Space Clouds

Jey’s quickfixing session 30/07/2014

As a followup for the sucessfull quickfixing session 2 weeks ago, im starting a new one for tommorow.

For those who do not know, the quickfixing session is in essence, a day i take off my normal work and focus on fixing/adding as many small things as I can from a list I compile from player requests.

Its at my own discretion as to which bugs or features I’ll do on that day, based mostly on if its possible to do it in the day and how many people are affected/want it fixed ASAP.

For bug request, if the bug can be described precisely including a way to reproduce it in a few lines, then just posting about it in the topic is fine. Otherwise a short description and a link to a bug topic is preferred.

Similarly for feature request, if it can be described precisely in a few lines, then just write it in the topic, otherwise a short description and a link to a suggestion is preferred

Calypso Update 7.28.14

This week’s update is going to mainly be a continuation of last week’s announcement of the Ship Stats window!

As a refresher, here is a screenshot of what the window looked like last Monday when I made my announcement post.

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Now, here is an updated screenshot of what the window looks like.

As you can see, quite a bit is different! Firstly, I’ve added colored icons to the resistance table. This was done to further reinforce the buff icon colors used for resistance buffs, as well as provide a more consistent look and feel for the tables. I’ve also updated and added a bunch of tooltips to clarify just what everything means! If you hover over the text for things like Augmenter Tweaking and Neuro Tweaking, you’ll get an idea of what they do. I’ve also added in values for Ship Turning Rate and Ship Thrust.

The bigger addition that I made this week was the weapons stat table. This table will figure out how much DPS, DPE your weapons have. How much damage they do, how far they fire and what’s their recoil! It also displays an icon to denote what damage type they are! This table currently takes into account all of your augmented stats, including multifire when it calculates damage and should provide a fairly accurate look at just how effective your weapons are. However, it doesn’t currently include buffs in those stats. This brings us to some finishing touches I am planning on working on in the coming week.

This window is nearing completion, but there are a few things I have slated to do. Firstly, I need to refactor the messages so buff updates will update the weapon stats and resistance tables as well. This would let you see your resistances after popping a blocker or how fast you fire when that Rapid Attack goes off. Secondly, because it’s been requested quite a few times, I’d like to add an item tooltip for the ship’s base stats (like what you would see if you clicked on it in a trade bay) somewhere in the window. I am thinking this could be a button or on hovering over the ship’s name. Once those two features are finished, it’s time for testing, debugging and optimizations and it’ll be ready for deployment!

So that’s it for this week’s update. I hope you’ve enjoyed a further look at the ship stat’s window.

Calypso Update 7.21.14

This week’s update is going to mostly detail a new feature that will soon be added to the game! Keep reading to find out more!

Mira

Firstly, something I forgot to mention last week when I announced Mira. With Mira I added a new mission feature that is used there and will no doubt see a fair amount of using going forward. This feature allows a mission to randomly assign another mission to a player on completion of the primary mission. In short, it means we can do randomly assigned dailies (like we have for T21 and T22) without the bulky mission item middleman!

As for the new feature. If anyone has been watching the Suggestions system, they will have noticed that the status on the suggestion for Ship Statistics has been changed from Accepted to Underway. That’s because I’ve started working on it! Since this is the first user-submitted suggestion that’s started development, I think it would be interesting to tell everyone just what’s gone into that so far.

Everything started with the suggestion — which asked that we add in a way to view the stats of a players current ship; stuff like mods, augmenters, class skills, etc. From there, I made a mock-up in Google Docs. We tend to use Google Docs for a lot of stuff since it lets us work on designs collaboratively!

mockup

From the mock-up, the next stage was modifying the existing dialog so it could support all the new features. Since our GUI is skinnable, dialogs are saved in XML in the client folder. At this stage it’s all about re-sizing the existing window, adding a bunch of UI elements and positioning them properly. Once this is done we can start working on the signals from the client that will feed these elements, like lists and labels, all the useful information about your ship!

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Before we can actually display the information though, the client needs to have it — which it doesn’t. That’s because it doesn’t have access to all the information about your ship, only what it needs to render it on the screen and display things like inventory and shield bars. It’s the server that has all the stats, buffs and other information needed to figure out things like damage. This means I had to make a few new client/server messages so the client could request the required information when the new dialog is opened, as well as ones from the server to send all that information back.

