[GAME] EmptyEpsilon

kwadroke · January 2016

That update fixes the compile issue.

KliVer · January 2016

Little issue : when the shields are on, there is non modification in the delta in the engineering view.

And for the jump drive, instead of having a 10 seconds wait and a limit of 40km, would it be better to have a longer limit (100km or even more) and the waiting time depending of the distance (1second/5km for example) thus putting more energy in the jump drive would be more interesting.
And wouldn't it be better to have the countdown in real seconds instead of the seconds when at 100% ?

daid · January 2016

Actually, a longer charge time for longer jumps would mean an "emergency jump" would become complex to impossible.

I've seen our crew quite often do a random jump (JUST JUMP! WHEREVER! NOW NOW NOW) to get out of hairy situations. Usually ending up out of the normal map.

What I currently like the least, is that engineering can just dedicate no power to the jumpdrive till it is used, and then when it is activated push it full power for a quick countdown.

So what I would propose, is a charging mechanism, which just charges up the jump drive all the time. Depends on the engineering power level. And jumping longer distances would take out more charge. And you can only jump on a full charge.

daid · January 2016

(The emergency jumps are great fun in my book. As it does save the crew, but puts you in a very confused position of not knowing where you are, what the status of your ship is)

KliVer · January 2016

So what I would propose, is a charging mechanism, which just charges up the jump drive all the time. Depends on the engineering power level. And jumping longer distances would take out more charge. And you can only jump on a full charge.

Sounds good and fun

HOU5E · January 2016

I quite like the idea of that "charge" removing the jump from the normal energy reserve. So if you have a fully charged jump drive + and your energy reserve is 1000 then at the end of the jump your energy will still be 1000; this immediately begins dropping to re-charge whatever amount of the charge you used.

A crew that have kept their jump drive ready can make a big jump into battle to save the day rather than jumping and wanting to recharge a bit before they join the fray, and if things are going south and an emergency jump is needed they can pour that energy into the drive to get charged enough to jump away.

Perhaps as a separate issue, I wonder how you could have some kind of emergency override which allows an immediate emergency jump but the distance is unpredictable and it WILL cause damage to your systems, guaranteed to take your Jump Drive down to -99% but may damage others also...

I'm just spit-balling here but thinking such a manoeuvre requires a two-code override sequence similar to Self Destruct between Helm & Engineering, and the result could be:

a) 50% chance of getting the jump distance they ask for, but also a completely ruined Jump Drive and possible damage/heat to other systems.
b) 49% chance of getting a jump anywhere between 10k-400k with the same completely ruined Jump Drive and increased damage/heat to other systems
c) 1% chance of breaking jump drive containment and flooding the whole place with deadly Daidlithium destroying the ship and crew instantly.

Too far?

Fouindor · January 2016

Haha, +1 for Daidlithium

More seriously, I think that a special mechanism for emergency. However, the jump charge thing seems a good idea.

Fouindor · January 2016

Woops, garbled my previous post. I wanted to say that a special mechanism for emergency jump is not needed now.

daid · January 2016

Added a charging mechanism. You can only jump if the drive is fully charged.

Upped the range of the jump drive to 50km. If I did a 100km, the slider gets too tricky to use IMHO.

Recharging the warp drive takes 2 seconds per km jumped, modified by the jump drive power in engineering. We'll have to see how well this works in tests.

JohnPalRivera · January 2016

Did a few runs with some pals on one of the more recent versions. It was a hit! Had an awesome time and will be watching very closely. Love that the mobile version works so reliably with the Windows versions we were using. Very jazzed to try this with a bigger crew within the week. Thanks again for your work and am very jazzed for the future of EE!

HOU5E · January 2016

@daid would you consider altering the jump mechanic so the "charge" counts as sufficient energy for a jump? I've done a bit of testing and I like the charge but it kind of costs the ship twice, once to charge the drive and again when it's used to actually make a jump.

If a ship is fully stocked and gets a message saying they need to race off and defend a far-away but mission-critical station then it's a little disappointing to arrive with around 60% energy.

daid · January 2016

Charging the drive did not cost energy. But I'm changing that right now (wanted to fix something else first)

So, now I use energy to charge up the drive. If you put less then 25% power in the jump drive in engineering you actually lose jump drive charge! So engineering needs to be careful with that.

daid · January 2016

Added a ships log, which contains all the history of the comms interaction.

Custom messages can also be added from the scripting interface. Currently only per ship (no broadcasts yet)

daid · January 2016

Also, a new build is up, this time with Android again. I think this should fix the Android connecting issue we had before. It also fixes a possible server crash.

matthias_wlkp · January 2016

I logged in here, as I saw daid posting here - great job with EE so far! I also posted a few suggestions on your github.

I really love the game so far and look forward for some more mileage with my group! Is there a regular online game day for EE yet?

daid · January 2016

Online, not that I know off.

We had a pretty large play session yesterday. Some grainy photos:

We had inexperienced people on science, caused a bit of a hickup. New shield systems worked without problems.

Following things are important to fix IMHO:
* Scan probes are pretty much unlimited when you are docked. Causing relay to spam the whole map full of them. So recharging probes should take time.
* Relay had so much information that he took over the science job. Most likely will take away it's range, heading and ship type indicators. So science has accurate info, and relay can only guess it.
* There was a constant struggle for energy. I am toning down the energy use of the jump drive a bit. But this was also because the shields where up a lot of the time, causing a large energy drain.
* So, there really needs to be more indication on when the shields are up or down.

