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[Lemunde]

Starting work on the docking system. Basically you select a dockable object like a space station or really big ship, click a button and the autopilot takes over and your ship flies to the space station, fading out as it docks. That's the idea anyway. I'm having to lay out the ground work for AI profiles before I can get into all that. Otherwise I'll have to go back and recode a lot of stuff later.

Speaking of AI profiles, I started thinking about the kinds of AI's you might see in the game. You know, because a merchant is not going to be doing the same kinds of things as, say, a pirate. So I started a small list of possible candidates:

• Merchant
• Raider
• Police
• Miner
• Explorer
• Whaler

Keep in mind the names are just for the AI profiles and not directly indicative of what might be in the game. For instance a "Raider" profile could be applied to any kind of hostile and aggressive ship, such as a pirate or someone from a hostile alien race that goes around looking for ships to destroy. The "Explorer" profile would just be any ship that flies around to random points of interest, loiters a bit, then moves on. Could be used for science vessels, maybe.

The "Whaler" is just me throwing around ideas in my head. I was thinking about adding some space creatures that you might come across and space whales sounded pretty cool. Basically you could go around hunting these things for their meat (or oil) and sell it, possibly on a black market depending on the system you're in. A "Whaler" would just be a ship that flies around attacking whales or other alien life and collecting the stuff they drop when they die.

Besides the "Whaler" those are the basic ones I'll need for the demo.

[GalenEvil]

I imagine space whales as 4D entities that sorta warp around. Just as back in the day the challenge of whaling was in being restricted to the water's surface (being w/o sophisticated tracking mechanisms and radars) and therefore essentially 2D hunting while the whale has 3D movement, in space where the hunter has 3D movement the whale should still have some method for efficient evasion by way of the extra dimension for travel

[Tsuchigumo550]

4D Quantum space whales. So they could exist in multiple places, in halves, in different TIMES and crap.

And by that I just mean sometimes they go poof into purple dust instead of being whales.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Space whalers...hm. The biggest problem is, of course, that no life as we know it can live in space. There also needs to be some method of locomotion, and of course a reason to hunt them.

Something supernatural, definitely. Maybe the "space whales" could be something like big plantarians (plant/planarians) which can manipulate gravity. They visit habitable worlds to scoop up atmosphere every so often and can defend themselves by deflecting things away from them. Their body contains chemicals which are needed for artificial gravity, FTL, and other such techs.

And they're the only non-mundane thing in the setting, a lone anomaly.

Sound good?

[Lemunde]

Been futzing around with a lot of stuff that goes on in the background. Nothing very interesting to talk about but it needed to be done to move forward. Hopefully with all this stuff out of the way I can finally start working on the docking system.

I've also been exploring other fonts for the interface as the current one seems a bit too large and hard to read. I think I found a good one but still looking.

[DrPoo]

4d space whales.. Then we need 4d harpoons too! Like transdimensional probes.

[Tsuchigumo550]

Will there be Space Jam?

[DrPoo]

Will there be Space Jam?

Then we would need space berries and space fruits!

What about.. Space Bees! Royal Space Jelly, the new warp fuel?

Actually any sort of organic spacecraft would be awesome.

[MaximumZero]

Will there be Space Jam?

Are you ready to slamjam?

[Tsuchigumo550]

Will there be Space Jam?

Are you ready to slamjam?

I'm going to build a ship in the shape of a cosmic basketball.

[Lemunde]

Still working but nothing exciting to talk about.

Been thinking about the music. The music that's playing now is just some schlock I whipped together a few months back. I'd like to actually license some music but that's fairly expensive. You're looking at somewhere between 300 and 1000 dollars per song, depending on where you go. I thought about dropping by the OCRemix forums to see how people felt about doing music for my game and how much it would cost. They've done stuff like that before but I think many of them are pretty jaded about doing music for projects that never get finished.

There's also my old standby: http://incompetech.com

This guy makes a lot of royalty free music that you can use for anything. I'd say the quality is roughly average but it's a lot better than I can do. The only real catch is the music wouldn't be exclusive to my game and I'm not sure how I feel about that. I'd like to have some music that people could identify with my game.

[Lemunde]

Is it getting hot in here, or is it just me?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Mephansteras]

Is that a blue star?

[Tsuchigumo550]

Is there a system for pulling "oh god too close to the star aaaaaaaaBOOM maneuvers yet?

[Lemunde]

Is there a system for pulling "oh god too close to the star aaaaaaaaBOOM maneuvers yet?

If by that you mean will stars cook your ship if you get too close, yes. Unless you have a really kickass cooling unit. The fun part is going to be teaching the AI not to get too close. Merchant ships that are trying to get to a planet on the other side of the star are going to have to have some kind of system for going around.