Sea Of Stars - development thread

[Drybreeze]

Hi Hanekem. You are correct regarding the chemical fuel consumption in the solid fuel rockets. The game does not allow consumption of more than one type of fuel... sadly. If it did, I'd have ships consume Uranium, Oxygen, Water, Solid Fuel, Food, and a bunch of other things representing general maintenance and repairs and consumption.

So the only solution is exactly as you suggest... have it approximated by increasing fuel useage of the main reactor. I've done this by having the solid fuel rockets a much higher consumption rate than they were... about eight times as much actually. Also I've doubled the energy output of reactors so that a ship isn't bogged down by having dozens of reactors to meet the output. They have the same charge capacity as well as the same fuel-to-charge rate, so the end result is that they burn fuel much faster as well as the thrusters. The overall effect is that ships now use fuel much more quickly than they did in v0.1. Due to solving a higher-than-necessary fuel cell capacity, I have also nailed down an issue that was creating drastic fuel shortages in early-to-mid game when a player begins to really start pumping out ships and stations.

The concrete bunkering I tried exactly as you said and it still kept favouring the concrete bunkering. In the end I did a hybrid option, where the armour was put in preference to the other armour in tech level, however I replaced it with a new type of armour called Plate Steel armour... it is basically just solid steel. Basic. Simple. Expensive as hell if you want to produce a lot of ships and stations clad in it. It is easily and quickly replaced by the update of Heavy Alloy armour, and then gets into the previous version of Layered Mass armour which starts to diversify the resource requirement and begins to produce some really efficient armour results.

It doesn't do quite what I was trying to achieve by introducing Concrete Bunkering (ie: use concrete resource instead of steel resource, and free steel demand up for other applications instead) but it will do. A player will find that their steel demand quickly sky-rockets unless they research a replacement for Plate Steel armour early in the game.

I'm fairly happy with this end result, and it is included in the v0.2 update which is being released now.

[Hanekem]

ORIGINAL: Drybreeze

Hi Hanekem. You are correct regarding the chemical fuel consumption in the solid fuel rockets. The game does not allow consumption of more than one type of fuel... sadly. If it did, I'd have ships consume Uranium, Oxygen, Water, Solid Fuel, Food, and a bunch of other things representing general maintenance and repairs and consumption.

I think that much detail would be a nightmare, even if possible

So the only solution is exactly as you suggest... have it approximated by increasing fuel useage of the main reactor. I've done this by having the solid fuel rockets a much higher consumption rate than they were... about eight times as much actually. Also I've doubled the energy output of reactors so that a ship isn't bogged down by having dozens of reactors to meet the output. They have the same charge capacity as well as the same fuel-to-charge rate, so the end result is that they burn fuel much faster as well as the thrusters. The overall effect is that ships now use fuel much more quickly than they did in v0.1. Due to solving a higher-than-necessary fuel cell capacity, I have also nailed down an issue that was creating drastic fuel shortages in early-to-mid game when a player begins to really start pumping out ships and stations.

That is an interesting change. I think refuel needs to be something periodic, otherwise the resupply ship is completely useless (actually I've never used it in vanilla)

The concrete bunkering I tried exactly as you said and it still kept favouring the concrete bunkering. In the end I did a hybrid option, where the armour was put in preference to the other armour in tech level, however I replaced it with a new type of armour called Plate Steel armour... it is basically just solid steel. Basic. Simple. Expensive as hell if you want to produce a lot of ships and stations clad in it. It is easily and quickly replaced by the update of Heavy Alloy armour, and then gets into the previous version of Layered Mass armour which starts to diversify the resource requirement and begins to produce some really efficient armour results.

It doesn't do quite what I was trying to achieve by introducing Concrete Bunkering (ie: use concrete resource instead of steel resource, and free steel demand up for other applications instead) but it will do. A player will find that their steel demand quickly sky-rockets unless they research a replacement for Plate Steel armour early in the game.

I'm fairly happy with this end result, and it is included in the v0.2 update which is being released now.

So, given that there is only one armor at the time in the base game, odds are the AI isn't prepared to choose armor by any other factor than its Armor Factor.
So, by that assumption, the AI will probably only be able to use one armor option at the time.

