Hurray! Another multiplayer clone project. :)

[kcd.Spektor]

Huge props for getting this done even to this point.

Thanks.

Initial comments on the alpha:
1. How will power be balanced? I was able to create a new ship with 15+ systems and power them all up with a quantum reactor (12 power max.)

Well quantum reactor is like an endgame system, that is supposed to have a price like a battleship, and be used on a bigger ships
The balancing will be the most important part, I think.

Would it be impossible to keep the same general power equivalence with FTL?

It would require a great overhaul of the current mechanic, and will not be worth it.

Players of that game are very familiar with what one reactor power gets you. lvl 1 Oxygen, or a tiny 1 power weapon, or half a shield bar. Would be great to be able to keep that mechanic.
1a. There seems to be a very large power scale difference (I mean in terms of flavor) between fission, fusion and quantum reactor. Probably every ship should just have a quantum reactor, but be able to provide anywhere between 4 and 25 (or 30 or 50) power like in FTL. That was a really great mechanic. 1 power meant something explicit. You could either have a weapon powered, or have oxygen, or have your hacking powered, or have a drone powered, but not all at once.

Yes here the power mechanic is somewhat different, but I think it just needs some balancing and the players will get familiar with it.
There wil be a separate post explaining the power mechanic better.

2. I was able to power all weapons also, and fire like 6 weapons at once.

That is intentional, and 6 is not the limit (I tried over 12 - check early update posts, there are screens)

2a. The capacitor mechanic is a massive change from FTL. It could be good, and I don't mean to rain on the parade of awesome that is your getting this much cool stuff done,

It is part of the different power mechanic, just need tuning and getting used to.(it is interesting, just give it a chance

but what about leaving the default FTL balance of if you have the power the weapon is on and charging, and if you don't have the power (or system control if it's damaged) then the weapon is unpowered and quickly decharging?

If the weapon/shield system has 0 power bars active or the ship has no working reactor - then that system is loosing charge.

2b. It could be a neat new system in the game, to have a capacitor system that you have to buy like hacking or drones or whatever, which enables you to start a battle with the capacitor charged (like any time you end a sector in passive mode, like by winning a battle, where there's no danger from an asteroid field or nearby star, etc) to either A, more quickly charge your guns from the capacitor than they otherwise would, or B, require no reactor power to be diverted to guns to charge them (though it would be a very temporary advantage.)

More on power mechanic in a separate post.

2c. I think a capacitor system could be a neat thing to add to the game, but (again, no intent to be rude or take control, just share my opinion) I don't like it as a default for all ships, because I'd like to see the default FTL-like game just with extra additions and mod-ability.

Important thing - this game is not an FTL remake.
It's a standalone game HEAVILY inspired by FTL, it has a lot of similarity in some mechanics.
This game is multiplayer, so it technically can't be the same as the original FTL.
But don't let this stop you from giving your suggestions - they really help.

3. The default hull being set to 100? Takes 6 powerful weapons firing on auto-fire a very long time to destroy an enemy ship even without shields. Just for the alpha? Most starting ships have 1 to 2 weapons. Default hull strength of enemies was between 5 and 10 hull points in FTL, sector 1.

The hull size will be configurable in the ship editor - each model will have it's own starting hull(so less for small ships, more for big ones).
And later on the players could upgrade their ships - including hull, somehow
Probably through augmentations.

4. Radar is not quite what I expected, but works well.

Thanks. It has more potential - you'll see

5. How does the pilot move the ship around? Does that matter at all? In FTL it's just assumed you're both flying around rapidly and trying to avoid each other, without requiring any input. Will the pilot have to fly the ship around? How hard will that make the ship to hit?

Charge the engines system, in pilot system interface on the radar screen - click to select new destination, press jump - 3, 2, 1 - BAM, the ship is teleported to a new location.
Can be usefull to evade a voley of slow moving projectiles, and other things
Also could be used for boarding, visiting stations with shops, etc...

6. All controls have been made much more fine-grained. Needing to hold R to repair a system is an example, or having to walk the crewman manually into a room to activate the system. Control has been passed from the ship's captain, able to command the entire ship, to now you control only one person.

Since it is multiplayer - everyone is now a separate crew member, someone would have to play the captain, someone would be the "weapons guy", and someone(or better everyone) would need to go and fix the darn things

Will that possibly change as the alpha progresses?

Most probably(95%) not.

7. The hyperdrive seems to offer up nearby stars as destinations.

I will make an explanation of how jump range works in a separate post.

8. When you go into hyperspace, the weapons control has an ETA of arrival time. It should show that ETA on the main screen so you don't have to be in a room to see it, shouldn't it?

The ETA is shown on all sector map screens in whatever system have those.(Weapons, piloting, engines, door control, sensors, ...)
If you for example jumped to hyper space while having boarders on board, that message on the main screen could distract you from fighting:)
Plus this way it is more realistic
If you want to know how much more it will take - use some system.
And if you are on board an enemy ship - you can't use any systems - so you don't know how far that ship is jumping.

9. I like that you don't need to fully charge the hyperdrive to jump to a destination that's closer.

Thanks

10. Since everything seems so modular, perhaps a communications room is needed? What if, in a closer to full-version of the game, it had the ability to make use of player microphones, and you could communicate through audio with your teammates, but if the communications room was damaged, the line would fill with static, and if it gets destroyed, the audio communication would cut out?

