Naev Development Blarg (Page 18)

• Wikinaev

  BY BOBBENS, ON JANUARY 21ST, 2011

  As part of our move to become more independent from Google’s services, which should allow us more flexibility and comfort, we have decided to host our own wiki. This wiki will allow us to organize proposals, todo and overall design considerations by centralizing them. This does not make either the forums or the mailing list obsolete, but complements them. It’s not fully fleshed out yet, but it is already far superior to the old one. If you are interested in Naev and would like to contribute to the wiki, feel free.

  One decision we have taken on the wiki is that we do not want every planet to have it’s own article. The wiki should focus on general information for both developers and players, without recording individual details. So, while the Empire faction gets it’s own page, the planet Em 5 does not. As with all wikis, we ask that you please do not add stuff you would like to see in game directly without getting the approval of a devteam member. However, you are completely free to write a proposal and submit that for review. You are all welcome to use the Naev wiki, let the editing begin!

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• Naev Etymology

  BY BOBBENS, ON JANUARY 14TH, 2011

  Today we’ll talk about the name of this game: it’s history, pronunciation and how to write it. First off a bit of history, as you probably do know, NAEV originally stood for “Neutron Accelerated Extreme Velocity” although “Not Another Escape Velocity” was also widely accepted. The original idea was to sort of create an improved clone of the original Escape Velocity game. However with the 0.5.0 release we will transcend that. Naev is no longer a clone and therefore no longer an acronym, it is now a proper noun. So from now on no more NAEV, only Naev! You may notice I have been changing that, this unification of criteria will make it easier to handle and no longer cause confusion.

  Now onto pronunciation, how is it pronounced? In case someday we hold a Naev meet or the likes we should all know how to pronounce it so we don’t make a mess and fools of ourselves (we probably will anyway). The proper way to pronounce Naev is /nɑ.ɛv/ if I got right my symbols (would need confirmation). I know most of you pronounce it more like knave, but trust me, that is wrong.

  For those who still have doubts on how to pronounce: Naev Pronounciation

  Naev /nɑ.ɛv/ An open source action/RPG space video game.

  NOTE Unfortunately it looks like we will have to rely on phonetic spelling due to a missing sound clip.

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• 0.5.0 Alpha Gameplay

  BY BOBBENS, ON JANUARY 8TH, 2011

  Recently the new x.org brought me frustration. My open source driver broke down and I was left without being able to run Naev. After realizing I needed a kernel upgrade I found out the biggest benefit of gallium3d: I can make videos! So kudos to the open source ati driver team. Here’s a video showing off preliminary 0.5.0 alpha gameplay in the balance branch.

  Things to note:

  • I’m using forward cannons, swivel for the win!
  • Using HatlessAtlas’ new AI, it’s harder to follow and track them
  • Pretty backgrounds (for those who haven’t seen 0.5.0 in action)
  • Smooth camera and dynamic zoom (zoom will be revised a bit more probably)
  • New rumble (it’s preliminary, but much smoother)
  • Penetration model (I barely get hurt – maybe more balancing needed)
  • New weapons

  This is not meant to be a really serious video, just me fooling off and showing my awesome ship build and mad skills.

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• 0.5.0 Status Update

  BY BOBBENS, ON DECEMBER 31ST, 2010

  Lots of you have complained about accuracy in Naev and hitting stuff with forward mounts. As part of the increased range and weapon rants it was unbearable in the sense you never hit anything unless you went point blank. I am proud to announce the implementation of swivel forward mounts. That means all weapons have a tendency to correct minor errors in accuracy. The longer the range generally the more they compensate. This also works similar to turrets with electronic warfare, but generally the accuracy is much higher with forward mounts than with turrets. Hopefully this will make forward mounted weapons actually usable.

  You can check out the changes in the every unstable balance branch on github.

  NOTE This screenshot has been lost to time :(

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• 0.5.0 Status Update

  BY BOBBENS, ON DECEMBER 21ST, 2010

  We haven’t posted in a while, so I decided to update even though we don’t have anything spectacular done (depending on your definition of spectacular). So what is going on? As you may know the current development and broken branch is the balance branch (This branch is now long dead, unsure of the commit sha). This branch is active and will mangle your saves if you load it. Why? It’s caused by the implementation of the weapon rant, which makes it so all the weapon are changed. Some retain their name, but most get lost in the transition. This is unavoidable and will happen to everyone once it’s merged back, but it shouldn’t happen again then.

  Other things, ewarfare has more or less been balanced. We’ve introduced another parameter for heat. So the more your ship heats up, the more visible it is. The equations are also tweaked in such a way they make more sense and are cooler overall. Also turrets finally use it, so you can’t track a fighter with a long range anti-capship turret. This all may still need fine tuning but it is working quite well.

  Another major change which has broken a lot of missions is the fact we’ve changed the time model. Previously time only changed when you landed or jumped. Now time will change while flying too. That means that slower ships will waste more time in system while jump times will be very similar. This sort of makes everything more interesting and realistic which is quite cool. However it means we have to revamp all our cargo missions which we want to rethink anyway when we do economics. For now we’ll probably keep them similar to how they’ve always been, but in the future we’ll change it.

  Finally mentioning some changes we want to do. With google being more and more evil, we’ve been thinking of completely foregoing both google code and google groups. We’re working on having our own wiki which shouldn’t take too long to be available. If someone is really interested in helping out we can sort of speed it up and spread the half-finishedness. It still needs lots of love. Secondly we’re considering the possibility of also hosting our own mailing list, but we’ll see about that. That hasn’t even been started.

  Closing words on the release. The original intention was to release end of 2010, however we believe it is much more important to have a good solid release than a half-finished rushed release that will need a dozen bugfixes to be playable. We would like to still release at the end of 2010, but chances are we’ll just do a beta at the start of 2011. There’s still much to do, need to finish some stuff and then fix everything we broke. To speed up the release we are trying to delay changes that aren’t fundamental, however we also want this release to sort of establish the maturity of Naev, but chances are 0.6.0 will be the true maturity once we get there.

  tl;dr We’ll release when it’s ready :)

  NOTE This screenshot has been lost to time :(

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