Re: Recent Additions

Here, various developers can tell you all about what they're up to, so you can yell at them for being idiots. "... and there was a great rejoicing."
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pd
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Re: Recent Additions

#16 Post by pd »

Awesome, thanks. Small change, big improvement :)

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Recent Additions

#17 Post by Geoff the Medio »

pd wrote:I noticed that the system circles appear around every star on the map. Has it been considered to only show them at systems (visibly) connected with starlanes?
Done in SVN.

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Re: Recent Additions

#18 Post by pd »

Geoff the Medio wrote:One can now order buildings or ships to be scrapped, using a right-click menu options. The same menu updates to allow cancelling scrapping if an ordered-scrapped building or ship is right-clicked.

Buildings or ships that have been ordered scrapped are indicated with an icon, which is currently a big red X, as in this screenshot of the FleetWnd and sidepanel.

Ship and building have been ordered scrapped, and user has right-clicked the unscrapped building.
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Nice work. FWIW, I've used about 60% opacity for the red X in the mockups - just a little easier on the eyes.

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Re: Recent Additions

#19 Post by Geoff the Medio »

pd wrote:I've used about 60% opacity for the red X in the mockups - just a little easier on the eyes.
Feel free to replace the current X with the same thing at 60% opacity.

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Re: Recent Additions

#20 Post by pd »

Right, will update the image. By the way,
SVN wrote:-Gave systems a small but nonzero stealth, so that they don't appear on map unless revealed by something. This means most of the galaxy isn't visible until it's explored, which I think will be interesting and make exploring more fun.
-Made visibility propegate along starlanes from adjacent visible systems. If a system is within range of a detector, its starlanes are revealed, and all connected systems are guaranteed to be at least basically visible, so that their locations are known and the starlanes can be shown, and ships can be ordered to them.
does sound like more fun. Are there plans for a new release any time soon?

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Re: Recent Additions

#21 Post by Geoff the Medio »

pd wrote:Are there plans for a new release any time soon?
None specifically, although I'd like to. Depends on tzlaine, kroddn, and .Id being avaialble to make binaries, and ideally tzlaine fixing a few bugs / issues first.

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Re: Recent Additions

#22 Post by Bigjoe5 »

pd wrote:By the way,
SVN wrote:-Gave systems a small but nonzero stealth, so that they don't appear on map unless revealed by something. This means most of the galaxy isn't visible until it's explored, which I think will be interesting and make exploring more fun.
-Made visibility propegate along starlanes from adjacent visible systems. If a system is within range of a detector, its starlanes are revealed, and all connected systems are guaranteed to be at least basically visible, so that their locations are known and the starlanes can be shown, and ships can be ordered to them.
does sound like more fun.
Yeah, but was blacking out the background really necessary...?

Also, why do I have visibility of all my opponents' systems at the start of the game?

And (though you surely know this) I lose more detailed knowledge of what's in a system when I no longer have ships there. Is this deliberate, or temporary?
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Re: Recent Additions

#23 Post by pd »

Bigjoe5 wrote:Yeah, but was blacking out the background really necessary...?
Does this mean gaseous substances are not seen for undiscovered stars? Could you perhaps provide a screenshot?
Also, why do I have visibility of all my opponents' systems at the start of the game?
I would assume this is done by some kind of switch(similar to the one to make all systems explored at the start) to observe AI actions and therefore aid in AI devlopment.

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Re: Recent Additions

#24 Post by Bigjoe5 »

pd wrote:Does this mean gaseous substances are not seen for undiscovered stars? Could you perhaps provide a screenshot?
I would...but since I'm clueless, I don't know how. Anyway, just imagine that instead of the nice background with stars and gaseous substances, there is nothing. Black.
I would assume this is done by some kind of switch(similar to the one to make all systems explored at the start) to observe AI actions and therefore aid in AI devlopment.
That would be reasonable, but worst case scenario, it's some kind of bug with "visibility".
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Re: Recent Additions

#25 Post by pd »

Bigjoe5 wrote:just imagine that instead of the nice background with stars and gaseous substances, there is nothing. Black.
Well, this sucks. The gaseous substance should at least provide some rough direction and sense of the shape of the galaxy. Since stars are now stealthy, the client probably doesn't know about their existence and therefore can't place the gaseous substance texture(they are placed at star locations). I hope this can be resolved somehow.