The communication screen will be part of the piloting(captain's bridge) system interface.
It will be used to interact with NPCs, chat with players, quests, etc...
I doubt that my skills would be enough to make a proper voiceover mechanic, plus it would be really easy to override the "not working" comm system by using skype.
But I do agree this kind of thing would be really badass cool

11. What about pausing? FTL was so frantic, pausing was a very necessary dynamic for most players. This looks to be more complicated, rather than less, so pausing should still be part of the game, right?

This is a very good example of a difference that single player and multiplayer games have.
If you pause the game in SP - it's cool.
If you pause the game in MP - you get many bad words on your chat from other players who were in PVP or something else.
But I thinks I will actually make it possible to have some sort of a pause in the game.
I was thinking on adding another type of ammo - Singularity cells(or smth like that).
Which you can spend in the pilot system interface to stop time in the current level(not the whole universe) for some time.
and that time could be configurable on the server params.

12. Currently, free-for-all or team-based pvp seems vaguely possible, but the ideal goal is to be able to have something like a full FTL campaign that more than one person can play together, right?

That is correct

Would it be possible to pull the events data from the base game like other mod-developers suggested? Could this be made compatible with other FTL mods like captain's edition or sml(sp?) polish?

Sadly no, this is a standalone game, and it uses it's own resources and resource mechanics.
You could manually take some resources from the original game and adapt them to this one.

The single world map of stars seems to get rid of the idea of 8 sectors, and seems to make using the FTL game data not possible. Just for the alpha, or a permanent design decision?

Permanent.
The idea here is similar to the open space mod of FTL

13. If we have a permanent star map, then you can't end up in Engi space, or Rock space, or Rogue AI space, depending on which direction you chose, nearly as randomly, which was part of the great random nature of the game. It didn't have to be "realistic" it just had to be fun and allow good variety.

The universe generation is not yet implemented.
It is planned to have some areas of the universe to be RACE related. That will be part of the universe generation.
So you could jump to some star or open space sector and find your self in pirate region.
Or you could use your sensors system to scan the destination before you go there, or smth like that.

14. For the sake of easing control for players, what if crew were constrained to walk only in the room-grid? using the WASD keys to move seems fine to me, but what if you could only move along the grid? This would make it easier for people, especially if they go into space.

To be honest I don't see how that would make it easier.
But It is possible to limit movement like this - if there will be need.

14a. In general, the control scheme should be made as simple as absolutely possible without compromising any gameplay possibilities. Most people aren't very technically proficient. It's great for a game to have hotkeys and things so that an expert player can control it better, but there should be room for even poor game players to be able to pick up the game and play it without being frustrated. (I'm thinking of my friend Duncan, for one.)

I'm eagerly open for other controls propositions.
But on the other hand, I don't want to make it a - "Press SPACE to win" game.
Also, what exactly was hard for Duncan to use?

Server/client/gameplay design:
1. My friend (Duncan) wasn't able to connect to my public IP address. Do all players need to be on a simulated (or real) local area network to connect? I had to connect via my 192.168 IP address, with the server up. How difficult to make it possible to connect over the internet via public IP address?

It is playable via internet(I've tested this from work to home).
Perhaps you didn't configure the router to forward the packets.

2. FTL has a very intuitive point and click interface, and then a much more efficient keyboard, hotkey-based control. Could we add more intuitive ways to control all systems?

I'm open for suggestions

Could there be a client options setting to automatically open doors that you walk into, for instance?

A bit hard but possible.
But it would be getting in your way when you are fighting boarders.

Could there be a setting so that you automatically repair a system that's damaged in a room you're in, if you're not doing something else? That should probably be the default, but it would be fine to have a flag to turn it off.

That would be too easy.
C'mon - is it that hard to hold the R button if you want to repair something?

3. How do you see the game developing in the future? Do you see it retaining the rogue-like nature of FTL, with a finite 8 sectors you travel through and a boss-battle? Will it be a more open MMORPG style world where people can connect and level up their permanent ships?
What about a captain's edition infinite type game, where you can travel through as many sectors as you want and just delay the end of the game?

I would like it to retain as much rogue-like features as possible, but that is quite hard for a multiplayer game I think.
There will be an open world map - not a 8 sector line rush chase.
More like Open space mod for FTL.

(This already seems implied by the needing to create a login on the server... would it be possible to just require you to submit a name for your character upon logging in, instead of requiring a login name and password on startup, since the server is running on your own PC, right now?)

It is planned to have it possible to host an online server for others.
So the password is necessary.
But for local game you can have just "1" for your password every time

4. Ideally, I think it would be awesome if the .exe itself was moddable enough to support all of those options.

The exe is just a wrapper for a jar. Technically you could modify some resources inside it.
But I can't make everything modable there has to be hardcode for core stuff.

How much work would be involved in doing something like an FTL remake, supporting all original code and including lua scripting or something like that, like others have suggested?

I think it would take me another 2 year for that (if I work on it alone again as a hobby project)

Outside your goals?

Yep. Those are not my goals for sure

5. As far as universe generation ideas, I could have a lot, but I need to know more where this is going. I know where I'd love to see it go, but I don't know if that's what you intend.

All ideas are welcome

6. If it's an FTL engine remake, with additional mod-ability and new stuff like multiplayer, new systems, new game control options added in, where the exe grabs assets from the FTL directory to avoid copyright issues (an ideal goal, in my opinion)

This is a standalone game HEAVILY inspired by FTL. With it's own resources, mechanics, etc.
Sadly you can't just take FTL and make it multiplayer.

then I would have all kinds of neat ideas for new races, new events, algorithms for store generation, for sector generation, for ship generation, etc. I just need concrete ideas where the alpha is going and what I can/should work on.

I do hope that you will find it interesting to share your ideas for this game.

That's probably enough for now.

