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[Broseph Stalin]

I'm actually not sure if you can turn the comets themselves off, just their orbital paths.

Wow that sucks.

[Flying Dice]

To be fair you almost never see systems with more than half a dozen or so and even that is somewhat uncommon.

[Lord Shonus]

How far in Pulsar in terms of development?

There's nothing *playable* yet, but:

The ECS branches core engine is mostly done,
It uses an Data Driven Entity Component System which should make adding game logic far easier than it was in the Main branch, which was becoming a problem as time went on.
It handles threading so as well as being orders of magnitude faster than Aurora (and even the Main Branch of Pulsar) from the start, it'll be able to handle processing multiple star systems and other logic at once.
It can load and save gamedata and savegames (...once we actually have games to save, the data is pretty much all the same).
It can create Systems (suns, planets, asteroids etc and give them atmospheres)
The way the engine talks to the gui has been mostly sorted, this ended up being a bit of a headache as we wanted to make sure we were not shooting ourselves in the foot when it came to adding multiplayer support.

I'm curious about something. Will Pulsar model firing arcs and combat facing? One thing I really dislike about Aurora is that all weapons are effectively 360.

[Sheb]

The thing is that with trans-newtonian tech that allow infinite acceleration, you can effectively switch your ship so that all weapons face the right way instantly.

[forsaken1111]

Indeed, space combat that takes place hundreds of kilometers apart doesn't really need weapon arcs. We're not piloting naval vessels on an ocean.

[iceball3]

Indeed, space combat that takes place hundreds of kilometers apart doesn't really need weapon arcs. We're not piloting naval vessels on an ocean.

Actually, tens of thousands of kilometers apart-- The absolute minimum max-range on a weapon is 10,000 km and that's the minimum meaningful combat increment for inter-ship combat.
What I'm thinking that the ships don't need much time at all to turn, considering that without turreting their weapons, ships use their movement speed itself for the tracking speed... It's basically assumed the ships can turn on a dime to aim at their targets at the ranges they're at.

[se5a]

We're not even going to think of touching anything like that till we've got an aurora clone up and working.
I'd much rather mess with a newtonian version than try to do something as hard as arcs.

[Flying Dice]

Re: firing arcs:

1. As other people have already mentioned, that's precluded by the nature of the tech-base in Aurora.

2. Even in a Newtonian Aurora, all that firing arcs would "add" to the game would be tedious micromanagement. There's no visual visualizer (heh) for ships, so you'd need a system where you assigned orientation of each weapon by degrees on both horizontal and vertical planes... and then, once you got that ship to combat, all it would meaningfully change would be requiring a tic or two to rotate the ship with attitude thrusters, because we're still talking about (by current real-life standards) extreme long-range combat.

Not to mention that it would just give everyone additional reason to only use missiles.

3. In short, it's both irrelevant to the nature of combat in Aurora, and would be a pain in the ass to implement and use. If you want Space is a Sea in the most literal of senses, there are good top-down tactical shooters out there.

[iceball3]

Re: firing arcs:

1. As other people have already mentioned, that's precluded by the nature of the tech-base in Aurora.

2. Even in a Newtonian Aurora, all that firing arcs would "add" to the game would be tedious micromanagement. There's no visual visualizer (heh) for ships, so you'd need a system where you assigned orientation of each weapon by degrees on both horizontal and vertical planes... and then, once you got that ship to combat, all it would meaningfully change would be requiring a tic or two to rotate the ship with attitude thrusters, because we're still talking about (by current real-life standards) extreme long-range combat.

Not to mention that it would just give everyone additional reason to only use missiles.

3. In short, it's both irrelevant to the nature of combat in Aurora, and would be a pain in the ass to implement and use. If you want Space is a Sea in the most literal of senses, there are good top-down tactical shooters out there.

lol, attitude thrusters.
But yeah, for the scale of the game it is, Aurora simply is not the right game for firing arc considerations simply because of the sheer scale.

[se5a]

Flying Dice has pretty much got it in one.

or... three.

I'll add a fourth: one thing I'm really keen on doing is adding some unit AI.
One thing I struggled with with aurora was the battles were *way* too micromanage-y - especially if you were using fighters.
Arcs would make doing this sort of AI even harder.

[Broseph Stalin]

Would laser warheads be effective for taking out large missile salvos?

[Willfor]

When it comes to Aurora, I've mostly lurked while looking at other people's posts. I've done this on and off, casually, for a couple of years now. Only, as recently as a couple of months ago, I read about ten of the Honor Harrington books. Now, coming back to Aurora, I recognize some similar technology names floating around.

Does anyone know if Honor Harrington was a bit of an influence on this game?

[Sheb]

Hey, me too! Exactly similar. I'm up to "At All Costs" at the moment. And yeah, I'm fairly certain a the Honorverse was a lot of inspiration.

[forsaken1111]

When it comes to Aurora, I've mostly lurked while looking at other people's posts. I've done this on and off, casually, for a couple of years now. Only, as recently as a couple of months ago, I read about ten of the Honor Harrington books. Now, coming back to Aurora, I recognize some similar technology names floating around.

Does anyone know if Honor Harrington was a bit of an influence on this game?

The primary influence was the starfire books, which are very similar

[Willfor]

Hey, me too! Exactly similar. I'm up to "At All Costs" at the moment. And yeah, I'm fairly certain a the Honorverse was a lot of inspiration.

I finished A Rising Thunder in early June, so I'm just a little past you. Also, excellent.

The primary influence was the starfire books, which are very similar

Ah, that would also explain it, I think. Thanks!