Balk
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Feb 29, 2012 19:42:09 GMT -8
Post by Balk on Feb 29, 2012 19:42:09 GMT -8
You're thinking of something like an external file with the logic for the rules? So if you want to run your own house rules where missiles are twice as accurate, all you have to do is fire up Notepad and change (sensors/3 + sig) to 2*(sensors/3 + sig)?
If so, I like the idea. You obviously wouldn't be able to add new features that way, but it would be fun if you could tweak the rules on your own. I'll have to see if I can track down a decent expression evaluator/parser. Or hack it up with DataTables or something. Yeah, let me see what I can do there.
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Feb 29, 2012 20:27:10 GMT -8
Post by captainfoo on Feb 29, 2012 20:27:10 GMT -8
Yeah. I mean clearly the framework of "what formulas exist" would have to be more or less hardcoded (I think) but as long as all the formulas could be externally defined that would create a lot of flexibility in rule testing.
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Balk
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Mar 4, 2012 16:35:40 GMT -8
Post by Balk on Mar 4, 2012 16:35:40 GMT -8
Yeah... let me get everything working, then I'll try to make things as modular as possible. Assuming I last that long. In other news, melee weapons have been added. Skipping over the bit where you walk up to your target and select your weapon... mouse over a pod and you get a breakdown like this: Red 1 here has 110 points of melee between his weapon and pilot skill. Blue 2 only has 65. So R1 has an 85% chance of doing damage with his attack. It could do anywhere from no damage at all to 144, if R1 gets the best roll possible and B2 gets the worst. (Since the dice can't roll less than 1.) Blue 1, on the other hand, has no melee weapon or skill at all. If R1 gets a flanking bonus, the minimum damage will go up since the worst thing B1 can do is roll a 50. Let's try the backstab... Over half his armor in one hit - not bad. The other new thing I've put in is artillery. Selecting a weapon is the same as before, and your range will still light up in red. If you mouse over a square within your range, the squares your artillery would hit will turn orange. Like so: Red 2 has 99 sensors and 20 range artillery, so this shot can't scatter. When you select a target square, the game shows a "So-and-so launched artillery" message and files the target away for later. At the start of the red team's next turn, it lands. Kaboom. Now I just need to add volleying, recharging shields, cannons, and hacking effects, and you'll be able to use this to play an actual game.
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Post by captainfoo on Mar 5, 2012 5:14:16 GMT -8
That's awesome! I may have missed this, but what does the pod selection interface look like?
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Balk
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Mar 8, 2012 20:41:48 GMT -8
Post by Balk on Mar 8, 2012 20:41:48 GMT -8
You haven't missed anything - it does not exist as of yet. My plan is to do something like the deployment for the last mission. As part of the map definition, a few squares will be identified as spawn points for each side. You click on a square, scroll through a list of pods, pick the pod and pilot you want to deploy in that square... pretty basic.
Although if you have an idea about how it should work, fire away. I haven't started on it yet, so I'm not set on doing it a specific way.
For now, what pods are deployed to the map are hardcoded. There is some flexibility, though. I just added external files where usable pods and pilots are defined. A pod entry looks like this:
===== TYPE Pod ID 2 PICTURE Balthezar ICON Balthezar SPRITE Balthezar NAME Balthezar Mk. 2 SIZE 154 ARMOR 150 SHIELDS 20 MOVE 6 JUMP 0 JUMP_SIG 0 ENERGY 20 REGEN 20 STEALTH 10 WEAPON ----- TYPE Autocannon NAME HAXXAW DAMAGE 15 RANGE 10 SIGNATURE 3 AMMO 30 RECOIL 12 ----- ----- TYPE Energy NAME Proserpina VX DAMAGE 20 RANGE 15 SIGNATURE 10 ENERGY 5 FOCUS 15 ----- ----- TYPE Hacking Deck NAME Viks CR-1 DAMAGE 20 RANGE 10 ENERGY 10 SIGNATURE 8 ----- =====
And there's a similar txt file for pilot data. If I get lazy and just want to push the alpha version out as fast as possible, the demo map will use those lists to put Pilot 1 in Pod 1, Pilot 2 in Pod 2, etc. You could modify those files directly if you wanted a different pod in spot 3 or wanted to try your own custom pod or whatever.