Many thanks for your feedback!

Would it be possible to skype at some point?

I hope I will manage to find some time.

[kcd.Spektor]

Additional comments:

1. When oxygen hits 0%, the player should start losing HP, rather than die instantly, probably.

Thanks, will do that.

2. When the player is inside an airlock, it should take x seconds to put their helmet on to go outside, and when they come in, it should take x seconds to take the helmet off and be able to breathe the internal atmosphere.

Don't think that would work well.
Plus it would take some time to implement.

2a. The oxygen tanks should still need to be recharged at the O2 station, even though with helmet off, the player isn't losing more o2 from tanks.

Once you are onboard you just start using ship's air supply.

2. Will rooms eventually have a vacuum/oxygenated state like in FTL?

Check the ToDo list - oxygen mechanic is the first on the list

3. Recharging your oxygen tanks at the O2 station makes sense, but it should be faster. About the same rate as medbay heal in FTL, for level 1, 2 and 3 respectively.

There are different o2 systems. The more power that system is using the faster the recharge rate.

4. When you get shot in space or in vacuum, your O2 should go down much faster, because your suit is punctured (unless you have an adaptive gel suit augmentation maybe)

When you get shot in space or in vacuum - You are DEAD MEAT

5. I seem to not be able to pierce the shields on the spawn station. Intentional because it's the spawn station, or limitation of the alpha right now?

The spawn station has a special flag that makes it immortal.

6. Weapons require very different amounts of power than FTL does for the same weapons.

Should be twice as much.
Thing is - if you want your weapon to recharge as fast as it can - give it full power.
The less power you give it - the longer it recharges.

7. They don't seem to do the same amount of damage as they do in FTL or have their special abilities (like pierce lasers not piercing 1 shield bar.)

Should be the same.
And piercing should work. I've tested it. (Plus the missiles do manage to get through the shields, and that's the same mechanic)
If a target has only 1 active shield - then the piercing lasers will ignore that 1 shield.

8. It would be nice to be able to spawn extra crew, and be able to issue them orders like in FTL, from the captain's perspective. Or maybe AI crew... it definitely seems like the number of crew shouldn't be limited to the number of people connected to the server. That would be an extreme handicap, because crew are needed for all systems, and in particular, since there are more systems that need crew control in this alpha.

Mobs/AI are planned.
But I can't think of anything what they could do other than walk arround fixing stuff, and fighting off boarders.
Any suggestions?

9. I was able to do a jump in-system. Didn't work quite as expected. Why is that powered by the engines? What benefit would that be? (Maybe it would require guns to be re-aimed, but that makes it a penalty only to actual players, since AI could do so instantly.)

I didn't quite understand.
What did you have in mind?

10. When the game resizes due to scrolling in and out, it would be great if the re-sizing algorithm was something higher quality than nearest neighbor. Would be great if it was something higher than bilinear too, though I have no idea how costly that would be in terms of cpu cycles, to do bicubic/spline/lanzcos resize)

Definitely not something I will work on anytime soon

11. Could the radar window be bigger? Maybe the game itself could be higher resolution, or be made resolution independent.

Funny thing - the initial design had separate pages for radar and target screens - but then I thought that it's not good.
Guess I'll change it back again

12. All of these are just suggestions/thoughts/comments, not meant to be complaints.

Thank you very much for your feedback.

Some compliments:
1. I like that rooms are more modular, and can be any shape, as well as systems being able to fit even in the same rooms. Would be nice for the graphics to be higher quality.
2. I'm impressed how well everything works. Haven't encountered any bugs so far.
3. The fact that you get sight of room blocks that are line of sight from your character on ships without sensors is AWESOME by the way.

Thanks

[kcd.Spektor]

It is written in Java, right? Why do you release only a Windows version? I use linux and I do not want to start a VM for a game which would otherwise be platform independent.

Right.
I've updated the archive - it should now contain jars as well.

[Cog]

Will respond in more detail later, but just wanted to comment one thing that occurred while reading your responses...

Having local, in-system jumps seems to offer an extremely powerful cloak-like effect that is repeatable and free (unless it costs fuel each time, which I think if it exists, it definitely should.) Getting to dodge an entire salvo with 100% evade rate is actually stronger than level 1 cloak, which cost 150 scrap, or required playing the Stealth ship, which had no shields. Cloak is so strong (even only adding 60% evade) that those ships are generally some of the best starting ships for expert players, because you can wait until they fire their first salvo then just dodge it and charge your weapons the whole time, take out their weapons room and take no damage.

In addition to that, clearly in FTL there are jump nodes that made the jump drive possible, functioning essentially like warp-gates. It made story/flavor and balance sense that you could only jump between two jump-nodes and not simply using your spaceship...

Like imagine a mod-scenario released by a mod author, where they want to create a highly story-centric release for the game. You start off on an abandoned space-station and need to reactivate the station's power to gain access to a ship docked outside. The ship (once you get there) has a functioning jump drive, but the jump node has been damaged by Rogue AI avatars who are in the area and may return at any time, so you need to find a way to escape the system before they return and destroy you. You use your sublight engines to travel (within the game) to a nearby part of the system to collect a macguffin and encounter more planned encounters and eventually are able to find a way to jump out of the sector, potentially after more scripted events. Any chance this kind of scripting/mod-ability could be in the engine (special pleading attempt.)

Also, I was thinking if the weapons officer has to reassign targeting after a jump, AND there's no pausing, it would be doubly irritating to human players every time an opponent jumps in system like that, (not only do your shots all miss, but you have to reassign all your weapon targeting, taking real-time because you can't pause) and it would make sense to stay as far away from each other as possible, so projectiles take as long as possible to reach your ship (giving you the largest possible time to charge your jump drive to jump away the next time they fire.)

