spidernl

I like the model. Very fighter-like. Would love to replace our ships by a set of those!

Did you forget to take your dose of Prozium?

I don't mind King Arthur, no. I consider myself about as glorious as him, and King is a befitting title.

You were saying you'd ask him to give his view on those points, which were very detailed and far from fundamental, my man. Let's not discuss JoWie here, though, because it's kind of awkward and off-topic.

I respect JoWie and his knowledge. I however think that seeing as he hasn't played for a long time, he won't really be able to add much to the discussion of those specific points. Maybe I'm wrong, but it's hard to say anything about 'just how good' a specific item is when you haven't really played a single flaggame where the item was used in years Edit: Also, I agree with JoWie regarding experience-versus-money. My new item set will* have a far greater selection of items available at lower levels of experience, with a relatively small amount of very specialized/unique items at the upper levels to serve as 'carrots' for players to work towards. *) Optimism.

Bursts are the main tool of rushers. Radiating deals with bursts. Therefore, it deals with rushers quite well. That's quite logical, and will remain that way unless rushers figure out some way to deal damage through other means. Although I do think that, even if three bursts won't kill the lanc, they'll still be forced to retreat as another rusher doing the same thing will take 'em down. Edit: Also, to spice this up a bit, let me write down a few things I could do as a developer to fix this issue: 1) I could make Radiating Coils itself quite a bit less effective against bursts. Interesting, but likely to return the item to 'hardly ever used' status. We don't want that either. I prefer the current situation of it being really good against bursts (which, well, is what it was meant to do) over the old situation where it was considered useless and hugely inferior to Solid Nutronium. 2) I could change the focus of Kinetic to Shrapnel, rather than Bursts. Right now, Kinetic is hardly ever considered worth it just for its shrapnel protection. A small change: a little more shrapnel protection, a little less burst protection. Seems viable when I write it down here.

JoWie? Exactly what would you need him for? It's not like any of those points are impossible/possible due to ASSS limitations Edit: Maybe my wording was a bit unfortunate. I never meant to imply Unix wasn't discussing things constructively. It mostly referred to me, myself, trying to use the discussion to both explain my point of view and maybe figure out new solutions to problems.

Let's discuss these points in a constructive way, shall we? 1: You're very much right in saying that, right now, Radiating Coils is probably the best Signature for any basing Lancaster. Yup. I admitted it. However, consider that it was considered a useless piece of tech for many resets. Yes, things have changed, but players have also figured out just how good the item is. Letting the metagame go on for a while is the only way to balance properly. You can't hammer down the most popular item the week it's considered 'really good'. Gotta give people time to really settle on a new metagame. Find new ways to deal with things. Yanno. I think Radiating isn't significantly overpowered. It's likely to be too good with Kinetic, though, I'll give you that. If I deem it necessary, I could reduce the item's effectiveness slightly. But for now, it's not going to be anything major. 2: I believe mass lancs have been quite effectively brought down to a less ridiculous level. Having multiple lancs is still advantageous, but the days of 11 lancs on a 12-man team are over. 3: True. That's mostly not because of the items, but because the most effective builds don't need those specific items, though. At least, that's what I've come to believe. Improving them might work, but might also make other setups obsolete. Perfect balance is rather hard to achieve, after all. 4: I'm probably going to try and make running a little less effective next item set by increasing the weaponspeed-to-speed ratio. Can do this by either reducing speed, or increasing weaponspeed (or both, of course). It'll likely remain somewhat viable, though. It's a tactic, after all, and it should be an option. It shouldn't be so easy to avoid death entirely by just being faster, though. 5: Bombs should remain heavy hitters, with guns remaining superior in the "you'll always manage to at least do some damage by shooting a lot of bullets" department. Bombs doing significantly more or less damage depending on positioning is unfortunate, but does add an element of skill. Makes running away with them a bit problematic, maybe. 6: My solution to this problem - if I had the time to implement everything I'd want to - would be to reward non-dead weight rather than punish dead weight. Differing opinions, and all that. Just how I'd do that I don't know. Monetary rewards seem to be popular.

