Mannnn, I'm glad there's some sanity in this thread. Thanks Aarioch~ "Hackers and engineers"? Mark Zuckerberg's trained as a programmer. This is a lot closer to being trained as an engineer than a businessman. Does your romantic, swashbuckling idea of a 'decent' developer stop when someone makes mon...

Rule of cool works for me then~

Eh... is the primary motivation for this idea realism? I can see the positive gameplay aspects, but if we're going for realism, justifying it because the systems *aren't* realistically scaled seems like... like... it's like running a simulation at length and time scales where the model under conside...

McDuff wrote:Counter-tangent maneuver:

Shouldn't "running away" be a valid tactic for avoiding combat anyway?

Yes, and there makes some sense also to have a countertactic that may involve some sort of "boost inhibition" field

Nor do exploding markers... but then, neither does friction exist in space. I think we can afford to make some concessions for coolness!

Well... nebulae aren't necessarily exploded remnants of stars - those are planetary nebulae, and they're not always necessarily fibrous! But I do agree a fibrous structure would look cool once in a while

The Sun is pretty noisy tho, DW. It's emitting a whole bunch of radio garbage. Definitely enough to mask whatever your little fusion drive is outputting. I'm thinking about something a little more too. Like once you 'look away from the sun' your sensors take a moment (probably not more than a momen...

McDuff wrote:I reckon in reality pointing a sensitive scanner at a star will clip your readings to buggery across a pretty wide spectrum. If I were Josh I'd make the star emit a pretty large swathe of noise as well as its nice clean frequency too. That'd hide a little ship.

^I really like this solution

Sounds good~ Certainly there's no point being immersion-breaking for the pure sake of a mechanic. But a man can dream! The main attraction that the idea has for me has is that, in terms of combat and information warfare, it removes the homogeneousness of space. Something that never, or at least rare...

I really liked the new scanner, but there are one or two things kind of bugging me: 1. It seems the signals are single-mode? I think it'd be awesome if we could have a multi-frequency signature associated with the given entity - this way, if we're picking up many entities on the scanner, to the unfa...

With the time-varying signals - if signals are going to be more complex than just single-mode sine-waves (for example), would it be a good idea to have some sort of FFT functionality? I realize this is essentially the same as the spectrograph suggestion from earlier. I think there's a lot of potenti...

I think the 'unusualness' of the scanner is one of its strongest points. I like the aforementioned idea of keeping a 'current' position. There's no reason why theta shouldn't correspond with time. Ordered pairs are ordered pairs, whether on a polar or Cartesian visualization - and imo the polar plot...

I couldn't agree more. Having been playing Crusader Kings 2, I was thinking the other day that what I really like about it is that the AI doesn't seem to be a substitute for the player, but rather the player is a substitute for the AI, in the sense that we're inhabiting the place an AI otherwise wou...

Necro, but I thought it'd be better to post in existing thread rather than start another one just for this (please correct me if wrong!) Is there any possibility to modify the structure of the star clusters that are formed? For example, if I wanted to fly around in a galaxy that resembled the Milky ...

So is it possible to have a global set of information A,B,C,...,X, not all of which may be true? If the problem is that we can't model an agent's idea of information, only what proportion of "total" information they do know, then can we get past that by allowing the player (or any agent, I guess) to...