Shrike's Mines & Missiles ++

[Song]

All station weapons have an omni mount, friend.

In any case, I love it. It's like those stationary turrets you can tear off and wield for a short time in an FPS.

Actually, large stations with multiple guns often have limited firing arcs. And it's more specifying "this gun is not omni, but the mount is". But since keeping up with the ammo drain was tough enough anyway, I didn't think my hacked solution to regenerating ammo would stand up to 4 of these.

Ah, right. The Curator stations.

Is your ammo regen solution the same as the Sapiens? I think that would work regardless of drain. I'd still agree that one of those is plenty.

No, I hacked it out of the Corporate Command shell nanofac. I might replace it through, since it's rather clunky.

[Song]

I'm considering making some more crossover tech between Bushido and the Sung. Specifically, I'm considering giving them (or an affiliate) some tiled ceramic armor. I have known precisely zero people who have used the tiled-armor system in the game (mostly because Sung armor is rubbish), but I really like the idea. So I think I might make some unique tiled armors. It would require rewrites of the XML though.

[PM]

I do not use tiled armor to fix others because I hoard spare segments for fabricator shenanigans or other lucrative activities.

[Song]

I do not use tiled armor to fix others because I hoard spare segments for fabricator shenanigans or other lucrative activities.

Yeah...I ignore the fabricator for balancing stuff. It's not a mechanic that many people use. I'm more concerned with people not using tiled armor because it's rubbish.


Ran a basic test today. Low-levelled gear is spawning as anticipated...except for the bushido turret. May need to tweak attributes slightly. Started out with the arbalest, then swapped to an enhanced collimated bushido blaster (which is....probably the most fun early-game gun in SM&M++), then lucked out and had a smuggler run right into me with an X-ray laser in its hold. Keeping in mind that that's the single version of the gun (not the dual version from vanilla), that's still a really good find. It does consume quite a lot of fuel though.

The arbalest is surprisingly fun (I haven't tweaked it....it's just been a while since I used it. Normally I go for the AK15). If it weren't for the vanilla damage adjustment system making it obsolete absurdly quickly, I'd make it into a station-defense weapon for later in the game.

[Song]

With the news (from Ministry) that a future release will have a lot of explosion (and other) effects redone, I'm planning to release SM&M++ a week or two after 1.6 comes out. It won't be entirely complete: I'm shifting to a gradual update system rather than replacing my mod over and over (like the previous SM&M's). So every so often, I'm hopefully going to update with improvements, tweaks, and new content to the public version. Pretty standard stuff. I would do the release now, but I need a few of the bugfixes in 1.6, and I'm going to wait for it to be fully stable before releasing a mod that more or less requires it for complete functionality. That way I can actually have some mines in this mod. That'll be nice, won't it?



...then when 1.7 (or whatever) comes and makes a lot of it obsolete*, I can redo it having had a decent public release before then.


Unfortunately, because some current bugs in weaponry will not be fixed in 1.6, SM&M++ will launch with some known bugs. I'll list those at the time of release. Hopefully, that which is not rendered un-needed by upgraded stock effects later on will then be completely possible to work with, without hitting major show-stopping bugs.



*Which is awesome. SM&M has always been about trying to improve the game without changing the feel of things, and if effects get improved to make stuff I've done obsolete, that's good. I can work on other stuff! Or, more likely, take the new effects and use them for more unusual stuff.

[Song]

Some delays to release progress....re-integrating 1.3-era munitions back into the mod has proven interesting....the M5 in particular is proving highly troublesome. Re-adding the default explosion effect to the shots hiteffet makes it also (erroneously) apply to the radius fragment coming off the missile. I'm not sure if this is a bug, or a bad bit of code somewhere in the spaghetti that is the M5 after all the experiments I did with it.

[Song]

Re-integration is going reasonably. Still got a few bugs, but they're mostly vanilla bugs that I can't work around. The NAMI heavy launcher is in, and ready for a last do-over to remove test stuff and old munitions that I've scrapped. Might add a few extra bits in. When it's done, I only need to add one more rename and a slight balance tweak and NAMI has a complete product lineup....except for the mine launcher. That one will take a while to get working.

