Bunch of final mission work, can't spoil with details
Added more story character portraits.
Dialogue editing/additions.
Added feature levels to the perk system where you auto unlock a major gameplay changing awards.
Lots and lots of user experience work (on going more and more since most things are working now)
Tuning perk level part boost values.
Added the ARENA! Each starbase has its own. Good way to practice fighting and to try out high end weapons before investing and spending perks on them.
Arena relations rewards with station owner, also very diminished returns for winning a battle you have already won (to prevent exploiting)
Arenas using pre-designed ships to showcase weapon types and large ship sizes. Enemies are randomly generated for each starbase, but are also persistent once generated. So you can keep battling the same enemy until you beat it.
Physics bug resolved where shields were causing the ships to turn more slowly. (Had been bothering us since Unity 5 upgrade)
Silly tractor beam was pushing parts vertically out of the play field. Was source of weird non attaching parts bug. Dead now.
Started designing arena ships. I won't list them yet since some may be cut and others added. Converted a terrible fighter carrier into an awesome one today. It's staying
Mousing over parts on ships in builder mode gives info on those parts in a readout similar to non attached parts, so you can inspect your ship and pick what to add and remove better.
Part spawning position system for the builder, similar to what was done with the inventory level. Put the parts in the same place each time to cut down on having to hunt for them in random space.
Fixed silly coroutine bug where ships scheduled for battling in the front end would sometimes spawn in the starmap! Took a while to find that one.
Upgraded controller input for menu sliders. Gave it a deadzone and added a lot of slide precision to the stick movement (cubed the input)
Dialogue continues to pour in daily.
Work on the ending cinematic. Yes we have an ending! (Note: game continues as sandbox after end)
The faction member inspector menu upgraded with faction relations and colorized names to faction colors.
Got the zombie faction to work with the faction inspector. Can look up old friends and enemies who have turned and keep an eye on the zombie war.
Gave the arenas a real menu of their own.
New part billboard system that shows part rarity live in battle and in the inventory level. Shader magic that I don't understand.
Pre warp in sound fx, so you know the direction something is about to warp in before it appears with a big Kaboom!
Diplomatic communication system! War, Peace, Alliances, Broken alliances. All the good stuff. Hooked up the the messaging system as well so when the AI does it, they leave a mail instead of suddenly taking over the whole screen. Player can trigger diplomacy when communicating with another faction leader.
Added ability to disable tutorials from the gameplay menu. We have a lot of tutorials.
Capital Starbases also work for diplomacy now, in case you cannot find the leader.
Doodad flags on ships finally aware of their parent ship. Only took 3 years.
Reworked infection system. All infection is now active, meaning all infection grows. When a part is fully infected, it spreads to another part. Infection consumes people over time. Infection is also repaired with people (it may involve some venting into space)
Infection is now updated live in battle and not calculated afterwards. This mean that if you evade the zombie cloud that causes the infection well enough or keep your shields up, your ship can remain clean. As a ship becomes infected in battle, you can see the infection spreading over the ship. Each part tracks its own infection levels. Don't hang around in purple clouds.
Infection cleaning done on the starmap the same as ship repairs. Starbases will not clear infection, but they will repair the ship. Infected ships have low crew (since they die off) this means the ship takes damage over time and requires more crew to clear and repair. Goons become super important late game.
Infected parts thrown into inventory will not spread to other parts since they have no people and are not powered.
Infected parts worth less when selling and buying. Usually about double the cost of clearing the infection, so purchasing an infected parts isn't a terrible idea if you have the people to sacrifice to clear it. But that is a bit evil.
Cinematic camera upgraded to allow for camera cutscenes for final mission polish.
AI captains know how to clear their infected ships as well now.
Real time dialogue system. For when we want crew members talking to us during a battle, and not when paused.
Added the zombie warhead. Special infection spreading missile.
Starbases know how to heal infection, if it happens to them.
