Shrike's Mines & Missiles ++

[Song]

Continuing the trend of absurdly fast-firing weapons, I've started revising a weapon I was never entirely happy with: the moskva 56.

Previously it fired at about 30 shots a second, but did so by firing 10 three-shot bursts. This was fine, but now I've got weapons that match it and it wasn't a satisfying weapon.

So I'm bumping it up to level 7, swapping from a repeat to a custom configuration (because repeating triggers an extra increase on the temperature counter, and multi-shot configurations do not).....and upped the rate of fire to 30 shots per second base. Taking into account its configuration, that gives it a true rate of fire of 90 shots per second. This puts out extreme damage.....but you only get about 1.25 seconds per burst if you don't want to break it. It's a very situational weapon as a result, favoring lighter ships that can dart around targets, avoiding heavy return fire and then moving in to knock out armor segments and weapons with precision bursts at close range.

....at least, that's the idea. It seems to work well enough in testing. If anything it's currently a bit too good if you can get it early on (might need to lock it behind a military ID requirement), but can struggle a bit against some of the enemies it might face at level 7.

The important thing though is that it looks pretty cool during those 1.25-second bursts:

[Song]

Today I added two new weapons.


The first is the omnidirectional recoilless cannon. This is a weapon that really should be in the base game....but isn't. I'll be trying to add more guns like this in the near future.

The second is a blast from the past: I've revived the old APA effects and spruced them up for 1.7. It's not finished yet, and there's still the good old graphical bugs with particle-effects on projectiles.....but it's looking very nice. It's not going on APA though: I'm making an endgame experimental howitzer from Makayev-Energia. I'm setting the different manufacturers on different courses:

Earth Industries has copied Ares technology to make their Plasma Cannon, which, like the APA and Kytryn, fires a burst of plasma by itself. I'm not altering the EIPC at this stage.
NAMI has developed plasma explosives, but not the techology to direct a plasma cloud effectively. Thus, their designs are for more powerful missiles and mines (......or they will be, when I make them) that use plasma instead of nuclear warheads.
Makayev-Energia has been caught out somewhat, and is adapting their howitzer technology. Their prototype weapon (one of several that would exist in-universe, but the only one you can buy in SM&M++) fires a howitzer shell that emits plasma as it travels along. Thus the damage is fairly low compared with other plasma weapons (and, indeed, the Mark VII howitzer) but is reliable....it's not a cloud weapon, so you get a single damage roll and that's it.

[Song]

Looking back at the old feature lists for the 2015 version....I have a great deal to add back into the game. But it's going smoothly and new-new content is also creeping in.


Before heading away on holiday for the week (domestic trip, so I'll still be doing my research and coding...just a different city and with some sightseeing) I've made a few extra changes:


-The moskva 56 has been renamed the Shtorm Repeater. Players of pre-1.0 versions will remember that this was the name of the Moskva 33, back in the day. No functional difference from the last iteratio as the Moskva 56, but the name suits it better.

-The Object 8609 (makayev plasma weapon) is about halfway through its cleanup. Ultimately it'll need to be run through transdata for a balance pass, of course.

-Tinkers now mount an omnidirectional X-ray laser, not a Flenser.

-New level 8 plasma cannon: Parker P51. It's difficult to use, but has some advantages over other weapons, Uses the same system as the Object 8609....and in-universe, that got the maker destroyed by spurious patent lawsuits. The gun's still around though. Unlike the Object and the "true" plasma cannons, the P51 has very light tracking on its projectile. This is more a curse than a blessing under some scenarios.

-Renamed my NAMI missiles to fit in better. Also allows me to fit in some extra missiles for the endgame.

-Started preliminary work to bring back some older stuff that was cut out of the 2015 SM&M++ release.

-Akan quadmount now back to using 4 slots, and put back at level 6. Technically the damage output puts it up at level 8, but the penalties for using it are pretty serious.

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Still a lot of work, but slow progress is still progress. Here's a shot of a test-firing of the Object 8609:



It's obviously very similar to my old APA effect...but I've cleaned things up a fair bit behind the scenes [and will continue to do so] and moved to new particle effects. I need to tone things down a fair bit and optimise things....but it's starting to move away from the old effect and onto a brand new one.

