Quickie notification about 0.117 (it's out).

[BadgerBadger]

Speaking of game mechanics, are y'all planning on having reclamation in AI War 2? I always loved harvesting enemy ships. I seem to remember it was questionable from earlier discussions in the kickstarter.

[x4000]

Speaking of game mechanics, are y'all planning on having reclamation in AI War 2? I always loved harvesting enemy ships. I seem to remember it was questionable from earlier discussions in the kickstarter.

Last I heard, that was on hold until after 1.0.  It might or might not return as a mechanic post-1.0, either as part of an expansion or the base game, is my understanding.  Even in AI War Classic there were a lot of hiccups caused by reclamation in terms of how it would affect balance of power and strategy, and now with squads it also brings yet a few new wrinkles in.  It's not intractable stuff (I don't think), but it's not in the initial scope.

[keith.lamothe]

Zombification is in, and the mechanic for that is designed so that other on-death effects like Reclamation (and the Saboteur's make-it-aoe-on-death effect, and the Reprocessor's gain-metal effect) will be straightforward to add.

The issue with Reclamation is balance. Which may not be something we can solve until post-1.0. But I'm guessing that something like "each reclaiming ship you have adds to your total-reclaimed-strength cap" would work. That way you could reclaim whatever as long as it doesn't take your total over that cap (it would be totally orthogonal to your normal ship caps, regardless of ship type). And since in this game everything has an at-least-semi-reasonable strength cost (because all its other stats are computed from that, more or less), that would at least be balanceable, given refinement.

[x4000]

So, I stand corrected.

[keith.lamothe]

Well, reclamation may or may not make it in before 1.0. It's sort of Schrodinger's feature.

[kasnavada]

What could work "at first" and possibly cause little to no issue with what you propose is that reclaimed ships become zombie ship whose stats have no relation to the killed ship. Basically the same as most video games, any human / elf / orc / whatever becomes a basic zombie. Which has its own zombie cap.

[keith.lamothe]

whatever becomes a basic zombie

"This ship made from 100% post-consumer material"

[BadgerBadger]

I am intrigued by the bit in the wiki that includes "Debug_DrawTrueLocationOfShotsInsteadOfLerps has been added as a game setting to turn off the new shot-lerping code" even though there's nothing in the wiki about the new shot-lerping code. Can I also say just how fun it is to say "Lerp"? Lerp Lerp Lerp Lerp

[Draco18s]

Can I also say just how fun it is to say "Lerp"? Lerp Lerp Lerp Lerp

Linear Interpolation!

[x4000]

My commit notes from today, as relating to lerping:

One

-part 1 of the lerping code for shots is now in.  It now looks LESS smooth than before because it's not lerping between the intermediate positions anymore, but one thing at a time.

* Debug_DrawTrueLocationOfShotsInsteadOfLerps has been added as a game setting to turn off the new shot-lerping code and just show the raw under-the-hood positional values like has been shown up until now.  This is mostly useful for testing, but it's good to be able to see those underlying pieces if need be.

Two

-fixed the lerping to use the LineEmissAndHitPoint locations, since that's the whole purpose of those aside from healing/tractor lines.

-lerping the lerps, now.   Things now move smoothly, although there is a psychadellic curvature to the lines of shots that is patently incorrect and something I'm working on.

Three

-it now takes into account ship movement, and so I think the main thing left is the re-acquisition messing things up.

[x4000]

Going to stop for the night.  I thought I could get some of this stuff a bit more finished up, but I have a lot more logic errors to run through first in the visual stuff.  I definitely want to release tomorrow instead of Friday, though, because I suspect there will be an unusual number of bugs in this one.  This sets in place the premise for all the fakey-lerping stuff in general, though, and gets the shots completely done from a code standpoint (beam weapons aside and other AOE, but those are easy), as well as the ships detaching from their squads when hit instead of just disappearing seemingly-prematurely, etc.

There will be another big raft of bugs as I implement things like the "ship cannon" from the constructors to refilling ships in the squads, and the warp-in/warp-out effects, but those are a lot simpler logic than what is now in place and not-yet-working-but-getting-there.

Right now all of the lerping works except for the post-death stuff.  The nonreal 3D-space firing and emission from specific ships and all that is there and doing fine.

[BadgerBadger]

For my ignorance, a few questions. So this lerping stuff; this is to make the shots actually hit individual ships in a squad? Or is this something else entirely and I'm just very confused.

Also, what is this "ship cannon" of which you speak so glibly? I remember there was something on your trello about it.

Or maybe I should just wait for the release notes....

[x4000]

Yep, it makes shots come out of individual ships and hit individual ships, rather than going between squad center to squad center.  But that's just visual fluff, not actually represented in the simulation code (for performance as well as visual quality reasons), so I have to do interpolation to make it look right to you while also being a reasonably-faithful representation of what the sim is actually doing.

The "ship cannon" is basically how the Ark or Space Docks give ships back to existing squads.  Right now the new ships just materialize inside the squad, but they should instead emerge from the host building and zip over to their place in the squad.  Again all an illusion for visual clarity/fun.

[keith.lamothe]

The "ship cannon" is basically how the Ark or Space Docks give ships back to existing squads.  Right now the new ships just materialize inside the squad, but they should instead emerge from the host building and zip over to their place in the squad.  Again all an illusion for visual clarity/fun.

Yea, the need for the animation is shown here: I don't think the players even know the Ark (or space dock) is constantly sending out reinforcements to local squads that have taken losses

[x4000]

They seem to have figured out that squads are repaired and have ships coming back in them, which is a plus.  But yeah.

It's great that one bit is clear even without animation, but the animations are definitely needed.