Subset Games Forum

Estel wrote:adjusting damage in corelation to beam path through the room - may be good idea ... For *MODS*, made possible, thanks to faithful FOSS re-creation of engine.

Mod != A recompiled engine with modified source.

The goal is to make an engine that is flexible enough that it can be scripted to mimic vanilla gameplay as well as what modders could want... without needing to alter the engine's code.

Not a re-creation with everything hardcoded to be exactly like the original FTL.

That's obvious - but, isn't last (few pages long) talk about beams heading into direction, when *out of the box* beams are going to work completely diferrently than in vanilla? It would be strange, if it would need mod (scripting one or not) to bring original functionality back.

Or, am I understanding it wrong?

Estel wrote:isn't last (few pages long) talk about beams heading into direction, when *out of the box* beams are going to work completely diferrently than in vanilla?

Several things contributing to that impression:

• No interesting coding is going on at the moment to direct the thread* (see: my stall, DiEvAl's distraction, and roadmap), so feature requests, speculation, and what-ifs are prominent.
• IIRC, nobody's cited a wiki or investigation thread as the definitive reference for how beams work in the original FTL.
• Ideally, a single mechanic would underlie both mod and vanilla beams (when damage isn't supposed to scale with distance, set a 0% falloff, etc). If vanilla beams are too weird, Overdrive will settle for an approximation since its focus is on enabling mods (for authentic vanilla gameplay, there's the original FTL).
• Suggestions sound simpler in one's own head. So I add follow-up posts unpacking them. These varied exchanges provide potential ingredients to use in the final beam mechanic.
• Onlookers may see the beam chatter as deadlocked by complexity, and add new 'simple' concepts.

* Kiloku might be up to something. John Luke Pack Hard was last seen studying libraries.

Thunderr wrote:Could someone update the OP with the new decisions? It's getting difficult to find current information about the project.

^

The silent, unheard words of wisdom...

To be honest, this is a coding project on the scale of creating FTL in the first place.

NewAgeOfPower wrote:To be honest, this is a coding project on the scale of creating FTL in the first place.

And this is new... how exactly?

dalolorn wrote:And this is new... how exactly?

Overdrive is a complete rewrite of FTL's engine in Java, to make it more moddable.
While the general design is already done (since we just look at what FTL did, and try to achieve the same results), the code still has to be written from ground-up, completely from scratch (since FTL is, obviously, not open-source), while also thinking ahead to make it flexible enough to be easily and extensively moddable.

So while it's not at the scale of FTL project-wise (graphics and design already done), coding-wise it's exactly as complex as FTL, if not more (due to moddability + portable device support)

Oh, I'm quite aware of what Overdrive is, and looking forward to it. My comment was directed specifically at the post I quoted.

I'm just looking forward to this. I do hope this is done before FTL modding dies completely. I wish I could code now. Also, I agree that the OP should have more up-to-date info.

Just out of curiosity, how is this coming along? Is it dead, temporarily shelved, going well, or is progress just slow?