Bushido is finalised, except for a balance pass and possibly one extra gun. I am torn between making the BEL have the option to fire the same round as the sung's nandao bolt cannon (and not having a bushido weapon like the Nandao), and making a bushido equivelant at a lower level then having the nandao be an improved version...and have both cartridges compatible/semi-compatible with the BEL. But that's relatively minor. The new Odachi starcannon (which lacks the accent it should have, because Transcendence doesn't support all that much unicode) is an extremely good endgame weapon, although it currently has absurdly high WMD (as well as passthrough) to counter the way that internal hitpoints make low ROF energy weapons more or less useless against endgame capital ships. This is entirely required at present in order to be able to kill anything, given that this gun requires ammunition. I'll remove most of the WMD when the compartments get nerfed back to a a sensible level of durability.

What little stuff Makayev gained in this version is mostly good to go. I need one more balance pass on the omnidirectional launcher (which is rather fun to use), and that's about it....the only other makayev stuff is the result of removing stuff from other companies.

And rasiermesser's big flack cannon is still pretty cool.

[Song]

Today I gave the Sung back the Nandao bolt cannon in its improved form. The bolts can still be fired from the BEL (it's a Sung improvement on Bushido's work and shares many parts), but you'll have to loot them. Like all BEL projectiles, you'll get a cut to damage from using the launcher. This is also true of the new particle cannon from Bushido: the Yumi. It's basically the same as the vanilla Nandao bolt cannon, only I dropped it down a level because the vanilla gun sucks at level 6. It's respectable at L5 though. Again, you can use the bolts in the BEL or the specialised gun, but the gun has better damage.

However, to sweeten things up for BEL users, I've revamped the EMP bolt I made earlier, and gave it a nice hit effect. Also visible is a Yumi bolt!


Using a radius fragment for heavy EMP effect, plus a particle spray I built for the Q-sphere and then abandoned, the EMp bolt is the only one of the bushido cartridge weapons with an area-of-effect, and it's exclusive to the BEL. Get a direct hit with the radius fragment for lasting EMP, or catch things in the spray for a low chance for mild EMP effects. It's quite a nifty little swarm-stopper.


I'm also considering raising the soft-stats on the BEL, so it can fire a bit faster than the specialised guns (which, because they share an autoloader in-universe [or 'are copied and pasted from the Nandao bolt cannon', in reality] have the same ROF at all levels)..so it's less efficient, but still useful. Maybe match (or exceed) the DPS at the expense of average damage. Might also give it one more type of bolt that only it can fire. Anyway, things are looking good. Another week or three and hopefully I can get something out the door.

[Song]

I've started final balance passes on a lot of content, and that's going fairly well. The NAMI guns are next up for "sort everything out then leave them alone". Then I'll go to Bushido again, and then it's time to make the NAMI heavy and mine launcher again. No idea when I'll be finished: I've got coursework again over the break so my "try to do it in a week or three" is getting dropped back to "when it's done".

Today I added more sounds to the game: A second howitzer sound for lighter weapons (the Mark I, III and V, plus the new 'Onager' cannon that NAMI have), and two new sounds for blast cannons (a 'light' sound for the Moskva series, and a 'Normal' for everything else). They aren't as good as I'd like...but I'm really not a particularly good sound designer. They'll do though...the Akan 30 at least sounds quite respectable now, and the 1200 is even more fun to watch than before. I'll probably extend these to the thermonuclear cannons as well.

While the sound quality is definitely not professional, it's a lot nicer than the old CLICKCLICKCLICKCLICK that people are used to. While over-riding more vanilla content makes SM&M++ even less friendly to other mods, I think it's worth it for the extra quality.

[JohnBWatson]

Glad to see NAMI in the spotlight for once. It's one of the most interesting corporations in my opinion, despite its lack of content at present, making both the ubiquitous missile launcher and the inscrutable Auton Bay. They seem be very American in their designs, focusing on missile launchers and drone - based combat systems, and having space - aircraft carriers as the only ship whose construction they even played a part in(If I'm not mistaken, which is quite possible). That, and the fact that another of their main weapons, the Fusionfire, just screams Eagleland.