Zombie ships carry a minimum supply of rez with them that they pick up from their hives (stations) Bigger zombies get more rez. Makes attacking them worthwhile (if you have the goons to clear the infection after the battle)
Updated the zombie part breeding algorithm. Zombies “breed” at hives using Rez and leave clones of their best parts behind. Other zombies arrive and do the same. Over time they cross breed with each other, passing around the best stuff.
Can no longer max relations through bribes and trade. You need to take actual action to max it, like rescuing them in a battle or helping them with a bounty etc.
Rejiggered the interface so Battle Wagon mode is now weapon group 1. Using tilde was weird.
Added hook for retreat dialogue to signal that an enemy, or friend, has decided to try to bug out of the battle instance. Gives time for player to do something about it.
Added a Nemesis tag to better keep track of AI captains that REALLY hate you.
Early work on a system to track player kills and deaths vs another captain on their portrait. So you can remember just WHY you are their Nemesis. Works like those bombing icons on the side of WWII bombers.
Built a universal icon legend for the menus
New weapon firing algorithm to spread out the shot timing slightly to make it sound better and look more natural. Takes each weapon team a slightly different amount of time to reload.
Player can now be kicked from a faction (they don't run) for extended bad behavior.
War is automatically declared if you as faction leader destroy another faction's starbase.
Leaders now get angry as you pick on their faction members.
Player faction starbases get the faction bonuses of the faction that they are mimicking.
AI captains are much more picky about joining factions. Also takes their personality traits into account now. Toadies love being in factions, even if they don't much like you.
Added many new captain dialogue categories/sounds. Matches the voices to the faces you are seeing when communicating.
Shield recharge upgrade. Damage now doesn't reset charging, instead it diminishes charging based on the severity of the hit. This makes hiding behind roids/evading and trying to get the shields back up much more viable and rewarding.
In sandbox mode, the zombie arrival bar now progresses and colors to warn you of impending death. Also added regular callouts reminding you of the infection progress. It is easy to get lulled into building an empire and forgetting that something very bad will eventually happen. We call this the “chronological inevitability warning.” Note: in sandbox you have control of how long this takes and if it even ever happens at all. In story mode, the zombie arrival is story flow based.
Taught point defense guns to not shoot my friends' missiles and fighters.
Parts that are locked out of being used on a ship properly tell the player why they are locked out. Too big, can't use weapon, or both.
Inform the player if their scavenging is aborted by some other scurvy dog stealing their loot under their nose.
The great sound crackle hunt begins... Any time an audio file goes from playing, to stopping, there is a pop produced as the speakers physically reset their position. This makes Richard and I insane. The problem was looping sounds (mostly) since we can't tailor the sound file to gently start and end at 0. The end result was a system that identifies loopers and only virtually stops them. Think of a monkey with its hand on a volume knob. Each time we say STOP. The monkey slowly turns the knob to 0 and THEN pressed stop.
So that sorted out the laser noises. Now we had more to deal with. Every time we pause the game or story dialogue came up, we would pause (some of) the current audio. Pausing was just like a stop, so crackle in and crackle out. We created a virtual pause that both turns down and pauses the selected audio channels and then unpauses and turns them back up. It sounds really nice now.
FINALLY there was one last crackle issue. When firing many many weapons we overloaded the number of channels Unity wanted to play. It took some digging, but the default was 32. We upped it to 255. Now battles sound fantastic and you can hear everything, crackle free.
Bunch of work ensuring menus and galaxy map ultra wide compliant. (actually all resolution compliant)
Building starbases and setting bounties are now feature perks that you unlock at certain levels. Makes you work to get that first base.
Did a weapon damage and energy consumption pass to make the larger more rare weapons more devastating, but much harder to power.
Added tutorials for the Arena and what we call Fail Gates (how we warp out of battle instances)
Added a gfx option to set the blur levels beyond just on and off.
When using the controller, if dealing with a long scroll box, the scroller will speed up over time.
New ship spine variations for extra large ships. Fully randomized spines were leading to underpowered ship designs where the largest parts would not fit. New spines fix this and look deadly too. A spine is a series of subcores that we attach wings, engines and noses to.
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Topic: Space Pirates and Zombies 2 (coming 2016) (Read 5534 times)