Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Akura]

New patch. Massive overhaul to graphics and ACBs. Also my progress with the tutorial was erased - I have to do it again and maybe this time the achievement will unlock.

EDIT: Tutorial 6 seems to be borked. It goes right to the quiz, and may or may not be related to the tutorial scene that was supposed to be played.

EDIT2: Finished tutorial, no achievement, and tutorial progress is not saved when exiting the game. Possible exploit from this, as you get a nice chunk of XP from doing tutorial steps.

[Ozyton]

Tried to boot the game up (in the devtest a few days ago) to make a quick starter ship and decided to start with the main cannon. Screwing around with that alone has taken up all my time because it's so easy for me to get carried away with all of the settings.... I haven't even made the shell of the boat yet.

[MrRoboto75]

Tried to boot the game up (in the devtest a few days ago) to make a quick starter ship and decided to start with the main cannon. Screwing around with that alone has taken up all my time because it's so easy for me to get carried away with all of the settings.... I haven't even made the shell of the boat yet.

What about the shell of the cannon?

[Ozyton]

Haha... yes. I still don't know what damage or armor penetration values are good but that is done.

I decided to add a CRAM cannon behind it because I found a tutorial on how to make them easily using the 'cram cake'(?) method.

[Akura]

I think they may have nerfed helium pumps. Last night, the airship I'm building would get up to 275m no problem. Now, it's actually falling after installing the bridge windows, which shouldn't have added too much weight compared to the rest of it.

[EnigmaticHat]

Good damage tests: for less expensive stuff see if it can kill a Bastion (Onyx Guard ship), for more expensive stuff see how quickly it can rip up a Gannus (Steel Strider ship).  Note that a new player could easily struggle to damage either.

What I found with CRAM cannons is that you want to put a ton of pellets on and relatively few ammo boxes.  But I never built a useful ship with CRAMs so grain of salt and all that.

You're not the only one who fiddles with one system forever, I spent like 5-10 hours fucking around with engines once (and I got a monster engine as a result).

[Akura]

Engines are simple enough. My method for engines is: generator->line of crank shafts->a cylinder every other shaft->two carbs per cylinder, perpendicular to the crank shafts->turbochargers on each carburetor->and exhaust pipes gathering all the exhaust from every cylinder before feeding it through each turbocharger in sequence before venting out the craft. Optionally, add superchargers between each pair of carburetor. Gets me pretty decent fuel efficiency, though it does take quite a bit of space.


For combat testing, I tend to use the DWG Marauder, Bastion, and for the really big stuff, the SS's Excalibur. The differences between the Marauder and Bastion necessitates testing both: the Marauder is capable of doing a lot of damage(that forward CRAM hurts), but since it has a wooden hull, it's easier to penetrate. The Bastion on the other hand, does weaker damage(its signature guns aren't as powerful as the Marauder's by a long shot), but the armor requires different weapon strategies.

[Ozyton]

I could have sworn there was a way to spawn in a ship so that it had all of its guns fully loaded, but I can't remember how to do it. I sometimes like to experiment with different ammo but it's a huge pain having to wait for the magazines to load every time I change the ammo type. It's a bit annoying having to set the barrel smaller then bump it back up to clear the magazine, is there a better way to do that?

E: I also found a little tutorial video on how to make ship bows... but we'll see if I'm actually able to put that to use, hehe

[Akura]

Still working on the airship. It's actually flyable, both by AI and player, but I had to link the forward motion props via ACB to when the the player pitches forward. They can't be linked to forward flight controls(for some reason) and the alternative was a complex controller which I hate using. Now that I think about it, I could have put ground wheels somewhere on the ship since the AI does forward flight via the ACB condition "commanded to move forward" which doesn't work for player air controls. The AI can navigate somewhat well, but more than once I've seen it decide to do a full circle rather than turn towards its waypoint and I don't trust it in combat yet.

