Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[BishopX]

Short term I think the easiest way to do "truck" stops would be to allow colonies to sell fuel, in the same way the pirate bases do, although probably for more money. Of course not all (or possibly none?) of the colonies are known to the merchants at the start of the game, so as the player sells knowledge of the colonies to the corporations the routes might have to be re-calculated. This is probably too processor intensive though.

In the long term the introduction of more entities is going to require some fundamental questions about how the game universe operates.  Right now we're in a sector full of ancient ruins which are being exploited by 3 mega corporations. There are merchants who trade between the corps, pirates of prey on the merchants and pirate hunters(mostly corporate) who prey on the pirates. This whole setup is fueled by the bunches of cyberneticaly engineered mercenaries who fetishize alien artifacts and walk around surrounded by  cheerful octopi (I am of course referring to the eponymous prospectors). In this setting independent "truck stops" don't really make sense (why wouldn't they be bought out by the mega corps? How are they really different from the space stations?).

Magellan has already mentioned that he is adding in much more active, ftl capable, aliens. It seems like this might be a good time to expand the "universe" a bit. By shrinking the current game rectangle down to say 1/2 is current size and calling it "human" space, where most of the stars position are known, if not freely available, and there is a strong corporate presence. There might still be some pirate fleets here hiding in gas clouds and anomalies, but not many. Outside of this rectangle there would be eight other rectangles arranged around it. These would be full of pirates, aliens and independent colonies. Most of the real money in the game would be earned by venturing out of corporate controlled areas. Either via exploration, trading between the tiny colonies or fighting/stealing from all comers. In this setup it would make sense for there to be merchant owned "truck stops" away from the corporate influence. Some might even let pirates dock. All of this will move the game away from the mining and exploration and into meeting new races, finding cool crap and navigating among slightly less monolithic power structures. I think this outcome will make the game a little happier (It's really rather dark right now).

[Deon]

Interesting Idea, Deon & Orb.
I was thinking that merchant captains would sell their sensor data for a particular leg for a few credits in bars.
Of course, such "Space truck stops" would be fun too, but they shouldnt make it too easy. Maybe they could charge exorbitant 3 credits per ton of fuel. There also could be a chance of "Something has happened"
...
Hmmm....

Bar fights!

Also, I've made 24x32 tiles for you to test. I would really love to see the game in 24x32. It wouldn't make it too huge as 32x32 and also allow a good amount of detail for the game to look beautiful.

Scout, long range fighter, light transport, troop transport, pirate ship:

       

[Blacken]

Short term I think the easiest way to do "truck" stops would be to allow colonies to sell fuel, in the same way the pirate bases do, although probably for more money. Of course not all (or possibly none?) of the colonies are known to the merchants at the start of the game, so as the player sells knowledge of the colonies to the corporations the routes might have to be re-calculated. This is probably too processor intensive though.

Really? Every game engine I've ever worked with could do something that trivial on the fly. Work-with-what-you-know isn't really all that weird.


I dig what Prospector's trying to do quite a lot. Not really very playable for me at present, but I'm keeping an eye on it to see how it progresses.

[Tarran]

Interesting Idea, Deon & Orb.
I was thinking that merchant captains would sell their sensor data for a particular leg for a few credits in bars.
Of course, such "Space truck stops" would be fun too, but they shouldnt make it too easy. Maybe they could charge exorbitant 3 credits per ton of fuel. There also could be a chance of "Something has happened"
...
Hmmm....

Bar fights!

Also, I've made 24x32 tiles for you to test. I would really love to see the game in 24x32. It wouldn't make it too huge as 32x32 and also allow a good amount of detail for the game to look beautiful.

Scout, long range fighter, light transport, troop transport, pirate ship:

       

They look nice, but the colors are not quite sharp enough for me. I mean, with their size it's somewhat hard to distinguish features.

[Deon]

Which feature do you want to distinguish? They are just ships . Some direct suggestions would be nice.

[Deon]

Did you mean something like this?

   

I tried to make it more saturated and add contrast with different colors.

[Tarran]

Well, the colors are too mixed, they need to be more distinguishing. The ships look somewhat blurry. A little sharpening can help.

http://www.bythom.com/sharpening.htm

Here's your scout run under a sharpening filter, and not run under sharpening. I used photoshop's un-sharp mask, Amount 100, Radius 2 pixels:


Prepostedit:

Did you mean something like this?

   

I tried to make it more saturated and add contrast with different colors.

Little too much.

[Deon]

       

Little too much.

Maybe, but note how the color range and brightness make it to appear much more "vivid".

Here's an example of a more "vivid" although more "arcade-like" light transport:

[Tarran]

       

Little too much.

Maybe, but note how the color range and brightness make it to appear much more "vivid".

Much nicer. I can literally see the individual pixels now.

[Deon]

Yeah I prefer this palette too because it looks more "serious", but the colorful ones are quite "cute" for my taste too .

[magellan]

Hum. If you look at how common it seems to be that people run out of fuel, I think it makes quite a bit of sense for the mega corps to have some mini stations/Truck stops/Fuel depots around. They could take various forms: planetside, mini-station, automated or run by corps, franchise, Mudds "Shop and tank-fly through" etc.
Of course life is cheap in prospector, but there might be cargo on those ships

[Orb]

Interesting Idea, Deon & Orb.
I was thinking that merchant captains would sell their sensor data for a particular leg for a few credits in bars.
Of course, such "Space truck stops" would be fun too, but they shouldnt make it too easy. Maybe they could charge exorbitant 3 credits per ton of fuel. There also could be a chance of "Something has happened"
...
Hmmm....

3 credits sounds a tad too expencive. I mean, it be cheaper for a while(depending on your play style) to just pay the mission fee. Plus, its not like you can gain income from these depots, so you would eventually have to dock at a station or else run out of money to pay for fuel. Maybe 2 credits per fuel?

Also, are you eventually planning on creating a dynamic trading system? Such as the more stuff a station has, the cheaper it is? Perhaps stations create the more advanced goods, and planets create the simple goods, like food? So you could run trade routes from planets to stations, but not indefinately, and you would have competition fromm regular merchants.

Finely, I seem to be confused on how pirating works. You start with a ship that cant detect merchant ships, but the only way you can make money is selling materials at way too cheap prices. I think im going about it the wrong way...

"Edit" Like the sprites deon.

[BishopX]

Orb, you are going about it right (well mostly). You wander around in the approximate area merchants are going to to be (they travel mostly between stations) and you bumble around until you find them and kill them. Rinse and repeat until you have enough cash to to either a) buy some better sensors and a ship detection system or b) equip a ground team and go prospecting.

[Deon]

Dynamical trade would be really cool, with some events via space CNN news like "there's a disease on such planet so it requires medicals" or "there was a pest infestation on such station thus it requires food".

It's used in many good space-rpg games and adds to the gameplay. Could you make something like this with time?

[Duke 2.0]

 Heck, even having well-known colonized planets out there instead of three stations would be nice.