Shrike's Mines & Missiles ++

A place to discuss mods in development and concepts for new mods.
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Song
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Today I buffed the heavy CLAW cannon. This gun is actually a dual AK15, but because it was shoe-horned into level 3, it was "balanced" by making it virtually useless. I've reversed some of those changes, and bumped it up to level 4 where it really should be. It's still a 2-slotter though, so it's not a fantastic gun as they go...and given that it now competes with the dual turbolaser.....yeah, there's still better guns. It's not as laughable as it was, and it's a fun thing to mess around with.

Next up, I'm making a minor tweak to the centauri recoilless to make it better for the AI, and then I'm making some changes to the centauri themselves....those changes won't be in the main XML, but they'll be an optional extra.
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Kourtious
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Btw, where could I possibly download this mod?
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Song
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Kourtious wrote:Btw, where could I possibly download this mod?
I haven't released it yet. Should be out reasonably soon though. I'm aiming for "Around when 1.6 launches". I'd do it sooner, but Xelerus refuses to let me upload stuff....so releasing is an annoying thing to do until it's nice and ready.
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bzm3r
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You should release on GitHub.
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Song
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bzm3r wrote:You should release on GitHub.
I'll be looking at my options closer to release. GitHub's certainly one of them.



Today I ported over some older stuff from Elemental Shift......specifically, tweaks to the centauri:

-the heavy CLAW cannon is now level 4, has higher energy cost, has better range, and mild armor penetration. This is because in vanilla it's actually worse than the baseline CLAW despite being labelled as "Heavy". In ES I swapped them around, but this time I decided to buff it.
-Buffed top speed of raider and heavy raider to 0.15c (from 0.13)
-Improved acceleration and turn performance of raider and heavy raider
-Improved firerateadj on raider. No change to heavy raider.
-Increased range and shot velocity of centauri recoilless.


You should now be a little cautious when encountering a heavy raider. Centauri aren't massively lethal (mostly), but they're closer to where they should be given what little backstory they have (all of which is ingame....I don't think there's any secret stuff).


I'm also working on some experimental tweaks and changes to the Heliotropes:

-Sunflare cannon now inflicts device disruption
-Sunflare cannon damage reduced, damage type increased from particle to ion. (may undo this: device disruption is an ion gimmick, and that's the only reason I made this change)
-Added particle beam secondary weapon to frigate
-Replaced turbolaser with particle beam weapon on gunship.


I haven't tested this yet, but I think "Fear the frigate" will be a thing.
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Tweak to the heliotropes have gone well....but there are a few AI issues. Adding a secondary weapon to the heliotrope frigate makes it not turn to fire the main gun properly. Can't really fix that though...it's the same problem the Phobos has sometimes.
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New code for the MAG launcher by assumedpseudonym has been integrated and is ready for testing.


I've also taken some code from one of Wolfy's experiments in TSB and used it for a prototype minefield encounter. Unfortunately it isn't working right now, so I can't show it off just yet. It will be a rare encounter for the later stages of the game, but be more common as you get closer to Ares space.

The encounter itself works as a particle field (like the sol debris field), with a scripted detonation system. If you trigger a mine flying through the field, the game will spawn the blast from a CRM100. In theory at least. Currently the game won't even start if the minefield code is in the extension, so it's gonna need some tweaking before I can even test it.

Minefields may or may not end up in SM&M++. It depends on 1. Getting them working and 2. If they playtest well.
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Shrike wrote:New code for the MAG launcher by assumedpseudonym has been integrated and is ready for testing.
 With credit to Atarlost for the original <Invoke> code, which I had to tweak slightly after completely rewriting the lambda side of things. I probably could have just tweaked that, too, but I usually find it easier to just start from scratch.
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Song
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Decided to try out making an animated GIF of a missile. Not gonna be a regular thing since it's annoying to get the filesize down. But anyway. Here's an S1 Hydra. Contrary to what's visible, there's actually five sub-missiles....I don't know what's going on with that particular detonation.

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I think two of them overlapped perfectly or something. Either way, that's one of the heavy missiles I've brought in. As a rare swarm-buster, it's quite effective. Using it on sandstorms is a bit of a waste though.....might not be quite as big a waste after I rebalance it though.
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Very nice. They seem to launch in a + formation, so I'll guess that if you modify the angles to a 72 degree separation exactly, you'll get them to stop doing that.
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Song
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JohnBWatson wrote:Very nice. They seem to launch in a + formation, so I'll guess that if you modify the angles to a 72 degree separation exactly, you'll get them to stop doing that.
You can't specify angles for fragmentation....yet*. It's supposed to do the equidistant thing automatically, but being within range of the sandstorms probably messed it up a little.


*George was gonna put it in 1.6, but it's apparently more difficult than he'd expected. It's on the list for 1.7 or so.

Edit: Also from another test, the Dvalin Ion9: Link because this one's a larger file and I know some peeps have slow internet.
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Today I did some minor tweaks to a few bits and pieces here and there. A few more bugs to squash (MAG switching has broken, and I'm not sure how/why, so I need to examine my copy-paste to see if I broke it or if there's a problem with the code itself).


Also recorded some more combat effects. Not embedding here because its a 14MB image, but if you want to see a bunch of the new effects, click here. New missiles visible are the S1 and M4 missiles (NAMI Heavy), new effects also visible for the positron lancer and the Ares Plasma Archcannon.

....if I'd included the bit before there'd also be the XM900, but that's not a massively changed effect. Probably the coolest thing in that is the APA at the end. It now looks like something you really, really do not want to get hit by.
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Kourtious
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After seeing most of your pictures and it's special effects, I really think George should implement your mod as part of vanilla. This would fix years of power creep that has made the game quite imbalanced.
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Song
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Kourtious wrote:After seeing most of your pictures and it's special effects, I really think George should implement your mod as part of vanilla. This would fix years of power creep that has made the game quite imbalanced.
Eh, I only scratch the surface. What'd be cool is a transdata (or whatever) thing that ran the balance tables automatically and checked the XMLs to see if stuff was above or below what it 'should' be, and by how much....but even that wouldn't catch some problems (eg: bad fragment setup).

But some of the changes should probably get carried over. I've made a couple of tickets that are on the to-do list that are based off changes I've made.




-------------------

Today I started work on the Teraton weapons. There's now a source for the plasma pods ingame (if you can find it. It doesn't really get used per se but it's there). I've also replaced the pre-0.99c vintage effects with shiny new ones based off the APA. Both the blaster and launcher are now looking very, very good. I still need some new sounds for them though.

Changes:

-Kytryn blaster no longer fires explosions

-Halved rate of fire of Kytryn Launcher
-Doubled fragment count of Kytryn Plasma Pod
-Replaced graphical effect. The new one is.....suitably unusual for an 'alien' weapon. It doesn't screenshot well though, so that's gonna be a 'surprise' for people.


In terms of power, the fragments from a plasma pod are still less powerful than the blaster, but there's 72 of them per pod. You can 2-shot a polar with this thing, and that's including all that internal HP.
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New Kytryn blaster and plasma pod. Doesn't screenshot well, but here they are.

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The graphical glitching on the explosions is a vanilla thing, BTW. Seems that if you overlap a bunch of Luminous graphics, the game borks the colours. It's just more noticeable with this particular explosion...which is hardly used at all in vanilla.


Ranx dreadnoughts are actually really good against plasma pods. Much better than the Ares, although I suspect it's down to the pods getting shot down by the (otherwise terrible) Akan 30's.
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