nivina

I've played.... way too many space games. The one part of this game that stands out to me is how ship composition is handled. I find the solution to ship "class" and progression to be pretty clever, by far the best system in the voxel universe. For the sake of argument, I'm going to refer to "rank" as the number of module slots your ship has unlocked. A few suggestions to take advantage of this feature: Pick Up Range As your ship ranks up, so should your pick up range. This would allow flying larger ships (20mil m3 and up) to be much less tedious. Perhaps each rank increases the base range by 25%, something along those lines. Turrets Turrets are interesting, because they can progress in a number of ways; size, damage, range, rotation speed. Size As you rank up, turrets should increase in size, requiring more space to mount. I'm thinking something like, at rank 10 your turrets require a space equal to a 2x2 block. This would allow the aesthetic of turrets to match your ship, in addition to be large enough to have more visibility. Tracking Speed As you rank up, and the turrets grow in size, their tracking speed should decrease. This would allow an EVE like balance of small ships being agile enough to possibly evade being shot down by huge ships because the turret tracking speeds are so slow compared to how agile the smaller ship is. This means that smaller ships have an easier time hitting larger ships, but to balance that out, the larger ship will more than likely have a defense that would allow them to treat the smaller ship like an annoying fly. This also introduces the concept of fleet composition, which also magically adds a very compelling reason to play with other people (co-op). Damage Seeing as how rotational speed will decrease, damage should increase. I'm not saying, take the turret damage as is today and multiply it, but the turret damage system should have some sort of lower variation base damage that is multiplied, based upon the rank of the ship. This way you can be pretty sure that a giant cannon mounted on the top of a ship is going to do serious damage to you, if you sit in front of it. This would remove the need to have that "fire power" stat displayed to players, allowing them to more-or-less trust their eyes. Range Base turret range should be multiplied, based on the rank of the ship. Pretty much every turret in the game has a frustratingly low range. I would suggest boosting the range of all turrets mounted on a ship by +25% per rank. This allows larger ships to be more stationary (which they should be), allowing them to just fire away at longer ranges, while smaller ships can dog fight and be more agile due to their shorter ranges. This also works for stations, as guns mounted on a station would be rather large, and used to defend at long ranges against battleship (and greater) classed ships. Types Now you can actually get into different types of turrets for different sizes of ships. For example, long range weapons, such as rail guns and cruise missiles, could be reserved for rank 8 and greater ships (as well as stations). Maneuverability As a ship ranks up, it's maneuverability should be restricted. I don't mean, make the player add a bunch more thrusters to compensate; i mean hard limits. Large ships should never be agile. Large ships (rank 8 and up) should be more-or-less carriers or armed to the teeth with long range weaponry. They jump in, do their thing (kill everything), and then move on. This would further add to the dynamics of fleet composition. I'm going to stop here. I suggest you run with this concept. Like I said, I really think the ship size / progression system you have in place has a ton of potential, and definitely sets this game apart from other games I've played of similar style. Also the combat is actually fun.

I'm new to LUA and hitting many roadblocks, the most silly of which is... How on earth do I make my way from TurretLoot, which is created when loot comes off a corpse, to the actual Weapon that I can modify the properties of? For the sake of argument, say I want to set the range of all mining lasers to 1 (cuz i hate miners and everything they stand for). Please resist the urge to direct me to turretgenerator.lua, that's not what I'm asking. I specifically want to understand how I can navigate from TurretLoot to a Weapon. This knowledge will help me in a bunch of other areas, I'm sure. function onEntityCreate(entityIndex) local entity = Entity(entityIndex) if entity:hasComponent(ComponentType.TurretLoot) then -- local weapon = howdo? if weapon.?? == WeaponType.MiningLaser then weapon.reach = 1 -- screw you miner weapon.blength = weapon.reach -- and the horse you road in on end end end