[GAME] EmptyEpsilon

Fouindor

We may have a convention coming up in June. I've thought of doing A4 quick reference cards for each the station, to give it to players for study during downtime (when they wait for another crew to finish).

For now they will be in French (so will be Empty Epsilon with my jury-rigged translation patch ^^), I can also do an English version, would any of the community be interested ?

I've started up designing officer icons from public domain icons (I know the image below has glitches ^^), here is for Weapons :

Here is the list of what I envision :
Captain - White background, flag and fist.
Helm - Yellow background, ship
Weapons - Red background, missile and laser beam.
Engineering - Blue background, spanner and lightning bolt.
Science - Purple background, vial and eye
Relay - Green background, speech bubble

kwadroke

@Fouindor, I'd be interested in that. I've thought about doing something myself, just haven't had the time. I've got some work in progress text for the wiki that might help. I'll see about getting it uploaded today.

You might want to check OpenClipArt.org for images. It's a good resource for public domain Vector (SVG) images.

Flea1

Oh that's a good idea too! I'm just suggesting because we all have keyboards and joysticks, we don't have tablets. But we have Android phones.

Fouindor

Thanks for the tip

I'm also thinking about stepping up on the Portable Bridge Illumination (gorram drivers spewing nonsense, may have to change my USB <=> DMX interface) and crew uniforms (at least for me), I'm even thinking about embroidered badges (I've yet to finalize the design). I've thought about several names and mottos, but the one I like the most would be HNS Monolithe, with motto : "Tous pour un, un pour tous" ("All for one, one for all", Alexandre Dumas's Three Musketeers motto), or "United we stand". Logo is still to do.

But keeping it real (and on thread), I see there is a lot I want to do, but a quite hard deadline ^^
I'll keep you posted.

kwadroke

I've uploaded the info that I have on this computer up to the wiki. It's mostly incomplete. Feel free to fix/complete.
I think I have some more on the machine at home, so I'll have to dig that out.

John Bono

Flea1 said:

Is anyone wanting to try and code in where you type in your heading and speed etc ?

For example, in helm I could hit h key to bring up a small input line, type in the heading and hit enter. Then the ship turns. I would but my coding skills are like hitting a rock against another rock.

Or does this idea sound mute? Curious to what Daid and anyone else thinks? thanks

With a change like this, I'd love to see an option where jump drives let you use a heading instead of using the ship's current heading. (One thing I like from Artemis is the ability to pounce an enemy ship by jumping in behind them.)

Fouindor

Thanks, @kwadroke , I'll go see it

Flea1

I didn't really like setting in the heading. I like the EE version a little better, seems more realistic to me...well as much as realism can get. But the option would be nice.

Dr_JT

I've been playing around with button shapes and colors. It would be really nice to have a different border_background.png and button_background.png for each station. That way we could give each station its own style.

daid

One thing I like from Artemis is the ability to pounce an enemy ship by jumping in behind them.

I really disliked that, from a gameplay perspective. Which is why I implemented it differently in EE. The reason is, it's so powerful as an attack move, that it becomes the only sane move to do. Any other strategy is horribly inefficient compared to it.

Fouindor

Completed the Weapon Officer's Quick Reference front page : http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=00766208714176395391

For the back page, I plan to describe more in detail the different ordnance types and give tips on what to do.

Again, the Quick Reference are intended for players who have never played the game.

Flea1

Daid. What do you think about a manual fire mode, so you fire when you want. And a weapons scope?? Maybe implement an indimiation effect in enemies, hitbthem hard in attempt to bluff them to give up?

daid

Manual beam fire? I know Artemis has something like that, but it confused the hell out of me as a player...

kwadroke

daid said:

Manual beam fire? I know Artemis has something like that, but it confused the hell out of me as a player...

Being that in EE we can target a system with the on-screen controls, the Artemis way isn't needed. But being able to toggle the auto beam firing on/off might be nice.

Flea1

Oh. Very true, but I like the idea of maybe keying a trigger key to the joystick:). Also what about adding to where only weapons and shields can only be operated with yellow alert or higher or do you prefer to keep it the way it is for players that don't like the overlay?

daid

As alert levels are an "extra" feature, not available on the "less people" stations, I do not think it's smart to link it to that.

jozan

As a sidenote to alert level overlay: it's not very good as it is. While it shows clearly which alert level is currenly active it blocks way too much vision. As of now I don't have any suggestions but might come up later with a better graphics or a sketch.

Flea1

What about a like edge aura for the color of the condition? Some games have just a bar with the name of the alert level.
Artemis changes the color of all the buttons I think.

Which on a smaller note I added the hvli rockets to my Trident heavy fighter (a load of 6, with 4 homing missiles) And it is a bitof a challenge to hit fighters with. But it looks better with the burst of five coming out of the wing rocket launcher position.

kwadroke

jozan said:

As a sidenote to alert level overlay: it's not very good as it is. While it shows clearly which alert level is currenly active it blocks way too much vision. As of now I don't have any suggestions but might come up later with a better graphics or a sketch.

