Hailing
Okay first of all, we recently added to the test branch the ability to hail other ships by targeting them and pressing h. Think of all the neat interactions we could build with this system!
You can hail NPC ships and stations now. It is required for using repair stations now. This concludes our introduction of the hailing feature, press 'h' to find out more!
Structure Overhaul
We think shipbuilders like theorycrafting every module that they put into their ships, and we want structure to be no different. That is why we are completely reworking structure modules.
Currently, every ship has an amount of inertia determined by how far all of its pixels are from its center of mass. A big, a long, or a wide ship will have lots of inertia, and in order to keep it running you need to have enough structure to support its size. The penalty for not having enough is that you sometimes hear a spooky sound in the interior and when you take damage from any source your ship will degrade with random damage taken to random pixels across your ship.
That system isn't very good for a number of reasons. For one, it isn't at all obvious to players what is happening to their ships. They often report strange unexplained sounds, and random damage is often reported as a bug by people who don't know why it is happening. More importantly, structure is a boring space-wasting module that is mandatory in every ship, but which doesn't have any fun benefits for the designer to theorycraft around. We can do better.
So introducing the new system:
There are now 2 different types of damage in the game: Explosive and kinetic. Explosive damage shakes a ship apart from the inside, breaking its structure and shattering its hull, while kinetic directly destroys the pixels that are hit. Every existing weapon will be upgraded to use some ratio of these two damage types.
Ships will have the same inertia as they had before, however structure modules will now provide significantly more structure points thus making it easier for you to meet the minimum requirement for your ship. Additionally, the penalty for having enough is completely removed, and is instead replaced with a benefit for being over the minimum. Ships with no structure, or ships with structure that is less than their inertia will take damage exactly the same as they did before from all sources, and with no random pixel damage across their ship. However, ships with structure beyond what is needed for their inertia will absorb a certain percentage of damage dealt to them and instead distribute that damage randomly across their structure modules until their ship's hull breaks, at which point they will take normal damage again.
This will have a number of effects on game balance, but here are the effects we are intending for it to have (as opposed to the unintended which we do not intend)
- increased diversity of weapon types
- adding extra structure to your ship is no longer wasted space
- skill cap for ship design is reduced since no structure ships are now viable
- theorycrafting around structure is now much more interesting
- low structure ships can now be viable glass-cannon ships
- high structure ships can armor tank for much longer
- structure can be added to make repairing easier and to protect modules
- damage dealt in combat will more often be on the interior of ships
- this makes the job of repairing combat damage more interesting
- this reduces the appearance of ships being "cut" by damage and flying around with big holes in them while being mostly healthy
- structure has a visible effect on the exterior simulation
- better visual feedback for the damage you are dealing and receiving
- more obvious to the player how damaged enemy ships are
- interior repair progress can be seen by the pilot
- modules near the exterior of a ship are no longer overly penalized by excess vulnerability
- armor tanks will not lose exterior module functionality as fast
- your valuable ship is now slightly less mortal
- ships will sustain more damage before breaking into pieces and losing their components
- ships can be made to feel very durable without simply being invincible
Overall this feels like a best of both worlds solution to the debate between health bars vs damaging tiles. You are still damaging tiles, but you also get the satisfaction of watching the length of a bar go down as your enemy absorbs bullets and missiles.
Everyone I talk to says this is the best new feature, and if you don't agree then you are a structure overhaul denier.
I hope you have a nice weekend, or week, whatever. We'll probably release this 0.9.0.00 update soon. Unless we don't!