I'm hoping to finish up the shipyard project soon and move onto the next ship builder. For the next one I am thinking I might focus on rounder sleeker shapes, but I am open to ideas.
what are you looking for when it comes to ship styles?
First, Welcome to the forum! 😀
It's hard to say what I'm looking for in ship styles, other than to say that if there are different factions in the game, each should have its own style. Look at FE2, FFE(D3D) and at what's been done already for Pioneer, and do what looks good to you. I'm sure you'll get plenty of comments. 😉
it's up to you...
i guess we Frontierheads 😀 forgot sometimes that not all prefere to have a "clean" spacegame.
but if you don't mind a complete elite/frontier fleet is a must, imho 😉
but it's not a straightjacked, feel free
there is no fixed polycount limit in pioneer, that didn't means that you can go and make models with millions of tris.
the way models get handled in pioneer is somewhat different to how it's usually done.
prefered are models like the Sirius Interceptor, because they are build from functions, which pioneer handles easy.
such a model has no real polycount limit and has, because of the way they are build, a "built in" LOD dynamic.
use of textures limit the whole thing much more then anything else, but of course we want textured models. even if i think sometimes a dustfree pioneer would be great to.
Whoohoo! Thank you potsmoke. I'm already flying in it and it looks much better now!
any chance of a) a smaller version and b) a larger version of that last ship ( maybe even different colours ie blue red green for edifferent factions)
I loved to add "parts" to my cars, now imagine:
you have your bland and bare white new Imperial Courier MkIV, you go to the station, there is the usual menu:"New and refitted ships", but in the Bulletin board you can find some adverts from hackers, example:
"From Old Good Henry Frinasky, only best and guaranted parts for your ships, we have everythink you need"
you buy some Hull parts for your ship and even a new hacked engine, and you come out from the station with a totally new Imperial Courier, with even different colour and drawings.
The hackers can provide some hacked engines that according to the hacker' skills, can have for example from 2% to 10% or even 15% more power and hyperspace range than the standard engines, but they last less time, so you have to repair them more often.
as i sayd just innocent speculation, but since the game is in its early stage, i think they are allowed.
I like this idea. Allow me to plug once more my other favorite project, Vegastrike. The way this is implemented over there is: in the ship upgrades screen there is a category "shady mechanic" - for a price you can buy unusual tweaks to your existing equipment. They usually cost quite a bit, and come with drawbacks. For instance you can add an extra metal layer to your hull to make it stronger, but it diminishes the capacity of your cargo hold. Or you can boost the recharge rate of your reactor, so you regain power quicker for weapon bursts - but it also diminishes the maximum power storage capacity so each burst will be shorter. And so on. So you have to decide not only if you're willing to pay the money, but also if you're willing to live with the negatives.
maybe i make some parts randomized, if possible with different ship specs.
different colors on the same ship (else, that blue is a random color)? a second ransom material can be set further i could use the colors ment for the flightgroup (squadron), red, blue, gold, green, violet.
using both random materials in one model looks often weird, because the colours didn't harmonize allways.
wherefore the plain "squad" colours fit allways.
I loved to add "parts" to my cars, now imagine:
you have your bland and bare white new Imperial Courier MkIV, you go to the station, there is the usual menu:"New and refitted ships", but in the Bulletin board you can find some adverts from hackers, example:
"From Old Good Henry Frinasky, only best and guaranted parts for your ships, we have everythink you need"
you buy some Hull parts for your ship and even a new hacked engine, and you come out from the station with a totally new Imperial Courier, with even different colour and drawings.
The hackers can provide some hacked engines that according to the hacker' skills, can have for example from 2% to 10% or even 15% more power and hyperspace range than the standard engines, but they last less time, so you have to repair them more often.
as i sayd just innocent speculation, but since the game is in its early stage, i think they are allowed.
I like this idea. Allow me to plug once more my other favorite project, Vegastrike. The way this is implemented over there is: in the ship upgrades screen there is a category "shady mechanic" - for a price you can buy unusual tweaks to your existing equipment. They usually cost quite a bit, and come with drawbacks. For instance you can add an extra metal layer to your hull to make it stronger, but it diminishes the capacity of your cargo hold. Or you can boost the recharge rate of your reactor, so you regain power quicker for weapon bursts - but it also diminishes the maximum power storage capacity so each burst will be shorter. And so on. So you have to decide not only if you're willing to pay the money, but also if you're willing to live with the negatives.
would be nice, in Frontier every ship has engines and devices with a standard reliability of 1 year (that means that after a year, the probability your engine will fail, raise much more)
so the idea could be: if you buy a hacked engine, the more it is hacked the less the reliability, so if i buy from a hacker a mod for my engine to raise my hyperdrive range of 20% (that is a lot), i could have a 20% or 30% less reliability, so instead of servicing my engine every year, i have to service it every i dont know, every 8 month for example...
