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BY BTAXIS, ON JULY 24TH, 2011
-
It has been some time since you’ve heard from us, so I’m taking it upon myself to give
- you all an idea of what’s going on with Naev.
-
The first thing I should mention is that is is summer for Naev, and summer usually
- means a lull in activity. It has to do with lots of other things happening in summer,
- many of them outdoor ones. I think you get the idea.
-
That said, things have been happening since the 0.5.0 release. The original plan for
- the next version, 0.5.1, was, and I quote:
-
14:16 bobbens we can do safe lanes
-
14:16 bobbens for starters
-
14:16 bobbens although I’m not sure on the safe lane stuff how to procede
-
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14:16 bobbens we can either go safe lane “simple implementation” first
-
14:16 bobbens for quick release
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14:16 bobbens or go quadtrees and asteroids first
-
14:16 bobbens for a slower crazy release
-
Once this discussion was over, we promptly started working on completely different
- things. One of those things is the revised faction standing mechanic, described in a
- previous
- blarg post. But there is more.
-
Disabling
-
For instance, work is ongoing on a revised disabling system. Up until 0.5.0, ships
- would become disabled once they sustained enough damage (to be precise, once armour fell
- below 20%), and that was the end of it. However, one of our team members (it was me) felt
- that this was undesirable, and designed something different. Rather than always being
- disabled through damage directly, ships now accrue “stress” damage, which builds up as
- weapons do damage, and falls naturally over time. Once stress damage equals the amount of
- armour the ship still has left, the ship becomes disabled. Assuming the ship is not
- destroyed afterward, it will come back online after a certain amount of time.
-
The important part in the above is that stress damage needs to reach the amount of
- armour health left on the ship. The direct implication of this is that ships with low
- health are more easily disabled than ships with high health, without tying the concepts
- of “low” and “high” to the ship’s maximum amount of health. This means that a small ship
- can be reliably disabled without running the risk of destroying it, for example.
-
The introduction of stress damage in itself also gives us the opportunity to
- differentiate weapons further. In practice, this means that most weapons will do minimal
- amounts of disable damage, much less than their actual physical damage, so that it’s
- almost impossible to disable a ship before killing it. On the other hand, certain other
- weapons will deal a lot of stress damage and limited amounts of physical damage, so that
- stress damage easily builds up toward the critical level.
-
Missiles
-
One of our current efforts is to make missiles more meaningful while at the same time
- not placing too much emphasis on them. In 0.5.0, most missiles are mostly useless, for
- various reasons. For instance, damage was low and the likelihood of missiles hitting fast
- targets or targets with jammers was rather low. One of our team members (it was me again)
- came up with an alternative missile system that would allow missiles to be more useful
- while hopefully not be too dominating.
-
In the new system, a missile weapon must acquire a lock on the target before it can
- fire. To acquire this lock, the target must be kept within the missile lockon area, which
- is an arc in front of the ship for normal launchers and everywhere for turreted
- launchers. The time the launcher takes to lock on depends on the lockon time defined for
- that launcher, and on the level of stealth of the target. As a general rule, small
- targets are more stealthy than bigger ones. So while an interceptor missile might lock on
- to a capital ship very quickly, a heavy torpedo would take a very long time to lock on to
- a fighter. Stealth is further affected by electronic warfare outfits such as passive
- scramblers and, to be implemented, jammers that must be activated and provide a
- short-term boost.
-
Once fired, missiles are quite good at finding their targets. Unlike most of the old
- missiles, all missiles now predict where their target is going to be, so unless the
- target can actually outmaneuver the missile, the missile will usually hit. The new
- missiles also do considerably more damage, so being hit by one can be quite painful. The
- aim is that most missiles are optimally suited to a certain class of ship, however,
- dealing too little damage to seriously hurt targets bigger than that and being too slow
- and sluggish to catch faster ones.
-
Ship health
-
A somewhat minor change, but perhaps worth mentioning here is the overhaul of ship
- health. Where ship armour and shields more or less linearly increased as the ships got
- bigger and heavier, one of our team members (it was me, sorry) felt a different
- philosophy should be followed.
-
Small ships now rely mainly on their maneuverability and their shields, as before.
- Their hulls are made out of bread, relatively speaking, so only a few hits will be enough
- to destroy them. Avoiding fire in an engagement is key to survival.
-
Big ships have received substantial cuts to their shielding. While they still have
- more shielding in absolute terms than smaller ships, the increase becomes less and less
- as ships get bigger. On the other hand, armour has been drastically increased. The idea
- here is that big ships, as big and lumbering as they are, will run out of shields in most
- serious encounters, but survive on armour for a considerable time after that. When combat
- is over shields will come back up but armour will not. In this manner, capital ships will
- get worn down between engagements, and will eventually have to return to a friendly
- planet or station to make repairs. Of course, this assumes combat will be sporadic and
- intense, as opposed to constant and niggling (as is currently the case!). All in good
- time.
-
I should also mention that shield regeneration has been boosted across the board,
- hopefully enough to make the regeneration actually matter in the middle of combat. I’m
- sure we’ll be tweaking that more in the future.
-
Soromid
-
Following contributions of some great ship models by
- Viruk, a new faction has been added to the Naev galaxy. The Soromid already existed
- as a lore writeup previously,
- but now they also own ships, stations and planets. In the future, they will also receive
- their own weapon specialization, and of course their own missions.
-
You can see a map of their territory to the right. It is located in the north of the
- galaxy, where previously there were only empty systems. Not anymore!
-
Also
-
Our team leader bobbens is working on a personal project as well. You can see the
- result here.
-
NOTE Unfortunately the above mentioned screenshot is lost, and there
- is some mention of bobbens’ toe. I wish I could tell you what that was all about -
- Synchro
-
