Rebalancing underway; CVS kinda broken

Development directions, tasks, and features being actively implemented or pursued by the development team.
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peteyg
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Rebalancing underway; CVS kinda broken

Post by peteyg »

EDIT: i think the runtime for this announcement is done.

A complete overhaul of ugprades, spaceflight and combat style, and ships is underway. Dandandaman and I, with input from Hellcat and JackS, have been doing some fine-tuning and experimentation since the last release, and believe we've found a good starting point to begin rebalancing all ships within Vega Strike.

After some more work, we have a preliminary set of new upgrades put into the game that go along with the new upgrade style (ships have upgrade volume, better upgrades take more volume, can have an awesome reactor but at the expense of other ugprades, no more .template madness... etc). All .blank ships are able to buy and install these new ugprades, but only 6 ships are in line with the new balancing scheme, all others have semi-random upgrade volumes for now.

There is also a new scheme for ship guns. There will be several different types of guns for each of light, medium, and heavy mounts... each type of gun will have multiple 'levels', each one more expensive but giving better performance (Laser I, Laser II, Laser III, etc). Right now there are only baseline-placeholder guns for the three levels, but this will be expanded in the future.

The only bases where you can buy the new upgrades right now are Ocean worlds and Mining Bases... because they're in the starting system, and we don't want to go crazy and redo the supply/demand/cargo for every base and planet in case we change the upgrade cargo categories.

Not much of this is even close to being set in stone, and will be tweaked probably right up until the next release. For some more details... take a look at this.

I have committed a the units.csv, master_part_list.csv, and weapons_list.xml to CVS. CVS is probably a bit broken (though not horribly so, I hope), and will probably remain so while we do the grunt work for the rebalancing.
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Post by Halleck »

Nice work. Let me know if I can pitch in a little.

The new SPEC plan sounds truly wonderful. Keep it up!
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Post by coppercore »

i'm not so much new to vs as i am just getting back into the swing of things. If there's some way i can help out with this as well, pm me or give me ring on IRC.

I'm home most of this week all day, except for 3 to 8:30-9pm eastern, due to work

and btw, keep up the good work, it just keeps on getting better!
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Post by Guest »

Hellcatv previously mentioned a navigation feature called ASAP which I have been unable to locate, but you could easily prevent overshoot by adding a bindable key for "Point Nose of Ship directly at Selected Target" With a tech base that allows velocity targets to be correctly computed relative to a moving target, it seems odd not to have this.
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Post by smbarbour »

That is pretty close to what ASAP does. When you get really close to the target though, it starts to issue course corrections that are rather large jumps.

It is currently an unmapped command. You will need to manually edit your vegastrike.config file to use it. (I personally map Shift-A to it (Default is ToggleWarpDrive same as lowercase a). It works great with fast turning ships. Slower ships like the Mule need to be pointed pretty close to the target area first or you'll find yourself orbiting your target instead! Also, I would advise against using time compression with it while in SPEC mode (generally a bad idea to use TC in SPEC anyway)

I don't listen to my own advice though. :oops: I use it fairly regularly and occasionally end up 600+ Light secs away due to ASAP course corrections. It's not too annoying since at that distance your SPEC multiplier gets maxed out (Also of note, you are travelling faster than light at that point since it takes less than a second to go multiple light seconds. :)
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Post by hurleybird »

Heres an idea. Have every upgrade fit into a specific mount.

This way, you can only have as many upgrades as there are mounts, and theres no more confusion that you get from somehow having three reactors or five different afterburner upgrades :wink:

Now, the cool thing is that this would open up some room for creativity when it comes to ship design. Imagine a ship that has three reactor mounts, for three times the power, more heavily armored ships might have multiple armor mounts.

Or heres a cool Idea, different mounts for differect sheild facings. So you would equip seperate sheilds for your left right back and front facings so, if you like to ram the enemy, make sure your forward emitter is really strong) . This would mimic the way that starfleet command handled sheilds, and would also be cool for vega trek.
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Problem with new upgrades.

Post by Barak »

I've relatively new to VS and have been playing my first ship for some time, using CVS/HEAD generated programs and data.

Since the new upgrades were implemented, it seems that many are not backwards compatible. My save files now give old bases/planets whose weapons upgrade iinventories are limited to ammunition/basic repair/(and maybe some weapons). Given that I was really shot up, this is bad, since I wanted to buy more hull upgrades.

In any event, I flamed all of ~/.vegastrike, reran vsinstall, and started over. The first thing I did was to buy a jump drive, some cargo, and accept some cargo missions. [I also tried buying some weapons, but that is not relevant].

The problem is that the jump drive doesn't seem to work. I get to the jump points, never see the "jump"
indicator, and pressing 'j' does nothing.

I've tried this with and without accepting missions as well.

