I would impose a retrofitting time, though, primarily because it could be open to abusive behavior if you can instantly change the design on the fly. If a FF is 95% gone, do you want someone able to instantly swap to a non-FF design, effectively losing nothing because it was almost down anyway? That's not a behavior the design should encourage, and a retrofit time that disables the ship's "parts" would solve that case pretty easily.
Yep, that makes a lot of sense to me. In the case of that example, whatever it is that is 95% dead in that slot potentially should be 95% dead in the retrofitted version, too, though, in either case. Retrofitting shouldn't be a way to heal your ship, heh.
to skip to the end of the story they decided to take a step backwards and revert to their matchmaking working more like dd1 had evolved into because it works better for community involvement.
by hosting their lobbies publicly, wether or not they are locked/filled being set by the host/players, they could show that the game was not dead. even now there are dead times but their game oddly from the same timeframe as aiwar1 still is lively and its argued wether the sequel is better or not. They made a choice to run their severs themselves for antihacking concerns(mostly bypassed regardless).
I am not aware of anyone thinking that AI War Classic is a dead game, but it's also not multiplayer in the same sense as DD1. It's more "play by yourself or with friends," which is something that really can't "die" per se. Not like an FPS game can, if you're depending on a large pool of random other players for your enjoyment.
i hope steamworks and experience with starward rogue has not burned you on steam as a support platform for networking. it is at the least convenient for players to use. i am not sure of the business concerns for intergrating with their platform.
Thanks for the reminder to add something about Steamworks integration into the design document. There's now a section about that in third-party components, which I've copied here:
Spoiler for Hiden:
1.g.iii. Deeper Steamworks Integration
Status: Super-Duper Theoretical
Risk Level: Extraordinarily High
We get asked about various forms of Steamworks integration all the time. We are not C++ programmers, however, and we really loathe trying to work at that level. The worst bit is trying to write code that works well on linux, osx, and windows, which are three pretty different platforms and require the use of unfamiliar-to-us IDEs in order to do anything. This winds up eating up tons of time, and frankly drives us a bit batty.
There have been various C# wrappers for Steamworks in the past, and we’ve had bad experiences with all of them. The official bindings from Valve were experimental and have never actually been compile-able. The older Steamworks.NET wrapper that we use in most of our games at this point had a ton of broken things in it that we had to work around in really nasty ways. Our prior experience before that was us doing our own p/invoke into dlls/so’s/dylib’s that we created ourselves (shoot us now on those).
None of this is really a criticism of the Steamworks API itself, which seems like it is set up well. However, it is very C++ in nature, which makes p/invoke hard to do against it given that that is more aimed at C-style method calls.
All of that said, there is a new (relatively) Steamworks.NET project on github that we have yet to try, and that we hear good things about. We will investigate this and see what we can do within a certain time budget, but we want to make sure we do not become overly dependent on Steamworks features in general, since that would be to the detriment of DRM-free and GOG versions of the game (hey, those folks deserve all the cool features, too).
My suggestion is to move away from aiwar 1 and its fixed player numbers to be n ( 8 ) player slots and allow jump in commanders as long as the host allows or even only from steam friend list in a steam hosted matchmaking method. this has worked successfully for both dungeon defenders 1+2 as well as for borderlands. i feel this type of being able to even just watch gameplay would be very valuable both for matchmaking and for advertising and outreach purposes. having even 4 slots dedicated to people observer only could be useful in teaching and sharing the game. having your camera as an observer lockable to a player would be a nice feature if you went this route. I'm assuming in game chat would still be an option. also by using steam integration steam has chat servers built in for communication rather than building your own.
Locking the camera to another player would be very impossible since all of those things are done locally. There's a reason that there is a delay lag on services like twitch. If someone is looking to teach others by letting them watch everything, then I would say twitch is by far the best way to go. In terms of having some folks jump in and either be silent watchers of one player or equal-parts-helpers on that same team, that is something we're talking about in terms of feasibility.
with you mentioning how music and sound often get s moved to a seperate thread anyway i was wondering how difficult issuing commands to the steam music player from inside the game was.... but enough of my musing.
I've never used it, so I'm not sure honestly.
so hyped and breathlessly awaiting the new game i can get my friends to try someday.
Thanks!
Switching to a different variant without having to scrap and rebuild
For champions, swapping modules requires an engineer to assist and being out of combat, but is pretty much instant. Switching hull types requires respawning back at base. I think retrofitting to a different variant should probably be a happy medium between those. Maybe, it has the same costs and reqs as repairing to full health from zero?
At this point I think this topic deserves its own discussion in the ideas subforum. It's basically getting into the level of design that won't be in the design document, because any one of these approaches is reasonable enough on paper, and quick to implement, so it's a matter of doing some talking about it, finding what sounds the best, then testing that out with players and seeing if that actually matches our expectations of it.
My only worry is that, upon release, this will be compared to the first game with its years of expansions and improvements, and found wanting.
I actually just added a new "Rationale For Scope Decisions" section to the design document, because I feel the same sort of worry. Funny we had the same thought, although I suppose it's not all that funny a thought.
My opinion on the way to combat that is basically a clear communication of the roadmap, and what things cost to make and add, etc. Plus there's a whole heck of a lot of new things that this new game can do that the old one can't in terms of having all manner of types of units and so on just by the very nature of it being data-driven, so hopefully that will offset things to doms degree.
Good point, that is now in the document.
Cool, one of my suggestions made it directly in the design document !
With the ability to switch on the fly, it sounds really good conceptually.
Awesome.
And yep, I imagine we'll be seeing more of your ideas in there...
My only worry is that, upon release, this will be compared to the first game with its years of expansions and improvements, and found wanting.
Happens with every duckin' game/movie on Earth these days. People don't realise how much of a birch it is to update a monolith of old code, rather than obsolete it and start afresh.
My chief hope is to combat that with communication and detail. A lot of games and movies and whatever don't actually explain anything and just hope for the best, and so of course people don't understand. I'd rather give people the cold hard facts instead. We shall see what happens.
i hope steamworks and experience with starward rogue has not burned you on steam as a support platform for networking. it is at the least convenient for players to use. i am not sure of the business concerns for intergrating with their platform. despite the naysays that veto everything steam i would suggest to not discount the matchmaking ideas in your core.
What happened with Starward Rogue and Steamworks?
Wondering this myself. I don't remember anything related to Steamworks?
Wondering that myself, too -- I also don't recall anything related to it, and that would have been me.