Once all this is finished, it’s time to start organizing and formatting the data so it’s a bit easier to read. To do this, I went with tables for stats and buffs and a list for the important stats you want to see at a glance, like resistances. I also added icons to the augmenter stats so you can tell at a glance what a stat modifies. For instance, a shield modifier has a shield icon since it directly modifies the values on that shield! I also colored the values so you can tell which modifiers are good and which are bad at a glance! After some internal feedback though, we decided the window was a bit cramped, so I widened it a bit so you can more easily see everything in it!

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This window is still a work under construction and I am extremely open to more suggestions on how to make it even more useful for players. So definitely feel free to post feedback in the forums about this! That’s all I have for this week, I’ll be back next week with another update. Until then!

Base Rebalance

Hi everyone, it’s a surprise post from Yclepticon which means that something, somewhere, is about to get balanced!  As I hinted a few times on the forum, I have been working on a plan to rebalance user bases with the goal of bringing them up to par with all the new tech 21-22 gear that has come out over the years.  Bases are one of the most distinctive and complex features of Star Sonata, so I want to make sure to get this right.  So first, let’s hammer out what the current problems are.

Bases

Most players will agree that bases don’t feel powerful enough compared to players.  Even though their weapons are enormous, they don’t seem to pack much of a punch when up against a squad of endgame ships.  And despite special dampeners and augmenters they don’t tend to survive very long when a group of ships open fire on them.  On the other hand, an otherwise weak galaxy can become very strong if a few players show up to defend.  This is because defending players are pretty tough to kill when backed up with healing from their bases, and they can focus their damage on support classes instead of mindlessly going for the tank like bases do.

So what we have is a situation where the presence of active defenders is one of the most important aspects of galaxy defense. This is not necessarily a bad thing.  PvB and galaxy defense can be really exciting.  However, we would like to make base building more accessible to players who don’t necessarily spend 8+ hours a day online, and would be unlikely to take off work or wake up in the middle of the night to defend their bases.  The struggle for territory is an amazing part of Star Sonata and we want to bring it to a wider audience.  This means making bases stronger so that casual and less experienced players have a chance to keep their galaxies safe from PvB.

I know some of you have just put a head shaped hole in your desk after reading that paragraph.  Let me save you the breath and ask the obvious question: How are we supposed to struggle for territory if you make PvB harder?

The answer is almost too simple: we are bringing BvB to center stage.  That’s right,  BASES with frickin’ LASER BEAMS attached to their heads.

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Here are the main points of the plan.

  1. Base gear will have most stats increased by a factor of 2.

  2. You will now be able to BvB from any galaxy you own, not just from HQ-connected galaxies (must still own the galaxy for 24 hours first).

  3. The number of kits you can deploy for BvB is being raised from 2 to unlimited.

With these changes, a good PvB squad will still have no problem against weaker galaxies, or even medium-strength galaxies if the owners don’t take defense seriously.  However, if your enemies put a lot of effort into defense, BvB may be the better choice for you.  In that case, you’d better go get your Ada kits ready because you are going to need some spares pretty soon!

I look forward to reading everyone’s feedback on this project.  To get the conversation going, here are a some points I won’t cover in detail right now but which are definitely not being overlooked.

  • These changes are tentatively scheduled to go live for next universe, subject to dev availability.

  • Everything will be tested extensively before going live.  I will make an announcement as soon we can arrange for players to try out the new system on the test server.

  • There will be cheaper, disposable alternatives to endgame base gear (which I announced informally a few weeks ago).  I will elaborate on these in a later post.

  • There will be temporary outpost drones that will help you hold territory you have “liberated” with BvB.  More on these later, as well.

Introducing Mira

This week’s blog post will detail an exciting addition that will be coming to the game soon — a new custom dungeon known as Mira!

Mira, also known as Akuk’ii Suqq’ Bana in the UrQa tongue, is the site of the latest conflict between the UrQa and Paxians. During routine exploration by the Terrans at the behest of the Paxians, they discovered an UrQa stronghold under construction near the strange binary star, Mira. The Paxians dispatched a fleet and have blockaded the immediate area, trapping the UrQa inside. It is up to the combined fleets of both the Paxians and Terrans to destroy their outpost and push the UrQa back to Iq’ Bana.