[Song]

Back from holiday, and back onto modding. I've added a few fairly boring guns:

ARCHIMEDES-I, II and III are ammo-using laser cannons at levels 1, 3 and 5. They do a lot of damage, but fire very slowly. Very slowly in the case of ARCHIMEDES-III. They have a bit of swivel to help with aiming, and share a single ammunition type. As you progress down the line they use this ammunition far more efficiently. They're more NPC guns than anything else, not that any NPCs use them in SM&M++.

From the same manufacturer I've added the AM-5 multitarget blaster. It's basically what my old mod Elemental Shift did to the laser cannon array. At level 4, this gives you an omni version of the laser cannon array, with multitargeting. It's your very own tiny early-game IM90.


As a generic weapon (no manufacturer), I've added the Dobson projector. This is a level 7 (for now) weapon that fires thermo cannon shells. It fires a lot faster than a regular thermo cannon, but has significantly worse weapon handling. A combination of short range, spread, and extremely low shell velocity make it a weapon that requires good aim at very short range. It's also extremely rare and a bit pricey.


Next up I have a missile launcher and some missiles to add to the Archimedes (company) lineup. This is the previously-mentioned-on-this-thread laser-warhead missile system. I'm also biting the bullet and planning to finally get a weapon repair kit working. It'll be basic and overpowered to start with, but I can split it into a bunch of more specialised items later. I also need to undo some of George's changes to the dual mark III (I have a different method of levelling and balancing crafted dual weapons and I need to make the DM3 fit in), and code up (and add a recipe for) the dual Mark I howitzer.

Following that, I need to rebalance my bushido energy weapons to fit in to 1.7's meta.

[Song]

I've just rebalanced the Akan 30 quad-mount. it now does actually get 4X (actually 5X but that's because we can't do arbitrary rates of fire) DPS over the Akan 30. As a result of this, the modified Ranx Dreadnought that I added has gotten....somewhat tougher. I've revised it and made it rarer. I've also bumped the gun itself up to level 7 (it's a 4-slot device and can only ever be crafted or looted, so level doesn't really matter).


But yeah, you can't do a rate of fire of 24 shots per second with an ammo-consuming weapon. So I was forced to go for 30. The results are impressive, and extremely expensive if you're buying the ammo.

[Song]

Today, at long last, I added the weapon repair kit. Any damaged weapon of level 7 or below (that isn't alien) can now be repaired with a weapon repair kit. They're quite rare items, but there aren't many things that would cause you to use them.


In the longer term, I'll try to separate these out into more than one item....but for now, a single kit will do. At the very least this means I can coax George into using the Shtorm repeater during next weeks livestream.


I have also added some new mining lasers. They're boring but practical. I also re-added my old fixes for George forgetting to set a sane passthrough value on mining charges, and tweaked some levelling. Dobson projector fits in well at level 8 with some tweaks.


I think I'll rework the Archimedes laser lineup.....again.....and make them a bit more sensible. I have some plans for how to accomplish that so it shouldn't be too bad.


I've also added the placeholders for the Auto90 range of projectiles, which should be good fun to work on.



EDIT: Following some intro-screen testing, I have nerfed the rare version of the ranx dreadnought that this mod adds. It's now very difficult to end up with more than one turret aimed at you at once.


This is what it looked like sometimes before I fixed that:



Just idly swatting three deimos at once. No big deal.

[Song]

Today in new weapons, the M1 Hades missile.




.....I did have an M1 in the old versions of SM&M. It was a blast tracking missile based on the old BlastExplosion4. I eventually cut it because there wasn't really a place for it. However I've now rebuilt it as a non-tracking military radiological weapon. As such it's the only illegal missile in the NAMI heavy range [EDIT: For now, at least]. It's hard to find and not that useful but I think it's good for worldbuilding. Note that you can only irradiate stations after they're dead, because George rightfully realised that the overly simplistic "radiation = death" system for NPCs would make it ludicrously overpowered if you could irradiate living stuff.

This missile should not be used at short range, incidentally. It uses a hybrid of old and new versions of radioactive explosion 2, with a damage boost. It's not a very powerful weapon by itself though.

I'm rebalancing the NAMI heavy somewhat. It's getting a greatly reduced rate of fire, with an increase to missile mass, value and damage to compensate.

Testing on the weapon repair kit has concluded. The kits are working as they should, even though the code's probably a bit sloppy. Things appear on track for being able to release something before the mod's up on livestream next week......hopefully.


EDIT:

I've also just added in a disposable minelayer pod. it seems to work quite nicely.

[Song]

Another day, another set of tweaks. And another near-complete post deleted by the forum bugging out. I love ancient versions of PHPbb.