On the other hand, the weapons work.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

I haven't played VS in a while now (WCU rather), but if I remember correctly, you just have to wait for a while for the energy to charge up and then the jump indicator will light up. And I think you can buy jump capacitance to speed up the process.
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Post by Barak »

I flew to the jump point, came to rest, and waited. Nada, even with time compression jacked up.

This worked a few CVS's ago (probably within the last 72 hrs).
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Post by smbarbour »

This has happened to me before (somewhat). I was in the Sol system and was well past my intended jump point when the jump indicator came up. I don't remember exactly which jump point it was.

Try flying around the wireframe a little. It may be somewhere other than expected. :)
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Post by flydpnkrtn »

Referencing the Jump Drive phenomenon... I know I have a Jump Drive, and I've flown all over the wireframes of a couple of jump points, and still no "Jump" at the top of the screen.

What gives? Anybody know? Obviously it's to do with the rebalancing... I'm guessing the Jump drive being listed under "Interstellar Jump Drive" instead of its old listing under "Misc" has something to do with it... is the ship simply not registered as having a jump drive? Is this something simple to VS data4.x to fix?
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Post by smbarbour »

If you are absolutely certain that your ship should have a jump drive, you can check the csv file under serialized.xml/game_save_name corresponding to your current ship. In that file there is a column that indicates whether or not your ship currently has jump capability. This should be set to 1. It is also possible (I believe) that the warp jump cost "could" be set higher than what your energy settings would allow meaning that your warp capacitor and main capacitor are too small to handle the jump cost that is set. I do know that the values in the csv file are what are used and not the upgrades you have installed. You can't sell your jump drive on a milspec ship because it is not listed in the upgrades installed (This is another thing that should be balanced. The upgrade space available should be less since certain upgrades are hard-wired into the ship. Wow, I actually made this post to be on-topic to the main discussion of this thread! :P)
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Post by jackS »

smbarbour wrote: It is also possible (I believe) that the warp jump cost "could" be set higher than what your energy settings would allow meaning that your warp capacitor and main capacitor are too small to handle the jump cost that is set.
This was indeed the case as of a couple of days ago.
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Post by hurleybird »

I dont know if it has anything to do with the rebalancing, but in the latest cvs the setup program does not work for me. It will run, but I cannot use it to make the game fullscreen, even after I set it to fullscreen it runs windowed when I start the game.
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Post by energyman76b »

Hi,

that is not a cvs problem... setup has NEVER worked for me, setting fs/window mode.. always had to do by hand...
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Post by petteyg359 »

I know the answer to that problem... at least on my Gentoo system. The CVS installer installs to /usr/local/share/vegastrike, and set that to root:root ownership (because it requires root to write there), where it should be root:games. I changed the group on them to games, and chmodded to 775, and it works fine now. But I've NEVER been able to get vslauncher to work. It always is hanging and nothing happens when I click the buttons.
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Post by Wisq »

With regards to not being able to jump -- do you have an "FTL Energy Capacitor" (filed under "SPEC capacitor")? I bought myself a Dodo almost immediately to actually transport cargo around, but when it came time to leave the system, I was confounded as to why I couldn't leave. Then, on a hunch, I bought myself a capacitor, and voila, I'm out.

The level 1 capacitor is exactly the cost of jumping (at least for the Dodo), so you tend to drop out of SPEC right after a jump, even if you have enough energy production from the reactor. If you want to remain in SPEC after a jump, buy at least a level 2 capacitor.

(Remaining in SPEC during a jump is really nice in terms of getting away from the jump point super fast, since it seems to forget the jump point gravity effect just after a jump. From there, you just shut off SPEC, reorient, reengage SPEC, and you can zoom towards your target at full SPEC speed. Of course, sometimes I get flung into a planet doing that, and auto-land.)

That category ("SPEC Capacitors") really ought to be renamed to be a little more intuitive (regarding its connection to jumps). Alternatively, perhaps a big red warning on the ship info screen would suffice, like the "reactor overdrawn" or "not enough weapon capacitance" warnings.
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Post by AeonOfTime »

I checked out the latest CVS version yesterday evening, and I must say, it looks really good - much more polished that v0.4.3, especially the Flight UI. And thanks for replacing that 'somered' background :)

I have started a new game to make sure my previous one doesn't make any weird problems, and emptied the generated folders first, and it works like a charm. Good hint though about the upgrades only being on Mining bases and Ocean planets, I was wondering where they had gone...
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Post by smbarbour »

I was wondering what the status was on certain categories not appearing (specifically Sensors). It should just be a standard change, but it doesn't work. I've also tried recategorizing them via master_part_list.csv, but to no avail. Just wondering.
I've stopped playing. I'm waiting for a new release.

I've kicked the MMO habit for now, but if I maintain enough money for an EVE-Online subscription, I'll be gone again.
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