This custom DG is targeted at players level 100 to 200 and contains 3 new bosses and 10 new galaxies. It will contain special unique items ranging from tech 5 to 12 from both the UrQa and the Paxians! These items will also include a brand new set of tech 5 class overloaders, something oft requested by players. The new overloaders will be added to the general dungeon drop tables, but all the bosses in Mira will have a special extra chance to drop one of them.

Players will be directed to Mira by way of a Paxian mission and the galaxy itself will have a small mission chain where the Paxians ask the players to defeat the bosses of Mira. Doing this will unlock a daily mission to kill one of the bosses which rewards a Paxian Medallion! This should encourage players coming back since they can spend Medallions on Warp Navigation training and other unique Paxian items.

Mira2

Mira was originally conceived at the same time as Vulcan and Arctia and has been a side project since I started working on those two zones. In the past few weeks I’ve been able to make significant progress on Mira (in between working on bugs and further Nexus changes) and it should be ready to go in midway this universe, or at the latest, next universe reset! This zone functions as part of the initiative to make sure there are places for newer players to go to level without getting immediately swarmed. Maybe even more important, it has the added bonus of furthering the UrQa presence in game. Considering how important the UrQa and Paxians conflict is to the game’s lore, the UrQa are severely underrepresented and easily upstaged even by some of the minor factions! UrQa from the main galaxy of this zone, if able to escape the Paxians, will roam the universe at large and make Earthforce Space a little bit more dangerous if you choose to attack UrQa ships and definitely add some UrQa flavor.

That’s it for this week’s update. I’ll be back next week with another update on what I’ve been up to! Until then, feel free to post in the forums with comments, questions or suggestions.

Jey’s quickfixing session 15/07/2014

We all know there are a lot of little things that are somewhat easy to fix, but end up forgotten in the system or ignored, so I decided I’ll try to start something.

Every 2 weeks I’ll start a new quickfixing session. Those session are essentially a period where you can shout out any and all small bugs or missing features that annoy you in the discussion bellow. On Tuesday I’ll go through the forum and fix as many of the issues listed as I can in the day.

Its at my own discretion as to which bugs or features I’ll do on that day, based mostly on if its possible to do it in the day and how many people are affected/want it fixed ASAP.

For bug request, if the bug can be described precisely including a way to reproduce it in 2 lines, then just posting about it in the topic is fine. Otherwise a short description and a link to a bug topic is preferred.

Similarly for feature request, if it can be described precisely in 2 lines, then just write it in the topic, otherwise a short description and a link to a suggestion is preferred

Only code related bug/features will be considered for now, since I do not do content. But if the concept become popular, who knows maybe a content dev will do the same !

Calypso Update 7.7.14

This week’s post is going to be exceedingly short, but will detail a little bit of what I was up to in the past week.

Mira

I was off on holiday for most of this past week (July 4th is a big day for Americans!) but that doesn’t mean I spent the entire week sitting idly by; I did manage to get some bug fixing in. There were three main bugs that I worked on.

Firstly, I added a special check in the missile AI code to stop some exploitative behavior. Missiles will now die when the ship that fired them docks at a space station. When this goes live some players will no longer be able to fire off missiles at AI bases and dock right away to avoid retribution.

Secondly, I took a look at the Deathblossom code and added a check that ensures that targets selected are detectable by the ship that’s firing the Deathblossom. This will fix the issues related to targeting a planet, using Deathblossom and hitting targets that are too stealthy for your radar to normally detect.

Finally, I took care of a minor bug with the trade window UI in relation to augmenters. Since I added the line coloring feature (for too expensive or too high tech) augmenters weren’t displaying the proper line color and were always appearing as grayed out. With the next client patch they’ll properly respect the rules that all other trade items follow.

That’s it for this week’s update. It was a short one, but I can promise that next week’s will be much, much more exciting! Until then, feel free to post questions, comments and suggestions in the forums!

