Mothership: Remnant: Flash REDACTED Derelict: Defender Help Reddit App Reddit coins Reddit premium Reddit 2D RPG/Trade/Fleet Combat Game. Battlestation: Omega: Aspect Tesseract: Other ZigguratUsing the Radiant is by far the best option since its disgustingly undervalued in the Deployment Points department and it just becomes.15 posts What in Ludds good name is that bounty :o And how is triple Paragon/quad Doom not even.
If this document has come into your possession outside of protocol 20 then you must destroy this document and report immediately to your unit intelligence officer for enhanced debriefing.Here be spoilers to Hidden Fun Content in Starsector. The following briefing is cleared for officers at Hegemony COMSEC level ALABASTER. If you approach the Remnant fleet after it has already begun attacking your Starfortress, it'll obviously count as "You are helping your Startfortress, which is getting attacked by the Remnant fleet" so they're going to attack the Starfortress more aggressively.
The conclusion to that exchange was to put off further discussion until “the time was right”. (At least someone around here respects important Hegemony COMSEC directives!)Upon reviewing correspondence with Our Benefactor, it appears that we first discussed stations … quite a long time ago. Which seriously is all you’re going to get out of me on that front. It was quite rewarding to see people freak out when they ran into a fully armed and operational Remnant Battlestation.And there’s more planned to do with stations in battle, of course. And we’d been planning to implement them one way or another for quite a long time.
What to do? Make the station rotate! (Like in Master of Orion 2! Which also had separate directional shields, which we also stole because it’s a great idea.) But movement is supremely important to defense in Starsector and an immobile target is an easy target. We knew from the start that stations had to rotate. This is actually largely covered by Alex’s post, Orbital Stations In Combat, but I’ll repeat a few points in my own words because they inform the artistic direction for battlestations: It’s obviously an awesome idea. But how would they work?There were a few core mechanics for stations that followed logically from the concept of stations in general and considerations of combat mechanics in Starsector in particular.
Starsector Redacted Plus Fills Or
Here’s what stations first looked like when they appeared on the Starsector campaign map:Clever modders who dug into the files will know that there was a larger base image for that station which was this:This was drawn in a fairly standard manner for early Starsector sprites heavy on pixeling, though with a touch of larger-scale geometry and airbrush shading. I’ll talk a bit more about these methods further in.Modules are also extremely helpful because they break the problem down into repeating pieces which range from small destroyer to small cruiser in size.Let’s back up from technique for a moment to focus on a question of overall composition. It’s a good thing then that there are many useful methods to make large-scale Starsector art viable: using repeating textures, digital painting, marquee and shape tools plus fills or airbrushes to form geometry and shading, and mirrored/repeated elements are all important. See here:There’s not way it would be reasonable for me to go in and do pixel-by-pixel fill for every detail of the station sprite. As sprite size increases, the area which much be drawn increases geometrically. If they’re smaller than ships, then what’s special? Nothing! They can’t move! Yeah, not very exciting — so they must be huge. Starsector sprites aren’t exactly pixel art, but they’re something closely related and as such they’re fairly labour-intensive to draw.
(It is one of my dad’s favourite movies, so I’ve seen it like a billion times. Where have we seen this?Correct! That’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. These are of course the assets used in Alex’s ISS Placeholder battlestation.I’d like to note the fundamental composition assumption made here: this is a top-down “wheel” style spacestation.
Fitting this into texture memory however? This station mockup was built of 13 separate images a few can fit into 256×256, but most are rather larger, and some exceed 1024×1024. Here’s a crop of the image at real size with a Hammerhead for scale:Drawing this would be a formidable task, but manageable with copied elements and repeated use of modules. The whole thing could be this spinning arcadey vortex of bullet-spam where you try to fly to the middle and take out the reactor or something like the Millenium Falcon in Return of the Jedi.This didn’t fly for a few reasons Starsector doesn’t quite play like that, and I made this thing a little over-huge. The dark gray portions would be areas the player could fly over, the light gray would be on the “plane of battle”. The layered PSD looked a bit like this:The idea was that there would be (*counts, gives up*) a whole bunch of separate rings rotating at different speeds, each with little gunnery modules.
Third, what if it sucked? It’d be stupid to draw this thing then find out it was a waste of time. Second, is this really where Alex should be spending his development time? Sure it looks like this would produce an epic battle, but it’s only an epic battle — not a complete game. If we raise system requirements unduly, it’s going to leave some paying customers behind and that makes somone sad*. First, Starsector is not a game aimed to be played on top-end machines.
But it’d definitely be a bad idea to deploy that much new content based on a new feature all at once. Would it be plausible to roll out an entire set of (very large) sprites and modules to roughly fit all of those at the same time as a completely new set of station battle mechanics? Maybe-sorta. This begs the question of being able to fight all of those stations in battle, each with their varied aesthetics and sizes. But once we had that, and the time was right to investigate post-v0.7 features, where would the ISS Placeholder fit into the game?An abortive effort at creating a larger cousin of the ISS Placeholder.We’ve already established a bunch of different station aesthetics with the campaign-level side-view stations. It’s way too big for a test case.(*Mod-makers, of course, have made no such implicit commitment and can do all sorts of crazy things that bring even the mightiest gaming machine to a shuddering crawl.)So this design was pulled way back to become the smaller ISS Placeholder station you saw above.
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