It also seems like it would be almost impossible to destroy most ships in any kind of a balanced scenario (where defenses are usually approximately equal to offense,) because with all your initial defenses up (shields, cloak, defense drones, etc,) your jump drive can charge and you can just jump away in a random direction that without special sensors maybe, would be impossible to follow. I guess if the AI doesn't make use of that kind of hit and run tactic then it might be fine (they generally don't in FTL, other than occasionally fleeing or if an AI ship, blowing up,) but PvP would enable trolling very easily. Fire a full salvo on somebody and immediately jump away with your pre-charged jump drive.

Can it be possible to move around without jumping using the engines? Like, clearly in FTL, the impulse engines are based on Star Trek's impulse engines, where they are a sub-light drive, and maneuvers and strafing runs and all kinds of things clearly involving rocket-like movements are mentioned in the game. That would be a huge addition, and I'm convinced, a potentially balance/flavor-fixing change because of the above issues.

I don't mean to be strident with all of these comments by the way. I'm hugely appreciative of the work you did creating this. It should be whatever you think it should. I'm just sharing my (strong) opinions, I hope politely and usefully.

Grudgingly (but in actuality, congenially) accepting that this will not be an FTL remake with expanded multiplayer capability. Though I do think that is possible.

I would like to work on algorithm problems after discussing with you, or to continue examining new versions of the program and sharing comments/ideas. Once you have explained the power mechanic/capacitor thing, maybe I will have some ideas, but it's hard to suggest since you seem to have some hard plans that I didn't fully understand when writing my initial comments. Ideally, if we could skype some time (like even planning a specific hour would be fine; I understand your sleep schedule is different) and work out even one thing I could work on for you, I feel I could convince you my quality output is very high.

Do you think you will make it open source?

[Cog]

Another thought... what if the jump node was actually a space station-like structure in each system you could reach via jump drive? And you had to be within x distance of the jump node to be able to activate it with your engine, maybe. This could make it possible to camp/guard the jump node to defend against ships (as in FTL) so that opponent player ships couldn't just jump away/kite you all the time.

Maybe in-system jumping could be possible, but only with the highest tier engine, newly designed tech only available in rare circumstances, adapted from the jump nodes themselves (which weren't designed by humans or engi or slugs or what-have you.)

Like, the jump node space stations could all have a room in them with the special jump-drive engine system in them, which most ships use to perform jumps, but you could get a jump drive engine (for like the equivalent of 150 scrap for a cloak or something) from a rare store purchase which would enable you to perform jumps in-system (either replacing your sub-light drives or enabling you to ignore them from now on as unnecessary), enabling the weapon dodge trick I mentioned, as well as enabling jumping to further star systems in a single jump maybe, or other possible advantages (could be enhanced by certain augmentations, even.)

Another random thought: What about having an elevator and a multi-floor ship? There are a lot of different ship systems in the game already, and if you add in teleporters, cloak, jump drives, who knows what else, even large ship designs might run out of room space. I feel like one way you could limit the number of weapons is to have certain rooms be specifically colored/marked as weapon hard-points, where only weapons can be attached to those rooms. There could even be 1x1, 1x2 and 2x2 weapon hard-points. Maybe possible to upgrade (read: purchase at store) hardpoint upgrades?

I feel ships may run out of rooms because of all the systems available, if that isn't designed around.

Are these long posts too meandering to be helpful or are they good? I don't mean to be an aggravation. I'm hopeful these comments spark ideas and are potentially worthwhile to you.

[Cog]

4. When you get shot in space or in vacuum, your O2 should go down much faster, because your suit is punctured (unless you have an adaptive gel suit augmentation maybe)

When you get shot in space or in vacuum - You are DEAD MEAT

Well, with adaptive gel suits (assuming those kinds of augmentations make it in, though I really hope so) it seems like you should be able to just take normal damage and keep on trucking. I like that you essentially have spacesuits now. It was a little silly in default FTL that as soon as you're in vacuum you're dying, and you can't teleport into AI ships because they're in vacuum. Why couldn't you have spacesuits on? But you can get shot at, and being shot would cause depressurization.

I don't know if I agree that you're just immediately dead though. Vacuum doesn't instantly kill, though an instant change from 1 atmosphere to vacuum would do severe damage to the body (blown ear drums at a minimum) But bullets/laser holes are small... the new NASA suits that work more like compression socks than pressurized suits wouldn't have their protective effect spoiled by getting shot by a gun. Blood might be sucked out of you pretty fast by the vacuum and it would probably be really un-good (but then again, being shot is way more deadly in real life than it is generally portrayed/implemented as in games) but you aren't instantly exposed to 0 atmospheres pressure. I would campaign for the ability to at least mod the effects of being shot while in a vacuum to be a reduction in total O2 in addition to total HP, or better yet (but probably more complicated to code) a speed-up in the rate of O2 loss until visiting a med-bay (better yet, air-lock and taking off your helmet and putting it back on again, since I still think that makes good balance sense that you aren't always instantly ready to go into vacuum, making hull breach weapons still deadly and making repelling space-boarders require preparation, but that's just my thought on it.)

5. I seem to not be able to pierce the shields on the spawn station. Intentional because it's the spawn station, or limitation of the alpha right now?

The spawn station has a special flag that makes it immortal.

-----
That explains it.

6. Weapons require very different amounts of power than FTL does for the same weapons.

Should be twice as much.
Thing is - if you want your weapon to recharge as fast as it can - give it full power.
The less power you give it - the longer it recharges.