Calypso Update 6.30.14

This week’s update is going to focus on some post-reset bug fixing, a few changes to the Ally AI type, an update on a mission feature and a look forward to what’s ahead for the Nexus! Keep reading to find out more.Mira3

With the reset we pushed the new Nexus — but don’t think we’re going to stop working on it. The Nexus is perhaps the most important area of the game. It’s the first thing a potential new player sees and it really needs to excite them. More importantly, it needs to make them want to keep playing. That’s why we’re committed to continually iterating it until it’s perfect. It’s in a much better state now than it was when we started this latest rework, but it’s not done yet. So expect to keep seeing Nexus changes as we move forward.

This past week I made a few changes to the Ally AI type that was developed for the Nexus revamp. I extended it so it functions with drones. Now when an allied AI drops a drone it will properly prioritize targets for both healing and attacking based on the type of ally that dropped it. For example, let’s say a pirate-allied AI drops a drone that has a healing wand and a pulse gun. If there are pirate affiliated players in the area, the drone will heal them. If there are hostile Earthforce affiliated players in the area, the drone will instead attack them. If it’s a factionless ally, say a Paxian, the drone will only heal players.

This is a pretty big change that let’s us do some pretty cool things with content. For one, we can have AI healers that will help players out. More importantly though, it further lays the groundwork for another extension of the ally system, one in which faction affiliation determines AI aggression. Eventually I’d like to be able to have neutral AI that can be attacked by either affiliation, but would lean towards one when it come to aggression. For example, one day it would be kind of cool if Space Blue AI weren’t naturally hostile towards pirate affiliated players, but Merchant AI, like Goldenboys were.

Star Sonata 2012-07-12 15-33-33-20

While I was in the drone code working on the new features, I also took care of a bug that I’m sure has been annoying some of you — drones shooting at immune targets. Along with that I took care of quite a few smaller issues as well, many of which have made their way to live servers already.

Finally, this past week I worked on an additional feature related to the autocomplete feature that was introduced a while back. There has been a lot of upset over the feature when it comes to turn-in missions for things like skills or other rewards, so I’ve added a new tag so we can manually flag some missions to never be autocompleted. This will be added in the very near future to all the missions in Staff Quarters, any of the T21 skill turn-in missions and other places like Strontium-90. Along with the slash-command toggle this should hopefully alleviate any of the issues some people have with the autocomplete feature.

That’s it for this week’s update, I’ll be back again next week with another update! Until then, as always, feel free to sound off in the forums with questions, comments and suggestions!

Monthly Event and E3 Recap!

First of all the monthly event is live! Enjoy Double EXP through Monday!

Secondly, Jeff, Ryan (SI), and myself all went to E3 this year! This was our first time meeting Jeff in person even though we video chat all the time. It was a little awkward at first, but a total blast! We explored all the new stuff at E3 and had some cool discussions on new and current things for Star Sonata!

We explored around the convention hall trying out new games and technologies. One interesting technology of note was the Oculus Rift, the 3D Virtual Reality headset. Ryan has the first version of the developer kit, and we were able to try the prototype for the second version. It was higher resolution and absolutely stunning. SI’s fun side project is Rift support for Star Sonata but it’s still in it’s very basic stages.

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We also got to play a pre-release gamemode in Titanfall (my current favorite FPS), and try out the new Super Smash Brothers games on both Wii U and 3DS. Ryan and I also got exceptionally lucky and got a rare test of Sony’s Project Morpheus (a competitor to the Rift). We also stopped by the Nvidia Booth and got to participate in a Titanfall Pro-Am competition. My team won and I got a free headset. Ryan won way too much Super Smash though. Damn Pikachu.

After the show on Tuesday Jeff, Ryan, and I had dinner at a really tasty mexican food restaurant in LA. This restaurant had exceptionally potent margaritas that nearly left me on the floor. First real life meeting with your boss and you get completely hammered… on just ONE drink? I’m such a winner.

At the dinner we discussed all manner of things Star Sonata, including a new idea we had for an alternate “speed” server with open PVP, and an insanely fast experience gaining rate. This server would only be active for a month at a time, and fully wipe at the end of a month. You’d start over from scratch each time this server resets.  Live Server bonuses would be given to people who got onto the leaderboards. Right now we’re working on our Steam launch, skin system, and catching up on some crucial bugs, but as soon as all that’s done, we’ll be discussing this idea with the rest of the team and possibly hammering out some details if it seems like an actual good idea. We’d love to know what you think of this idea!

