointless until you get the Ray3-E which is basically cheatmode.

Aside from the Aestival but you only get to fly it in a few missions.
[19:31] <MatthTheGeek> you all high up on your mointain looking down at everyone who doesn't beam everything on insane blindfolded

 

Offline Droid803

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:U
I like the face. It's cute.
(´・ω・`)
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Offline Darius

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Incidentally, I'm digging the rotated Kaze 2 as a vertically-aligned fighter design :nervous:

 

Offline Lorric

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Incidentally, I'm digging the rotated Kaze 2 as a vertically-aligned fighter design :nervous:
Makes me think of:

https://youtu.be/fd_6SYW2xwA?t=53