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Re: Recent Additions

#26 Post by Bigjoe5 »

pd wrote:Well, this sucks. The gaseous substance should at least provide some rough direction and sense of the shape of the galaxy. Since stars are now stealthy, the client probably doesn't know about their existence and therefore can't place the gaseous substance texture. I hope this can be resolved somehow.
Known systems also do not have gaseous substances around them. Systems with detection however, have a coloured circle that indicates their detection range.
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Re: Recent Additions

#27 Post by pd »

Have you checked, whether they are enabled in options? Maybe they are turned off by default in your release?

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Re: Recent Additions

#28 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Bigjoe5 wrote:Yeah, but was blacking out the background really necessary...?
The "gaseous substance" locations are placed by the client using the locations of known systems, so if the client doesn't know about a system, then there won't be any gas. Things could be modified to change this several ways, although not knowing about the shape of the galaxy makes the unknown a bit more mysterious...
Known systems also do not have gaseous substances around them.
They should. Maybe it's just too faint to see for a small number of explored systems for you? Also make sure it's not toggled off in the options.

I added a check to default to turned off galaxy gas, scanlines, background starfields and optimized system rendering if your OpenGL version is below 2.0, to reduce crashes. If you want to enabled these, you should be able to in the options, though.
Systems with detection however, have a coloured circle that indicates their detection range.
I intend to add a toggle for that as well. It isn't finished yet, since it doesn't have the toggle, which is pretty necessary given how big and dominating the circles can be, so I haven't made a post about it.

Note that ships (and probably planets separate from their system, though I might have already thought about that) also have circles.
Also, why do I have visibility of all my opponents' systems at the start of the game?
This doesn't happen for me. My first guess would be that you've modified the ship hulls or parts so that default ships at the start of the game have 0 stealth. If anything has 0 stealth, it can be see by anyone from anywhere in the galaxy. If you can see a ship in a system, then you can see the ship's fleet and the system as well, although you wouldn't be able to see any other ships or planets in the system, unless they also had 0 stealth, or you had a detector close enough to reveal though through stealth.
And (though you surely know this) I lose more detailed knowledge of what's in a system when I no longer have ships there. Is this deliberate, or temporary?
This is temporary. There is presently no stored knowledge about the universe, so what you see in game is only what your owned objects can see on the current turn. There are a few ways this could be fixed. One option is to always show the name of a system if it can be seen at all (including "basic visibility" systems with fog of war scanlines) and to keep track of all systems a particular empire has seen, and to show those at basic visibility. I'll probably add something a bit more complicated, which keeps track of the last known version of each universe object for each empire, though. The issue holding this up is me wondering if I can do this in a way that doesn't require adding a bunch of extra rendering and object-getting code to handle not-visible-now-but-previously-seen objects.

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Re: Recent Additions

#29 Post by Bigjoe5 »

Geoff the Medio wrote: They should. Maybe it's just too faint to see for a small number of explored systems for you? Also make sure it's not toggled off in the options.

I added a check to default to turned off galaxy gas, scanlines, background starfields and optimized system rendering if your OpenGL version is below 2.0, to reduce crashes. If you want to enabled these, you should be able to in the options, though.
You're right. Once again, my observations were due to my own ineptitude.
This doesn't happen for me. My first guess would be that you've modified the ship hulls or parts so that default ships at the start of the game have 0 stealth. If anything has 0 stealth, it can be see by anyone from anywhere in the galaxy. If you can see a ship in a system, then you can see the ship's fleet and the system as well, although you wouldn't be able to see any other ships or planets in the system, unless they also had 0 stealth, or you had a detector close enough to reveal though through stealth.
Quite correct. The default ships at the start of my game have 0 stealth, but I thought you made stealth 0 objects follow regular detection rules? Did you change it back? That could be troublesome when there are giant ships with stealth 0 that can be seen all the way across the galaxy...
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Re: Recent Additions

#30 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Bigjoe5 wrote:Once again, my observations were due to my own ineptitude.
Updating to a new version and being surprised when it changes something in an unexpected way from the version you're used to isn't really inept...
The default ships at the start of my game have 0 stealth, but I thought you made stealth 0 objects follow regular detection rules? Did you change it back?

Currently stealth 0 objects are always visible to an empire that has at least one detector object (or possibly even if the empire has none... I don't remember exactly what the order of logic and looping is).
That could be troublesome when there are giant ships with stealth 0 that can be seen all the way across the galaxy...
Their size is irrelevant, but yes; ships with 0 stealth can be seen anywhere. This means having your ships have nonzero stealth is an important design consideration.

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