Messages

31

Game Development / Re: Arcen Platform

« on: November 01, 2011, 10:15:00 AM »

If memory serves me right, there were some posts a while back talking about removing a bunch of AI War-specific stuff that was cluttering the code up from the AVWW branch back in the early days of its existence, and from time to time improvements that have been made for one game that are applicable to another have migrated over eventually, like between Tidalis and AI War at some point.

From the way it's been talked about, I get the impression that it's maybe not quite as formal as you're implying, but they do share a lot of code for the tasks they have in common (all the custom stuff that extends or replaces what Unity doesn't do well enough/at all but is still broad enough that it's applicable to all of the games, e.g. all the stuff you pointed out).  I'm going to guess that it's still maintained manually if my guess that it was was before is correct, because I don't know where they would've found the time to change that with how busy they've been lately.  Heh.

32

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Q & A

« on: November 01, 2011, 12:49:41 AM »

I quite fancy the idea of discovering a sentient dinosaur species that are actually far smarter than any other npcs and spend their free time reciting shakesphere, discussing the space time continuum and carving long difficult algorithms into large rocks.

Smart dinosaurs?  Sign me up.  He even travels to different time periods.  It'd be perfect.  Heh.

33

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Q & A

« on: October 31, 2011, 12:11:27 PM »

now we need some mega-projects/TU sinks, like fortress building, rail links, military training.. 

Apollo Program/space victory?  Screw you, overlords.  I'm getting off Environ and finding a better planet without wind.  Why yes, I did "just one more turn" my two hour Civ session into a ten hour one yesterday.  Heh.

34

AI War Strategy Discussion / Re: Autobombs: Defense Strategy

« on: October 30, 2011, 04:00:00 AM »

That thread reminds me how awesome that was.  And how very, very silly it was, too.  I'd almost forgotten about it.  Heh.

35

AI War / Re: Spirecraft Rams and Raid starships: OP?

« on: October 30, 2011, 02:46:29 AM »

Yea, Raid Starships have been majorly OP in the past; some folks would just take a full cap of all marks (possibly multiple homeworlds worth of that) and just go clean out an AI homeworld with just that.

Yeah, that's what my first reaction to this thread was: remembering that, and laughing hysterically.  You silly people, thinking they're overpowered now.  I think I was able to take a full cap of just my own in a 5-player game in 3.120 and kill every single datacenter in the galaxy without returning home to repair them or anything.  And this was early enough in the game that we had ten planets or less on an 80-planet map on 7/7.  No escorts or anything.  Yes, including the ones that used to seed on the core worlds.  If everyone else had unlocked them and sent theirs with me, I probably could've won the game on that trip.  Raid Starships were fierce back then.

36

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Q & A

« on: October 27, 2011, 02:06:19 AM »

Logically yes, but computers and programing dont respond to logic very well sometimes.

It would be more accurate to say programmers don't respond to logic very well sometimes.

Ah, there we go.  I think we have a winner.

37

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Q & A

« on: October 22, 2011, 02:44:49 PM »

computers and programing dont respond to logic very well sometimes.

Wait, what?  I wasn't aware they responded at all to anything else.  Now they finally tell me after all these years that I've been doing my job wrong this whole time.  Maybe I should try talking to it about its feelings next time.  Heh.

38

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Q & A

« on: October 21, 2011, 02:13:37 PM »

The things you're referring to on the ground might be vents, but I'm not sure.

No one else ever really seems to be sure, either.  That one type of object seems to have been the source of more "What the heck is that supposed to be?" questions than anything else in the entire game, which is funny when you consider how mundane it is compared to all the other crazy stuff surrounding it.  I think it might be that it's just a bit of an odd angle to see them from, so it's not entirely obvious.

39

AI War / Re: Spire Archives Uses

« on: October 19, 2011, 06:47:21 PM »

The deeper problem is that any sort of reward for killing or even getting close to an AI homeworld is rather worthless, as by that point in the game, you don't need any more rewards, for two reasons. One, you are already very strong; you don't need anymore rewards. Two, in many cases the game will be over rather quickly by that point, so trying to incorporate more rewards into your efforts would slow you down by that point.

Pretty much.  By the time you can even go there you don't need what you can get from there, and because of where it is, what you can get from there is extraordinarily not worth the rather terrifying risk.  Even if you capture it after taking the first homeworld, who wants to waste their time guarding the stupid thing forever when you could just go win the game instead?

They'd be more compelling if they didn't have quite so much of a penalty associated with them and they were available somewhere that didn't automatically stamp a giant, red "NO" over them.  If they're meant to be restricted to the latter part of the game, use the shard-seeding logic from the FS campaign and have them be x number of jumps away from the homeworlds or something.  Probably would make sense to have x scale with the map size and use something like x±1 for the sake of variety/not being able to predict exactly where they'll be, but you get the idea.

40

AI War / Re: Spire Archives Uses

« on: October 19, 2011, 05:53:21 PM »

I have never, in any game I've played, on any map I can remember, ever run into a situation where I thought it was remotely a good idea to take and use a Spire Archive.  In fact, I don't think I've even seen one where I didn't think it was the worst possible thing I could do on the entire map, other than colonizing one of the planets with one of those stupid things that give you like 3 resources with a 100 AIP cost if the AI destroys it.  I just consider it a giant "don't touch this planet" sign.  Not that I would touch it anyway, because I'd be too busy winning the game at that point.

41

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Spell gem tiers aren't fun

« on: October 17, 2011, 02:35:22 PM »

Similarly, If this were say, Diablo, then you would experiencing the same thing, you would be fighting through groups of enemies with slowly increasing stats, making your weapons relatively worse, until *clang* something drops a weapon with higher stats and you are back to parity.

The only real difference here is that this is honest about the lack of actual increase.

It's not exactly Diablo, but after convincing my friend he should play Titan Quest, he dragged me back into it to play co-op recently.  It may in some ways effectively amount to "treading water" over time in terms of your strength compared to the enemies (although that depends on how good of a build you use and how far into the game you are; you can improve more quickly than they do if you know what you're doing or get way behind if you make really poor decisions), but it doesn't feel like it in the same way, for a few different reasons.

In a game like that, as you level up your stats increase, you gain more skills, and you get new equipment.  The equipment may at times be just a replacement of the old stuff with higher numbers on it that just counteracts the higher stats the enemies have, but even then it has a different name and looks different, so it feels like a change, and a lot of the time it's actually something that is functionally different in some way.  Adding some extra type of bonus damage to your attacks, giving you elemental resistances, lowering the cooldown time of your skills, granting unique abilities, etc. all give a lot more variety than just "yay you have the same thing as you did before with the number adjusted to compensate for the enemies being a higher level now".

And that's not even counting the separate skill progression, which works on a different scale and rewards the player in a different way and with a different frequency and can also have synergy with the equipment.  Obviously AVWW will have more of that added later on, but pretty much the entirety of its progression is crammed into one system at the moment (get more gems, make more (of the same) spells), so it seems a little silly to compare it to an MMO or ARPG that has vastly more depth and tricks to hide the way things are done and players are rewarded to keep them from getting sick of it.  Even other Metroidvania games have much more player-visible change/reward in terms of progression and power increase over time compared to AVWW's current state.

Of course, most of the spells are still missing, and everyone seems to forget that crests and enchants and things like that don't even exist yet, all of which should have a non-trivial affect on how all of that plays out during people's time in the game, to put it mildly.  Getting too invested arguing about how to balance it based on the lack of existence of most of its features is kind of silly in some ways.  Heh.

42

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: What's the difference between red and yellow hearts on wind shelter sites?

« on: October 17, 2011, 02:02:50 PM »

Just reached level 40 in my current game and so far no second settlement found. Did find one in my old world though.

Oh wow.  That sure says a lot about the way stuff on the map is built out and seeded differently now compared to when I started.  I had something like half a dozen settlements at level seven.  I had to stop looking for more and go do other stuff because I was getting tired of running around building farms and crap just to feed them all.  Heh.

43

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Hallways to Nowhere

« on: October 17, 2011, 01:56:12 PM »

Even if it is not realistic, people still expect things to be reasonable, sensible, and logically consistent. It is established in this universe, humans are reasonable and rational, and as such long hallways to nowhere and nothing conflict with that.

See Magic A Is Magic A and Willing Suspension of Disbelief for better descriptions about why sensibility and consistency should be maintained even in non-realistic settings.

See A Wizard Did It and MST3K Mantra in the meantime for placeholder excuses to tide you over until the rest of the game finishes getting implemented and fixes that for you.  Heh.

44

AI War / Re: Context Menu

« on: October 16, 2011, 05:07:57 PM »

The only things I use the context menu for are the galaxy map layout and science lab auto-gather knowledge. I would happily use Hearteater's galaxy map thingummy, but I can't see myself learning a keybinding for auto-gather. Otherwise the context menu might as well not exist as far as I'm concerned.

Those two things are probably also the main reasons I use it in single player, but in multiplayer it suddenly becomes very important for giving resources to people.  If someone pops a distribution node, they can give whatever extra they don't need to other people, or if someone's building a particularly big project or just got their fleet wrecked while doing something important, other people can toss some spare resources their way to speed things up (although just having your engineers assist whatever they're doing also works, depending on what exactly is going on).

45

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: AVWW Beta 0.525, "Rushing Minis," Released!

« on: October 16, 2011, 11:59:07 AM »

Huh, yeah all of the ingredients for snow/heatsuits are tierless; iron ore, magma and quartz rock. How do we make higher tier suits?

Obviously revert to whatever ridiculously old 0.40x/0.41x version it was that still had them as tiered items, despite the different tiers not being any different from each other.  I mean, duh.  Heh.