If you are still having issues with Steel demand, perhaps the solution could be in making the resource more abundant, both in quantity of sites and percentage.


About the aliens you wrote, they sound interesting, but I am not a fan of super bio-tech. Not because it can't be interesting or varied, but because to get high end performance you need to redefine Biological, at last as we understand it, and end up with something that looks biological, or has a biological coat, while it performs like non organic materials (Had enough to be compared to metallic alloys, or generate enough electricity to compete with a fission reactor, and superconductive materials to make it all possible)
Spacebugs are a trope of the SF setting, yes, but I personally prefer the bugs to be tool users, because otherwise we need to do a lot of mental gymnastics.

[Drybreeze]

I will do my best to "suspend disbelief" in the player by providing lore and clear cut common-sense explanations of all items in all races.

An entirely biological solution to technology is not a new concept. With our current leaps and bounds in our own understanding of biology, it is entirely plausible that within the next 10 or 20 years we will have engineered entirely unique man-made organisms. Already we have managed to strip a cell's DNA down to the bare minimum required to live. Soon we'll be engineering genes and tinkering with their placement until we produce not just splices but entirely ground-up artificial living things. It's only a matter of time until those things replace non-renewable resources such as metals and plastics in the creation of technological solutions.

Below is a picture of the characters and race-images I've created for the mechanical race of "Cydracites" and the biological race of "Sedt'at".

The species will all have lore and also specific rules relating to how their technology works, their units and characters are named, and their own sound effects. I don't think DW:U allows me to be able to make music race-dependant (I read in some other thread awhile back) but I'll see what I can do... perhaps some folders that can be moved around to player preference client-side.... something like that.



I'll work on the humanoid race next, and then move into the graphics for both the components of the above two races as well as the ship designs for each of the new races.

[Drybreeze]

Version 0.2 alpha is now released.

Link can be found at the bottom of the first post in this thread, as well as a version history which will be updated from time to time. There's also a link at the bottom of this post.

I decided to publicly release this alpha because it is in a FAIRLY playable state. The release information describes what it includes and doesn't include.

Please let me know what you think, what doesn't work, what does work, what to improve, etc.

Please also remember that this is NOT a complete mod (yet). There's so much more I want to do with this.
However, technically, it COULD be a complete mod if I didn't have any further things to do... it really is basically complete. I expect there to be a few things I've missed - your help pointing them out would be very much appreciated.

Thanks so much for your patience, and I look forward to hearing what you think.
Meanwhile, I'll keep working on version 0.3 which will have all the new races included, including characters, technologies, custom components... and my personal favorite is that each race will have quite different resource hungers. So if you know your enemy you have the edge because you can move to cut off their resources and starve them into extinction mwhahahahhaaaa! Also this will have some interesting dynamics on the inter-species trading dynamic... I'm looking forward to seeing what happens there actually.

Thanks again folks and ENJOY!

v0.2 alpha - shared zip file
DOWNLOAD NOW AVAILABLE
Release includes:
Revised research tree to ensure all upgrades are upgrades.
Revised component weights and outputs.
Revised resources distributions.
Revised costs for components.
Various race inclusions at a basic level (some research inclusions are currently locked).
Faults and incompletions include:
Races, characters, and race-specific technology will be worked on for next release.
Ship graphics are yet to be worked on.
Planet view graphics are yet to be worked on.
Sound effects are yet to be worked on.
Music is yet to be worked on.

[Drybreeze]

I am having some great success introducing new races to the game.
I have included Sedt'at, and given them their basic technology in the research tree, and made their technology trees and those of other races mutually exclusive.

The Sedt'at have armour "Carapace" which primarily uses the resources of Biomass, Oxygen, Hydrocarbons, Methane, and water to "grow". In higher tech versions this armour will include steel as a component (directly competing with other steel-hungry races in late game just as it becomes a very valuable commodity, forcing rivalry and conflict).

They have no shields at all at the start of the game, (however their early-game Carapace is quite tough, countering this apparent weakness). Later in game they will be able to develop something similar to the Humanoid shield "Active Nanite Cloud" where they have a swarm of smaller suicidal creatures that intercept incoming fire before it can impact the host vessel. Both these techs will eventually get a shield graphics replacement ultimately, assuming the game allows it.

