3089 v0.90a: Shadows, quest & muliplayer improvements Thread - 3089

Hey all,

The biggest thing in this update are shadows, which bring a great new look to 3089:

The shadows will follow the sun & fade away at night and during overcast conditions. They are also quick, so even lower-end machines should be able to use them, but there is the option to turn them off in the "Effects Config".

I also improved two situations that may have been troublesome for some newbies: I've removed roads from the starting town, since in some situations, it replaced space for important buildings. I've also made sure easy, medium & hard quests get generated. They will be sorted, with the easiest (e.g. fewest quest tasks) first.

Still lots of work to do with multiplayer, but it should be a bit more stable & robots should synchronize in basic situations. I'll be working on getting damage & boxes to synchronize next.

Full list of changes here: 3089game.wordpress.com

OK, back to work!

- Phr00t

Edited by: Phr00t

Those screenshots look really nice.

oooooh, perrrty... lol. Those shadows are great - simple, but very effective

If roads no longer generate in starter towns/bases, would it be possible to force at least one to spawn/start in a doorway? That way it could be like a "follow the Yellow Brick Road" kind of deal - the Overlord could suggest taking the road to the nearest temple (after defeating the first ghost perhaps - that way you get an Overlord story arc as well as the start of the Xax native one), or going your own way as an alternative.

Okay, so, I kinda missed the last patch or two, mostly due to IRL stuffs, but they have turned out to be quite good. The "boss" idea seems to have come out very well.

This one is pretty nice as well, those shadows look great! I like the difficulty system with quests as well.

As problems go, right now, there are two rather large ones I can think of:

1. Transit. This can take FOREVER. There's no point, right now, in even trying to transit by ground. Just takes too long and usually requires that you either kill or run from about 10 billionty bots along the way. The special items seem to do nothing to alleviate this. The hoverboard in particular is seeming a bit pointless... it doesnt actually go any faster than the player can run, and it seems to actually be SLOWER on hills. The roads are a decent idea.... but only if they happen to be going somewhere that you need to go, which seems to never be the case. They're still pretty slow though, as player walking/running speed really just isnt that fast.

So, ships seem to still be an absolute necessity. This wasnt TOO much of a problem before, but in recent versions, it has become one. The reason: Grabbing a ship from any zone other than a red city is totally futile most of the time. Almost always, it *will* be destroyed before I can get it out of the area, or reach a high enough altitude to avoid enemy ships. This also means that ships flown in from elsewhere sorta become one-use-only most of the time, because they just cant be gotten back out of the zone you land in (IF you manage to land at all; I usually have to jump out of the thing when above the clouds if I want to get it to the ground since that's the only way to stop things from targeting it). Enemy aggression range is simply too high, and once they're on you, that's it.... the ship is done. Even if you're in one that has weapons, it generally doesnt matter; the thing just wont last long enough to survive the battle (which almost always ends up being against multiple targets). Ships gotten from within the same zone dont have health/defense to survive in that zone for very long. I'm not really sure what to suggest for this particular thing that would be a good idea and not mess with anything else.

2. The quest stations. I think the whole "stealth obsession" thing with these has actually gotten worse; even more cycling of stations is now required to get it to spit out one that has no stealth requirements, particularly if I'm trying to get one of the harder ones with a better skillpoint reward. It can take awhile.

Other than that, everything is quite positive at the moment. This game sure has come a long way since the start of the alpha! Bugs, there arent many right now... I still get the occaisional robot stuck inside of something or underground, and I had one quest target robot who kept teleporting into the clouds for no apparent reason. These things are very infrequent now though. There arent any major bugs currently that I can think of.

1: I've never used ships and most of the time don't use hoverboards or grappling hooks, I get around just fine with running. Though early on I just run to areas maybe 10 levels ahead to get quests there, until it's time to move on again.

2: True (not that it matters much for me, since I prefer stealth character builds anyway).

In all fairness, I'm a rather impatient individual, so that's some of it. I may actually have negative patience. It's the reason why I dont do stealth, because the time spent slowly sneaking could instead be spent charging at the enemy and getting on with things faster

I suppose it also somewhat dependant on playstyle, like how often the player is moving around the map in an overall sense. I seem to do it *alot*, zooming from one building in one area to another, so that's the other part of it. Ships and teleporters end up being my main transports to save lots of time.

Ship combat, now that I'm thinking about it, that's another thing I'm hoping to see improved in later versions. The idea of aerial combat or something like bombing ground foes sounds fun, if the player decides to use the piloting skill, but right now the gunships dont seem to be very helpful. Currently I take out enemy ships mostly with the sword. .....not that that ISNT fun, mind you, because it is

Yeah, I'm looking for bases containing all or most stations, backup there, do quests, teleport to the backup station and repeat that. And of course sometimes I venture out to kill some bosses. So, I don't really have long ways to run most of the time.
In any case, maybe we'll get trains later, that would help with getting somewhere fast.

AFAIR phr00t said in a different thread that there are ships with bombs.

Hoverboards do make you move faster than running, it is around 20% faster.

