Help Me Please

[net23]

[font="Verdana"][/font] So recently I bought the full version of Starshatter and I am really enjoying playing with it. I am very interested in multiplayer. When I enter a multiplayer scenario alone and start moving things around I get into big trouble.

First problem: When I send ships to different sectors in the same system, or even different systems, I cannot seem to be able to ever see them again in a 3d view or give detailed orders to them. Am I missing something? I must be.

Second problem: When I get ships at opposite ends of the 3d map, I am having a hard time dragging a box around them or even being able to select other ships once I have focussed on one that is far off to one side of the map. Help please.

Is there a way to fly the camera around the map to get to far flung ships or squadrons to give them more detailed orders?

How do you enter a 3d view in a sector that your cap ship is not in?

Any help will be greatly appreciated. I am an oldtime harpoon player for whom starshatter seems like a great game, if only I could figure it out.

Thanks.

Bob

[John DiCamillo]

Hi Bob,

There is one key difference between Starshatter and Harpoon that may help things make more sense. Or less sense, I suppose. Anyway, in Starshatter you are always in charge of one ship. Even though the game has aspects of a real-time tactics game like Harpoon, at the end of the day it is still a spaceship simulation. As a result, Starshatter limits your visibility in game based on your own ship's ability to detect other ships using its sensor package.

Problem 1) In Starshatter, you can only view and give orders to ships in your own sector. Technically, radio communications and sensors are supposed to be limited to the speed of light, and remote sectors are generally light-minutes or light-hours away. There are a couple of loopholes in this theory (and they probably make the game a bit more confusing than it needs to be) you can still receive radio communications and status reports instantly from remote ships and you can indirectly influence them by setting navpoints in the map screen. I'm not going to pretend that I can justify those loopholes, they are just there. Perhaps I should close them in a future build, but I am loathe to remove features that players may have come to rely on.

Problem 2) In Starshatter, you can only focus on an enemy ship if it is within active sensor range of your own ship, or one of your allies. Force:Space ships use a sensor-sharing network so that if one ship has a strong return from a contact, all friendly ships in the same sector receive position updates for that contact. On the other hand, without an active sensor return, your ship does not have sufficiently accurate range data to generate a close-up view of the target in F3 view. Of course, due to the sensor sharing network, you always know exactly where all other allied ships are at all times.

Note that if you need to get a picture of an enemy ship that is currently out of sensor range, you can launch a sensor probe towards the passive contact (i.e. the little red diamond). Once the probe gets close enough to the contact, it will update you with an active return, and you will be able to focus on the distant target and evaluate its position and subsystem strength for a short while.

Hope this helps clarify matters somewhat.

And thanks for playing,