Naev Development Blarg (Page 16)

• Disabling Revamp

  BY BOBBENS, ON OCTOBER 16TH, 2011

  So, this was done a while back; finally getting around to posting about it. Briefly, we’ve changed how disabling works: Instead of auto-disabling when a ship reaches 30% base armour, you can now take disabling damage. As for how this works, weapons can now deal two types of damage: normal and disabling. Disabling damage is only applied when your armour is hit, and this increases your disable damage. If the amount of disabling damage taken exceeds your current armour, your ship is disabled. This applies to all ships and will make it so now you have to outfit to safely disable ships. However, specialized new missiles come to the rescue and provide disabling damage so that you don’t have to sacrifice shield piercing abilities for your cannons/turrets.

  As a side note, this now means the player’s ship can be disabled. If your ship is disabled, you can be boarded, so prepare to see pirates boarding your poor, sad ship and looting your hard-earned funds. As a side mechanic, disabled ships do automatically recover after a while, so this means clumps of disabled ships won’t accumulate around dangerous jump points. There are limits to what they can steal, so don’t worry about losing all your credits to a lone pirate. We believe that this will make the game more interesting, especially as we introduce more complex mechanics that will interact with this.

  NOTE This screenshot has been lost to time :(

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• Recent developments

  BY BTAXIS, ON JULY 24TH, 2011

  It has been some time since you’ve heard from us, so I’m taking it upon myself to give you all an idea of what’s going on with Naev.

  The first thing I should mention is that is is summer for Naev, and summer usually means a lull in activity. It has to do with lots of other things happening in summer, many of them outdoor ones. I think you get the idea.

  That said, things have been happening since the 0.5.0 release. The original plan for the next version, 0.5.1, was, and I quote:

  14:16 bobbens we can do safe lanes

  14:16 bobbens for starters

  14:16 bobbens although I’m not sure on the safe lane stuff how to procede

  14:16 bobbens we can either go safe lane “simple implementation” first

  14:16 bobbens for quick release

  14:16 bobbens or go quadtrees and asteroids first

  14:16 bobbens for a slower crazy release

  Once this discussion was over, we promptly started working on completely different things. One of those things is the revised faction standing mechanic, described in a previous blarg post. But there is more.

  Disabling

  For instance, work is ongoing on a revised disabling system. Up until 0.5.0, ships would become disabled once they sustained enough damage (to be precise, once armour fell below 20%), and that was the end of it. However, one of our team members (it was me) felt that this was undesirable, and designed something different. Rather than always being disabled through damage directly, ships now accrue “stress” damage, which builds up as weapons do damage, and falls naturally over time. Once stress damage equals the amount of armour the ship still has left, the ship becomes disabled. Assuming the ship is not destroyed afterward, it will come back online after a certain amount of time.

  The important part in the above is that stress damage needs to reach the amount of armour health left on the ship. The direct implication of this is that ships with low health are more easily disabled than ships with high health, without tying the concepts of “low” and “high” to the ship’s maximum amount of health. This means that a small ship can be reliably disabled without running the risk of destroying it, for example.

  The introduction of stress damage in itself also gives us the opportunity to differentiate weapons further. In practice, this means that most weapons will do minimal amounts of disable damage, much less than their actual physical damage, so that it’s almost impossible to disable a ship before killing it. On the other hand, certain other weapons will deal a lot of stress damage and limited amounts of physical damage, so that stress damage easily builds up toward the critical level.

  Missiles

  One of our current efforts is to make missiles more meaningful while at the same time not placing too much emphasis on them. In 0.5.0, most missiles are mostly useless, for various reasons. For instance, damage was low and the likelihood of missiles hitting fast targets or targets with jammers was rather low. One of our team members (it was me again) came up with an alternative missile system that would allow missiles to be more useful while hopefully not be too dominating.