-----
Why is it possible to assign more power bars than your reactor provides? (answer can wait for power system explanation if you're going to write that at some point)

7. They don't seem to do the same amount of damage as they do in FTL or have their special abilities (like pierce lasers not piercing 1 shield bar.)

Should be the same.
And piercing should work. I've tested it. (Plus the missiles do manage to get through the shields, and that's the same mechanic)
If a target has only 1 active shield - then the piercing lasers will ignore that 1 shield.

-----
What do you think of implementing a Captain's Edition Endless Loot-like modifier system to apply to guns and drones? That's something I would enjoy working on/balancing. Speaking of which, will drones be in at all, eventually?

8. It would be nice to be able to spawn extra crew, and be able to issue them orders like in FTL, from the captain's perspective. Or maybe AI crew... it definitely seems like the number of crew shouldn't be limited to the number of people connected to the server. That would be an extreme handicap, because crew are needed for all systems, and in particular, since there are more systems that need crew control in this alpha.

Mobs/AI are planned.
But I can't think of anything what they could do other than walk arround fixing stuff, and fighting off boarders.
Any suggestions?

-----
For sure, there's tons of things you need extra crew for. Everything that's beneficial about having more crew in FTL as a start. The fact that if a crew member dies, if you have 8 crew, you still have 7 afterwards. If you have only 2 crew, because you only have 2 players, then if someone dies, you are effectively crippled, and also the player whose avatar died has nothing to do now. Would make running a clone bay the only viable option for a multiplayer campaign game.

Also, because the captain can't assign weapons targeting from the pilot's chair, it means that if you're by yourself, you can't even fire weapons without manually walking to weapons control. If you had an AI crewman in the door control, any player onboard should have the ability to open and close any door via click, like in FTL. If you have an AI crew in the sensors room, you should be able to see inside the enemy ship.

Making it possible for multiple people to control different ship systems is great for multiplayer possibilities (would also like to see two ships captained by two players as a possibility too) as well as roleplaying/scripted scenarios, but mandating that you have at least 3 real players logged into the game or you can't control engines, weapons and shields at the same time would be a big handicap. Maybe everything can be controlled to a more limited degree from the captain's chair or any system, but you have to be in the main room to do certain things? Maybe upgrading the auto-pilot or a similar system gives you access to more control from the piloting chair?

Also of course, more crew means more boarder defense, more ability to repair things quickly, etc.

9. I was able to do a jump in-system. Didn't work quite as expected. Why is that powered by the engines? What benefit would that be? (Maybe it would require guns to be re-aimed, but that makes it a penalty only to actual players, since AI could do so instantly.)

I didn't quite understand.
What did you have in mind?

-----
I covered this in my previous post, but for one thing, I think all jumps should be powered by the jump drive/hyperdrive. "Engines" should move the ship like a rocket, or like the impulse drive in star trek (which FTL mentions a bunch of times.) I also made some comments about the balance implications of a local in-system jump drive.

10. When the game resizes due to scrolling in and out, it would be great if the re-sizing algorithm was something higher quality than nearest neighbor. Would be great if it was something higher than bilinear too, though I have no idea how costly that would be in terms of cpu cycles, to do bicubic/spline/lanzcos resize)

Definitely not something I will work on anytime soon

-----
Well okay... I assume there's an codebase limitation here. Even bilinear would be a huge improvement, and is sort of the standard when you do anything 3d (which even 2d games almost always are, to make use of modern graphics hardware and transparency effects, right?) Is it possible even theoretically?

11. Could the radar window be bigger? Maybe the game itself could be higher resolution, or be made resolution independent.

Funny thing - the initial design had separate pages for radar and target screens - but then I thought that it's not good.
Guess I'll change it back again

-----
It's necessary to be able to see the radar and target screens at the same time, for sure. I was running the game at 1280x800 resolution, because I had just been playing FTL in windowed-mode. My monitor can do 1920x1200, I should probably check it out at that resolution.

You can't zoom in and out on the target screen either, and that would help, maybe.

12. All of these are just suggestions/thoughts/comments, not meant to be complaints.

Thank you very much for your feedback.

-----
Hopefully always helpful.

Wanted to mention this again: The fact that you get sight of room blocks that are line of sight from your character on ships without sensors is AWESOME by the way. I saw that only by chance, after creating a ship without sensors or a doors system, so the doors didn't auto-close after I opened them and I kept walking around and then noticed different squares lighting up and darkening.

I immediately imagined a ship design that starts with a no sensors handicap, but it is compensated for by having the piloting chair set up in the middle of the ship, in a location where it can have sight on all rooms on the ship. What about a ship that doesn't even have walls or doors, but just a completely open layout? Any breach would begin to evacuate air on the entire ship, but much more slowly since it was much more room space, and it would be much easier to run to any specific area and repair because you could move in a straight line.

About moving on rails along the middle of room squares... it would prevent people from getting caught on doors or along the mostly invisible ship exterior edge. Also, max of 4 people in a 2x2 room or no?

I may have found a potential bug by the way. I started the server and then started two game clients on my PC. I logged in on client 1 as Cog and on client 2 as Cog2. I seemed to be in control of Cog on client 2, and when I died, I became in control of Cog2 after respawning.

Also, when Cog2 went onboard a ship that Cog had spawned in, it didn't allow me to control any weapons, as if I wasn't authorized, or something.

