The Stars Beyond

[sdw195]

water...in a bag!

dont you know thats how they do it on the iss

[Atarlost]

You have to do it that way anyways because synthetic gravity can fail and liquids spilled westwards in a centrifuge may remain airborn causing electrical hazards.

You have to remember that during combat you can lose gravity at any moment and if theres a pot of coffee in the mess hall when the red alert sounds there's a good chance there will be coffee everywhere when the alert ends. Maybe you can manage to waterproof everything in the mess hall, but combat can last long enough you need to worry about keeping people hydrated, remembering that one second game time is a minute in universe time. That wandering hostile that spends a couple minutes exchanging fire with a CSC is actually pounding away for hours.

Remember, you're counting on systems built by the lowest bidder and selected by bureaucrats who will never serve on the ships in question. These bureaucrats nominally answer to politicians most of whose constituents are more interested in butter than guns. Or at least only interested in the guns being used against closer to home irritants like the Sung and Charon.

[Drako Slyith]

True, but there's still the muscle degredation. If there is no gravity ever on the ship, then the officer's muscles will degrade and everyone will one day find they can't move. And their heart has stopped.

[Atarlost]

You only need gymnasiums to have gravity. Everywhere else you can do without it. Everywhere that has a use for it will be empty during combat. (the mess, the wardroom, and the gym. Even if you need your liquids in null gravity containers for safety gravity is handy for playing cards.)

But the CW aren't pure humans, they're enhanced or augmented. It's not certain they need gravity at all. Except to play cards. And iron filings in the paper on a magnetic table would probably do for that. Some means of rolling dice would be nice as well, but if worst comes to worst there's always /dev/random.

[Drako Slyith]

That's true. But there is still the problem that with no gravity movement in anything but narrow tubes is impossible, because the instant you touch the ground you bounce back off.

[Aury]

I've always been making things under the assumption that of the human-descended factions, only the Ansabi, Domain & Therrus have the necessary technology: the Ansabi use it in their stations in their experiments, but usually keep to 0g for normal operations, as thats what they are used to, the Domain never really messed around with it beyond what they could do to weaponize it, and the Therrus are the only ones who use it extensively, considering virtually all of their technology revolves around gravitic manipulation. Not to mention they are a much more planet-based society having gone from earth directly to another planet (they were in statis on their arcship).

[Aury]

The generation 4 CSC is in! (thanks to atarlost who had to put up with me pointing out scene setup issues & rendering size problems all morning)

[RPC]

i was just wondering... but
What is TSB?
My current thoughts:
Is it just a collection of factions and topology? (from your comments on the tactical, over systems AI in my Dynamic Systems thread, I have a feeling that most of the stuff you want to implement have not been though out yet)
Since it is a TC, doesn't that mean it overrides even the normal game?
Is it out for collaborative work yet (I want to help!)?

[Aury]

At the moment it is just a collection of factions - not even the topology yet.

Down the line I plan on adding an actual strategic AI & tactical AI, topology, different plotlines/campaigns one can pursue (or not & simply sandbox), missions, massive quantities of additional content, a high replay factor, and all kinds of fun stuff.

[Aury]

TSB is now past 100MB O_o

[george moromisato]

TSB is now past 100MB O_o

Wow! Nice! Is there someplace that I can see all the artwork?

[Song]

TSB is now past 100MB O_o

Nice job. I'm not going to need to buy a new external HDD to play the finished thing, am I?

Looking forward to the AI stuff you mentioned....there's plenty of room for it, and it'll be a neat challenge.

[Aury]

I can pm you the development version that contains all the ships that are slated to be in TSB as of this moment, but is not publicly available due to the presence of secret factions & ships. (probably tomorrow as Atarlost will have a freighter for by me then)

Unfortunately the public version only contains assets that I have created, not displaying the content that Atarlost & Aeonic have contributed. I need to get around to doing that some time.

In actuality, TSB contains /fewer/ ships than vanilla at this point (80 vs. 98 - 81 as of tomorrow: all numbers excluding dummied-out graphics in vanilla like the old iocrym command ship), the reason for the file size being that TSB has a large number of very big 40-facing ships, all jpgs are at 100% quality, and the bitmaps are 8-bit for transparency support.

[george moromisato]

I can pm you the development version that contains all the ships that are slated to be in TSB as of this moment, but is not publicly available due to the presence of secret factions & ships. (probably tomorrow as Atarlost will have a freighter for by me then)

Unfortunately the public version only contains assets that I have created, not displaying the content that Atarlost & Aeonic have contributed. I need to get around to doing that some time.

In actuality, TSB contains /fewer/ ships than vanilla at this point (80 vs. 98 - 81 as of tomorrow: all numbers excluding dummied-out graphics in vanilla like the old iocrym command ship), the reason for the file size being that TSB has a large number of very big 40-facing ships, all jpgs are at 100% quality, and the bitmaps are 8-bit for transparency support.

That's cool--don't go to any trouble on my account.

One of these days I will support PNG--that may or may not help the file size (it should at least compress the 8-bit masks down).

[Aury]

if we had png support, couldn't we just do direct transparency? (ie, so only one file would be necessary)