Why are you selling items so often that it becomes a problem anyways

Yeah, I'm sure it's not because the entire game is dying. Let's be honest here, if you looked at HS this summer, it sure as hell wasn't dying as quickly as other 'popular' zones. To me it seems like it's been picking up again recently, too. Been in a couple 10v10 flaggames in the last few days. Which, for the record, were regular weekdays - and I don't even play at 'peak US' times. Edit: And by the way, your last post illustrates exactly how we differ. Your solution to the 'newbie problem' is to leave them to themselves in public freqs, while everyone with good ships (and skills, I guess) would isolate themselves in private frequencies. Which would, of course, win all the flaggames. Which would then lead all the newbies to having no money or experience. Which isn't exactly going to make it more fun for them. And no, they won't suddenly go "Well, this zone is hating on me for being new, but I'm going to stick around and get better instead of just leaving!". No idea where you got that idea, but that's like saying the average newbie comes in saying "Wow, I love how my ship is weaker than everyone else's, I really want to keep playing" rather than "Wow, why is my ship weaker? /ragequit". * My solution would be to improve the evener so newbies are equally spread around, giving each team approximately equal 'dead weight', meaning good players get to make the difference - a few newbies will just be reaping the benefits of the better players' work. Don't see why that's so bad. Rewarding more effective players would also be a better method to trigger new players to learn, in my opinion. Do you also hit your dog when it does something wrong, rather than reward it when it does something right? *) try to think back to the 'before starter kit' days.

I'll be honest here. While it does look like a ship, it's not quite what I envisioned when I said "Keep the warbird looking somewhat like a warbird in style", haha. I'll be honest and say it's not my taste either, and thus I can't say I think it looks good with a straight face. However, it's still a nice attempt and better than anything I could do. Edit: Hm, judging from the file name being 'HSLULZ' I doubt you thought it looked amazing yourself. Oh well. Had me fooled.

I do indeed do whatever I want, but one of my wants is to see Hyperspace stay alive, well-populated and most importantly, fun, for as long as I possibly can. Since I'm only one person, that often involves taking feedback and suggestions from others, as I can only come up with so many things.

As for Dr Brain, in all fairness I doubt he has enough time to really judge the zone as it is right now and consider whether or not he supports what I'm doing. That's not his fault, and I'd rather he did have time, but that's not the case. I do, however, think that both Dr Brain and I are fond of experimenting with new things. Which is what I usually do with my development time. Edit: That's probably also something I can improve to make HS' development seem more.. professional: introduce items a bit more slowly so I don't have to remove items mid-reset because I changed my mind, which has happened a couple times now. Right now I do have a tendency to treat HS' pub as an experiment from time to time.

I'm sorry, but Unix's ideas I have always rejected using arguments that to myself held greater value than his/hers. That's how opinions work. I disagree with Unix's view on the zone, and how it should cater to the top players and let them rip apart newbies in private frequencies. Same deal with the 'make a subarena to split up our already thin-spread population because that will make newbies want to get better' twisted logic. My opinion is that this zone should cater to everyone. The whole 'dead weight' story in flaggames I disagree with. Yes, it can be annoying, but if the evener were better it would have very little effect. The evener, however, isn't better. You don't fix that issue by letting "pros" reign supreme (or giving them their own private playground so the most active players will be in arenas other than pub - in case you've ever paid attention to what happens when an event draws all players from pub : it causes new players who enter pub to go 'oh, nobody is here' and leave again; doesn't sound like a good way to stimulate population growth/stability to me) and letting newbies bite the dust. In other words, I respectfully disagree with Unix's views of how the zone should be. I also have no idea which things suggested by Unix would require workarounds at all. 'far as I know they were mostly "let pros band together in privs because public freqs are full of dead weight" and "let pros have private flaggames in a subarena because they're too elite to work together with 'dead weight'.". Both are very feasible ideas, but also ideas that conflict heavily with my own. Not that I'm against private frequencies, mind you, but I don't think letting them reign supreme in flaggames is the solution. If I'll ever let privs flag, their size will be heavily dependent on the public flagging frequencies'. For example, if freqs 90 and 91 both had 9 players, privs would be capped at - at most - four. A 'second pub' for a select few would only happen if we had enough population to have good (~7v7 and up) flaggames in two pubs at once*. We only rarely have that much population, and odds are that when we do, that's because a large portion of the players playing at that time enjoy even larger flaggames, and wouldn't be there for just 6v6. *) 'least, the ideal is that flaggames of that size are good. If not, bases or items need changing.