The Sedt'at's primary weapon begins as a missile weapon - something called a Seeker which is launched from a Seeker Hive mounted on vessels... it is a small stunted clone of the parent vessel which homes in on a target, bypassing the shields and grinding its way into the hull, exploding and damaging the target. They are small and numerous, and quite hard to defend.

The Sedt'at also have an omnidirectional electrical discharge which acts as an ion weapon, as well as a natural non-conductive biology which makes them resistant to ion attacks.

All of these things will have upgrades, improvements, and off-shoots which can be researched by the Sedt'at.

I have yet to begin working on the Cydracitics weapons.

v0.2 release is the humanoid weapons. I have also altered the race familes to be Anthropological (humanoid), Biomorphic (Sedt'at and Shakuri), Synthetic (Cydracitics and Mechanoids), Pseudophysical (the Nephilim) and I'm toying with the idea of having Energetic (high temperature organisms), Amoebic, and possibly a completely non-sentient Fungal family... although I'll have to see if this works well with all game features such as trade, etc.

I'm a bit dissapointed that nobody has made any comment about the public alpha release of v0.2... nobody has any thoughts on it...?

[dejagore]

Drybreeze - kudos to all the hard work You're doing in here [&o] The mod scope and vision is amazing! I'll try with the version 0.2 and check the game play.

Are there any specific starting conditions that are more suitable for this mod ? I usually play with very expensive research, disabled techtrading, lowest colony prevalence and pre-warp start.

[Hattori Hanzo]

hello DryBreeze, the v.02 alpha release is a great improvement over the previous version: I love your Sea of Stars mod [&o][&o][&o]

[dejagore]

@DryBreeze
Ok. After first hour playing as Son'a I found following issues:
- Default Construction ship design larger than I can build (553) - propably the same for AI so they won't build those at the start which might actually make them stay in prewarp
- Ship design screen - there's missing txt for two values
- Issues with sprint speed in standard designs - for instance medium freighter has Cruise speed 25 and Sprint 2

Apart for that - I was confused with all those new resources. But in general - the whole overhaul idea looks very promising. Keep up the good work! Cheers

[Drybreeze]

Thanks folks for yer feedback!

@Hattori:
It has had a lot of changes to it, and the current introduction of races and their race-specific tech alters it a LOT more.
It won't be until it's v1.0 that I would consider it to be a complete mod. It's still alpha.

@dejagore:
I am going to make sure that it works for all game types, but most of the time when I'm testing it I go classic era, with independants abundant and research costs normal.

I have yet to produce proper designs and development paths, because these two things require the techs to be settled into a final version first, so yes the construction ship is one of a few ship issues I've found. It is mostly overcome by manually editing designs - the AI eventually researches ship sizes which allows it to catch up. Some races are better than others due to weapon focuses and weights. It is a high priority for v0.3 alpha, but for now I want to introduce at least two new races and their tech.

Thank you very much for your input!

[Drybreeze]

After creating the three unique races that I said I was creating earlier in the thread, I deleted all other races.

The launcher does a pretty good job of detecting errors, and announcing in the DW_Crashdump.txt file what the problem is and where. However deleting races causes an issue only when I get to the races screen of the game setup screen...

So I thought "Ok maybe I've reduced it to too few and it needs to have more than my three plus the Shakturi and Mechanoid" (I figure they need to stay in there in case people choose the background story options in the game start up).

So I went back to my latest backup, restored it, and then created twice as many races.

So now I've got:
Humanity (Anthropological)
Cydracitics (Synthetic)
Sedt'at (Biomorphic)
Nephilim (Psuedophysical)
Amoebus (Amoebic)
Kelvinic (Energetic)
Fibrum (Fungal)
Shakturi (Biomorphic)
Mechanoid (Synthetic)

Re-launch. Same thing. As I type.
Bugger.

It doesn't tell me what the problem is in DW_CrashDump.txt, it just says there's a handling exception error and asks if I want to continue or quit. Continuing just repeats the error until the end of time, so really let's just quit already.

