This update brings police, bounty hunters, smuggling and a conversation dialog system. It's another big update to Loadstar.
Legal status
All ships in the Loadstar universe now have a legal status with each of the factions in the game. Each crime will be recorded in your criminal record and carries a punishment, either a fine or custodial sentence depending what you did. This means if you commit a crime in the Empire you're in trouble, unless you leave imperial space, that is. You can be wanted for piracy, smuggling, trading illegal goods, resisting arrest, bribery and the classic illegal dumping, can you catch them all?
A long criminal record
This is the police
Of course that doesn't mean much unless you can get caught so there are now police ships. These will be launched to intercept you if commit a serious crime, and there are now also police patrols which might just stumble into you and realise you're the captain that's wanted for murder a few systems over.
Police interceptor
An integral part of the traffic stop is trying to talk your way out of trouble so in alpha 6 I've added a conversation tree system. The conversation system is pretty flexible and data driven so it's going to be really useful in future for developing missions and story quests. Depending on the corruption level of the system you might be able to get away with bribing the police to look the other way, or maybe not.
Do you realise how fast you were going back there?
Then again you might just get bribery added to your list of crimes. If you are apprehended you will have to serve your sentence in a prison cell or perhaps just have to pay a fine (or maybe both). I plan to limit the length of careers in Loadstar (something like Sid Meier's Pirates!) so if you get sent to prison for 5 years, that'll definitely set you back!
Prison cell
Bounty hunting
If you have a list of crimes as long as your arm, you could always just stay away from that sector of space. After all the police can't get you outside their jurisdiction, right? Well, true but ships can now be assigned bounties by the authorities and the bounty hunters coming to claim it won't care about such legal niceties. It works both ways and you are also able to make a living claiming the bounty on other ships, which you can turn in at a station for the reward.
Right now the bounties are a little reactive, wait in a system for traffic to show with a bounty on it and attack like a spider waiting in a web. In future I'm planning to further flesh this out by having particularly high bounties listed as jobs you can pick up. These will require you to follow a trail of breadcrumbs to try to catch up to the target such as asking around in taverns or scanning hyperspace jump clouds.
Pirate Havens
It was already possible to steal goods from another ship but this was a bit of a problem for progression. If you buy your trade goods and sell them in another system, all you get is the profit, but if you steal all of a ship's cargo it's all profit. Sure piracy should have the potential to be more profitable than trading otherwise why risk it but this was too much - one lucky heist and you win the game. It should be difficult to sell stolen goods, most theives are caught when they try to sell the goods after all. I decided to use the Elder Scrolls approach - stolen goods are marked as stolen in your cargo list and can't be traded on legitimate commodity markets. Instead you must find a fence and they aren't going to pay full price.
Where can you find a fence? Pirate havens of course! The game now includes hidden pirate havens which are not visible on your map until you discover them. Right now you can only find them by getting lucky and travelling within sensor range of one on the map, but in future updates I'm planning to build on this so that you can learn of their locations through rumours, or by earning respect with certain factions.
A pirate haven in YZ Ceti
Smuggling
As well as stolen goods there are now illegal goods. Different systems have different goods which are illegal, some systems have a long list of illegal goods and some systems have none. By buying goods where they are legal and taking them somewhere they aren't, you can potentially make a good bit of money. Of course the tricky part is getting them into the station without being caught. The chances of getting caught are based on what proportion of your cargo is illegal. The authorities are much less likely to notice a couple of tons of weapons hidden amongst 100 tons of fertiliser than an entire hold stuffed full of narcotics. Another trick is that you can replace some of your cargo bays with concealed cargo bays which have a smaller capacity but a much lower risk of detection.
And once you've got the stuff into the station you have to sell it. This can be done by finding the black market in the tavern (and again in future I will probably make finding the black market a process involving earning respect or gathering rumours). Illegal goods attract a significant price boost over their normal price but it's also possible you could be talking to an undercover cop - if you pay attention you can tell by looking at the buyer's name.
Black market transaction
I realised while developing these features, you could become lumbered with a cargo that could get you in hot water and which you can't easily get rid of. So I added the ability to jettison cargo while in space, doing this in an inhabited system will earn you a fine for illegal dumping. You could also make a profit by taking waste and dumping it in an empty solar system - hey if you're idea of fun is playing as a sci-fi garbage scow, I'm not going to judge.
Avionics
Something I've been mulling over for a while now is whether to add various different kinds of sensors as parts you can install on your ship. Things such as being able to analyse a hyperspace jump cloud to see where a ship ran to or whether a potential target has a bounty on them. Each kind of sensor could provide the player with additional, useful information but it somehow didn't feel right to require them to sacrifice space on their ship loadout to support it. It would probably mean that sensors wouldn't be available on smaller ships and that meant that having a small, fast and powerful bounty hunter wouldn't be possible.
Instead I decided to introduce a separate concept of avionics. It's now possible to install avionics packages on your ship. Ships will have anywhere from one to four slots available to avionics. The packages I've implemented so far are:
Cargo scanner - shows what another ship is carrying
Combat sensors - show the inside/crew of the enemy ship in combat from greater distance
Bounty scanner - lists all the bounties assigned to a ship
Hyperspace analyser - see where a ship jumped to and when they will arrive
Long-range sensors - see other ships from further away while travelling through a solar system
Avionics installation
Some other candidates for future avionics packages could be scanners for space exploration and mining to analyse planets and asteroids and I can imagine some mission specific packages could be cool too.
Next Up
Creating the conversation dialog has whet my appetite to develop the mission system so that's what I'm going to look at next.
Thanks for reading, see you in the future.
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