So this week it’s my turn and I have a nice little collection of questions to answer!
From starwyrm:
Hours of SS played weekly?
What recent content have you had a hand in?
I think your position has something to do with the forums, but remind us all of the specifics?
Any plans on an in-game ship based on your forum avatar?
And from DragonGod:
What was the answer to the Dungeon Danger Factor competition?
So firstly, in all honestly I don’t play a lot of Star Sonata any more. I occasionally log in and do some DGs or bosses with Jeff. I don’t play a lot of games in general though, well three or four, including Star Sonata and excluding little flash web games.
Changing direction a little bit, I’m going to answer the third question before the second one (it makes more sense this way, trust me). I think your position has something to do with the forums, but remind us all of the specifics?
My position doesn’t really involve the forum and I could work without using it all. When it boils down to it, when I joined the dev team I was a rather active forum poster (had over 5,000 posts) and that trend just continued on. I now have about 7,500 post if you include that 5,000. Although I would say I don’t post as much as I used to, I occasionally follow threads and never post in them if they intrigue me. My actual role is much the same as Calypso’s; content and programming. Although I only do server sided programming. I also often to lookups on things like missing slaves or blown up stations.
Still in odd directions, question two! What recent content have you had a hand in?
Recent content… I haven’t really done a lot lately that’s hit live and players known about it. Calypso pumps out a lot of content-y things like missions and zones etc and also posts about them in blog posts every Monday, while I generally do odd fixes and miscellaneous things. I do quite a few things you never see or hear of either like documenting stuff on the wiki for other content developers or extra little things for the admin panel. To answer the actual question of what I’ve done recently, in terms of big content, not a lot. I created the DD22 boss originally and scripted it to act like an Engineer-ish as well as working on The Crucible, the mining content I mentioned a few weeks back and making various class superitems. Mostly I do little odds and sods around the place, these are the things I committed to the last patch:
- Changed the radar blip to be uniformly transparent.
- Removed the ‘experimental’ and ‘alpha’ notices from Orthographic camera, HDR and SSAO checkboxes.
- ‘Buttonified’ the undock button.
- Added support for untanglers (graviton disruptors) to optionally also disrupt tweaks (including auras etc), gremlins and critical hit effects (you’ll still do the extra damage).
- Made missions take into account required items to complete it when calculating if you have enough space to finish it.
- Made missions able to have multiple galaxy reveals on the map
- Missions now tell you how many credits you are short when you try to complete a mission that requires credits
- Beefed hullspace on Academy Freighter and Academy Thatch.
- Fixed the blue photon transwarper missions not taking the credits they should
- Fixed the mission ‘Urzod’ to kill Urzod (the giant volcom) not telling you where Honey Moon is.
- Fixed incorrect manhours on the Adonis Protector Z blueprint
- Added Zebucart variants (CS, HF and FR) to the Basic (normal Zebus) spawners in Earthforce and Celestial Gardens
I also created the sound projector items that came in with this years Halloween event, and of late have been doing a few things to spice up this Christmas.
Any plans on an in-game ship based on your forum avatar?
I do not have any content planned around my forum avatar, for a very simple reason. This is just an image of the ship Red Dwarf from the British science fiction sitcom of the same name which has been modified to be blue and flipped horizontally. The actual ship from the show is a five mile long mining ship belonging to the Jupiter Mining Corporation. I haven’t checked, but I’m pretty sure using the model or a similar model would be copyright infringement.
DragonGod’s question: the answer to the Dungeon Danger Factor competition.
For those of you who don’t know, a couple of months ago I hosted a competition about how Danger Factor works which was won by singularity. Basically, in the code danger factor is 100 times smaller, DF100 in game is 1.0 in the code. DG’s start out at the galaxyDF + a random number from 0.025 to 0.1 * 10. The random part becomes pretty small in the end, if you take a DG from a DF400 galaxy, the first stage is going to have a maximum DF of 4100. From here the DF increases between 37.5 and 62.5 per stage, averaging about 50. The clues I gave were pretty cryptic to solving the puzzle but did get there. The first clue related to PvP ranges, the second clue was towing costs.
That’s all of the questions for this week, but I did like answering them so you should definitly ask some more!
Discuss in the Forum