[George] Where do shots of ammoless matter guns come from?

[PM]

If you insist on bringing realism into this

Only enough so that I do not make a weapon that grossly violates suspension of disbelief for one of my mods.

[FourFire]

It would be nice to know which weapons fire sub-kilogram shots, and those that fire heavier shots. If the shot is heavy enough, it would make sense for the weapon to use ammo, playability issues aside. I look at the AK15/RK15, and see that they fire the non-tracking equivalent of the 10 kg SmartCannon round.

If you insist on bringing realism into this, it takes 450 terajoules to make a 1 kg mass go .4c. The largest mass weapon takes what? 350MW? I forget what the real to game time conversion is, but that's well over a week of charge time. If these are actually supposed to be relativistic weapons, try the milligram range, not kilogram.

This is exactly what I am talking about; if I cared overly about realism I'd demand that the stations, ships, planets and stars be to scale but that is not the case.

[ThePrivateer]

This is exactly what I am talking about; if I cared overly about realism I'd demand that the stations, ships, planets and stars be to scale but that is not the case.

My biggest gripe about the game - the scale is completely out of whack. Ships are the size of stations, which are often bigger than entire moons, and hovering right on top of the sun never, ever, burns my craft to a crisp. Also, the player never needs food or water, despite both objects being sold throughout the galaxy. (Domina can do miracles, but keeping my stomach full seems like a stretch! )

Don't get me wrong, I love transcendence, but trying to apply advanced physics to an indie space-roguelike will always fail.
On that note, though, I do think Trans is starting to look a little dated, and more things like that scale, like the lack of bloom etc, are becoming more noticeable with age - but I think George has done a hell of a job, all things considered.

On topic of the matter, I agree with the fact that playability comes first, and truth comes retroactively. Take even big blockbuster games like The Elder Scrolls - I can carry around 20,000 gold coins in Skyrim, and never feel the weight. I pick up one extra snowberry, and my guy is suddenly 'overburdened' and 'can't run'.

So yes, let's just leave it at, the ammoless weapons make a really awesome job of destroying enemy ships. Besides, Physics makes my head hurt...

[Ttech]

This is exactly what I am talking about; if I cared overly about realism I'd demand that the stations, ships, planets and stars be to scale but that is not the case.

My biggest gripe about the game - the scale is completely out of whack. Ships are the size of stations, which are often bigger than entire moons, and hovering right on top of the sun never, ever, burns my craft to a crisp. Also, the player never needs food or water, despite both objects being sold throughout the galaxy. (Domina can do miracles, but keeping my stomach full seems like a stretch! )

Don't get me wrong, I love transcendence, but trying to apply advanced physics to an indie space-roguelike will always fail.
On that note, though, I do think Trans is starting to look a little dated, and more things like that scale, like the lack of bloom etc, are becoming more noticeable with age - but I think George has done a hell of a job, all things considered.

On topic of the matter, I agree with the fact that playability comes first, and truth comes retroactively. Take even big blockbuster games like The Elder Scrolls - I can carry around 20,000 gold coins in Skyrim, and never feel the weight. I pick up one extra snowberry, and my guy is suddenly 'overburdened' and 'can't run'.

So yes, let's just leave it at, the ammoless weapons make a really awesome job of destroying enemy ships. Besides, Physics makes my head hurt...

What do you mean by hte lack of blooms?

[ThePrivateer]

This is exactly what I am talking about; if I cared overly about realism I'd demand that the stations, ships, planets and stars be to scale but that is not the case.

My biggest gripe about the game - the scale is completely out of whack. Ships are the size of stations, which are often bigger than entire moons, and hovering right on top of the sun never, ever, burns my craft to a crisp. Also, the player never needs food or water, despite both objects being sold throughout the galaxy. (Domina can do miracles, but keeping my stomach full seems like a stretch! )

Don't get me wrong, I love transcendence, but trying to apply advanced physics to an indie space-roguelike will always fail.
On that note, though, I do think Trans is starting to look a little dated, and more things like that scale, like the lack of bloom etc, are becoming more noticeable with age - but I think George has done a hell of a job, all things considered.

On topic of the matter, I agree with the fact that playability comes first, and truth comes retroactively. Take even big blockbuster games like The Elder Scrolls - I can carry around 20,000 gold coins in Skyrim, and never feel the weight. I pick up one extra snowberry, and my guy is suddenly 'overburdened' and 'can't run'.

So yes, let's just leave it at, the ammoless weapons make a really awesome job of destroying enemy ships. Besides, Physics makes my head hurt...

What do you mean by hte lack of blooms?

I mean that there is a general lack of lighting and dynamic effects, such as Bloom effect, or HDR Lighting. Everything is a static image, generated on a spritesheet - not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's just seeming a little like a dated engine. As a novice programmer, I respect the fact that implementing stuff like that is a really hard job, and doing so in C++ and DirectX is probably not the easiest thing to do.

However, after playing through some more recent games (I'm thinking of SPAZ (Space, Pirates and Zombies)), I definitely have come back to Transcendence and noticed the very static engine.

[RPC]

Ooh SPAZ. Shiny, isn't it?
I know you don't like IRC but it was brought up during a discussion about 2D sprites and such. On a related note I think we recently got parallax, but on the bloom side we're still lacking.