[George] What ships will the player swap into after part I?

[george moromisato]

Thus I would like to enable the engine to support player capital ships, hopefully before Part II is complete.

O_o

Ok, I just saw this...

TSB is going to need to take this into account down the line... X3

Just to be clear, this doesn't mean that D&O (Part I or Part II) will have player capital ships--only that I want to support it for people writing mods.

[Aury]

Thus I would like to enable the engine to support player capital ships, hopefully before Part II is complete.

O_o

Ok, I just saw this...

TSB is going to need to take this into account down the line... X3

Just to be clear, this doesn't mean that D&O (Part I or Part II) will have player capital ships--only that I want to support it for people writing mods.

Yes, I know - I was just hoping to make any reasonably playable ship playable (provided there were graphics and it not being ridiculous to have the player flying around in it) - this widens my options by quite a bit. (ie, before I was excluding things sometimes solely on the basis that they were too large for the UI to handle making them play properly and realistically).

[Ttech]

Any reason why you don't want players to have that capability? I'm curious what the reasoning is. That being said I'm totally fine with it, but it seems like you have a plan and you know how much we love getting bits of the Transcendence dream... or as they like to say "Spoilers.."

[Amariithynar]

Introducing an entirely new mechanic (crews) just for the benefit of adding a new ship class seems a bit weird. Is the Wolfen really that small that it does not require a crew as well. Adding crew to all ships is a very drastic change, and one that can bring with it a lot of issues. That makes me think that focusing so much on crews is not the right idea. We should be looking at the mechanics that are already in game, and see how they would work with something like capships (like mentioned, fuel, maneuverability etc...).

I'm not thinking of it as a "they're nameless crew" but as "They're a specialist in their field, whatever it may be, and so you hire who you want filling that role". As for the Wolfen needing a ship crew: Well, the Millenium Falcon gets on with only two crew, and it probably has a lot more aboard it than just 30 tons of cargo space. If we go by that level, then no, you don't really need crew; However, when they had Luke et al aboard, they were able to perform at a much higher efficiency level, what with taking the guns being much better at a manual level than automated.

[Aury]

Any reason why you don't want players to have that capability? I'm curious what the reasoning is. That being said I'm totally fine with it, but it seems like you have a plan and you know how much we love getting bits of the Transcendence dream... or as they like to say "Spoilers.."

Who was this question being directed at?

[Ttech]

Any reason why you don't want players to have that capability? I'm curious what the reasoning is. That being said I'm totally fine with it, but it seems like you have a plan and you know how much we love getting bits of the Transcendence dream... or as they like to say "Spoilers.."

Who was this question being directed at?

Ah yes, forgot to update this after we posted on IRC, it was at George.

[george moromisato]

Any reason why you don't want players to have that capability? I'm curious what the reasoning is. That being said I'm totally fine with it, but it seems like you have a plan and you know how much we love getting bits of the Transcendence dream... or as they like to say "Spoilers.."

I'm not sure I get the question--what capability? The ability to play a capital ship in D&O? For the two reasons that I mentioned in my post: hard to balance and doesn't fit with one of the main themes.

Edit: I should also say that when people say "capital ship" I interpret that to mean "a large, multi-crewed vessel, generally considered the principal ship in a fleet." I don't interpret is as "a large, powerful ship with multiple weapons." If the latter can be crewed by a single person (the player) then it would still fit (though might still have some balance issues).

And to re-iterate, I have no problem with other people creating mods with capital ships (in D&O or otherwise); in fact, I want to support it as much as possible.

[Resident-Pyromaniac]

I have an Idea for this:

and that idea, is that in order to become powerful enough to compete with Galactic/Halos, is to Command Fellow Pilgrims; Building in time, fleets of individual Pilots who find and install their own Weapons. This would add A lot of Strategy to the Game, And Mutiny/Loyalty variations couldn't be too hard to add to that.

[Aury]

For starters, that would be incredibly difficult to implement UI wise...

[ejames]

Another aspect to work on is ship crews. It seems to me that the major difference between a cap ship and the current player ships is the crew. We need to come up with some game mechanics for that. In fact, it might be that adding a crew will help with #1 (balancing a cap ship).

An option I have thought about in a Transcendence style game I am working on is ship maintenance. This maintenance would cover things like crew, upkeep, and general "behind the scenes" repair to the ship. On a personal ship (with no crew) this maintenance would be very low, however on a capitol ship the maintenance would be very high.
To handle running out of money due to maintenance I am planning on allowing the player to run a deficit.

[Aury]

ejames, I think your quote is broken

[ejames]

You're right Wolfy

I edited my original post.

Thanks

[Aury]

Ok, thanks, - I can understand it now.

Lets see - you making a mod?

While the engine can handle negative currency, you'd have to rewrite just about every single dockscreen in order for it to work right, because the dockscreens were never designed with negative currency in mind.

[Ttech]

Any reason why you don't want players to have that capability? I'm curious what the reasoning is. That being said I'm totally fine with it, but it seems like you have a plan and you know how much we love getting bits of the Transcendence dream... or as they like to say "Spoilers.."

I'm not sure I get the question--what capability? The ability to play a capital ship in D&O? For the two reasons that I mentioned in my post: hard to balance and doesn't fit with one of the main themes.

Edit: I should also say that when people say "capital ship" I interpret that to mean "a large, multi-crewed vessel, generally considered the principal ship in a fleet." I don't interpret is as "a large, powerful ship with multiple weapons." If the latter can be crewed by a single person (the player) then it would still fit (though might still have some balance issues).

And to re-iterate, I have no problem with other people creating mods with capital ships (in D&O or otherwise); in fact, I want to support it as much as possible.

Yeah you got it. Thanks for the information I just was curious and didn't see the reasons before.

[Clear Air Turbulence]

I think food constraints would be a little backwards for this setting, in a transhuman setting there should be new challenges, especially as the player moves into regions where normal human minds would not be able to compete. Even now, meeting the nutrition needs of a spaceship crew could probably be handled with concentrated vitamins and recycling of waste, pulling into port to get more food seems pretty 19th century.

One of the possible challenges to transhuman intelligence would be dealing with boredom - when you have a mind that operates hundreds of times faster than a human brain, travelling through space with the only entertainment being what you discover along the way and your repositories of existing knowledge to review could possibly lead to insanity or the intelligence evolving into something that has incompatible goals with the player. An interesting mechanic would be to have your crew require novelty to avoid turning it's focus inward and losing interest in helping run a spaceship. A ship with a large crew may need to explore as a necessity, to give the crew something to think about and debate the meaning of in those long seconds between important actions.

The way this could work in the game mechanics is to give your crew a timer before it gets so bored that it moves on to another level of consciousness or decides to end itself as it "has already seen it all". The timer could be delayed by finding and scanning new planets, new alien races, or by accessing stores of data that were previously unknown. If you spend too much time in familiar space, encountering the same challenges, your crew would start to transcend, creating it's own internal universes to make up for the lack of new things happening in the real one. You could perhaps get upgrades that allow you to slow down experience for your crew to get through the "boring" parts, but the drawback is that their reaction time and other capabilities are hindered until they have time to adjust. Or you could recruit crew who are less intelligent (though still smarter than humans) but living on a slower timescale so that it's evolution is slowed.