It's no longer just a mockup!
We've gone a step further than the designs and mockups and plans of earlier, and now have a fully operational robot hacking interface. Note that's with an emphasis on interface, because none of these commands actually do anything yet, but certainly the foundation for interacting with them needs to be in place to facilitate their implementation. So with the UI out of the way, here are some more samples...
Unlike their current state, Engineers will be hackable.
Here's an example of hacking a Recycler, also demonstrating what it looks like when some required tools are unavailable.
As you can see, non-combat classes have their own class-specific hacks, the total number of which will even exceed combat hacks, making for a lot of strategic options.
Next I need to actually code all the effects!
Spice of Life
Cogmind's 8x8/Mini font is mostly for my own purposes, and fun (hey you can play in a 480p window!), but lsend used it in combination with his 3440x1440 monitor in portrait mode to screenshot one of the largest maps in the world (kinda spoilery if you look closely, but you'd need to break out the magnifying glass :P).
This week Cogmind also got a spot in a Strategy Gamer article listing some good games doing Early Access right. You can see them here.
I haven't been streaming lately, but an increasing number of frequent players over on the Discord community have been getting into it and picking up the slack. More recently we have a lot of people newer to streaming, but all of them do winning runs and special challenges:
- Pimski and b_sen (dual commentary streams)
- Malthusis (extended end-game runs)
- Mhorre
- nuzcraft
- GOR (no commentary)
Be The Hacker (Part 2)
Last time I gave an intro to the new hacking system, so let's pick up where that left off. I was just about to get into the principles underlying the new system. It needs to...
- Decouple machine and robot hacking. Even just machine hacking alone provides a wide range of extremely effective abilities, so there's no reason to keep both types of hacking under the same umbrella of supporting parts. Thus robot hacking shouldn't be based on standard hackware, we'll need something else.
- Control the snowball effect seen with early robot hacking. Sufficient stacking of machine hackware makes pretty much any hack a success, and this is fine for players willing to invest that kind of slot use, but applying the same approach to robots makes it far too easy to eliminate any and all danger by accumulating more and more allies, or at least nearly effortlessly taking out enemies. We'll need upper limits on what is possible.
- Remove much of the RNG. Under the old system, anything but a good robot hacking setup is too unreliable--you have to hit with a Datajack, penetrate to their system, and then there's still the final hack chance to succeed at. RNG works well for machine hacking, but with robots the time element is much more limiting, and the consequences of failures are too dire, especially for bots that are not necessarily set up for combat! Too much RNG in a system like this makes planning much more difficult, thus keeping the RNG would basically work against the combat hacker style itself. Removing the RNG here will be very good for balance.
Overall there are more limiting factors in the new robot hacking system, but by extension that means it can be more effective! More effective is more interesting, as it also increases the range of possibilities. The goal is not to become OP, it's to gain tools for solving a subset of unique situations and challenges.
The hacking process starts similar to how it exists now: Datajacks are still a thing, and you have to both hit the target and penetrate to its system, but after that the processes diverge significantly. Robot hackers will often want to make use of a new type of Hackware dedicated to robot hacking: Relay Couplers. As Hackware these are destroyed on removal in normal fashion, and even have limited uses, but they enable all the best hacks.
Even successfully attaching a Relay Coupler requires an installed RIF, mentioned last time, otherwise...
Couplers come in a variety of types (there are 12) and must match the target's class to gain access to high-level hacks for that target. For example a "Relay Coupler [Grunt]" is used to hack Grunts. The one exception is Relay Coupler [NC], which applies to all non-combat bots, so that one alone will be more widely applicable.
The alternative approach would've been to have Hackware that enables specific hacks, rather than targeting specific bots, taking the system in a completely different direction, but I believe it's far more interesting to be able to do almost any kind of hack to a specific kind of robot than the same hack to any robot.
Note that not all hacks require a Coupler, however, or even an RIF. So Datajacks will still have some robot hacking purpose aside from their other functions. The new Parse behavior will serve that purpose alone, as it's free and always works, usable on almost any robot. (I'll demonstrate that later once it's implemented.) There are also some cost-free hacks that still require an RIF, for use against non-combat bots.
More about Relay Couplers and hacks in Part 3 next week :)
There may be other relevant discussion of this SITREP on the GSG forums.