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Mar 9, 2012 10:38:06 GMT -8
Post by captainfoo on Mar 9, 2012 10:38:06 GMT -8
What does the ID field in TYPE Pod do?
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Balk
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Mar 9, 2012 17:08:26 GMT -8
Post by Balk on Mar 9, 2012 17:08:26 GMT -8
I thought about explaining the stuff that isn't ripped right from the build sheet, but I figured no one would care until they started messing with it. That'll teach me. TYPE is the unit type. All we have are Pods now, but if I get crazy enough to add support for other things like assemblers, base defenses, or whatever, the TYPE field will be used to tell the game what kind of unit to build. ID is the unique identifier of the pod. When the game starts up, it reads through the pods file, uses the text to make an actual pod template, and then saves the template as whatever you put for the ID. It's just a way for the game to keep track of the pods. It's never shown, and it doesn't have to be a number - anything will do. PICTURE is the name of an image file to be used on the pod's status screen. ICON is the tiny picture that will be shown above the map, by the name of the faction that pod belongs to. And SPRITE is the image that gets drawn on the map. You'll be able to use any of the standard images (Achilles, Balthezar, Gladius, etc.) for those. You can also add your own. If you make, say, Sledge.jpg and drop it in the same folder as the other images, the game will be able to show it.
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Mar 9, 2012 17:13:18 GMT -8
Post by captainfoo on Mar 9, 2012 17:13:18 GMT -8
That's what I figured I'd caution against the unique ID, though. That will cause issues with people trying to integrate new pods from various sources. Unless you plan on making a tool that will scan the /pods directory or whatever and re-ID everything. Say there's 10 stock pods. I build Sledge, and give it ID 11. Dis builds No Name With a Vengeance and gives it ID 11. What happens when I want to use his pod? Either there's a conflict or I have to edit IDs. What happens if I download a Pod Pack that uses IDs 267-275 and a Big Pod Pack that includes different pods with IDs 200-300? I have to re-number everything! e- perhaps I should read better :V I should design my pods with foo-01 or something.
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Balk
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Mar 9, 2012 17:27:46 GMT -8
Post by Balk on Mar 9, 2012 17:27:46 GMT -8
You're right, that would be a problem. In the scenario you describe, the last pod in the file that uses a given ID will overwrite the earlier one.
There's no getting around the need for a unique ID, though - I've gotta have something I can save and retrieve the pods by. What I can do is just move that behind the scenes, and automatically assign the pods IDs based on their order in the file. Or have the pod name do double duty as the ID.
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Mar 9, 2012 17:38:49 GMT -8
Post by captainfoo on Mar 9, 2012 17:38:49 GMT -8
Might as well have it be the pod name.
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Balk
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Mar 9, 2012 17:56:24 GMT -8
Post by Balk on Mar 9, 2012 17:56:24 GMT -8
Works for me.
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Balk
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Mar 17, 2012 20:47:36 GMT -8
Post by Balk on Mar 17, 2012 20:47:36 GMT -8
I'm still alive! Spring break is to blame for the lack of progress lately. For want of an actual status update, I'll just go back to the blooper reel. This is the story of the amazing moon-jumping Achilles (or, the dangers of re-using the same variable for multiple things). I was testing the weapons when I ran into this bug. Here, the blue Balthezar is about to take a shot at the Achilles in the northwest corner. Before shooting, I figured I should move the pods closer so the laser could hit at full power. I ended the Blue Team's turn without cancelling the target selection. Then I went to the Achilles to have it jump closer. The possible range for its jump was a bit... larger than I expected. Not resetting that variable meant that the Balthezar's laser range got included in the list of spaces the Achilles could jump to. But the jump did work! So... whenever I get something playable put together, keep your eyes open for stuff like this.