  In the new system, a missile weapon must acquire a lock on the target before it can fire. To acquire this lock, the target must be kept within the missile lockon area, which is an arc in front of the ship for normal launchers and everywhere for turreted launchers. The time the launcher takes to lock on depends on the lockon time defined for that launcher, and on the level of stealth of the target. As a general rule, small targets are more stealthy than bigger ones. So while an interceptor missile might lock on to a capital ship very quickly, a heavy torpedo would take a very long time to lock on to a fighter. Stealth is further affected by electronic warfare outfits such as passive scramblers and, to be implemented, jammers that must be activated and provide a short-term boost.

  Once fired, missiles are quite good at finding their targets. Unlike most of the old missiles, all missiles now predict where their target is going to be, so unless the target can actually outmaneuver the missile, the missile will usually hit. The new missiles also do considerably more damage, so being hit by one can be quite painful. The aim is that most missiles are optimally suited to a certain class of ship, however, dealing too little damage to seriously hurt targets bigger than that and being too slow and sluggish to catch faster ones.

  Ship health

  A somewhat minor change, but perhaps worth mentioning here is the overhaul of ship health. Where ship armour and shields more or less linearly increased as the ships got bigger and heavier, one of our team members (it was me, sorry) felt a different philosophy should be followed.

  Small ships now rely mainly on their maneuverability and their shields, as before. Their hulls are made out of bread, relatively speaking, so only a few hits will be enough to destroy them. Avoiding fire in an engagement is key to survival.

  Big ships have received substantial cuts to their shielding. While they still have more shielding in absolute terms than smaller ships, the increase becomes less and less as ships get bigger. On the other hand, armour has been drastically increased. The idea here is that big ships, as big and lumbering as they are, will run out of shields in most serious encounters, but survive on armour for a considerable time after that. When combat is over shields will come back up but armour will not. In this manner, capital ships will get worn down between engagements, and will eventually have to return to a friendly planet or station to make repairs. Of course, this assumes combat will be sporadic and intense, as opposed to constant and niggling (as is currently the case!). All in good time.

  I should also mention that shield regeneration has been boosted across the board, hopefully enough to make the regeneration actually matter in the middle of combat. I’m sure we’ll be tweaking that more in the future.

  Soromid

  Following contributions of some great ship models by Viruk, a new faction has been added to the Naev galaxy. The Soromid already existed as a lore writeup previously, but now they also own ships, stations and planets. In the future, they will also receive their own weapon specialization, and of course their own missions.

  You can see a map of their territory to the right. It is located in the north of the galaxy, where previously there were only empty systems. Not anymore!

  Also

  Our team leader bobbens is working on a personal project as well. You can see the result here.

  NOTE Unfortunately the above mentioned screenshot is lost, and there is some mention of bobbens’ toe. I wish I could tell you what that was all about - Synchro

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• Expanding on faction standing and landing

  BY DEIZ, ON JUNE 20TH, 2011

  To provide a brief overview: In 0.5.1, the landing and faction standing mechanics will be changing in a big way. They’re both no longer hard-coded in C, having been moved to flexible Lua scripts that can operate differently for each faction.

  Important military outposts and such will now be restricted to factional allies, seldom (if ever) accepting bribes, and attaining standing with a faction will require campaign missions rather than just killing the faction’s enemies.

  <img class='img-fluid' alt='They don't take kindly to outsiders at Dvaered High Command.' src="/imgs/blarg/2011/06/noland-300x225.png" />

  Landing

  Landing has long been a rather simple mechanic in Naev. Plainly, being neutral or friendly with a faction means you can land on any of their assets — up to, and including, their primary military and political headquarters. Likewise, if you’re hostile with a faction, you can simply bribe your way into the spaceport.

  Yet somehow, it seems that high-ranking bureaucrats and military officers might frown on enemies of the state traipsing around their headquarters after throwing a few credits at the landing control officer. As such, it’s become a priority to do away with the overly-simplistic permission system.

