Postby DryEagle » Mon Apr 15, 2013 7:48 pm
Avalrin-
For the drones, I meant that since they'd be moving all around the ship, they'd be going below the waterline... for a flier type thing, that would just be bizarre...
direction of fire, if shots come from down below, then that doesn't make any sense whatsoever if it was a cannon shot or harpoon etc, since they wouldn't dip that low. I mean it just wouldn't correspond to where the shot was coming from at all.
enemy ship fire direction is hardcoded and cannot be changed. so yea, that too.
As for the sprites - if carried items don't work, how about just focus on different colours of clothing, and perhaps different hats or backpacks? if it's possible to make different clothing obvious (e.g. tell the difference between a captain's suit and a simple shirt) the captain would have a big hat, the boarder would have something like a bandana, etc. would this be doable with the sizes that are there? if not, initially we'll just have different recolours of the current sprites I guess, until we can come up with something better. I know there was a mass effect mod with different races for the crew sprites, so it's worth you taking a look at that if you haven't seen it yet, maybe there's some ideas there.
Pieman -
As I said, the weapons here will be quite substantially different. We're basically going to have the split of 2 categories being "cannons" (lasers) and "bolts" (missiles) - bolts will include things like harpoons, which cause breaches, and incindary bolts which cause fires, etc. Basically one is for direct damage and the other is for special effects.
The cannons themselves will come in batteries, so we're going to have 3-5 shots per weapon group - so if you get a few of these going, you're looking at salvoes of 10-15 projectiles at a time. This is why we're going to have ships with different amounts of HP or defensive systems, and different prices for repairs etc. The charge times will be quite long however. Dodge will matter. Crew location for repairs will matter. I'd like to get perhaps 10 different weapons in the initial release; it's not nearly as many as the vanilla game, but with all the other changes, it should be sufficient to give enough options to make things interesting.