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Mar 23, 2012 23:04:46 GMT -8
Post by Farseli on Mar 23, 2012 23:04:46 GMT -8
Hey, lemme know when you want some testing done then! I work at Microsoft Game Studios as a game tester so I'm I do this kind of thing professionally! I'm assuming we are waiting for the new system though and you'll have to redo a lot of stuff.
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Balk
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Mar 24, 2012 6:58:54 GMT -8
Post by Balk on Mar 24, 2012 6:58:54 GMT -8
and you'll have to redo a lot of stuff. I really hope not. I've been under the impression that the only significant changes would be to the podbuilding system, and I haven't done any programming for that. From what Grave has said, I might need to go back and put in a new formula for calculating melee damage, but that should be the worst of it. But yeah, the more testers the better. When I get things to the point where you can play an actual game, I'll definitely put it up for download so you all can tear it apart. Still working on cannons for now. After that all that's left is recharging, volleying, and hacking, so it's getting close.
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Balk
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Mar 26, 2012 19:32:21 GMT -8
Post by Balk on Mar 26, 2012 19:32:21 GMT -8
Cannons and recharging really just needed one more piece - a way to enter the number of rounds to shoot or energy to put into shields. And now it's here! Our old pal Lightfoot has hopped into a Balthezar to demonstrate these new features. Choosing to shoot the cannon, not much new there. After you pick the cannon, another window pops up where you select the number of rounds to shoot. It's pretty simple - click the arrows to add/subtract numbers in increments of 1, 10, and 100. (The window has three digits so I can use it for recharging shields too. I don't think we'll ever have a cannon shooting hundreds of rounds at once. Now that the Snaggletooth is gone, anyway.) I picked a 3-round burst, so the recoil penalty is pretty hefty. Yep, it missed. Too bad. You may have noticed from the first image that Red 1 has been damaged. Let's patch him up by clicking Recharge from the menu here... ...and then entering the amount of energy to put back into the shields. The window at the bottom will show the state of your shields/energy reserves before and after the recharge. Maybe I need to change the labels there - not sure if they make sense. Anyway, Red 1's shields are full and he's gained some sig for his moves this turn - 3 for the cannon shot and 4 for the recharge. Although he should have 14 sig instead of 7... looks like I forgot to double the sig for his cannon and the recharge. Whoops. Now it's on to hacking.
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Balk
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Apr 13, 2012 18:40:18 GMT -8
Post by Balk on Apr 13, 2012 18:40:18 GMT -8
Now that the game in the SA thread is about to start up again, I guess I'd better get back to work on this, huh? I lied about hacking being next - volleying was the lower-hanging fruit, so that got tackled first. To test volleying, new challengers have appeared! I think the Revanche is (was?) the only stock pod with 4 of the same weapon. So anyway, we pick Volley from the menu... And then we get a window like this. A lot like the weapon window, except for the Confirm button and the traffic lights on the right side. To volley weapons, you click on their name to select them and then click confirm when you've picked all the weapons you want to shoot. The little light icon turns green for selected weapons. To de-select them, you just click the name again. Here, I'm going to select all 4 and then click Confirm... ...and I get a targeting display that's also pretty similar to the ones we've seen before. The only difference is that the info screen at the bottom will show you how many weapons you're volleying and what the penalty is. Anyway, let's say I decide NOT to volley all 4 guns and instead shoot the Arclite with only 1 laser. If I try to volley weapons again, the window will look like this: The light is red for the first laser because it's already been used this turn. Anything you can't volley, like guns you've already fired or stuff that just plain can't be volleyed (like hacking decks) will have a red light. There you have it. All that's left is hacking and the combat part will be done.
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Balk
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Apr 15, 2012 18:28:48 GMT -8
Post by Balk on Apr 15, 2012 18:28:48 GMT -8
No new features for today, but I thought I'd add the icons and map sprites for the rest of the stock pods.
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Apr 16, 2012 9:16:14 GMT -8
Post by Gravedust on Apr 16, 2012 9:16:14 GMT -8
Loooking good! Sorry I've been so not-here recently. : / I love what you've been doing though.
It's kind of good you haven't got into hacking much, because a few of the effects are changing a little. Details not quite finalized yet but should be soon. Nothing major, but a few of the effects that were boolean now aren't.