So I'm back to single-edit launch trial-and-error modding. Le YAWN.

I'll figure out what the issue is, but it's got me a bit stumped at the moment and I'd much rather be creating techs and components for new races than battling some unknown box.

EDIT > Racebias.txt, RaceFamily.txt, and RaceFamilyBias.txt have current and correct races reflected in them, and I'm pretty sure no typos. I'm going cross-eyed I checked so much.

So... I'll re-load all former races and try deleting one only and see if that changes things.

EDIT2> It seems as though a minimum number of races the game will accept is 12? All mods I have looked at have this as a minimum... can anyone confirm any mods that have less? And if so how many? If this is true then I'll have to rethink how I'm going to do this... I might make sects of each primary race... for example the Sedt'at might have a couple of variations which have different degrees of aggressiveness and resource focus. The Humanity might have a splinter group that the others despise because it is in league with the Sedt'at... in this way I can minimise the number of race-specific tech trees I need to add, but can still meet the minimum number of races.

[IFailAtGaming]

There's at least one obvious improvement for me in early game, the fuel use increase means that my stl scouts are no longer trying to slow-boat to another system.

[Drybreeze]

Yes most feedback I've had indicates that players are not custom editing ship designs. So it's clear that I need to male ship designs work for every race as part of any release.

[Twigster]

Yes most feedback I've had indicates that players are not custom editing ship designs. So it's clear that I need to male ship designs work for every race as part of any release.

Seriously? Editing ship designs is one of my favorite things to do! [:D]

[Drybreeze]

@Twigster

I agree, setting up ship designs is half the game. However the mod will need to cater for this NOT being necessary to function for two key reasons:
1) Some players don't enjoy it or do it for whatever reason, and
2) AI players of course can ONLY work from mod/game-designed ship designs, and therefore if they don't function off the bat then the AI empires are completely ineffective.... and there's little fun in playing against a crippled and ineffective opponent, let's face it.

So I really need to ensure that ship designs function WITHOUT requiring editing by the player ahead of time.



I have taken a little bit of time away from editing the mod to focus on things necessary to launch the game itself... which as some readers of this thread would know is the ultimate end-game of this entire project.

So the very first thing I've done is discovered that Sea of Stars is in fact already taken... sort of. Turns out that it's a chapter in a current game called Infinite Space.... Infinite Space III: Sea of Stars. Well, great.

So after a lot of tantrums in the board room, throwing pencils into the ceiling insulation bats, kicking kittens and generally being unhappy with the situation, we decided that rather than figure out our legal standing regarding a game name and a chapter name it would be a lot simpler to simply re-name the game. Fine.

So... brain storming time.

Synonyms for Sea on left column.
Synonyms for Stars on the right column.

See what the best match-up alternative would be.

Turns out it's Puddle of Pricks. (Censored by the auto-censor - but it's what happens if you stick yourself with a pin...)

Not exactly what we're after... so we went for "Sea of Suns" instead.
Still conveys what the game itself is about, just... differently slightly.

So we've now set up a Facebook page (like in signature) which will have more game-specific updates on it.

This thread will remain largely mod-specific, which is one of several key steps in the development of the game itself.
If you're interested in the game Sea of Suns and how it develops, including graphics previews and such, feel free to subscribe to the Facebook page by clicking on the link in my signature below, and "liking" our page.

Regarding the mod itself, I'm still working on races, and have made good progress but nothing substantial enough to boast about. I'll keep you informed of course.

[Twigster]

Understood. Really looking forward to this!

[Hattori Hanzo]

any news here ?

[Drybreeze]

Yes this is still active.
Slower than I'd have liked due to personal things (we're in the process of selling and building) but still active.

I'm in the process of creating race factions, so that there are the key races but they have factions that are different, therefore filling out what seems to be the minimum number of required races for the game to work.

I want to ensure that the next release is completely self-sufficient and does not rely on players editing their own ship designs and so on.

[Shogouki]

Hope things are going smoothly at home for you and I can't wait to see your next release!

[Twigster]

+1

[Nen]

Looks interesting. I love mods that adds more resources. Good luck with your mod. [:)]