  Our new mechanic for this is rather more nuanced. As we’ve done with many things, landing is now handled through Lua — the behaviour is no longer hard-coded in C. The simplistic landable-if-not-hostile model has been replaced with a ternary system that can operate differently per-faction: while civilian worlds will let neutral strangers land, important factional outposts will typically be restricted to allies. Correspondingly, a backwater civilian settlement that you’re hostile with is likely to turn a blind eye if you pay them off, while officers at a military outpost will tend to be far less lenient.

  The restricted assets are also divided into tiers. While an outsider will be able to land at most of a faction’s military assets after doing a number of missions for them, key assets such as faction home worlds will remain off-limits to all but close allies.

  Standing

  A second, closely-related mechanic is faction standing. Like landing, it’s also far from optimal in 0.5.0 and earlier — you can become a faction’s trusted ally simply by going on a brief rampage and killing off a number of their enemies’ ships.

  This may even happen inadvertently through normal gameplay. It’s a given that players are attacked by pirates in many areas of the galaxy, and since pirates are a common enemy among many of the lawful factions, simply fighting off pirates ingratiates players with all of these factions.

  For 0.5.1, it’s undergoing a substantial revamp. Like landing, the previously hard-coded behaviour has been replaced with a flexible Lua solution. Generally, killing alone won’t take you terribly far. To become an ally of a faction, it will be necessary to do missions for them.

  Grunt-work such as cargo ferrying and patrol missions won’t go all the way, either. Each faction has two ceilings on standing. The first is the point at which killing stops increasing your standing, and the other is the limit on how far normal missions can raise it.

  To become a faction’s ally, you’ll need to do campaign missions for them. The reputation limit that regular missions can reach will be increased by the campaign missions, essentially representing an increased willingness for the faction to trust you.

  The way reputation is gained through killing is also changing. The 0.5.0 reputation system is essentially omniscient. If you kill a pirate out in the middle of nowhere with no witnesses, your standing will still go up with all pirate enemies.

  The new system operates on two levels. Killing a faction’s enemies in systems that the faction inhabits will trigger a normal standing increase, because you’re directly defending them and their populace. The other case is where you’re fighting a faction’s enemies outside of the faction’s space. In this instance, killing a faction’s enemies only increases your standing if the faction has a ship that’s within sensor range.

  Plainly put, a faction should only take notice if your actions affect them in a direct manner. The Empire shouldn’t care if you kill a pirate deep within Sirius space, nor vice versa.

  We hope that these mechanics will make general faction relationships more compelling, and ideally they will serve to distinguish factions from each other, rather than faction standing polarizing into lawful versus lawless, with one group of factions at 100% and the other at -100%.

  The Naev devteam is proud to announce the release of Naev 0.5.0! This release is the result of over a year of hard work done by nearly 30 committers. This release is just a step in the path for ultimate greatness and a major step forward in the maturity of Naev. It has many major gameplay changes and signifies the coming of age of Naev, which has now exceeded the tag of Escape Velocity clone.

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• Naev 0.5.0 Release

  BY BOBBENS, ON JUNE 3RD, 2011

  The Naev devteam is proud to announce the release of Naev 0.5.0! This release is the result of over a year of hard work done by nearly 30 committers. This release is just a step in the path for ultimate greatness and a major step forward in the maturity of Naev. It has many major gameplay changes and signifies the coming of age of Naev, which has now exceeded the tag of Escape Velocity clone.

  

  Due to the size of the 0.5.0 ndata, downloads shall from now on be hosted at Sourceforge instead of Google Code due to the latter’s arbitrary size limits.The rest of the project infrastructure will remain unchanged.

  In the future, a shorter release cycle will be used, with focus on the remaining features left before content can be the main focus which include asteroids, dynamic economy and fleet AI, among others.

  Some statistics of the release to give an idea of the magnitude: 961 files changed, 91734 insertions(+), 25431 deletions(-)

  Download: https://sourceforge.net/projects/naev/files/naev-0.5.0/ Blog: https://naev.org/ Forums: http://forum.naev.org/ (Forums are lost.)