Anyway. I've been working on a small side project lately and I'm starting to re-integrate it into SM&M. It's buggy as hell so it's taking a while (code typos). Before I get to that, here's some other changes:

Ion Blaster family: Renamed all weapons. The family now works like this:

[*]Light Ion blaster has been renamed to "Ion Blaster"
[*] Ion blaster has been renamed to "Heavy Ion Blaster"
[*] Heavy Ion Blaster has been renamed to "Super-heavy Ion Blaster" and has been overhauled to do significantly more damage....at the expense of a second device slot. Also more power consumption. It can now actually kill things with decent shields

I've also added a new weapon in: the dual ion blaster. Because in vanilla there actually aren't any dual ion weapons.


In more Earth Industries news, I've also added a 2-slot heavy weapon at level 6: the particle convergence cannon (name may get changed later). This is basically three lancer cannons glued together, firing at a point about 20-30ls in front of the ship. The range is reduced a lot, so you only get that cone of death. It's a heavy power-hog, but it's rather powerful.



Finally there's the work I've been doing on the side. I'm adding a new faction into the game......hopefully. I've gotten the ships and a very special item done. They're called the "Lombard Outcasts", and they're an offshoot of the marauders that (will) turn up in the late game. They use the same ships, more or less, but with some significant upgrades including a very work-in-progress externally-mounted M2 missile that's....currently not working properly.

Current ships:

-Corsair Deluxe (based on the corsair II) [More or less finalised, working very nicely]
-Barbary II (based on the barbary) [Needs equipment tweaks to stop it EMPing itself]
-Drake-class advanced missileship (name will change) [More or less finalised]
-modified Tripoli-class destroyer [more or less functioning, not a very good ship but that's kinda the point]
-Viking-class minelayer [horrendously overpowered, due to be nerfed into the ground]


The idea is that these ships can hit quite hard, but are fairly fragile compared with similar ships of the same level.

Finally, here's what it looks like when you spam a load of advanced Drakes (on both sides) on the intro screen:



Can't hide it in a spoiler tag because I can't get them to work and I don't even know if they should right now.

[Song]

I have made an interesting discovery.


While making the side-mounted mark I howitzer I found that when combined with the dual mark I primary weapon, the side-mounts were having odd weapon handling. Specifically the shells from the side-mounts were falling behind the main shells, despite being fired at the same time. What's more, it was consistant that the left sidemount shell would be travelling slightly faster than the one on the left.


So what I think is happening, assuming George hasn't cunningly hidden something amazing in the engine code for just this situation, is this:

-When I fire, the game fires my main gun instantly and applies its recoil force to my velocity.
-It then looks for linked-fire weapons
-Finding them, it fires first one, then the other. It applies recoil forces as each gun is fired.
-Critically, it does this all in a single "tick".

The result is that while all guns are fired at once, technically the side-mounts are fired after that first recoil force is applied, and one of the two side-mounts is fired after the recoil force of the other is also applied. So the shells are travelling at a reduced net velocity because the ship is starting to move backwards. Except it isn't, because this all happens instantly. The net result is that if you're using linked-fire weapons with recoil, particularly high recoil, you are going to see effects on weapon handling.

Here's this effect in action. The dual howitzer rounds are travelling at full speed, with the side-mounts lagging behind. All rounds 'left the barrel' at exactly the same time and have the same speed set in the XML.

RecoilDemo.png (79.63 KiB) Viewed 10098 times

While this is probably a bug, I have to say I rather like the effect.

[AssumedPseudonym]

 Can pretty much confirm. I get the same thing with linked fire howitzers on the Psi in TBR (and also on lighter UnBound ships when they wind up with recoil weapons).

[Song]

I'm now starting to refine stuff down do some rudimentary balance work (still need to work out how to run the balance calculations with Transdata some time) and cut out extra crap. Sadly, this does mean that crafting the Akan 30 quad-mount will no longer be possible in the early game. It's just too powerful, even with the ammo drain. That gun's gonna go up to level 8 or so, and continue being a station defense gun.


What will replace it is a rapid-fire Akan varient that you can just buy. It'll behave similarly to the old version of the Akan 1200 in terms of rate of fire (since, again, there are limits to what kind of ROF you can actually get out of the engine), but without the custom config.

And replacing the quadruple akan in the "insane stuff the tinkers can make" is the side-mounted Akan 30. It works very well, and if you get two of them and a regular akan 30 you've basically got what the quad-mount was supposed to be anyway: a very powerful setup that drains ammo like there's no tomorrow.