We met up with Jeff again for a dinner on the last day of the show, where we were introduced to a really cool card game. Unfortunately my phone broke on the last day of the show so I had only one really blurry picture of the three of us as proof we actually met. Ignore the photobomber behind Ryan and Jeff, also my really derpy excited smile. Ugh.

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The next blog post you’ll see from me will be July’s Suggestion Review post which probably will be published the second week in July. See you next time!

Calypso Update 6.23.14

This week’s update will focus on some minor tweaks to the Nexus, a change to the TSL transfer cost formula and a change to the trade bay GUI. Keep reading to find out more!

TSL

I got quite a bit of developer feedback on the latest iteration of the Volcom side of the Nexus since I completely reworked it — and with feedback comes a lot of little bugs and tweaks that can be made. One of the biggest ‘problems’ I had with the new Pirate tutorial is that it lacked any sort of story motivation. So I came up with a fairly quick story to rectify that! The new Volcom tutorial focuses on running an Earthforce Blockade of the Mutara Nebula in order to meet up with the Volcom pirates. It’s not a groundbreaking story, but it definitely adds a bit more flavor into the introductory experience.

I’ve also taken care of a lot of smaller balance and mission issues that cropped up during our latest round of testing. Overall, the goal is to make it much harder to to get stuck and to encourage exploration. Even though the new Nexus has launched with the universe reset, I’ll be continuing to make changes and tweaks as more feedback comes in — so definitely give feedback on the experience so we can get it as polished as possible before the Steam launch!

TSL

As we’ve been working on the Nexus we’ve also constantly been thinking about the TSL. One thing that can be extremely confusing about Star Sonata to a new player is how to handle storage of items they don’t need on their main ship — but they don’t want to throw away. It’s not the most intuitive concept to buy a new ship, keep it docked and fill it full of stuff. We used that as motivation to make some changes to the TSL. The first went in a while back; it was changing the name of the station tab from TSL to Storage. That change was added to address new player comprehension. It’s much easier to figure out that the Storage Tab is for storing stuff, TSL isn’t going to have any meaning to them.

Secondly, for a bank, the TSL was prohibitively expensive. Moving it around the universe just cost WAY too much for a low level player for it to function as an adequate bank. The previous formula is as follows.

Transfer Cost = (Base + (# Transfers * Base Ratio)) * Base + Item Value * 0.5

The old formula counted the number of transfers you made throughout the universe and it got more expensive each time you moved it. It also charge a fairly prohibitive base cost — and it really wasn’t needed. As a team we decided if we’re going to encourage the use of TSL, it definitely needed to be a bit cheaper. The new cost formula only takes item values into account.

Transfer Cost = Item Value * 0.1 + Commod Value * 0.5

This drastically reduces the cost to transfer items with your TSL. During testing costs for ~10M worth of gear dropped from over 100M to transfer to around 1M. This change should make the TSL infinitely more usable for newer players.

simplified_trade_bay

Another very big design principle we’ve been adhering too as we’ve reworked the Nexus was to remove clutter as much as possible. We’ve been trying to cut away all the unnecessary UI elements that only serve to confuse new players. One of the biggest offenders was the Trade tab. The shear quantity of items in the trade bays in the Nexus was a bit overwhelming for new players — so we’ve been taking steps to remedy that. Firstly, Jeff worked on giving us a way to specify which categories of items should appear in the trade bays. That way we can remove item types like Misc, Base and Cloaks which a new player doesn’t really need to know about and would only find confusing. While this worked well, it didn’t entirely alleviate the confusion since it left behind entirely blank trade tabs. To fix this, I’ve worked on a change so a base will only display item tabs in the trade bay that have items listed in them! This will also make player shops a bit less cluttered so it’s really a change that affects both high and low level players.

So that’s it for this week’s update, I’ll be back again next with with another update. Until then feel free to post questions, comments and suggestions in the forums and enjoy the universe reset!