[kcd.Spektor]

Having local, in-system jumps seems to offer an extremely powerful cloak-like effect that is repeatable and free (unless it costs fuel each time, which I think if it exists, it definitely should.) Getting to dodge an entire salvo with 100% evade rate is actually stronger than level 1 cloak, which cost 150 scrap, or required playing the Stealth ship, which had no shields. Cloak is so strong (even only adding 60% evade) that those ships are generally some of the best starting ships for expert players, because you can wait until they fire their first salvo then just dodge it and charge your weapons the whole time, take out their weapons room and take no damage.

It's not like you can jump every time your enemy shoots
It takes quite some time to charge the engines(not to mention that it requires power - which will be rebalanced)

Like imagine a mod-scenario released by a mod author, where they want to create a highly story-centric release for the game. You start off on an abandoned space-station and need to reactivate the station's power to gain access to a ship docked outside. The ship (once you get there) has a functioning jump drive, but the jump node has been damaged by Rogue AI avatars who are in the area and may return at any time, so you need to find a way to escape the system before they return and destroy you. You use your sublight engines to travel (within the game) to a nearby part of the system to collect a macguffin and encounter more planned encounters and eventually are able to find a way to jump out of the sector, potentially after more scripted events. Any chance this kind of scripting/mod-ability could be in the engine (special pleading attempt.)

I like it! Should be 100% possible!
It's actually something I had in mind for now(the mechanic).
Only thing that it's not that you need a working beacon to jump, but rather - you can't jump out, because there's an inhibitor of some sort, present in the system, so you need to deal with it, before you can jump out.
Also acquiring the macguffin triggers the activation of some ai drone, or alerts the bad guys that you are trying to get out, and now you are on a timer
Would really like to see more of such ideas/suggestions - that will make it easier to create the world generation/quest API.

You could have small scenarios like this just within 1 sector map:
Have several stations in a sector, populated by NPCs, triggerable events...
Oh man I can't wait to get working on this

Also, I was thinking if the weapons officer has to reassign targeting after a jump, AND there's no pausing, it would be doubly irritating to human players every time an opponent jumps in system like that, (not only do your shots all miss, but you have to reassign all your weapon targeting, taking real-time because you can't pause) and it would make sense to stay as far away from each other as possible, so projectiles take as long as possible to reach your ship (giving you the largest possible time to charge your jump drive to jump away the next time they fire.)

In proper balance regular ships won't be able to jump around the sector like mad rabbits
Treat local jumps as something not simple to achieve - but still possible to do.

It also seems like it would be almost impossible to destroy most ships in any kind of a balanced scenario (where defenses are usually approximately equal to offense,) because with all your initial defenses up (shields, cloak, defense drones, etc,) your jump drive can charge and you can just jump away in a random direction that without special sensors maybe, would be impossible to follow. I guess if the AI doesn't make use of that kind of hit and run tactic then it might be fine (they generally don't in FTL, other than occasionally fleeing or if an AI ship, blowing up,) but PvP would enable trolling very easily. Fire a full salvo on somebody and immediately jump away with your pre-charged jump drive.

When you jump to hyper space your systems stop draining power from capacitor and stop charging. So you can't jump it, shoot, jump out.
When you jump in your weapons can be precharged - and I thing it should stay like this because other wise you might jump in to a sector where some other player was waiting for you with fully charged weapons, and you would have to wait till yours charge.

Can it be possible to move around without jumping using the engines? Like, clearly in FTL, the impulse engines are based on Star Trek's impulse engines, where they are a sub-light drive, and maneuvers and strafing runs and all kinds of things clearly involving rocket-like movements are mentioned in the game. That would be a huge addition, and I'm convinced, a potentially balance/flavor-fixing change because of the above issues.

Ships won't be able to move around like projectiles - it would require an enormous remake of the core mechanics.
I thought about it in the beginning of the project, and made local jumps simple as teleporting a ship with passengers because it would be too hard to implement otherwise.

I don't mean to be strident with all of these comments by the way. I'm hugely appreciative of the work you did creating this. It should be whatever you think it should. I'm just sharing my (strong) opinions, I hope politely and usefully.

Your input is hugely appreciated

I would like to work on algorithm problems after discussing with you, or to continue examining new versions of the program and sharing comments/ideas. Once you have explained the power mechanic/capacitor thing, maybe I will have some ideas, but it's hard to suggest since you seem to have some hard plans that I didn't fully understand when writing my initial comments. Ideally, if we could skype some time (like even planning a specific hour would be fine; I understand your sleep schedule is different) and work out even one thing I could work on for you, I feel I could convince you my quality output is very high.

I should definitely find some time to skype.

Do you think you will make it open source?

Not anytime soon.

[kcd.Spektor]

Another thought... what if the jump node was actually a space station-like structure in each system you could reach via jump drive? And you had to be within x distance of the jump node to be able to activate it with your engine, maybe. This could make it possible to camp/guard the jump node to defend against ships (as in FTL) so that opponent player ships couldn't just jump away/kite you all the time.

Maybe in-system jumping could be possible, but only with the highest tier engine, newly designed tech only available in rare circumstances, adapted from the jump nodes themselves (which weren't designed by humans or engi or slugs or what-have you.)

Like, the jump node space stations could all have a room in them with the special jump-drive engine system in them, which most ships use to perform jumps, but you could get a jump drive engine (for like the equivalent of 150 scrap for a cloak or something) from a rare store purchase which would enable you to perform jumps in-system (either replacing your sub-light drives or enabling you to ignore them from now on as unnecessary), enabling the weapon dodge trick I mentioned, as well as enabling jumping to further star systems in a single jump maybe, or other possible advantages (could be enhanced by certain augmentations, even.)

