Hey Folks!
As many of you know, our next planned milestone (v0.15) adds ship-to-ship combat to the game, and is entitled "Fire in the Hold." We've received a lot of questions about the next milestone, ranging from what might be in it, to when it's coming, or even whether it is still being planned.
We've already begun working on the new features, and we've been roughly splitting our time equally between making new stuff, and improving the user experience on existing stuff (a.k.a. our "hardening" phase). It's too soon for us to predict when you might get your hands on the combat milestone, but the current plan is to release pieces of it incrementally, so you may see some parts of it sooner than others.
Here’s some details can we share about ship-to-ship combat:
Missiles
As you might expect, one of the main weapon types we're planning to include is some sort of guided missile. Our current thinking is that this munition is fired from a launcher, separates from the ship a moment or two, and then accelerates towards a target, as seen in the following screenshots:
Here, we've engaged another ship at a range of about 60 km, and fired a volley of missiles at it. Missiles are likely to be a long-range weapon in Ostranauts, fired at targets dozens, or even hundreds or thousands of km away. They may have a minimum range.
And so far, these weapons are likely more for situations where you simply want the other ship gone. Their explosive, indiscriminate damage pattern means the other ship may not be much more than a nest of twisted metal and trash if it hits.
Testing so far suggests these missiles are hard to evade, given their much higher maneuverability than human-laden ships. But they can be shot down, and will eventually run out of propellant.
We also anticipate having defensive measures to help shoot them down (e.g. see below) and/or jam their guidance systems, which can be an incentive to saturate your target with many missiles at once, hoping one gets through.
For those reasons, we'll likely make missiles a purely manual-fire weapon, letting the user decide when and how many to use.
Direct Fire
We're also experimenting with direct fire weapons (including rail gun and coil gun types), as a way to contrast the damage pattern and trajectory of guided missiles.
Rail guns and coil guns will accelerate a dense, penetrating munition at high speeds towards a target, traveling in a straight line at constant velocity. Their impact effect is not unlike a micrometeoroid, often punching a hole through ship hulls, equipment, and crew(!) alike, in a narrow channel/path.
And while this weapon's range is technically infinite, in practice, they are typically employed in short-to-medium range. Roughly up to 30 km. This is because even at high velocities, the propelled round can still be inaccurate at long range, particularly if the ship (and pilot) is nimble enough.
For this reason, the targeting of direct fire weapons works a bit differently than the missiles above. The targeting computer will only begin tracking on a target within this effective range, and takes several seconds to acquire a firing solution:
The orange arc seen here is an indicator of both the firing arc and the relative certainty of a hit. As the targeting solution improves, the arc narrows, until it reaches a full-solution and auto-fires (in this case, launching a comically large bullet-shaped ship).
As part of our prototyping and playtesting, we've experimented with both autofire and manual fire, and will likely make both an option. Currently, autofire happens if the weapon is enabled and the user has begun locking a target. Manual fire can happen at any time, and the accuracy of the shot will be dependent on the arc's narrowness.
And, of course, we'll likely experiment with different combinations of firing arc, reloading time, targeting time, ranges, velocities, etc.
The version we have here turned out to be fairly effective at taking out an incoming missile or two, but was easily overwhelmed by volleys of larger numbers. As a result, we'll likely be experimenting with an even shorter range, higher rate-of-fire defensive cannon in the near future, specifically for this purpose.
Fire
And what if one of these munitions hits something a little more...spicy? This update is called "Fire in the Hold," after all, right?
This is a work in progress of our new fire effect, showing both the particles it spawns, and how it can act as a light source.
Our goal for the fire mechanics is to reuse much of the existing systems we have in-game for heat generation, respiration, suffocation, and structural damage. And possibly reuse a large portion of the [redacted] spreading mechanics to control the growth of the fire across flammables.
Fire is likely to be a serious threat to ship crew, even if an attack does little other damage. It will quickly consume breathable O2, increase cabin temperature, and do damage over time to most things it touches. So adding tools and methods to deal with it will also be important.
Behind the Scenes
Of course, none of the above would be very fun if it merely existed out of context. Some of the additional work we've done is a bit harder to show in neat, tidy images, and includes:
Making different types of sensors vary in what they see.
Making some sensors reveal our ship more to others.
Modeling hit damage on remote ships vs. our on-screen ship, including relative ship orientations.
Prototyping ways to present combat info and controls to the player.
Adding logic to control when AI pilots fight vs. flee.
Adding logic to control when AI pilots call for help.
Building systems for weapon munitions and reloads.
Plus, we have a number of important questions we need to keep in mind as these systems come online, including:
Where will most of the fighting in-game happen? And why?
What if players don't want to fight?
What do these weapons look like on the ship? What resources do they use?
Hopefully, these tasty morsels of information help tide readers over for a bit as they wait for the next milestone. It's easily one of our most anticipated and requested features, so we want to make sure we have time to get it right. But rest assured, we are working on it!
As always, if you have any questions or other feedback, we're keen to hear it! The best place to post is as a reply to this Steam announcement, which we'll monitor for at least a few days. But we will also keep an eye on our Discord's #suggestions channel, and comments to the Reddit link to this post. Thanks for reading!
Best,
Daniel Fedor
Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC