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Post by Farbs on Oct 3, 2012 10:21:01 GMT 10
PAX wiped me out for a bit, but I've shuffled my hours around to work on CJ for a little while each day rather than for one day a week, and that seems to be working really well. Recently I:
* Rewrote the save system! In all current builds you can't shut down your browser unless your ship is safely in a docking station. That's kinda cool, but also frustrating. In the new system (which seems to work, but will need more testing), the game saves on important events and also periodically, so if your browser crashes while you're flying through deep space, you can just restart the browser, load the page, and continue flying. This should remove a lot of frustration.
* Cleaned up manual docking a bit. It was pretty messy.
* Made sector configuration a bit more flexible, so I can hardcode things occasionally. eg: A small introductory starting area, a narrative end sector, secret weird areas etc.
* Decided to hold off on voice for a while. The tech is cool, but the work in getting all the content recorded and cut up and integrated into the game is, uh, substantial. For the moment I have the new synth patched into the old robospeak system, so you get unique voices for all the ships but they aren't particularly intelligible. I'll probably stick with that for 0.6, and move on to full voice clips later. Oh, if you want to check out the voice work though I'll have a deluxe version of Foraxian up on XBLIG soon!
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Post by Vaconcovat on Oct 3, 2012 12:29:55 GMT 10
Glad to hear it. Thought we'd lost you for a while there.
What do you have planned for these 'secret' areas?
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Post by Farbs on Oct 4, 2012 9:01:17 GMT 10
Uh... secret secrets? I probably won't get around to these for 0.6, they're just a future possibility for now.
Spent some time yesterday trying to collate a decent list of star systems and their relative locations. The various databases online are terribly inconsistent, especially in regards to popular names.
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Post by Darkond2100 on Oct 4, 2012 15:50:10 GMT 10
He's telling us that he hasn't done them yet so that we'll be surprised to find that he really has. I'm onto him.
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Post by Farbs on Oct 5, 2012 13:02:53 GMT 10
Heh.
I finished up a pass on the 0.6 sector list today, and now have ~50 sectors in the game. Much of the data was autogenerated, but there are still some interesting places to visit.
Right now Barnard's Star is a tiny spelunk area, which is incredibly challenging. I liberated a Beta station without too much trouble, but the next lowest station level was a Delta, with a guardian sporting prismatics! There was no way I could take it w/ my simple Alpha launchers. Instead I found a seam of Iron Ore near the Beta colony, saved up and bought the only thing I could - a Charlie level Bubble Shield. This was my only shot at taking out the Delta guardian, and my only shot at saving the sector.
A close victory later I'm back at the ore seam, saving up for an Echo torpedo launcher. That'll make mining MUCH faster, and put me on the road to buying a nice set of Echo Plancks.
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Post by Farbs on Oct 6, 2012 15:59:28 GMT 10
Just popped into the code for a moment to add a new ALL STOP option for the cruise control direction. By specifying this you can enable cruise control without actually going anywhere. It's extremely useful for mining, since you still get the time dilation effect.
Previously I'd have to enable cruise control and reverse thrust at exactly the same thrust as the ship was trying to move forward, which required a bit of key juggling and felt very silly.
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robodoggy
Charlie Rank
Affirmative!
Posts: 27
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Post by robodoggy on Oct 7, 2012 14:14:46 GMT 10
WOO HOO!!! Good to see you again Farbs!
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Post by Farbs on Oct 13, 2012 11:44:10 GMT 10
Whoops, lost a week there. Am back in the code today, and should get a bunch of time in the coming week.
I just fixed some fiddly bugs w/ the new save/load system, like your ship automatically re-docking on your first launch, and all deadhead pilots being mysteriously named Michael Smith-Smith.
My goal for today: Savegame import/export. By stuffing these into regular files players will be able to back up and even share their savegame data, which should alleviate the flash cookie deletion problems a bit. Unfortunately I can't just save to regular files silently, otherwise I'd just do that and forget cookies entirely. Instead I have to pop up a dialog box asking where the file should be saved to / loaded from. Still, it's a good move I think.
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Post by Farbs on Oct 13, 2012 11:46:46 GMT 10
Oh, and if I get that knocked out soon enough I'll spend some time experimenting with Hub and Repeater station designs. These'll form the backbone of the 0.6 zone linking interface. I finally found a good direction for these, and am v keen to see them in-game. Woo! EDIT: Two posts in a row is enough, so I'll just edit instead. I just added the interface for data backup, via the SYSTEM menu. Since this required a third page in that menu I cleaned up paging a bit, and padded out the new page with a bit of fluff. Now you can specify cabin temperature and humidity, and configure the DVT massage system. Oh, except that the humidity controls seem to be broken. That's going to be uncomfortable. EDITEDIT: I guess I'm just going to keep adding to this The import/export system now loads and saves files, just not the right ones. Need to work on that. On the front end side, I realised people will probably get shirty if they aren't warned that importing will discard any current progress. I added a nice little popup for verifying that yes, you really do want to do this. Even if you stuff up there, you can still cancel from the file selection dialog.
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Post by Vaconcovat on Oct 13, 2012 23:22:39 GMT 10
Now you can specify cabin temperature and humidity, and configure the DVT massage system. Oh, except that the humidity controls seem to be broken. That's going to be uncomfortable. What does the cabin temp. and humidity actually affect? Also, good to see you coming up with some improvement to the save system. The only real thing turning me off playing jameson right now is that sometimes my hardwork is lost for no reason.
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Post by Farbs on Oct 15, 2012 13:29:10 GMT 10
What does the cabin temp. and humidity actually affect? Absolutely nothing! ;D I just added them so the page wouldn't look empty.
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Post by Farbs on Oct 16, 2012 19:59:42 GMT 10
First pass at Hub stations, which look okay but not as cool as I'd like. Going to have to think on that a bit.
Added a pulsing data transmission effect for them in the blur layer, which led to me thinking about what else could go there. Moved the regular ping effect there too, which I think looks good. Also moved the background grid, which I think looks great (and renders faster!). Experimented with moving a ship there. Iiiiinteresting.
Playing now, I noticed that ramming spikes don't affect asteroids. HAD to fix that. You can now mine by smashing your ship into rocks at high speed. It is fun.
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Post by sfsdfd on Oct 17, 2012 8:35:26 GMT 10
What does the cabin temp. and humidity actually affect? Absolutely nothing! ;D Hmm. Might be fun to have two temperature settings - Normal and Cool - where Cool reduced your oxygen usage, but also introduced some sluggishness in the controls. Enables an option in case of emergency, where you need to squeeze the last drop of oxygen out of the system. (Or maybe I have watched Firefly's Out Of Gas episode one too many times. That may be true.)
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Post by Farbs on Oct 17, 2012 8:41:53 GMT 10
That is a great episode!
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Post by arsanthania on Oct 17, 2012 12:26:05 GMT 10
Hi! I absolutely love the game and the idea-one of the most original and smooth feeling browser and flash games I've ever played. I support this idea and will follow it through to its end. I played Captain Forever a long time ago (a bit over a year ago) and had some decent builds up into the level after Delta, but not much farther, due to the fact that I was busy doing other things, mostly building my own games. I actually forgot the name of the game, as it were, until recently when I searched for the game again-Looking for the keywords of something like "Neon Browser space combat game" and found a link to Captain Successor, and then found my way back to forever, and then immediately clicked the "support" link when I saw that this game idea was still in production. So that's where I am now. I really like where Captain Jameson is going, and I love the design, but it's a bit difficult at the beginning-I;ve put a good 3-5 hours into the game, and I'm still only at starting to get into the charlie level, simply because of the fact that there is such a large module and combat efficiency gap between Bravo and Charlie to Delta. Just an idea (and I'm sure other people have said things similar to this) but I feel that the oxygen system is a little warped, as is the health of the weapons, the lasers in particular-This feels to be mostly due to the fact that the enemy ships are always like "FACE AWAY FROM ENEMY, which while it is effective, requires the player to destroy almost all of the valuable modules to actually pop the ship's command module. I think that if you reveal the command mod, the AI should give the occasional change for the player to destroy the command mod, in a way that makes it look like the AI made a mistake in turning; turning to far, something like that, while a dialogue like "NO!" or "Crap." plays. Could be interesting to see and play with, while making the beginning more playable. Also, the oxygen seems to be very limited-I think that the initial amount should be boosted, to something like 40 or 50, and then the oxygen tank mods (if you can find them) give similarly increased volumes, or an increased chance to find or get these. Just a few ideas to make the beginning a little bit more achievable. Oh, and here's my most recent build: Yay for wall of text. :S
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Post by Farbs on Oct 18, 2012 8:49:18 GMT 10
Hey, thanks for the notes and ideas. One of the major features of build 0.6 is interlinked game areas, which I'll use to smooth out the difficulty curve at the start of the game. For example, I think the very first sector will just hand you a mid level ship and send you off to destroy a small alpha level end-boss. There'll be no need for ship building, gathering modules etc. All that will come later. I probably won't extend out to Juliet class ships 'till the player is several sectors deep! I'll add a little tip for shipbuilding here too: Bigger isn't always better. I see that your ship, while very cool, has a lot of unnecessary parts that aren't really contributing to the function. Instead they make your ship a bigger (and thus easier to hit) target and slow you down. You might be better off selling some of it for scrap, and using the cash to buy a few higher level modules. Once you start finding shields it can be good to build up a larger ship, but until then you'll want to stay pretty small.
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Post by arsanthania on Oct 18, 2012 14:30:22 GMT 10
Interlinked areas? I saw some stuff on that, but I'm not sure how you're going to implement it-to be honest, I really don't understand how/what you're doing with that idea from the get-go. Something like the different sectors in Successor? Spoiler is hiding wall of text. The reason my ship was big at that point was because those were the best modules I could get to, and I was trying to focus a bit on mining; I expanded the design a slight bit off of those expansions on the sides, which improved maneuverability a tad, but then I tried to challenge a Delta guardian, and had my ass handed to me (the one to the west of the start port, it had missiles, and lots of them; my guns didn't have the range and I couldn't back up quickly enough to avoid them, and lost about half of my ship) So, I dropped those decks and added on a few other things here and there, and rebuild my design based on the hollow design I've used in the past for CPT Forever and Successor, and ended up with this: arsanthania.deviantart.com/art/Charon-Build-2-332963463th03.deviantart.net/fs70/PRE/f/2012/291/e/9/charon_build_2_by_arsanthania-d5i8k93.png[/img] I'm probably going to ditch the back section of the ship, and continue getting those Delta translocators to replace the various forward and rear facing engines. It all depends on how many more Delta Girders I can get. The charlie station/planet thing to the south of the starting dock has a LOT of good delta modules, plank shields, translocators, and snipe launchers, and there's another one just a bit west of it with something good as well. [/spoiler] Anyway, I'm planning on learning Java in the next month, and I plan to make a Minecraft mod or two (or three or four, depending on if I have any momentum and want to make them), and one of them I want to try to incorporate the Captain Forever/successor/Jameson stuff into it (I can give a more complete explanation if you want to know). That being said, I'd like to know if you'd "endorse" the project and/or give support and ideas for the design of the mod. Also, if you do think that'd be a cool thing to do, I was wondering if it'd be possible to send a few of the resources you're using in the CPT games (in particular the sounds/sound-loop-thing/"song" of the lasers and the impacts SFX), due to the fact that I both can't find them and I would think it'd be cool to have a greater collab with the actual dev of the series versus me just making a fan-mod-thing, as it were.
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Post by Farbs on Oct 19, 2012 7:45:40 GMT 10
Oh wow, yeah that ship looks much more combat-ready.
The area you're playing in now, with a Charlie settlement off to the south of the starting dock, is a sector. The end-goal challenges in each sector will be to unlock access to other sectors. All up I think alpha 0.6 will have about 50 of these.
I'd be very happy to talk about a minecraft mod, and to supply audio assets if you get it working. Good luck!
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Post by Farbs on Oct 22, 2012 16:31:58 GMT 10
More work on Hub data effects. Lots of work on Microwave Link stations, including some cool new data wave thingies. Notifications on approaching settlements. These are cool but could probably be done better.
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reks
Alpha Rank
Posts: 2
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Post by reks on Oct 23, 2012 2:18:35 GMT 10
Playing now, I noticed that ramming spikes don't affect asteroids. HAD to fix that. You can now mine by smashing your ship into rocks at high speed. It is fun. Finally, a REASON for me to own Juliet ramming spikes. It felt like spikes of foxtrot level or higher one-shotted any ship part, so upgrading was unnecessary (still did it for style points of course ). Overkill! Apply directly to the Command Module!
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