[Spoon]

I've had this post reply tab open for roughly 4 days, but instead of actually typing the damn post, I spend most of my time being stupidly absorbed in total warhammer. But hey, finally united and saved the empire, so there's that.
Game development is hard, especially when I can't muster any motivation to do unfun things that are work and effort, and completely make no progress towards that internal deadline I had set for myself.

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.

Old WoD's Kaze had a lot of... issues, it wasn't particularly fun to fly with. I think I've adressed most of these issues in nuWoD at least.
Also that is definitely not the color scheme it will end up with. Unless the CRF ends up importing them from the SF...

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.

There's no catch, it's just a straight up better Kaze!


In other development blog news, once more about missiles. Previously when I complained how countermeasures are so backwards, and I finally got a build that fixed all of the issues I had with them, I figured I'd be done with missiles for a while! But as I was test playing, I just couldn't help but keep noticing how bad most missiles seemed at just hitting their damn target. Even missiles like the DHSM-3c Dart, which has a turn time of 0,6 seconds will often just not turn right. Most missiles seem pointless to use at close ranges too. I randomly mentioned/complained about it on irc that I just didn't liked how missiles felt in Freespace, no matter what kind of settings I seemed to fiddle with. This prompted DahBlount to look into the code for me, and he discovered it was actually something simple and silly. It's swarm missiles that can't hit things for ****, and well, most WoD missiles tend to have swarm enabled to some extend.
I didn't really had any indication that making a missile a Swarm, would innately mess with its ability to track. But hey, the more you know.

To give you an idea how it affects missile behavior: https://my.mixtape.moe/njonia.webm with Swarm
https://my.mixtape.moe/jcvmrh.webm With Corkscrew without any twist applied to it.

So I ended up changing most of the swarm missiles to corkcrews instead, but this means I'll have to go mess with all of their turn values again, since over the years I've just been giving them really low values to try and compensate for bad swarm tracking...

[LoneFan]

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.

Old WoD's Kaze had a lot of... issues, it wasn't particularly fun to fly with. I think I've adressed most of these issues in nuWoD at least.
Also that is definitely not the color scheme it will end up with. Unless the CRF ends up importing them from the SF...

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.

There's no catch, it's just a straight up better Kaze!

I always avoided the Kaze when possible due to its low defense and my play style, so an improved Kaze excites me. It's also worth taking a look at how changes and refinements in weapons between classic WOD and nuWOD have effected its performance.

[Lorric]

The above post was Spoon's when I first read it, and now it's been deleted and replaced and it's now LoneFan's. I know that post was there before today, and now it's supposedly only been there just under two hours. What's going on???

[FrikgFeek]

LoneFan ****ed up the quote feature and copied Spoon's post instead of quoting it, that's all.
You're not going crazy.

[LoneFan]

OOPS
..............
............
..........
.........
...... There, all better now.

[Spoon]

Well, missed my own internal deadline for stuff by two months, game development is hard.
Or more precisely, staying motivated and on target is hard. It's not that I set impossible goals, it's just that a lot of development is just kinda unfun work, work that is required to achieve a certain level of quality.

In all honesty, I'm not even sure at this point if I can live up to the promise of a release this year. If I could muster full focus/concentration/motivation and just get a lot of hours in. Sure.
But hey...

[Lorric]

Because you've now surely fallen deeply in love with War of the Three Kingdoms (Three Kingdoms 2010 as I know it), right?

[Spoon]

It's a nice distraction while I do work that doesn't require a lot of attention.

Perhaps what WoD needs is some good old baby tossing? 

[Lorric]

Well, for a more serious post, I remember marvelling at how long it took to deliver Episode 1, and how people were getting through it in a length of time measurable in hours on one hand. If I had the same ability as you, I would not see that as an acceptable return on investment. The quality gap between NuWoD and old is immense, and yet old still brought me here, as in signing up to post.

http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=79476.0

I'd discovered this place and been playing for months before that. I may well have never signed up at all without WoD. I certainly had no desire to beforehand until I played through WoD and enjoyed it so much that I felt compelled to talk about it here. Don't feel you have to chase after Blue Planet or anything else to deliver a certain standard of quality. Even Blue Planet seems to be collapsing under its' own weight now with the oracle thread opened out of fear the project will not be finished. WoD doesn't need to collapse under its' own weight, even if you drop standards considerably, it will still outdo old WoD by a wide margin.

As for the baby tossing, The Nordera could perhaps do that with their young, believing it to toughen them up. Those that die in the process were just too weak anyway. They don't seem to have made the connection about the lack of intelligence in their race resulting from being dropped on their heads multiple times when infants.

[Commander Zane]

They don't seem to have made the connection about the lack of intelligence in their race resulting from being dropped on their heads multiple times when infants.

Their love for fighting ultimately comes from being butterfingers then?

[Spoon]

They don't seem to have made the connection about the lack of intelligence in their race resulting from being dropped on their heads multiple times when infants.

Their love for fighting ultimately comes from being butterfingers then?

 

[Lorric]

Except in this case the baby is thrown to the ground on purpose rather than because the baby was dropped accidentally.

In the material we're talking about, in one of the most unintentionally hilarious clashings of ancient vs modern values you're ever going to see, a man intentionally throwing his infant son who's just been rescued heroically by the man who hands him over to the ground manages to be by the values of the time seen as a positive thing. You can watch it happen here if you want:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhdqnsiDSa8

And here someone's had a bit of fun at the end:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHQPFWWHyMU

[Spoon]

Another comparison between old and new. Because of the larger portraits, some of the old scenes have to be rearranged a bit, as you can see, the old version easily has enough space for 5 characters on screen at once, but with the larger new size, there's gonna need to be some swapping of positions.
But hey, ~animations~ and stuff. Neat.

[Commander Zane]

Neat.

Indeed it is.

[Lorric]

I can just imagine Tempest elbowing her way into Dawn's position when she shows up, even though that's not what happened.

[Axem]

[Commander Zane]

Hades' WiP of a Hertak strike craft made me realize WoD never really did have tall ships. While the Fura'ngle capitals are tall, they also have radial width, and majority of others is oriented lengthwise first, width second, with any depth coming from stabilizer structure like the Zy capitals or Prometheus Frame.

I'd like to see how this turns out, if the design theme continues.

[Spoon]

Leaks! Spoils! O:
The Hertak rework is top sekret, I've given Hades' a brutal flogging for being so careless.

But yeah, Hades also noticed the lack of tall ships in WoD, so it was his suggestion to go with height for the redesign. It'll be the theme for all the Hertak vessels.

[Flak]

Actually I am also interested in how the Nordera and Fura'ngle look like

[manwiththemachinegun]

You can do it Spoon! You can dooooit!