I don't want to make travel too quick and easy, since I want players to be challenged from getting from point A to point B. I also don't want players getting into areas that are too difficult too quickly. If you want to quickly get back to where you came from, teleporting to backup stations and/or using built teleporters should suffice.

There are ship bombs, you just need to find a ship that spawned with one. I can increase their chances, but it makes shooting other flying guys almost impossible... I could increase the health of flying ships to make aerial combat last longer, perhaps...

I increased the number of quests that get created in v0.90a, so it should be a bit easier to find less stealthy quests. However, I don't want to make it too easy to completely ignore stealthy aspects throughout the game... you shouldn't absolutely need a great stealth skill to complete these types of quests... just take a little more time keeping line-of-sight down, perhaps...

some general, over-arching ideas (some of which are mroe like re-posts from other threads) which might help here:

-trains. Why run when you can ride?

-air-to-air missiles for ships as well as 'cannons' and bombs like we currently have. Instead of having a single gun with a chance of having homing rounds, or else a bombing style weapon; the ships could have from 1-3 weapons for fighters/bombers. The options could be air-to-air missiles, BIG bombs (ones that are actually going to make it worthwhile giving up the missiles for - I'm thinking bombs with the ability to wipe out small groups or medium enemies with a few well-placed hits in a single run), or a cannon like they currently do. The weapons should be shown in the ship design - e.g. cannons stick out from the nose, bombs hang underneath and missiles have visible "launcher pods"; so you know just by looking at a ship what it has. The weapons would be cycled the same as carried equipment, and using right-click would put you in bomb/missile targeting mode (bomb shows you an overhead view, missile gives you a free-pan camera or something which locks to enemy flyers).

- "mega bases", less-random bases which are guaranteed to have one of every station at least. They could spawn in the "towns" (red and blue biomes), and much more rarely in other biomes. They'd be easy to recognise (some kind of Overlord symbology to remind us of His great benificence in having them constructed ), and might even come with otehr bonus features like parapets or other defensive applications so they can be used as a fort.

Those three things would, IMO, really help out with the direction the game is taking after 0.9 and the otehr recent updates. I'm another player who's not a big fan of grinding or repetitive tasks, and I can't stand walking (although, I must say I enjoy zipping along the new roads with a hoverboard when I can find an open stretch - unfortunately though, they always seem to be packed with enemies...). Having options to "shortcut" the longer, more grindy things like finding -the- perfect base might get some people more interested

Phr00t wrote: Hoverboards do make you move faster than running, it is around 20% faster.

I don't want to make travel too quick and easy, since I want players to be challenged from getting from point A to point B. I also don't want players getting into areas that are too difficult too quickly. If you want to quickly get back to where you came from, teleporting to backup stations and/or using built teleporters should suffice.

There are ship bombs, you just need to find a ship that spawned with one. I can increase their chances, but it makes shooting other flying guys almost impossible... I could increase the health of flying ships to make aerial combat last longer, perhaps...

I increased the number of quests that get created in v0.90a, so it should be a bit easier to find less stealthy quests. However, I don't want to make it too easy to completely ignore stealthy aspects throughout the game... you shouldn't absolutely need a great stealth skill to complete these types of quests... just take a little more time keeping line-of-sight down, perhaps...

Yeah, I know about the bomber ships.... I tend to avoid them, as I cant hit a damn thing with them, haha. Cant hit anything with those rolling shots certain launchers have either; my aim is much too bad for that. Same reason why I use the swords so much, heh. As for the gunner ships, it's very rare that I actually attack other ships with them, since that seems to almost always just get mine wrecked instantly. It seems that I need to hit most enemy ships many times with my own, but they need only hit me a couple of times. It can be hard to tell though how many times a single target is striking my ship though, as it's rare that only one thing is firing at it.

As for the stealth bits.... it's mainly the "cannot be attacked", "target cannot attack you", or "only target can attack you" ones that drive me up the wall. I dont think I've *ever* finished one of those with a non-stealth character. It got even worse when enemy aggro/sight range seemed to increase after a certain patch. I typically have zero stealth skill on my characters aside from random bits given as side stats by certain equipment, but.... honestly, I cant do it even with a stealth character simply since I dont have the undying patience necessary, or any sense at all of the sorts of tactics necessary. That the game loves to spawn such quest targets in the center of big heaps of robots doesnt help. Usually I'm bored of trying that after about 10 seconds, and then I just go berserk. Even if I dont do that though, something always goes wrong regardless. 90% of missions though seem to have that sort of requirement to them and it's the central reason why I end up cycling the stations (or even just reloading the save over and over). The "spy on" ones arent too bad (and they nullify the "target cant attack" problem since you dont need to approach them anyway).

On another note, a couple of small bugs; I had a group of random orange guys at one point suddenly decide that it was a good idea to follow me in prestige mode (and I have no prestige skill at all)... dunno what triggered that. I hadnt even gotten too close to them either, they did this after a big battle with some blue guys. And then, those same guys, they would sometimes teleport inside of walls and things as I moved around. Particularly once I entered a tower.