I mentioned hopefully getting to help you out some more on artiness, what I'm intending is to rig up the art resources for a custom pod builder (modular weapons and pod parts that you combine) And a custom pilot builder (different eyes, hairstyles, accessories, etc, I guess I need to talk to you about what kinds of recoloring you can do on your side so I know how to set things up...) and I may finally get around to messing around with some UI art.
Having the time to do this depends a bit on the new build system not collapsing immediately into flames and needing to be redone again, but it's something I'm looking forward to getting to do.
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Balk
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Apr 16, 2012 16:23:30 GMT -8
Post by Balk on Apr 16, 2012 16:23:30 GMT -8
Thanks for the heads up. I'll stop work on hacking until the new rules are in. I don't really want to change directions halfway through, and there's some other framework stuff I need to work on anyway. As far as coloring goes, there aren't a lot of fancy options for just drawing images. All I can do out of the box is tint things. That's what I'm doing with the map sprites - I start with a white image like this: Then I apply a red or blue or whatever color tint to get the sprite you see on the map. There are more advanced effects I can bring in (like taking an image, looking for one color, and replacing it with another color, etc.), but I haven't had the occasion to use much besides the basics here. So if you give me black and white images, I can fill in the white with any color you want. For anything more complicated than that, let me know what you're looking for and I'll figure out how much trouble it is.
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Apr 17, 2012 9:40:17 GMT -8
Post by Gravedust on Apr 17, 2012 9:40:17 GMT -8
Hmmn okay. I've got some questions that pertain to the character builder but I think I'll need to mock it up first so I know if it's really going to be a problem or not, in the first place.
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I was thinking of beginning with the pod builder, which would have 2 parts.. The 'overhead' view for the map screen, and the 'portrait' view for the status boxes.
The 'Overhead' pieces I'll probably do in Illustrator (in Grayscale so you can tint them however you need, and I'd like them to have a little shading and more detail this time around so I'll probably rebuild all the pieces.)
The 'portrait' pieces will probably be hand-drawn like the current portraits are, (Or a combination of hand drawn with some Illustrator elements, ie. perfect circles for the core spheres.) though of course separated into components (core sphere, weapons, legs, etc) Because I am insane I plan to do enough pieces that most choices a player can make regarding their pod will have a visual effect on the portrait screen. (Things like you can tell the damage output of a laser or railgun by looking at the number of glowing ports on it's side, actually having longer barrels on cannons with extra range and adding muzzle brakes for recoil adjustment, etc.) If that's more crazy than you feel like coding for then please let me know. But for proof of concept I'll be keeping things a lot simpler anyway.
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Apr 18, 2012 8:17:16 GMT -8
Post by Gravedust on Apr 18, 2012 8:17:16 GMT -8
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Balk
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Apr 20, 2012 18:12:21 GMT -8
Post by Balk on Apr 20, 2012 18:12:21 GMT -8
I'll have to figure out a way to just turn off their monitor when they flip that switch. Anyway, about implementing the new rules. The changes to volleying, direct fire / hacking rolls, size bonus, and fall damage are easy to make, as is the tweak to the melee formula. Haven't started on hacking yet, so no problem there either. The biggest changes from my perspective were adding special melee effects and allowing any pod to use melee attacks, so that's going to be a bit more effort to rework. Although if there are a lot more changes still to come, I may just work on some of the other stuff I missed earlier (allocating experience, different terrain types, actually adding a way for the game to tell when someone wins) and come back to hacking and melee after the rules are more stable.
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Apr 21, 2012 8:00:49 GMT -8
Post by Gravedust on Apr 21, 2012 8:00:49 GMT -8
Well good, I'm glad I didn't screw thing up too badly for ya. Sorry about the melee bits. Pretty much the only thing I have planned for the near future is messing with the stat weights in the build system, I don't -think- I'll be making any more mechanics changes soon, but who the hell knows, really. : / Later I will probably be adding more weapon types and a few other goodies, if I ever get to stop remaking the base game. Otherwiseeeee, I did start fiddling around with templates and such for the pod portrait thing. So there's that. Depending on how much time I get this weekend (not expecting much, TBH) I might get cracking on the overhead sprites too.