Another random thought: What about having an elevator and a multi-floor ship? There are a lot of different ship systems in the game already, and if you add in teleporters, cloak, jump drives, who knows what else, even large ship designs might run out of room space. I feel like one way you could limit the number of weapons is to have certain rooms be specifically colored/marked as weapon hard-points, where only weapons can be attached to those rooms. There could even be 1x1, 1x2 and 2x2 weapon hard-points. Maybe possible to upgrade (read: purchase at store) hardpoint upgrades?

I feel ships may run out of rooms because of all the systems available, if that isn't designed around.

Are these long posts too meandering to be helpful or are they good? I don't mean to be an aggravation. I'm hopeful these comments spark ideas and are potentially worthwhile to you.

The long posts are ok - but there are some ponts that require detalisation.
So we should 100% talk over skype

[kcd.Spektor]

4. When you get shot in space or in vacuum, your O2 should go down much faster, because your suit is punctured (unless you have an adaptive gel suit augmentation maybe)

When you get shot in space or in vacuum - You are DEAD MEAT

Well, with adaptive gel suits (assuming those kinds of augmentations make it in, though I really hope so) it seems like you should be able to just take normal damage and keep on trucking. I like that you essentially have spacesuits now. It was a little silly in default FTL that as soon as you're in vacuum you're dying, and you can't teleport into AI ships because they're in vacuum. Why couldn't you have spacesuits on? But you can get shot at, and being shot would cause depressurization.

I don't know if I agree that you're just immediately dead though. Vacuum doesn't instantly kill, though an instant change from 1 atmosphere to vacuum would do severe damage to the body (blown ear drums at a minimum) But bullets/laser holes are small... the new NASA suits that work more like compression socks than pressurized suits wouldn't have their protective effect spoiled by getting shot by a gun. Blood might be sucked out of you pretty fast by the vacuum and it would probably be really un-good (but then again, being shot is way more deadly in real life than it is generally portrayed/implemented as in games) but you aren't instantly exposed to 0 atmospheres pressure. I would campaign for the ability to at least mod the effects of being shot while in a vacuum to be a reduction in total O2 in addition to total HP, or better yet (but probably more complicated to code) a speed-up in the rate of O2 loss until visiting a med-bay (better yet, air-lock and taking off your helmet and putting it back on again, since I still think that makes good balance sense that you aren't always instantly ready to go into vacuum, making hull breach weapons still deadly and making repelling space-boarders require preparation, but that's just my thought on it.)

5. I seem to not be able to pierce the shields on the spawn station. Intentional because it's the spawn station, or limitation of the alpha right now?

The spawn station has a special flag that makes it immortal.

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That explains it.

6. Weapons require very different amounts of power than FTL does for the same weapons.

Should be twice as much.
Thing is - if you want your weapon to recharge as fast as it can - give it full power.
The less power you give it - the longer it recharges.

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Why is it possible to assign more power bars than your reactor provides? (answer can wait for power system explanation if you're going to write that at some point)

7. They don't seem to do the same amount of damage as they do in FTL or have their special abilities (like pierce lasers not piercing 1 shield bar.)

Should be the same.
And piercing should work. I've tested it. (Plus the missiles do manage to get through the shields, and that's the same mechanic)
If a target has only 1 active shield - then the piercing lasers will ignore that 1 shield.

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What do you think of implementing a Captain's Edition Endless Loot-like modifier system to apply to guns and drones? That's something I would enjoy working on/balancing. Speaking of which, will drones be in at all, eventually?

8. It would be nice to be able to spawn extra crew, and be able to issue them orders like in FTL, from the captain's perspective. Or maybe AI crew... it definitely seems like the number of crew shouldn't be limited to the number of people connected to the server. That would be an extreme handicap, because crew are needed for all systems, and in particular, since there are more systems that need crew control in this alpha.

Mobs/AI are planned.
But I can't think of anything what they could do other than walk arround fixing stuff, and fighting off boarders.
Any suggestions?

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For sure, there's tons of things you need extra crew for. Everything that's beneficial about having more crew in FTL as a start. The fact that if a crew member dies, if you have 8 crew, you still have 7 afterwards. If you have only 2 crew, because you only have 2 players, then if someone dies, you are effectively crippled, and also the player whose avatar died has nothing to do now. Would make running a clone bay the only viable option for a multiplayer campaign game.

Also, because the captain can't assign weapons targeting from the pilot's chair, it means that if you're by yourself, you can't even fire weapons without manually walking to weapons control. If you had an AI crewman in the door control, any player onboard should have the ability to open and close any door via click, like in FTL. If you have an AI crew in the sensors room, you should be able to see inside the enemy ship.

Making it possible for multiple people to control different ship systems is great for multiplayer possibilities (would also like to see two ships captained by two players as a possibility too) as well as roleplaying/scripted scenarios, but mandating that you have at least 3 real players logged into the game or you can't control engines, weapons and shields at the same time would be a big handicap. Maybe everything can be controlled to a more limited degree from the captain's chair or any system, but you have to be in the main room to do certain things? Maybe upgrading the auto-pilot or a similar system gives you access to more control from the piloting chair?

Also of course, more crew means more boarder defense, more ability to repair things quickly, etc.

9. I was able to do a jump in-system. Didn't work quite as expected. Why is that powered by the engines? What benefit would that be? (Maybe it would require guns to be re-aimed, but that makes it a penalty only to actual players, since AI could do so instantly.)

I didn't quite understand.
What did you have in mind?

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I covered this in my previous post, but for one thing, I think all jumps should be powered by the jump drive/hyperdrive. "Engines" should move the ship like a rocket, or like the impulse drive in star trek (which FTL mentions a bunch of times.) I also made some comments about the balance implications of a local in-system jump drive.