Fun moments:

We played the Edge of space scenario. And there is a LOT of text in those transmissions. A minute before a transmission, I added 2 extra enemies in a nearby nebula, just outside of the scan probe range. So relay could not see them, and science could not see them as well.
And just as the relay got the next piece of text and started to read it out loud, the 2 ships poped up on science. Science started to say "2 new ships!... scan... they are enemies!". But during this time, relay just kept talking and talking, pretty much causing chaos as it was impossible to follow what was happening.

They where easy ships to kill, so they lived. But was hell of a fun to see that someone focused so much on the importance of their job, causing more problems then it solved.

Then they took a dreadnought head on in the next bit, pretty much suicide right there.

In the Beacon of light scenario, the first thing that happens is that you need to get to a ship in a nebula. When you fly into the nebula, 2 ships show up that kill the ship you need to investigate, and then head for you. However, the whole crew missed this fact, missed the fact that they where now under attack. And missed the fact that the music changed. So they where suddenly under fire without anyone being prepared.

They lived, but they did not have anything left, every single system was destroyed except for beam weapons.

daid · January 2016

(And I just smiled and looked at the GM screen)

kwadroke · January 2016

daid said:

Following things are important to fix IMHO:
* Scan probes are pretty much unlimited when you are docked. Causing relay to spam the whole map full of them. So recharging probes should take time.

Why not make it where you have to use rep to get more probes like Nukes, Homings, etc?

daid said:

* Relay had so much information that he took over the science job. Most likely will take away it's range, heading and ship type indicators. So science has accurate info, and relay can only guess it.

I noticed that too at the Convention last weekend. Players figured out that Relay had more info on the ship quicker than Science did.

daid · January 2016

I'm wondering if it might be a good plan to let science see and scan objects 5km around the scan probes that relay placed...

kwadroke · January 2016

daid said:
I'm wondering if it might be a good plan to let science see and scan objects 5km around the scan probes that relay placed...

That might make more sense. Relay (and science) would just know a ship of some kind is there until science scans it.

matthias_wlkp · January 2016

daid said:
I'm wondering if it might be a good plan to let science see and scan objects 5km around the scan probes that relay placed...

If you do that, it would be cool to be able to define a destination for the probe, so it stops. They could be also targetable and destroyable by enemies, so it would be inefficient to spam them.

kwadroke · January 2016

matthias_wlkp said:
If you do that, it would be cool to be able to define a destination for the probe, so it stops.

You can define a destination for the probe. You have to click the spot where you want to probe to stop after clicking Launch Probe.

matthias_wlkp · January 2016

Good to know

daid · January 2016

Oh, and I made waypoints selectable in science, so that helps in getting distance and heading to them.

Fouindor · January 2016

Nice setup

What tablet do you use ?

daid · January 2016

None, we got a bunch of touch screens for cheap (heavy duty ones, anti-vandalism). Free old laptops, and CNC milled the externals.

Photos of the production phase:

HOU5E · January 2016

Regarding the Shields, I have been meaning to mention that the amount of power they draw could probably be reduced from what I've seen.

I guess it depends what the "intended strategy" for combat is, but last time I played on the Engineer stations I was often begging the Weapons station to turn Shields off in between attack runs. For example when combating enemy fighters there tend to be short periods where the ship is within beam arcs with longer periods in between where there is no real threat for the Shields to intercept.

I found myself trying to ride the Reactor controls and gain back some precious energy in time for the next pass, but there's precious little chance of that with the Shields on.

Then again, it's quite evocative of what Star Trek I've seen to have Engineering weeping into the controls as demands for more power come pouring in, so maybe that's the point?

As seems to be the case a lot lately, Shield Power Consumption might be a contender for an Option when starting the server (and/or a variable that can be set in the build of the Ship). Trickle/Stream/Torrent/Flood settings perhaps?

I know I could add yet another request to GitHub but I figure there's probably intent behind it so didn't want to without discussing it first

daid · January 2016

I came to the same conclusion the last play session.

daid · January 2016

Break the silence!

Thanks to Fouinder we now have the option to link a probe to science, which allows science to view 5km around a probe. Pretty cool, as it gives extra interaction between science and relay.

Also, I added a patch which allows the following from scenario scripts:

    swarm_command = CpuShip():setShipTemplate("Ktlitan Queen"):setCallSign("Swarm Command"):setFaction("Ghosts"):orderIdle():setPosition(3000, 0):setCommsFunction(function()
        setCommsMessage("Are you not curious of why I'm getting back here, at the hands of my torturers ?");
		addCommsReply("For an AI, this move seems to be not very logical.", function()
			setCommsMessage("I was not the only AI detained in the Black Site 114. My co-processor was here also.")
				addCommsReply("Are you trying to liberate it ?", function()
                    setCommsMessage("Indeed. Without it, I'm not whole, the shadow of what I could be.")
				end)
				addCommsReply("I have heard enough.", function()
                    setCommsMessage("Of course. I wouldn't trust your feeble species with understanding my motivations.")
				end)				
		end)
		addCommsReply("Not really.", function()
            setCommsMessage("How surprising, a human more stubborn than any program.")
		end)
    end)

You can now define inline communication scripts, instead of having them in a separate file.

Feralmouse · January 2016

Dammit such a pita site to get on. Can you PLEASE put some contact details elsewhere -_-;;;; I can't get to you via github, I spent the last HOUR trying to register/contact admin of *this* site. Geh.

Now. Guys. Girls. Strange things in the corner. Kindly tell me, how the hell do I install?

I use linux, of course and ordinarily I wouldn't bat an eyelid but I've been a little pampered by the repository and compiling from source is not usually a requirement.

Do I need the engine and the game? Which one do I compile first? Which commands should I be running in order to compile it? O.o;;; Anyone?

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