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Balk
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Apr 22, 2012 12:59:11 GMT -8
Post by Balk on Apr 22, 2012 12:59:11 GMT -8
Cool. No rush on that, though - I'd prefer getting the game mechanics ironed out before we worry about the fancy stuff.
And if you've got the new podbuilding rules handy, can you post them somewhere? I'm not going to need them for the PC game for a while, but I'm curious about what the new system is.
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Apr 24, 2012 15:30:41 GMT -8
Post by Gravedust on Apr 24, 2012 15:30:41 GMT -8
Oh it wouldn't be taking up a majority of my time, I'd be spendling like an hour a day on it. The art I do for pod stuff I can do really, REALLY fast. it's actually a nice break from dicing with mechanics. (Plus.. if I get a working pod portrait maker I can assemble portraits for all the custom pods that get made even faster. >.> ) As for the build thing; It's mostly what I explained in the big post, with the exception that instead of using different sets of stat weights, right now there's only one that's pulling duty for everything. I'm still messing with it, but it's basically boils down to: Each pod starts with these base stats: 100 Armor 20 Energy 10 Regen You get 100 points, and: A point of Mobi costs 4 points A point of Jump Costs 5 points A point gets you 3 Armor (Might be changing) A point gets you 1 Regen A point gets you 2 Energy (Though this is going higher as the next change, very likely) Etc. etc. etc. Except instead of a little list there's just numbers and boxes and you fill in the boxes to help keep track of the points you've spent. (In practice you don't need the boxes at all, in fact I've got things memorized to the point where I don't really even need to look at the sheet except in certain cases.) It's really, really, really easy. Weapons are more complicated, but work in a manner identical to how I described in the Big Post. Most of them are final-ish, but Cannons are about to be redone, along with Artillery, and some costs will probably be adjusted according to how effective weapons turn out to be versus how I thought they'd be. Cannons are very likely to have their recoil no longer scale linearly, and instead have set recoil values for the number of rounds in a burst I.e. instead of [Recoil x #shots] it'll be [Recoil = 10/30/60] (for 1 shot /2 shots /3 shots) Artillery may also be changing to have -adjustable- radii. I.e. when the shot is fired the shooter calls the location AND radius, and damage done depends on the radius selected. (More for a smaller radius, less for a larger one, as in like : [60/30/15] for Radius 1,2,3) So you can get bunker busters and daisy cutters out of the same launcher. Hopefully this change will make them more versatile, and also unclutter things a bit in the builder. (which is a mess right now because of BS involving different radii.) But seriously, if anyone's worried; No I'm not just making the stats up as I go. Every pod listed is legit according the the system. (Though I'm also not exploiting the current flaws to make broken pods.) Yes everyone will get to mess with it, as soon as I stop finding things that need patching.
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Balk
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Apr 26, 2012 20:47:37 GMT -8
Post by Balk on Apr 26, 2012 20:47:37 GMT -8
Ah, ok. You did have me worried that you were planning to sit on the build system and replace it with a setup where we just take the enemy pod designs. Which would not be nearly as fun. I'm looking forward to messing with the new pod builder. And in other news, I made some headway on implementing the new rules. There are some new options on that action menu. All pods now have the built-in melee attack. The Experience option is for allocating pilot XP in battle and is still under construction. Selecting Melee gets you a new window where you pick the type of melee attack to use. Should be pretty self-explanatory. I haven't put in the special melee attacks yet, so all that works is the normal attack. Since melee damage is fixed per pod, the attack tooltip doesn't show a damage range anymore. Here, Brown 1 (20 melee) is preparing to attack Red 1 (0 melee). And here are the odds for an attack on Blue 1 (20 melee). If you pick a special attack, the effect will be shown below the damage. On the back end, the changes for volley-able weapons, fall damage, and size bonus have been put in. The pod status window has also been updated. That's all for now. I'll probably wait until you're done messing with the weapon mechanics before I do any more work on melee or hacking. The next thing I make will most likely be the XP allocation tool.