Edit: I'd like to know how you make the sounds for your weapons. They're cool, and it might help with some of my own projects, as I've never been able to get sounds that sound right.

[Song]

Glad to see NAMI in the spotlight for once. It's one of the most interesting corporations in my opinion, despite its lack of content at present, making both the ubiquitous missile launcher and the inscrutable Auton Bay. They seem be very American in their designs, focusing on missile launchers and drone - based combat systems, and having space - aircraft carriers as the only ship whose construction they even played a part in(If I'm not mistaken, which is quite possible). That, and the fact that another of their main weapons, the Fusionfire, just screams Eagleland.

Edit: I'd like to know how you make the sounds for your weapons. They're cool, and it might help with some of my own projects, as I've never been able to get sounds that sound right.

Well, since the game doesn't have a way to tag stuff as being an obsolete product without tanking the resale value, I dropped the fusionfire from NAMI to Makayev. Might put it back though with a slight tweak to descriptions. Make it so it's an old product they'd like to drop, but can't yet. They are (originally) a conglomerate of american industrial giants though, so they do have the eagleland thing going.


For making sounds, I take the original sounds from the game (all 5 of them or so), and mess around in Audacity and throw stuff at them. Pitch/speed/temp change, reversals, phaser effects, high and low pass filters....eventually, something works and I can mess around until I get something. It's not very professional and the success rate is low....but it's high enough. For example, the last sound I made (which has worked out as an exotic weapon sound....I'd put it on the graviton gun in CC if SM&M++ supported CC) I took the stargate sound effect, removed the 'bang' from the beginning, sped it up, reversed it, filtered it once, and added a phaser effect (with about 15 stages). The end result is a plausible generic energy weapon sound. For howitzer and cannon effects, I generally take the generic "ship destruction" explosion and mess with it.

[JohnBWatson]

Interesting -- Thanks.

[Song]

Decided on a whim to mess with the Makayev 'moskva' range since I was adding a new sound for them. So here's a new weapon: the Moskva 56 autocannon (number may change, doesn't really matter). This tops the line at Level 6, and it's the fastest-firing weapon in the game*. It puts out about 30 of the bog-standard moskva shells each second. Despite this, it's not the easiest weapon to use effectively: the low individual damage of the shells causes problems against resistant enemies and the scatter makes it most effective at very short ranges. Furthermore, extended firing will overheat the weapon. It doesn't take a long time to cool down, but this is definitely a gun you need to be smart with. On the plus side, you can do some serious damage to internals when you're firing this many shots per second.



This thing sounds fantastic, BTW. I wanted to see if I could make something that really used the new low-caliber cannon sound to good effect, and I think this does the trick.


I've also buffed the range of the Moskva 33 to match the 56, and will probably do the same to the dual cannon model.


*Well, technically it's matched by the Shuriken. But the Shuriken fires one shot each time, and this thing fires 3. So it works out as three times the speed of the (lower level) shuriken.

[Song]

Today I made the Penitent gun....um....


....well it still sucks, but it's a bit prettier and has the new snExotic1 sound. Woooo.

Bonus visual pun to accompany the rant I'm about to give.

PenitentGun.png (95.44 KiB) Viewed 5594 times

No fancy hit effect, sadly. But really it's not worth it right now. Maybe when part II brings more exotic stuff to the table.


This gun is appallingly bad at level 4. It's appallingly bad at any level, although to be fair that's mostly because of the low ROF making it have appalling performance against internals. Because it was apparently a good idea to have one of the most exotic weapons in the game turn up in the first system, I can't change that. But I can make it look a bit nicer! It also has a slightly more generous dice roll for its damage, which gives slightly higher average damage and doubled minimum damage (from 2 to 4). Since this is a gun that mostly works by using an obscure damage type to game the armor curve (a system which I think most IRC regulars know my thoughts on at this point), that does add up to a bit of a buff since damage at low levels is multiplied. But it's still a bad gun, so fear not. Even I can't fix this thing.

[pixelfck]

Nice looking effect! I've tried getting something like that, but never really made it happen. Could you sharing the source code snippet? (I may abuse it for a positron weapon)

~Pixelfck