It is a little distracting. A couple of friends and I were discussing it last night.
I've modified resources/alert-overlay.png to remove the fill and just have an outline to make it a little less so. Might be something to look at.

daid

The alert overlay is quite new. I haven't got around to play with it myself. So updates are welcome on it.

jozan

@daid hey man. Me and TohtoriVesala are both very interested in EE. We'd like to see this game gaining momentum and growing bigger player base. As of now our contributions have been quite small, so far couple of wiki articles and few small pull requests.

Anyhow, since neither of us are C++ programmers but web developers naturally we're almost entirely out of our comfort zone. Heh. We've couple of ideas that are more of an extension to the game and would not change the game or how it's currently played. But before we propose anything it would be very nice to hear your vision and where you'd like to focus next. We'd prefer brief Hangouts or Skype session but this forum or email is also ok.

Our main idea what would be nice extension would be cool is to have option to turn damage control mode to advanced. The default would be normal which is same as the current system where engineer controls patrols to fix broken systems. When the setting is turned advanced those patrols disappear from the interface entirely and instead people would do the same tasks in the bridge them selves operating simple machines. I know the idea sounds crazy but we'd like to explain it to you in more detail. From architecture point of view it would be modular system etc.

So are you up to a chat? If you don't like our ideas it's no biggie. It's still important to hear your vision and to know is it worth investing in this game from our point of view and how could we actually make an impact.

Fouindor

Congrats on the 1000 commits !

EE, going boldly where no space sim went before

daid

jozan said:

@daid hey man. Me and TohtoriVesala are both very interested in EE. We'd like to see this game gaining momentum and growing bigger player base. As of now our contributions have been quite small, so far couple of wiki articles and few small pull requests.

Do not underestimate the value of a few wiki articles.

jozan said:

Anyhow, since neither of us are C++ programmers but web developers naturally we're almost entirely out of our comfort zone. Heh. We've couple of ideas that are more of an extension to the game and would not change the game or how it's currently played. But before we propose anything it would be very nice to hear your vision and where you'd like to focus next. We'd prefer brief Hangouts or Skype session but this forum or email is also ok.

First off. I sometimes use EE as a "playground" to experiment with new C++ features and stuff. This makes especially the multiplayer code and the script interfacing code pretty magical. It also means the code contains almost every trick I know. Which isn't the most optimal place to learn.

As for talks. I rather keep discussions public accessible. Other people might want to pinch in as well. I also got the keys for my new house a few weeks ago, and still most of my free hours go into that. (Most of the EE work I do on the train)
You could ask @nallath, he works with me, and generally has a good view on game design. He will most likely be up for skype chats if you want to quickly discuss your ideas.
(Also pictures, pictures help shitloads in getting ideas across. Dirty mspaint drawings on top of screenshots tell wonders)

jozan said:

Our main idea what would be nice extension would be cool is to have option to turn damage control mode to advanced. The default would be normal which is same as the current system where engineer controls patrols to fix broken systems. When the setting is turned advanced those patrols disappear from the interface entirely and instead people would do the same tasks in the bridge them selves operating simple machines. I know the idea sounds crazy but we'd like to explain it to you in more detail. From architecture point of view it would be modular system etc.

Currently, I'm not that eager to add complexity to engineering. It's currently already the most busy station to work on.
On medium experienced crews, what I've seen, it's usually engineering that screws up. As he is too busy to do all it's task that he forgets to report the status of systems.

daid

Oh, and if you want to assist more, but not sure where to start. We could use more variety in ship templates. Ideas for missions. More lore. There are so many ways it is possible to contribute without writing a single line of code

HenriVesala

"Advanced" damage control mode wouldn't increase load for enginering. Instead it would take the load off. Main idea would be to split enginering to have independent damcon station. For this there would be an additional crew member or two. Damcon station would have x amount of subsystems (independend computers or physical iot devices) that could "broke down" when taking damage. To fix the problem someone would have to physically go to subsystem and "fix it".

jozan

I don't like to introduce new station per se. My vision of "complex" damage control would actually take most of damage control off from the engineer and distribute it to other players since fixing systems involves dealing with the physical machine(s).

I think it would be more suitable to talk this on its own thread which I'll create later. It'll have all the details in one place.

nallath

One of the ideas that i've had (which might suit web devs somehwhat) is having multiple screens that are only used for data display / simple operations

Think about it; Having a single screen bolted to the wall that visually shows how much missiles are left could be interesting.

If anyone wants to talk about game dev stuff, we could set up skype meeting. I'm also some what familiar with the code base, so I can also answer basic questions as to that (haven't done a lot with EE for a while, spent most of my time on finishin my 3D scanner)

HenriVesala

nallath said:

One of the ideas that i've had (which might suit web devs somehwhat) is having multiple screens that are only used for data display / simple operations

We have talked about similar idea. It would be cool we could have many little display widgets and you could cherry pick what you want to display and where.

Flea1

I'll post my ships. Here soon, I made five,

daid

Stand-alone widgets shouldn't be that hard to create with the http API and some web dev skills.