10. When the game resizes due to scrolling in and out, it would be great if the re-sizing algorithm was something higher quality than nearest neighbor. Would be great if it was something higher than bilinear too, though I have no idea how costly that would be in terms of cpu cycles, to do bicubic/spline/lanzcos resize)

Definitely not something I will work on anytime soon

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Well okay... I assume there's an codebase limitation here. Even bilinear would be a huge improvement, and is sort of the standard when you do anything 3d (which even 2d games almost always are, to make use of modern graphics hardware and transparency effects, right?) Is it possible even theoretically?

11. Could the radar window be bigger? Maybe the game itself could be higher resolution, or be made resolution independent.

Funny thing - the initial design had separate pages for radar and target screens - but then I thought that it's not good.
Guess I'll change it back again

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It's necessary to be able to see the radar and target screens at the same time, for sure. I was running the game at 1280x800 resolution, because I had just been playing FTL in windowed-mode. My monitor can do 1920x1200, I should probably check it out at that resolution.

You can't zoom in and out on the target screen either, and that would help, maybe.

12. All of these are just suggestions/thoughts/comments, not meant to be complaints.

Thank you very much for your feedback.

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Hopefully always helpful.

Wanted to mention this again: The fact that you get sight of room blocks that are line of sight from your character on ships without sensors is AWESOME by the way. I saw that only by chance, after creating a ship without sensors or a doors system, so the doors didn't auto-close after I opened them and I kept walking around and then noticed different squares lighting up and darkening.

I immediately imagined a ship design that starts with a no sensors handicap, but it is compensated for by having the piloting chair set up in the middle of the ship, in a location where it can have sight on all rooms on the ship. What about a ship that doesn't even have walls or doors, but just a completely open layout? Any breach would begin to evacuate air on the entire ship, but much more slowly since it was much more room space, and it would be much easier to run to any specific area and repair because you could move in a straight line.

About moving on rails along the middle of room squares... it would prevent people from getting caught on doors or along the mostly invisible ship exterior edge. Also, max of 4 people in a 2x2 room or no?

I may have found a potential bug by the way. I started the server and then started two game clients on my PC. I logged in on client 1 as Cog and on client 2 as Cog2. I seemed to be in control of Cog on client 2, and when I died, I became in control of Cog2 after respawning.

Also, when Cog2 went onboard a ship that Cog had spawned in, it didn't allow me to control any weapons, as if I wasn't authorized, or something.

Again thanks for your input - I will answer during a skype chat.

[Cog]

I see that you said you'd prefer to respond to long posts in skype. Fair enough. Already wrote this before I saw that, so I will just enter it here, so that other people reading the thread can maybe respond to it or share their input. Hopefully I'm not writing too much to be helpful or drifting into annoying.

"Ships won't be able to move around like projectiles - it would require an enormous remake of the core mechanics.
I thought about it in the beginning of the project, and made local jumps simple as teleporting a ship with passengers because it would be too hard to implement otherwise."

Major bummer. What about locking the players down to the grid on the ship and making any kind of sub-light ship movement like this possible? Even if not during battle (maybe it's just assumed that the ships are circling one another during combat, as FTL does, even though you aren't)... or even just re-labeling the in-system jumping to being like using the sub-light drives and the time delay is the engine warmup and cooldown or something, and with a significant system upgrade (costing about the in-game equivalent of 150 scrap you can get access to an in-system jump drive which works about as often as cloak or maybe a little less frequently.)

To explain what I mean... you leave the in-system ship teleportation in, but the game basically says that you traveled from point A to point B (maybe shows some kind of in-system travel animation) using the sub-light engines. Projectiles should NOT miss, but actually change course and hit you anyway, since it's assumed that the weapon targeting is compensating for the opponent ship's moving around and trying to dodge. Only an advanced engine that gives you in-system jumps provides the 100% evade teleportation effect.

Some advanced missiles should maybe reacquire target after a ship jumps within system.

Upgraded weapon systems should retain targeting on a ship after it jumps, even if projectiles miss, too.

On another subject: I know you're saying people won't be able to jump around like rabbits, but even jumping once every 3 minutes is about as powerful as a cloak. And even if it's only once every 15 minutes, you could have it fully charged at the beginning of battle, and then it will just be an annoying part of fights... your first volley missing due to their charged in system jump. It's fine for it to be a special system, like having a cloak (which is also annoying when an AI has it, but in a balanced way) but I really REALLY think ships shouldn't start with this ability as a default.

About weapons being charged during/after a jump... The weapon pre-igniter was an awesome augmentation just for this reason. Awesome idea: To prevent an enemy from just having weapons already charged up as you arrive being a problem, weapons should charge normally up to max, (like with a red or yellow progress bar, as in FTL) and then be able to fire... but if you don't fire, begin charging at about the same speed (or longer for balance purposes, especially for short-charge weapons like auto-lasers) with like a dark red bar overtop of the red/yellow charge bar. If the dark red bar gets fully charged, the weapon system takes one bar of damage. Weapons handle huge amounts of power and are not designed to remain in a fully charged state for any length of time (otherwise why would ship captains tell their officers to activate the weapons? Why wouldn't they just have the guns charged at all times? If you have a dedicated weapons officer, balancing these kinds of issues is essentially their job. You could keep the guns fully charged and ready to fire most of the time with continuous effort by like manually de-powering them one at a time to cool then down, but if someone's going to go to that much real-life trouble, they should be able to ambush me if I jump into their trap.)