Shrike's Mines & Missiles ++

A place to discuss mods in development and concepts for new mods.
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Atarlost
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Shrike wrote:When I do have time, I think the next thing to make will be the NAMI thermo weapons. Those should be fun....they're basically giant mass drivers. They start out at AK505 size and then just get bigger. The basic principle (written by an ecology graduate who never did nuclear physics) is that they're using the technology developed for NAMI's very popular low-level recoilless cannons, but firing nuclear shells....the energy of impact is used to trigger a small fusion reaction that provides most of the punch (yes, this is bad physics, but this is a universe where kinetics kinda suck). They'll probably top out at level 8 or 9. They're a competitor to Makayev-Energia's howitzer line (and possibly the fusionfire and thermo cannon), but have relatively low shield damage (impacting the shield doesn't let the warhead fire properly) and the armor-penetrator modifier (having a nuclear weapon detonate as it passes through the armor is not very good for your ship). This will be really hard to balance effectively, but it should make for interesting weaponry when I'm finished. They will probably accept the high-speed howitzer loader.
Um. You pretty much just described the Tritium Cannon and Fusionfire. Those are already NAMI products.
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Song
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Eurgh. Sometimes I wish these manufacturers tags would stay constant. That being said, these are different enough to tritium cannons to not matter. Fusionfire may be problematic but I can always change its manufacturer.
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Shrike wrote:Eurgh. Sometimes I wish these manufacturers tags would stay constant. That being said, these are different enough to tritium cannons to not matter. Fusionfire may be problematic but I can always change its manufacturer.
Alternatively, modify it to fit with the new line of NAMI thermo weapons you're making. It could do to be less like the Mk V, given the different manufacturers, and I've always found it to be a rather boring weapon despite its usefulness.
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Song
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JohnBWatson wrote:
Shrike wrote:Eurgh. Sometimes I wish these manufacturers tags would stay constant. That being said, these are different enough to tritium cannons to not matter. Fusionfire may be problematic but I can always change its manufacturer.
Alternatively, modify it to fit with the new line of NAMI thermo weapons you're making. It could do to be less like the Mk V, given the different manufacturers, and I've always found it to be a rather boring weapon despite its usefulness.
Boring but practical is good! In moderation, that is. Earth Industries has "boring but solid" as their general method of building things, so I can always fit it into their line of stuff.....while it's inferior to the other large-bore nuclear howitzers (particularly the hecates), it's still a weapon I find quite useful at a pinch.
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The first of the two large NAMI mass drivers is built...the AT60 'Onager' is a rough competitor to the Mark III howitzer, but uses nuclear technology....it's a military weapon. Inferior at shield damage, but greatly superior against armor. It's also heavier and more expensive than the ubiquitous Mk.III.


The second one is mocked up and getting adjusted into existence....the 'Trebuchet' assault gun is roughly competitive to the Fusionfire (which is now an EI weapon). Or it's supposed to be: I'm having some issues with balancing it properly.

Both guns need some effects tweaks still, since I'm still using the default effects (which look abnormally small due to the low raw damage of the gun).

I'm also adding a new NAMI enhancer into the game for their heavy weapons. Unfortunately, it has some problems with what happens when you stack it with other things...I may have to add a temperature counter to the new guns to keep the balanced. Right now you can make an absurdly good gun just by stacking multiple enhancers on the Trebuchet.

Edit:

I've also been doing some new effects for other weapons. Have an Ion9 screenshot:
Ion9.png
Ion9.png (52.91 KiB) Viewed 9284 times
The ion9 has always been a fun gun to use, but now it feels fantastic. Still a little weak against the phobos though.
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I like the new Ion9. Looks really different from the Iocrym weapons, which is nice.
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Really nice weapon effects Shrike!
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Song
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Also worth noting: I've buffed the damage as well. Not by all that much though. While it's now technically overpowered (general 'rule' is that shieldbusters should do ~3X level damage to shields, and 1/3rd normal.....but virtually NOTHING actually obeys this).....it's a hard-to-get quest item with significant drawbacks. I figure it needed a little more punch to make it worth it.
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Another day, another bit of progress. I've finally made it into my uni program (lots of red tape and problems with that, but I can relax now.....for a few days, at least). I've also started work trying to make the Hanzo decent.


