Good thread.

Formations are useful in the realm of tactics, not strategy, but otherwise I'll have some of whatever you're smoking. I also would like tactics (of which formations would be one form) to be driven in part by culture. Ditto for operations. Is the culture careful about protecting and optimizing resour...

If it's a single-occupant fighter, power/status monitoring and control systems might be pretty minimal. If the typical fighter-sized engagement lasts < 1 minute because a fighter craft is a small, relatively very weakly defended vessel, then maybe LT should not be designed so that fighter pilots ha...

I would definitely agree that perfectly geometric formations have a limited place, more reserved for auto-pilot, robotic civs, and hiveminds. They should, like other cultural variants be an occasional-and-to-degrees encounter, sometimes being ubiquitous, sometimes nearly non-existent. One of the th...

Some of this may depend on the size of the ship you're controlling. If it's a single-occupant fighter, power/status monitoring and control systems might be pretty minimal. If the typical fighter-sized engagement lasts < 1 minute because a fighter craft is a small, relatively very weakly defended ves...

Thank you for another excellent (and timely) post, Josh. 1. FORMATIONS Without objecting to what anyone else likes, I will say only that perfectly geometric formations look to me as though the individual ships must be remote-controlled by computer or piloted by robots, rather than by living people. ...

A new update has been posted to Kickstarter. (Not sure if this one is public or only for backers -- apologies if it's not visible to everyone.) The Pine team seem to be making progress on a number of fronts: music, UI, world assets, and interaction with the world and NPCs. It's still hard at this ea...

Cornflakes_91 wrote: ↑

Thu Oct 12, 2017 1:17 pm

Flatfingers wrote: ↑

Thu Oct 12, 2017 1:16 pm

Reason #1 for circular space stations: no magical "anti-gravity" technology.

industrial stations dont need gravity, though.

and depending on who lives there they probably dont want gravity there either :V

Those are rather a lot of assumptions, aren't they?

Reason #1 for circular space stations: no magical "anti-gravity" technology.

Building a perfect pilot needs a lot of testing anyway, so why not record and use the test sessions? I think you'll find that all solutions to codifying NPC pilot expertise will need to be tested pretty thoroughly. ;) So setting that aside, I wonder if what we're looking at here is the difference b...

what i see as a bigger problem is how to store and search the recorded data sets fast and efficiently. theres a lot of possible scenarios and a lot of possible reactions to those, thats a lot of data that has to be distributed in a game (and not as an attachment to some research paper) and to be se...

what if solar systems had significant relative velocities and wormholes conserve that relative velocity on transit? :think: when you go through a wormhole between two systems with high relative velocity you get shot through the target system at the corresponding vector Ever read any of C.J. Cherryh...

Can we have a slider that determines the number of sliders offered?

I'm not very optimistic about "copy the human player" as a learning model. What if the human actions are sub-optimal? What if there are multiple humans whose ideas of "best" actions are different -- couldn't that confuse the naïve NPC learner? What if some tactical problems have solutions that no hu...

FormalMoss wrote: ↑

Sun Oct 08, 2017 6:36 am

I'm loving the chances for so many emergent gameplay elements from narky AI, to faction warefare just let rip - am I getting too excited?

IMO, no -- no, you are not getting too excited.