Also started work on the weapons. Right now, it's only got bombs - 20 missiles, 6 gantries long, 10 are fragmentation(fins,fins,APN,frag,frag,frag,frag,frag,frag,proximity,safety,IR), 10 are explosive(fins,fins,APN,explosive,explosive,explosive,explosive,explosive,explosive,explosive,magnet,proximity,safety,IR), and the explosive bombs have a delay before drop and a longer staggered-fire add-on, so that they don't hit at the same time as(and therefore deflect) the frags or each other. Tests on both the Marauder and Bastion; Marauder was shredded pretty decently, Bastion laughed off multiple bombing runs. Might add some EMP bombs next, under the logic that the frag/explosive bombs will blast away as much as possible between the EMP and whatever sensitive components the EMP can destroy.

I could have sworn there was a way to spawn in a ship so that it had all of its guns fully loaded, but I can't remember how to do it. I sometimes like to experiment with different ammo but it's a huge pain having to wait for the magazines to load every time I change the ammo type. It's a bit annoying having to set the barrel smaller then bump it back up to clear the magazine, is there a better way to do that?

Not sure how to spawn in a fully loaded ship, but I could swear that ships spawned via the "X" menu in creative are always fully loaded. As for clearing the magazines, in 2.12 they added where you can open a cannon's Q-menu, and in the same spot as the settings for gauge size, etc., there's a button labeled "Clear Intakes" - this discards all shells in all the autoloaders and ammo clips attached to that firing piece.

[Ozyton]

So apparently there's a big update in the works which includes an AI rewrite, missile rework (small and large missiles added), and a bunch of smaller stuff. The new AI seems to be the biggest change since you won't have separate naval or air navigation cards anymore and will instead tell the AI what sort of behavior to use in the Q menu.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So a new thread for the on going work and I'm very excited about this one.
Here are the key events / plans for the next four weeks until Saturday 13th October
'
New starts: HerpeDerpeDerp and Rhea have joined the team. Both have done great work with modding and very excited to see what they can do working within the "vanilla" version of the game. Ideally this will soon include the decorations from Rhea's and Gladyon's After Cataclysm mod being added.
vehicle AI is being re-worked (see below)
Missiles with multiple gauges and more will be released
Some "exciting" new mini features (see below)
Continuing to update to the new AIs, refactor and test the code, fix the bugs in the bug tracker
Balancing
'
So in more detail
2) The AI
I'm reworking it so that it splits "naval, aerial and land" into three types of components
a) Behaviours (where we are going, and why)
b) Manoeuvres (how we get to the desired location)
c) Additional (control sails, make the tea, etc)
Some examples of these might be
Behaviours: broadside, charge, point at and maintain distance, bombing run, circle, run, evade, move submarine below, hover above.
Manoeuvres: 6 axis stabilised hover platform, boat with rudder, fighter plane, thrustercraft, yawing aerial, submarine,
Additionals: control sails, use activate shields, launch flares.
The way this will work is that the mainframe will have the AiMaster Code running within it, and you'll be able to customise what routines it has from it's own UI. I don't plan on having separate placeable blocks for this neccessarily.. if that does become the case it will simply be to "allow" these routines to run so that battle damage can disable their use. It will be centrally configured and saved.
General reasons why are:
to allow dev team and modders to make a load of small modular routines that can be used, swapped between, etc, quickly and easily.
By separating a routine into two parts it "squares" the number of combinations possible. I.e. straight off the bat you can use the legacy aerial AI in a ship, or the legacy naval AI, in a boat.
additional routines can be used by anyone, which means aerial AI can control sails, etc.
modules become testable
FTD and FS will use the same AI system, although FTD uses it via mainframes, and FS uses it inbuilt into the ship, as long as the captain is present.
The naval AI card, Land AI card and Aerial AI Card, will become obsolete, but will, for the sake of keeping everything running smoothly, basically do this. I use the example of the Naval AI Card here:
Put in LegacyFtdNavalBehaviour into the mainframe
Put in LegactFtdNavalManoeuvre into the mainframe
Load the NavalAiParameters which were set via sliders, and apply those parameters to the Behaviour.
Mainframe runs the behaviour, maneouver, etc, and will, from that point forward, save those parameters.
When asked to save the Naval AI Card will not save anything
When vehicle reloaded the Naval AI Card will do nothing at all
Through this 6 step cycle the routine and it's parameters are offloaded from the card (now safely removeable from design) and loaded into the mainframe.
'
4) Exciting new features. Basically just adding new stuff.
a) steam powered CRAMS that fire a low detectability shell, and use steam to increase packing rate using a Steam Autoloader perhaps.
b) a LASER melee weapon (basically a laser cheese wire between two points on your ship)
c) a PAC melee weapon (a curved PAC cheese wire between special new terminators on the PAC)
d) tank treads on wheels
e) Huge extremely powerful propellers for steam crank shafts
'
6) Balancing
a) Plans to tied to tie the effectiveness of defensive countermeasures (like LAMs and shields) into the accelerations of your platform, so that unstable movement / high recoil / being thrown about by explosions lowers LAMs accuracy, causes shields to intermittently fail, makes guns less accurate, detection less accurate
b) This will be tied in with probably a general debuff of the APS system to make it less overpowered in comparison to other weapon systems. Recoil based inaccuracy might make a comeback. Bullet speeds reduced and fire rates reduced.
c) Aim point selection totally changed. Ultra Wide Band Radar added which can see through blocks (depth depends on power supplied to it). Radar can see through maybe 2m of blocks. IR can see hot things under some depth of blocks. Visible no depth. Aim point card will need to "see" a specific block before it can aim at it, will gridcast to check depth to block. This will lead to some interesting things like circling your opponents to get the best angles to view their internals, and building out of materials that block the view of certain modalities of detector). Special detection craft to get up close with an Ultra Wide Band radar and relay the location of the mainframe to others in the fleet.
d) Perhaps an on hull buff for weapons built on the hull, rather than on turrets. To be confirmed.
e) Balancing of the new missile gauge stuff to avoid large vehicles spamming the hell out of hundreds of tiny missiles.