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May 2, 2012 13:26:13 GMT -8
Post by Gravedust on May 2, 2012 13:26:13 GMT -8
Looks good. That was pretty fast, too... Sorry for not getting back about this sooner, I've been pretty busy for a while. A word on XP: Really that was put in to add a bit of persistence to the forum game, and as such it isn't really a critical portion of the base game. So it's your choice to include it or not.. It could certainly be a cool facet to have though, also if there's ever anything like a campaign mode or what not, though I imagine anything like that would be far, faaaaarr into the future. In other news, I've been working on an expanded set of LOS rules, which will probably be the next thing I introduce. I'll let you know what's up as soon as I've got something final-ish, which will hopefully be soon. Also I -may- be altering the Size bonus a bit to make it a shade less ridiculous at Range 1, since ranged weapons are almost guaranteed to hit at that range and you'd need a pretty large amount of Melee skill to match that success rate, which takes a bit of its edge off. Hacking is very likely to get an overhaul pretty soon as well.
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May 2, 2012 18:44:16 GMT -8
Post by Balk on May 2, 2012 18:44:16 GMT -8
Well, I figure if I have pods with pilots, and the pilots have an XP stat, I might as well do something with it. It's already started and it's not a huge hassle, so I'll probably finish it off while I wait for a stable batch of rules.
My two cents on the rules changes:
As long as the new LOS rules are simple enough to implement, I'm ok with them. I can't draw lines on the map and see what parts of the terrain they intersect, so the PC game version of the rules may not always get the same results as the original.
I also think it makes sense for ranged weapons to be extremely accurate up close. I'd expect to get a big bonus if I make it to point-blank range. If you're concerned about the melee/ranged balance, you can always tinker with the melee system instead... up the damage a bit so the lower accuracy is a better tradeoff, change the hit formula so melee attacks are more accurate, or whatever.
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May 3, 2012 10:40:24 GMT -8
Post by Gravedust on May 3, 2012 10:40:24 GMT -8
Yeah, weapons at R1 should be accurate, but right now they're too accurate.
At R1 the bonus for a size 5 pod is 300. Meaning that a pod with a 0 Acc pilot can 3-burst volley 2 high-recoil weapons versus an enemy with 50 evasion and still have a ~80% chance to hit.
Basically my concern was at Range 1 there is a very very good chance for a ranged attack to succeed, and you get that accuracy for 'free', whereas with melee you have to invest skill points to increase effectiveness. I think in the long run when it came down to it, this would make cannons (or low-focus lasers, or even railguns) better melee weapons than actual melee weapons, since you could put all your points in Eva or what have you and just rely on the Size bonus to let you get very reliable hits at Range 1.
So I was just gonna reduce the R1 bonus by a bit: S5 = 200 S4 = 160 S3 = 120 S2 = 80 S1 = 46
Which is still enough for even people with pretty low Acc to hit most sizes reliably, (versus a non-insane amount of Eva,) but isn't so high it encourages shenanigans.
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May 4, 2012 14:14:32 GMT -8
Post by Balk on May 4, 2012 14:14:32 GMT -8
So, about the new LOS rules. They seem a bit... complicated. Not terribly easy to transition to the PC game, either, since there's no longer a simple test to determine if you have LOS or not. What I'll probably have to is simplify them a bit. For example, here's some quick pseudocode... While checking all the tiles along the line between the attacker and the defender: If you find a tile (call it tile X) higher than the defender's tile (tile D), stop. Find the difference in height between tile X and tile D. (If tile X is height 3 and tile D is height 1, difference is 2). Look ahead along the path by a number of tiles equal to the difference. If tile D is closer to tile X than the difference in height between them, tile X blocks LOS to tile D. Otherwise, keep checking tiles. (So if there's a 2-height building between my target and I, and my target is within 2 tiles of the building along the path my bullet needs to travel, I can't shoot him.) I haven't put a whole lot of thought into this just yet, but it'll probably have to be something like that. It should wind up being a reasonably close approximation of the new rules.
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