Niiice like the sound of invasions and such keep up the good work star sonata team

I'm surprised there are no questions for Jeff about Star Sonata or game development? You guys are missing your big chance to grill Jeff!

My #1 Question that i have about the game is:

Why is it so hard to make credits? In this game credits are king, and i have gone to countless DGs in warp 2-3 and gotten total crap drops.

For instance, i used to do late warp 2 DGs all the time, heres an example of what i got.

Alcatraz Pod
Soul Beam
Ariba Torpedo
Sponge Charger
Plum Jux
Andaman Shield Z BP (Seriously, who the hell uses that shit anyway...)

Capping AI is a very easy way of making money now, since everything is sellable.

And a very lengthy drawn out way aswell.

Capping is only viable at the lower levels, from level 20-500.

After that you need to make atleast 200-300mil a day to supplement GG losses and to further your character.

Bases can hardly do that now, .

Im not a basebuilder, im a combat oriented dude when it comes to RPG's. I save basebuilding for RTS's.

i might help them ;D

i have a question...

how many hours a day/week do you spend on SS?

how many lines of code are in starsonata?

wheres waldo?

My question to Jeff:

Wheres Engines 20 and whats the holdup?

well its Defently not what i expected to be i was expecting Jeff an Older man who has little kiddys running around His house Screaming Daddy Daddy I pumped on myself...but, yea, Good Question Hermes

ubers, make me harder

more higher lvl AI

uhh,

HI JEFF

q: Why is it so hard to make credits? In this game credits are king, and i have gone to countless DGs in warp 2-3 and gotten total crap drops.

I think credits are pretty easy to get if you build bases. Colonies can be very profitable as can selling stuff to AI bases. You just set things up and then your bases/slaves/colonies are making money while you go out fighting for gear and XP.

q: Wheres Engines 20 and whats the holdup?

Engines 20 are in Micron. Atlum started it but he hasn't gotten a chance to finish it. The other content guys have also worked on Micron a bit, too, but it's still not done. Since content creation right now is all done by volunteers, it's hard to put the foot down and get something like that finished. The programmers are working on features which I think are higher priority than adding new content at this point. I prefer to focus programmer energy on procedural content, like encouraging PvP, Emperor runs, alien invasions, better DG's, that sort of thing -- things that can be created with programming and game design and don't take a lot of time and effort just to make one area.

q: ubers, make me harder

The previous comment also kind of applies to the the request for more ubers, though we will be doing the alien invasions and total revamping of w4, which will have very difficult enemies in it and will be the next level up in content.

q: how many hours a day/week do you spend on SS?

Since last February, I have been spending an average of about 32 hours per week on Star Sonata and have been treating it like a full time job. (Of course, that is 32 hours of real work, no meetings, lunch or coffee breaks included.)

q: how many lines of code are in starsonata?

I don't know. How do you figure that out? Some kind of recursive grep that count's newlines in all cpp and h files within a directory structure? We have so many files in so many places... Also, would you could the lines in the xml data files that we made that describe all the items and custom galaxies?

Jeff, Up the drop rate on things.

DG's do suck.

With engine 20, you don't have to make it spiffy, just add a galaxy that has it

Then, later release it.

A simple byte count of code files, not including graphics? Not a line count, but its easier

I saw a preview of micron (seemed almsot finished) about a year ago...