Thoughts form the more experienced players?

Still haven't made a boat yet. Well, I've made 2 boats but I'm not happy with them...

[Akura]

Welp, looks like I'm going to have to replace all my creations. (They all suck anyway)

I just finished this morning replacing the paddle sections I was using for railings on my airship with the new railing block... which has the exact same model, cost, and stats as the paddle. Granted, those may change later on, and it was probably good since railings don't use as much CPU time as paddles do.


Loving the idea for more steam stuff. And tank treads. Personally, I would have liked to see some kind of engine-based(steam or otherwise) system that increases the pack rate of CRAMs, but the steam loader seems like a step in the right direction.

d) Perhaps an on hull buff for weapons built on the hull, rather than on turrets. To be confirmed.

Gonna have a slight disagreement here. The main advantage for hull-mounted weapons over turrets is that you generally have a lot more space to put things; more gauge increasers, more autoloaders, etc. You can also layer more hull armor over those components. As such, they already have their "buff". Turrets also have a distinct disadvantage of being rather easy to separate from the ship; a single stupid-high AP laser pulse can, if correctly placed, vaporize the spinner itself or whatever block it's attached to - in fact this is one of the best was to take out an Excalibur; aim for the lower hull under the turret, and you'll likely detonate the autoloaders.

[LoSboccacc]

tank treads on wheels

Spoiler: my hull is ready (click to show/hide)

[Ozyton]

That looks cool. How effective is it though?

[LoSboccacc]

Laser were hella op back then. It’s still ok for the cost. I’ve even got one that floats, great for assaulting those campaign cityes

[MrRoboto75]

Their rambots hide in metal BAWKSES!  The cowards, the foools!