Comments - Codestar

Whoops. Fixed the greenlight page. Thanks!

I'll be dropping in screenshots of each ship over time in no particular order.

The new ships (and other updated effects/visuals) will only appear in the final released version (1.0). No schedule on that currently.

If you start a game that you want others to connect to, all you have to do is create the server and it will automatically show up in the browser for anyone else.

I appreciate you mentioning the turret bug, I think I know what you're talking about and it should be an easy fix to get into the next build.

Hyperspacing between sectors is the most confusing thing and I definitely plan to address that. As MurcDusen mentioned, to jump to another sector, you just need to aim at it while holding the hyper charge button until it fills up.

Thanks!

1. No concrete plans so far but expect it not to be. That said, all the alpha versions (now and in the future) will all be completely free.

2. I don't have specifics since I haven't done any true benchmarking but the requirements are pretty minimal. On the plus side, if you have any doubts the latest alpha build is available to try out right now. It even has an FPS counter built in (minus key by default)!

Glad you're liking it so far! The Artillery turrets not firing under AI control is definitely a bug and not a config issue. I've noticed it before myself but fixing it will require some dedicated digging to figure out what the problem is since the same code controls all AI turrets and only one ship has issues.

I'll make sure to work on this for the next build, thanks!

7. I love Homeworld and I used to play the hell out of it (1 and 2). Unfortunately, I'm not very good at RTSes and would get stomped regularly though the battles always looked awesome. What I always wanted was to play something like Homeworld but from the perspective of a single ship in the middle of a huge fleet on fleet battle. Many years later and I decided I would try my hand at taking that vision and making it so here we are :)

8. I opted to create a subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/battleoftauceti/) for discussion/feedback/bug reporting. It's not very active at the moment but the place does exist and I encourage anyone who is interested to post there.

9. The voice chat was added super last minute and goes out to everyone on the server currently. I intend to at least update it so only teammates hear you and ideally a way to talk to only your ship as well though that adds more complexity. I also need to add a indicator that shows who is talking. So these coming soon.

This fantastic feedback and I really appreciate the time you've spent both on the game and in posting your thoughts here. Hope I've answered everything and don't hesitate to contact me here or at any of the links in the game summary if you have any more questions/comments.

Thanks!

5. The firing angle relative to the crosshair will almost certainly change a bit so I'm not too concerned with it being 100% accurate right now. The way targeting works is that each player can target ships (q by default) to see health/crew/position/ability(if you can stay locked). If another player in your ship targets something, you will see it but partially transparent/not as prominent - bots targeting ships is what I think you're seeing as the automatic parts. Also, you will lose a target if you lose line of sight. This is allow players the chance to lose chasing enemies in an asteroid field for example. A sector radar type thing would be cool but I don't have plans for that right now though that's something to consider for the future at some point.

6. There are logs in the data folder that accompanies the .exe. You can also see the log console by hitting ~ in game. I don't know how helpful it will be for this particular problem but it's always possible. As far as performance issues in general, I've spent only a small amount of time dedicated to optimization so there will be issues but that will be improved over time.

Wow so many questions! Let me see if I can answer all of them adequately.

1. Gravity Wells are definitely in and you'll see them as only a single resource asteroid with a purple-y glow. The chance to spawn is currently naive in that it will check each type down the list with asteroid sectors first and gravity wells last. If they are all set to 99 then you probably wont see them. I'll revisit how that logic goes but it hasn't been a priority yet.

2. All sectors contain resources. The way it currently works (subject to change) is that your flagship will periodically send out a collector to each captured sector you own. More captured sectors will mean more collectors.

3. There is no hypersace damage but if you get down to less than 10% health you will have a "hull breach". This mean you will take additional hull damage over time (like bleeding out or being on fire). Since you said you were low on health, this is most likely what happened. Thinking about it, I may alter it a bit so you don't take breach damage while hypering to give you more of a chance to make it to the repair station.

4. You cannot man the flagship turrets. I don't see a need to provide this as you pretty much always should be able to hop into a ship.

Thanks for the great comments!

Yeah I've been wanting to do some kind of freelook for a while and haven't settled on how exactly I want to do it. You'll most likely be looking out of a cockpit eventually and I kind of like the idea of only being able to see what you can see from inside the ship and relying on teammates to spot elsewhere. On the other hand, it'll be a while until that might be implemented and it might not be that fun (especially not in the mean time). I'll seriously consider making the third person view into more of a freelook in an alpha patch.

The fighters are supposed to have a hard time maneuvering at low speeds so that is working as intended. While not terribly realistic, it's an effort to force them to make strafing runs (like a plane) rather than to sit in one place firing (like a helicopter which is more the intended role of the corvettes).

Thanks!

That is correct, the grid shows the boundary of each sector.

No problem :)

I'm assuming you're talking about the crosshair coloring specifically rather than the implementing the crosshairs as a whole. While it's not a monumental task, it's probably not quite as trivial as you might think.

Yes, actually setting a sprite's color (in NGUI) is a single line but the question is which sprite and which color? So we have to have some selection based on which ship the local player is in and which weapon is currently active and which crosshair sprite is associated with that. Still not terrible as much of this exists for other purposes.

So we still need the color and being able to choose mean GUI elements (NGUI helps a lot here), saving player preferences, and converting between Unity colors, hex codes, and strings. So there's a bunch of GUI control code, run time updating, and utility functions.

This response is probably way longer than it needs to be but anyway I thought it was a cool feature worth showing off!

It's still too early to be setting prices as there's still many things to be done but if sold it'll certainly be priced as an indie (i.e. not outrageous).

If you mean "Will there be gravitational forces towards celestial objects?", the answer is no. The game entirely takes place in zero gravity space sufficiently away from any significant gravitational effects.

If, on the other hand, you're asking if there will be gravity wells as they exist in Homeworld, the answer is somewhat. In Homeworld, the gravity well generators keep enemy ships from entering hyperspacing and there's a similar mechanic in Battle of Tau Ceti. Each ship gets an ability module and one such module is the Hyperspace Disruptor. This module allows the pilot to activate it (on a cooldown) to instantly fill enemy ships' hyperspace charge effectively delaying any hyperspacing by forcing them to wait until the charge goes away before attempting to make any jumps.

Thanks for the comment, hope this answers your question!