‘Big Dick Gator Boss’ – JayEcho

Time for a ship progress update!

All of the core stuff for ships has been done for a little while now; to give a refresher, this is the stuff that’ll be supported out of the gate:

• You’ll be able to switch to entirely different ships.
• Each ship has a different internal layout and map that you can move around in.
• Certain parts of ships can be upgraded; initially this is just weapons, but we may open up more options as we feel the balancing allows. These upgrades are unlockable, purchasable and rewardable- some you can just outright buy as many as you want, some will require looting things from combat, and other still will only be provided in limited quantity for doing specific things.
• Crewmembers properly take up space on the ship, so the number you can have with you at any time is finally limited…
• … but you’ll be able to assign them to different jobs aboard the ship and potentially receive bonuses in the process. Off the top of my head things currently support something like 7 core system assignments, and potentially dozens of weapon assignments. (Capital ships pls tia)

The last couple of weeks has been spent slowly tweaking a lot of existing code to ensure that things will work with the new ships. Another list should help demonstrate what is eating up all the time…

• In the past we only ever had a single “room” to check against to test if the player was aboard their ship or not, so many of these checks (a few thousand, by my count) have needed modification. I need to do a second pass on these and potentially make some of these checks apply to any ship or just the player’s ship where appropriate.
• Ship interiors introduce a second “layer” of maps, so a couple of the core game functions that make everything tick have received careful surgery to switch between the different ways maps are handled.
• All of these new features introduce new types of complexity that we never had to save in the past. About 25% of my time working on each part of this is extending and testing the code that handles saving all this stuff. It’s better (and should be much faster) than the old way, but it still has massive room to be improved if more time is invested in it.

Next up on my plate is actually starting to generate content for this stuff; we have overviews of many of the ships and potential weapons but none of the meaty details that are required like the interior descriptions of the ships for all the rooms that they’re now going to have, or the specifics of the weapon attack descriptions…

For now though, hab some meaty JayEcho draws ?

Hi, my name’s Savin, and I live under a Comcast monopoly. Wherein Comcast (literally yesterday, in a matter of supreme irony given Fen’s post) sent a truck over, knocked the telephone pole over at a 45′ angle, and then denied it on customer service for two hours because apparently my internet being out must be a modem problem. While the pole outside is sitting halfway down with a truck-shaped dent in it. Thanks, Comcast, you guys have the best customer service. I’m glad I don’t have any other competitive ISPs in my area! 😀

Support Net Neutrality.

Net Neutrality is kind of a big deal. I don’t care if you’re a republican, democrat, communist, libertarian, or some sort of weird political party based entirely around getting Marvel to release the next Avengers movie early. This is important. Important enough that I’m posting political shit instead of talking about weird space parasites. Net neutrality helps protect small startups from being quashed by bigger peers, and helps protect weird niche sites (like this one) from getting filtered or slowed by ISPs who’d rather maintain a “family friendly” image than allow their customers to access the content they want.

If you’re an american, please consider supporting net neutrality. Here’s one place with some things about it. Battleforthenet.com has a nice little form set up to send a message to the FCC and congress if you want to be lazy about it.

I’d ask you to strongly consider future candidates’  positions on net neutrality before voting for them, but I think internet regulation is pretty low on every one else’s priority lists. Oh, and also… vote. There’s a reason politicians care a lot about catering to grandma and grandpa’s whims  – it’s because they vote.