I always really disliked that 'feature' in FFE. It basically put a ring around the galaxy which says you cannot go here.
A year is not a long time at all. Even a new car has 3 years before it needs its MOT (UK rules), but they could go even longer... But I think it would still be nice to simulate failures just perhaps a bit differently.
I guess the problem with Frontier was, you never knew whether the ship you were buying was new or reconditioned (the BBS entry mentions new and reconditioned, but the game never made any distinction between them).
Look at Gran Turismo 5 - you can buy a 2nd hand car from the "Used Car Dealership". Yes, the cars there are older, and can be considerably cheaper than an equivalent from the "New Car Dealerships", but the 2nd hand cars have additional wear and tear on them when bought - you need to give them an oil change in the "GT Auto" section and you need to give the engine a rebuild in order to get the engine's performance back up to scratch, and you can also get the body rigidity restored. All that gives you some extra cost.
What if Pioneer had a similar system:
1) Brand new ships cost lots more than used ones do, but the drive and equipment doesn't need to be serviced for up to 3 years.
2) Used ships cost a lot less, but can start with a random selection of damaged equipment/thrusters/drive, hull damage, and the drive/equipment service period can be "overdue", or due within the following year.
3) Part-exchange value for your own ship is dependent on the age of the ship, the period since the drive/equipment was last serviced, the damage level of the hull, the value of the equipment installed, etc.
4) Hyperdrive failure occurs only while attempting to hyperspace from a system with a starport, and only following a random period of time after the drive service due date. Failure of the hyperdrive should not prevent interplanetary flight. Failure turns the drive into some kind of item in your cargo bay, and can be sold off once you dock - "scrap metal" or "rubbish" would be a fitting cargo type, I guess
5) Other equipment (such as thrusters, autopilot, missiles, fuel scoops) would fail as in the original Frontier
I think that would add a layer of realism, without detracting from the "fun" factor of the game too much - failures wouldn't strand the player or leave them unable to continue their game, but would still cause them some disruption in their plans.
Also, how about damage to lasers if you continue firing them while they're overheating?
Different levels of hyperdrive failure could be interesting and the longer you go without having the drive serviced would increase the chances of it happening before it ultimately dies completely.
Symptoms of failure such as:
Mis-jumps, where you drop out in inter-stellar space between systems, with a high chance of alien encounter.
You arrive at the destination but it has taken longer than normal or used more fuel than usual.
Catastrophic failure, drive explodes causing serious damage to the ship and random sub-system. Cannot hyper-jump from the current system until the drive is replaced.
Ship drops out in a completely random part of the galaxy. Cue 'Lost in Space' theme!
Some nice ideas there. I think that would be great for the smaller ships, but on bigger ships where you can literally have an entire crew it should have far less of an effect. Like startrek when the engineer takes the engines offline for their service while they drift in un-chartered space. 🙂 Maybe the bigger ships can still have things fail, but the crew could have the abiliy to repair them to about 80% of max quality, and a real station service would completely recondition parts to 100%.....
Version 0.5 of the blend was released:
hm, no need for super large ships...
excerpt of another post from me, that should show why size is a bit limited in pioneer,
a allready quite often asked question,
"What is this Pioneer style, spirit or whatever the heck?"
yes, let's talk about what we old bozos and bonos imagine for a game like Pioneer 😯
because it's possible to imagine many different things for a space, sci-fi game, i will give your horses a harness.
Pioneer is to see as a game settled in a quite unsecure galaxy, death is behind any corner. technology is advanced to a certain point, but the social and economic structures vary from stoneage over medieval to modern democracies.
it seems like technological progress has stagnated after invention of the hyperdrive, economy is weak in many systems due to the unsecure situation, you get either killed by pirates or by a failure of a system in your ship, who knows. additionally there is a "cold war" situation between leading allegiances. trading is done by a fearless "race" of elite pilots 😉 that's why spaceships in Pioneer are rather small and often piloted only by one.
no one will find a bit of you in the endless black velvet.
i guess this describes the "limits" of Pioneer well.
no battle-stars with 100's of guns and 1000's of missiles, no super-duper get me anywhere drives, a very limited technology overall.
because Pioneer is going to be a GAME and not a sandbox space sim, we need such heavy limitations, no risk - no fun.
you can compare it to the early centuries of conquering the seas, ships was rather small, large carriers you find only from 19th century on.
the same here, ships are rather small due to the risky life in space.
Yes damage modelling would be a great thing to fully implement into Pioneer, for not only system failures, but combat damage too. Watching this IL2 video got me wondering if Pioneer could ever have a damage model like this. 😎
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