Posts by SWAT_OP-R8R

as someone who tends to forget his own birthday if not reminded... well... HAPPY MOTHERSDAY

🥂

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It wasn't me. Dunno how that happened.

Joke aside.

The new update is almost read for release.

Atm I am still a bit busy working on the Bonus mission stuff and the return to the main mission issue.

Essentially I am trying to simplify the whole struture to something "simple" like this:

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I've done first tests and results are promising but not perfect.

The watchtriggers carry through to the end and would allow to return to the point where you have left the main story.

But that is unfortunately only the case if no savegames are loaded in the meantime. Savegames seem to "forget" the watchtriggers which explains why for some players returning to the main mission was perfectly possible while for others it failed.

I might have a solution for that in which I let savegames reload watchtriggers depending on their previous state and pass them through to the next save point. (tech babbel). If the tests are successful this might turn out to be the solution to finally fix this issue.

Furthermore there are going to be changes to the entire storyline of CF.

There are several thousand text elements displayed during the missions. ~400 of them are mission descriptions, personal logs, pop-ups telling part of the story, etc.

These ~400 story elements have been rewritten. This will not change the story as a whole but it will add further detail to the story, correct mistakes and provide a better reading experience with more variety and less spelling mistakes.

This stuff is all ready and done, just has to be included into the update now.

Additional change included is that the area in which the first side mission triggers now is 50% bigger, making the search less tedious.

That being said and done... the update would almost be ready for release.

Two more tasks need to be done.

1. creating the instructions for the launcher to distribute the update

2. creating a server version of this update (there are adjustments needed for it to run on the server)

So probably a release can happen somewhen next week.

🍻

its not about the draw distance of the nebula but the fog density

There have been multiple complaints in the past about Nebulas being too transparent in CF.

The fog draw distance was increased by x10. I would consider to reduce it to x5... keeping transparency but essentially reducing it by 50%.

I can include it relative easily into the upcoming update but need a bit more feedback.

So what do you think?

I stubled a bit into a crash issue these days in certain systems. Cause was a new plugin that I wanted to use to fix a issue with fonts.

Dunno really how to get it done without it yet.

But I made some progress on the Renaissance modular station parts. There are still a few minor issues to be taken care of but most of it seems to be working.

Btw.

Did the tradelanes always tilt to the side this way? This is not intentional.

Ok, the new Order (NPC) ships are now fully functional and correctly spawn where they should. The pilotable version (event reward) will be done with the update right after this one (as I want to see how the event is working under real conditions first)

We are moving closer to a release of this update now.

Things still on my to-do list:

• Fixing a bunch of minor bugs... well... more like cleaning up a bit.
• Including the modular station parts for Renaissance (yes, I also decided to release this now)
• Balancing the first version of the new server event system
• a few minor tests and rebalances
• maybe testing the new method of switching from main story mission to bonus mission and back (dunno yet if I'll make it part of this update)
• writing the launcher update instructions

there we go...

ignore what I wrote above... going to give the coalition hq a 4th try

As already mentioned 2 weeks ago on discord, there was a small setback since my USB drive died and all data on it, inlcuding the latest version of the update, was lost.

It took me a week to restore everything that already was finished and working but I lost some tools and plenty of assets that can not be restored that easily.

That means I have to do some additional work in order to replace the stuff that got lost.

On top of that I did some decisions regarding the upcoming Event System came to the conclusion that it might be a good idea to put some additional content into the update. This stuff actually was meant to be released at a later point but releasing it prior the event stuff goes live makes more sense.

I am specifically talking about the Order Ship refresh (the Order ships that are only spawning in Sol). These ships are going to be replaced with new 3d models. With the new automatic Event system these ships can be earned in MP by participating in the server events. We are talking about ~20 Battleships/Cruisers/Gunboats and ~5 fighters/bombers.

The ship models hopefully all will turn out to a much higher quality and are meant to mimic the color scheme of the Order fighter (light brownish as a basse color).

Size and handling will be more similar to vanilla ships.

So far I got 50% of these ships into the game already... but there still is pretty much work to be done. Work that I actually wanted to do last weekend but I got stuck with some other 3d model refresh that refused to work until late last night.

If everything works the way I have intended for today I can post some images of the new Coalition HQ later this evening. I had to removel this station 3 times from the scratch to finally get it into the game without errors. But I think the result is worth it.

As of now the update (only the already finished parts) has a size of 1.2 Gb and +800 files. Writing the patch instructions for the launcher will be an intersting task.

Ok, where do I start?

Maybe it is a bit tricky to compare different games or even different mods.

What works for one does not neccessarily have to work for the other.

I know that Discovery has a clan base feature and that back when we developed the one for CF we clearly decided to do stuff differently both in the way how the base is constructed and also how it is maintained. We have a very modular approach and I think this is a strength of our implementation.

This being said... the server side code as a result also is VERY different and making adjustments now is extremely difficult and time consuming. Only Huor who created the original code can do that and I am not really keen to ask him for even more work to do (especially since I requested his help in a different area just recently).

But lets talk about the stuff we currently have.

In order for clan bases to work every system in the game needs to be prepared. Every system already needs to have a dummy base before a clan base can be constructed. This base never is used unless a clan starts the building process. For player bases you literally have to multiply the amount of dummy bases by X and with +150 systens in CF we would end with hundreds or thousands of these preprepared dummy bases.

On top of that each of these bases would require to have interiors.... NPCS.... market settings and adjustments for the dynamic economy.

That is the underlying efffort that needs to be done before even a base can be constructed.

Maintaining the stuff is even worse.

Right now I have a payment system in place that allows me to see which clan has payed for which system and can pretty much check if a clan system still is a clan system based on that.

For payed player bases (if i understand it correctly) I would also have to figure out which player has payed for the base... link the payment somehow to the player account on the server (which I dont knoow how to do) and have a controlling mechanism to figure out which players are no longer paying.

That is an adminstrative mightmare.

On top of all of that there is a bug bugging me ever since the clan bases were introduced.

The server sometimes is mixing up the names and ids of the bases... we have this problem for years and never figured out why it happens. Its a bug we never fixed... therefore I wrote a script which automatically checks clan bases for errors and tries to correct them after they happen.

This seems to be working... but the configuration once again has to be done manually, right after a clan base was constructed. So with player bases the same error mitigation has to be done aswell for every player base. I guess that is going to be even more effort and I would not be able to guarantee that when there are 100 player bases that everything still works as intented.

I still favor clan bases over player bases because of the technical reasons explained above.

And maybe we should try to focus a bit more on how to get more players to the server again... and how to keep them busy with the help of clans.

Originally the clan bases were only be meant to be a foundation for an even bigger gameplay system on the server which unfortunately never was introduced due to a lack of players and the amout of coding effort.

But since we already talk about this topic...

Clans were meant to be able to conquer and extend their territories in CF.

The clan base was the foundation for that from which clans were meant to work for system influence by supporting other systems with supply deliveries.

There is a commodity in the game "supply goods" which pretty much at this point serves no purpose. It can be bought at clan bases and was meant to be delivered to other systems. The server was meant to log this trade and clans which gained a certain amount of influence via these trades would gain ownership over further systems.

At least that was the idea... a competitive long term gameplay loop for clans.