The Hanzo blaster in vanilla is a bit of an oddly bad weapon, like a lot of Bushido's stuff. It has a very good fire rate, but does low damage. So low in fact that in stock form it's basically blown away by its main rival, the dual TeV9. The Hanzo is more expensive, does lower damage per second and lower average damage (making it a little more vulnerable to round-off errors), and has a lower range. The one saving grace is the bushido enhancer....which only mildly alleviates the issues.

Originally, I'd planned to leave it mostly as-is, but maybe add a little armor penetration, or up the range. But with the integration of SASS it's quite clear that my heavy particle weapon sounds don't really work well on a super-high ROF weapon. Faced with the choice of making a brand new sound, or just lowering ROF and upping damage......I took the easy way. But I took the opportunity to try to make the gun a bit more unique at the same time.

The current development version has similar DPS, but higher damage per shot and reduced rate-of-fire. All in all, it is a slightly more effective weapon than it was before. I haven't messed with the range yet, but I imagine that I'll be buffing either the range or the damage. Probably damage. I've also removed the rather boring default particle graphics and added a new effect (still WIP, may change as I continue to modify the Bushido lineup):
HanzoNew.png
HanzoNew.png (32.86 KiB) Viewed 9246 times
The colour is going to change slightly before the final version. Right now I'm just getting the look of the beam itself nice and sorted, so it's using a mix of default particle colours which I don't especially like. But it gets the idea across. The little bits of blue around the sapphire aren't a glitch or a fire effect or anything: I'd just been shot by the lightning gun on the Polar when I hit the screenshot button.

There's a graphical bug where particlesjets won't die(or rather, the emitted particles don't collide with the target and keep going through it). It's quite noticeable with this gun (although not in this screenshot), but I really can't do anything about it....that's a George Bug, not an SM&M++ issue.

Edit: I've side-tracked a little to try making the EI Ion Blaster a bit more.....useful......it seems to be going well.
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Song
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The EI ion blaster is going well! It's now a pretty reasonable weapon against the Ares on par with the Katana (note: Katana is slightly nerfed...the range has been cut by a little bit so it's not quite such an insane weapon).


I've also done a little tweaking to the other weapons. The light ion blaster is actually a very respectable little gun. It's not as good as the Katana, but that's because the Katana is somewhat overpowered. Apart from buffing the range a bit, I have really done anything to it. Likewise, the omnidirectional ion blaster (which is in fact an omnidirectional light ion blaster). They've also kept the default weapon effects (but have the standard SASS ion sound....for now). The two heavier weapons however have recieved some changes.


The standard ion blaster was a pretty bad weapon, used only by the Luminous drones. Now they have their own gun, and the Ion Blaster is all left out. It has reasonable damage per shot, but a low rate of fire. Bucking the trend for vanilla energy weapons it actually has WMD1. This is practically useless: WMD1 makes 4% of damage occur on a hit. On an average hit with the ion blaster, that gives 1.52 damage. On a low rate of fire gun. Not exactly something to write home about. On a higher rate of fire weapon this would actually be useful.

To deal with this, I altered the weapon to have WMD3. This makes a more respectable percentage of damage be passed onto solid targets, and makes up for the low rate of fire to make it easier to kill large targets....keeping in mind that you need to repeatedly hit the same spot on them to get through the armor and do this internal damage in the first place with a shot that can be taken out by any solid fragment, I feel this is only fair. I also added a new and improved shot effect.