I've also knocked out some placeholders and started refining the Auto90. It's not balanced and it won't be balanced for quite a long time...but the shells look more or less like they're supposed to. One thermonuclear (radius) shell, one non-fragmenting AP round, and a plasma round.

[Song]

Today in "scrambling to get things into shape for George's streaming":

-Parker P51 plasma cannon reworked slightly. No longer tracks, but is still a robust, albiet low-damage weapon.
-New weapon: Parker P67. It's a sped-up alternating version of the P51, and slots in to level 9. Both it and the P51 use slightly antiquated effects, but they just don't seem to work with the modern orb coding so I'm leaving them on the older stuff.
-Revised effects and description for Object 8609 prototype howitzer. This weapon is finalised until I go over it with transdata (not gonna happen until long after George plays it and I release an alpha)

-Fixed some tinker crafting stuff. A lot of recipes are still seriously imbalanced.
-Added the side-mounted smartcannon (suggested by AssumedPseudonym). Works very well indeed although it's still just a smartcannon.
-Changed mining laser to use the stock laser effects
-Added Heavy Mining Laser
-Added Advanced Mining Laser (needs IMU membership to purchase, unless I've goofed)
-Added some more 2-slot converging weapons you can craft at the Tinkers using those new mining lasers: Dual mining laser, dual heavy mining laser, dual advanced mining laser. They're incredibly impractical for combat but somewhat fun. Need a balance pass later on as the fire-rate is a bit....questionable.
-Particle convergence cannon got bumped up to level 7, lost the multi-slot requirement. Will eventually get a balance pass to retune its power use for that level.
-Duplicated a dockscreen to stop the (slightly different) person doing custom work at the Rigel tinkers from morphing into someone else while doing the work.
-Updated the Rigel tinkers to use forced-encounter code graciously provided by AssumedPseudonym, fixing minor conflict with Corporate Command.
-Updated Readme file
-Used some surplus UNIDs to fit in things better. Soon I'll have to resort my UNIDs properly but this will do for now
-Reduced momentum on XM500, XM900, NM900 and CRM900. Recoil6 was excessive and caused issues when fired at the player. Currently set to 3, may go up to 4.
-Altered the Tripoli (base variant) to spawn with either KM550's, XM500s or XM900s. The XM900 is fairly rare, but you should expect to catch nukes when fighting the Tripoli in SM&M++
-Tinkers that aren't in Rigel will (in theory) trade equipment to friendlies, similar to how Omnithor does it. Since the code in question is in fact ripped directly from Omnithor.xml and then modified, it is likely there will be entertaining issues with my version of it. Tinkers will not install any weapons that require ammunition (eg. side-mounted Akan 30).



I've also put some time into replacing dud/placeholder sounds from SNAPSS, and finally hit on what I currently think is an okish basic plasma weapon sound. Certainly it seems to work for the P51. I'm sure I'll hate it immensely in a few weeks, but it'll do for now.

Tomorrow I'm mostly busy, but I'll be doing my last bits of added content before I freeze it and work on cleaning stuff up for the Stream Edition and writing my cheat-sheet for George. Also testing some of the more speculative code in the current version.

[Song]

23-hours-before-stream update:

-Fixed CRM600 "Daffodil" mine. Rather than use the particle-effect system for damage (which is incredibly unreliable by nature) it now uses a shockwave fragment and some graphical particles. The effect is a bit odd, but I can't really fix that with the current engine capabilities (or a few hours of workarounds).

-Updated the tinker recipes further. Pretty much everything I want craftable is craftable now. Rebalanced prices a bit.
-Changed around some of the vanilla tinker recipes to make the ingredients a little easier to get.
-Added a MaxSpeedBonus to duralloy armor
-Added "Mercenary's Wolfen" playership. Quite strong (almost certainly overpowered) but eh, screw it. It's only there to show off two weapons right off the bat.
-Fixed missing firerate in bushido laser blaster
-Reduced ammo cost for minotaur lasers
-Increased swivel on minotaur lasers
-Updated the readme file

Things are looking pretty good.

[TheLoneWolf]

Shrike. Do me a favour, please, and tell me how you made the M1 Hades! That effect! How?! Just HOW???


I want to do that too (looks greedily) on my own though.

How do you make effects? I wanted to make pin sized projectiles, and can't.

[TheLoneWolf]

Shrike just loves Greeks, doesn't he? Please spare a name or two for me