  List of changes since 0.4.2:

  For Players

  • Larger universe
    • Expanded Dvaered, Frontier, Empire and Pirate territories
    • All-new Sirius and Soromid territory
  • Big systems
    • More planets per system
    • Much larger planets, many new planet and station graphics
    • Players must fly to jump points before jumping to another system
  • Overlay map for in-system navigation
  • Mouse interactivity
    • Planet, ship and jump point targeting
    • Contextual click actions (board, hail, land, etc.)
    • Optional mouse-controlled flying
  • Electronic warfare
    • Ships have cloaking and detection abilities
    • Sensor range depends on cloak vs detection
    • Turrets no longer track all ships equally
  • Time model changes
    • In-game time progresses in real-time
    • Dynamic time compression speeds up long journeys
  • On-map security rating abandoned in favour of faction presence indicators
  • System backgrounds (nebulae, stars and more!)
  • Fancier new GUI
  • Brand-new tutorial that is independent from the main game
  • Outfit slots now have sizes
  • Weapon sets allow easy configuration of different weapon combinations for each ship
  • Ship and weapon heat system
    • Weapons start with perfect accuracy, and become inaccurate as they overheat
    • Severe overheating causes rate of fire to drop
  • Damage absorption and penetration system
  • More diverse planetary inventories (see the tech system below)
  • Random bar NPCs
  • Sound system improvements
  • Smarter autonav behaviour
  • … and plenty more (new missions, ships, outfits, portraits, etc.)

  For Developers (Missions and likewise)

  • Faction presence
    • Replaces security and simple fleet spawning
    • Fleet spawning is now controlled through Lua on a per-faction basis
  • Universe and system editor
    • Allows easy and quick modification of the universe
    • Can create and manipulate planets, systems and jumps
  • New tech system
    • Techs are groups containing outfits, ships or other techs.
    • Assets (formerly planets) sell whatever is in their assigned techs.
  • Hook improvements
    • Pilot hooks pass arguments by default
    • You can now pass custom arguments to hooks
    • Many new hooks
  • Replaced old timer system with new hook-based timer system
  • Improvements to the in-game Lua console
  • Missions can now use more than a single mission marker
  • ndata-locating code is much-improved
  • Lua/Luajit and CSparse system libraries can be used instead of internal ones
  • SDL_image is no longer a dependency
  • Events can now be saved
  • GUIs can be written in Lua
  • Camera API allows much greater camera flexibility
  • Vast amounts of other Lua API additions and enhancements

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• OpenAL showcase

  BY BOBBENS, ON MAY 18TH, 2011

  With 0.5.0-beta2 out the door I decided to work on more videos to show off missions and fancy things we do in Naev. I first decided to record the OpenAL effects (EFX) we do in the nebula. For this I decided to show off the “Destroy the FLF base” mission. If you do not want to be partially spoiled I recommend you do not watch the video. Although it is really cool.

  Effects to notice:

  • Positional sound (basic for OpenAL)
  • Doppler Effect (depends on velocity)
  • Air absorption factor (sounds like you’re under water)
  • Reverb (also helps make it sound like you’re underwater)
  • Speed of sound changes (depends on nebula density – also for sounding underwater)

  For the implementation I’m using the SW OpenAL implementation by KittyCat. Which should work on all systems that support Naev, so I highly recommend it. With the SDL_Mixer backend you do not get all these fancy effects. Some of these effects are also active when not in the nebula and especially notable is the pitch shift with time compression. So I highly recommend you all use the OpenAL backend.

  Now without further ado here is the showcase video of the mission:

  I’m not an OpenAL expert, so if anybody has any advice or recommendations, I’d love to hear them. This isn’t final so it may sound different in the 0.5.0 release. Of course I haven’t touched this part of the sound code in 2 years or so. We’ll see.

  (Sorry for the 4:3 resolution also, I promise I won’t do it again)

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