The heavy ion blaster is....still complete rubbish. Even with the same buff to WMD that I gave the standard ion blaster, it barely has enough power to get through the shield on the ICS, and is completely unsuited to taking on the command ship in general. it does handle lobsters fairly well though. The problem is that at range (which I buffed. Previously you couldn't really open up the range with this gun) it's hard to hit an armor segment reliably, and at short range you waste shots through hitting disintegration spheres that are fired at you..and getting through the shield is hard enough even with all your shots hitting.I will need to experiment to see what the options are for making this gun endgame-viable. It may just end up as a gun that cannot be used against the iocrym.


Here are the current effects for the ion weapons. The top effect (default vanilla effect in its smallest form) is used by the light ion blaster, and the omni. The other two are the standard and heavy versions of the gun:
IonBlasters.png
IonBlasters.png (42.34 KiB) Viewed 9224 times
I may change the light effect a little, but I do rather like it at present. It's certainly not bad.

Unfortunately, one tool that I'd love to have seems to be evading me. I've seen stuff in the long-distant past that used the old "greenparticle" effect, only with colours other than green. I'd love to replicate this for my own work, but I don't know if this is still possible. If anyone can recall if such a thing is possible, I'd love to know.

Edit: Next on the list, the greatest challenge possible.....the Gaian Demolition Cannon. 78DPS, one shot per second, 350MW, and you only get 8 shots. And for some reason, George never defined the missilespeed so it defaults to 100% of C. And the range is appalling. I've got a few ideas for this, so it might just be possible to make something work here.
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Use this for old-style green particle beam.
<Effect> <Beam beamType="particle" primaryColor="#5ff12a" secondaryColor="#5ff12a" intensity="1" /> </Effect>

For blueparticle, use primaryColor="#ffffff" and secondaryColor="#0000ff" instead.
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Thanks for that. I might add a little orange static around the ion blaster beams as a test.
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Still in the planning stage for tweaking the GDC. I'm also reworking the NAMI enhancement devices.


There will be two devices...either seperate, or built into a single device with a switching function via invoke. Both will cost the same amount of power, which will be relatively slow. They will impart a number of alterations on any installed NAMI matter weapon (so yes, you can backtrack and buff the hell out of a Trident. Not sure why you'd want to, but you can):

Mode 1 (or device 1, if they're separate): will reduce rate of fire, and increase average damage, working out as an improvement over the stock DPS

Mode 2 (or device 2) will increase rate of fire and reduce average damage, working out as an improvement over the stock DPS

Both modes (or devices) will also impart a reduced efficiency on the gun, if I can manage that....so your guns will use a certain % (10-20%) more power in order to access the new modes.


So in short, you can choose if you want to buff the rate of fire of your NAMI matter weapons at the cost of damage, or improve damage at the cost of rate of fire. And either option will cost you a certain amount of fuel that varies with the gun in question (obviously, turning off the device will negate this penalty if you need more time out of your reactor).

I do, however, actually need to make this at some point. I'm fairly confident that it can be done, however.
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Managed to make the GDC overpowered during testing. At least....in theory. if you land all the shots in one place you can two-shot a Deimos and 6-shot a Phobos. Keeping in mind that it has an 8-round 'clip' before it's useless....that's not bad. That does, however, require it to do 60d40 damage with WMD7. Somewhat excessive. And if you use a bunch of injectors is becomes capable (with good rolls and exceptional aim) of killing the ICS in 5 shots. That's not what I'm after, alas. It's impossible to aim that well in real combat, and if you do the result is absurd. So yeah.....that damage is not good.

I'm going to lower the rather extreme damage rolls and make it more consistent. But I have at least found a way to overpower the gun. Now I need a happy middle-point so I can start adding reload mechanics and the like. In the end, I think it'll be the ultimate thermo weapon. Basically, I'd like it to be a viable weapon against the ICS......a cross between the QAC (which is not viable, but has reload mechanics similar to this thing) and the APA. Only it's a thermo weapon. So a bit higher damage, but reduced effect because of the damage type.
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Excellent work Shrike! Ought to be given a serious look for including in vanilla, what I've been seeing in your past few posts especially..

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