Zone staying down after a recycle - not sure why. Likely persistdata died again or some other mysterious force is behind this.

Disagree. That puts your team in a 'defensive, ready to move back' position rather than an 'aggressive, ready to push forward' position. Rushers are dropped off seconds from their goal, rather than 'almost instantly' if the lanc is further forward. Although staying behind your team might work if you're already part of a team that's stronger than the opposing team; if you want to win a more equal flaggame you'll have to do some aggressive lancing to really push hard. Least, that's my experience, and I used to be a decent lanc a reset or three ago.

A good GUI is practically impossible to make. Issues are lag (thus slow responsiveness or, worse, inaccuracy), lack of 'proper' input methods (such as the mouse), and lack of 'good' ways to display the GUI. Yes, there's LVZ, and those are a must, of course, for anything like this. However, for things like dynamic text, you run into issues such as the hard-coded limit of ~32,000 object IDs, 255 image IDs, and the fact that using such a large amount of 'IDs' requires a substantial amount of bandwidth. Now, I personally think that the bandwidth issue can be avoided by simply 'cutting ties' to any player in a GUI. You stop sending them position packets from other players and vice versa, which translates to both less bandwidth required for the server and the client. However, the hard-coded limits are an issue. At most you'll be able to 'dynamically' display 500 characters or so. And that's likely to be a high estimate. Now, a smart GUI based around 500 characters can still be useful, so even this isn't a show-stopper. The input methods are going to be fairly annoying still, however. You could use 'flight' controls (rotation, thrust), or stick to keys such as the Decoy and Brick keys. However, those are far from ideal. And.. last but not least, there's the development time that'd be required to implement a GUI. And you might just end up with something that works awkwardly and is generally worse at doing its job than the text-based system we have right now is.

X-Radar isn't nearly as big of a deal as base design. The current generation of bases has few alternate routes, generally narrow hallways and choke points you can't really sneak through. Even if the enemy team doesn't see you, odds are they'll kill you since you can't rep away their gunline.

Don't recall ever telling any coder coming to me offering help to piss off. Not even you, Cheese. Not using your 'open source super excellent' fake player framework isn't the same thing as rejecting your help. It's your own work, and I don't want/need it.

Fair point. I was planning to do that. It's another mistake I made - get a giant load of items in, develop new mechanics for them, but give none but a specific few real stats. Since that meant nothing was playable, motivation was gone sooner or later.

People can present their ideas politely, but that doesn't make them ideas I'm willing to spend my time on or that fit in MY PICTURE of what HS should be. Also, show me some of these ideas, please. And I'll give you exactly my arguments of why I didn't 'accept' them. If the ideas really were that good, my argument would likely be "Sorry, I don't think that'd be as much fun as , and I have to choose where to spend my time." Edit: Also, some irony for you: every time I implement something that people admit is (a) fun/good idea/improvement, someone from the community always goes "Yeah, I was talking about that to you, SpiderNL, x months ago." to take credit for the idea. So maybe I might've turned them down then, but their idea still got in. Or they're just trying to get credit for my or other people's ideas, of course.. Edit 2: A large amount of the time people come up with things that'd be amazingly fun or whatever, but are simply impossible. That's probably the most common reason for ideas being turned down. People don't know the limitations of the game as well as devs, pretty much. Since I do (or at least mostly do, I still run into fun little workarounds every once in a while), the ideas I do come up with are generally possible(!), which also makes them more likely to be implemented. Amazing, innit?

You overrate energy and underrate repels, my man. Tanking positron's DPS through high amounts of energy is the wrong way to go about it. Real strategy: Get repel(s), energy infusion, decent amount of energy, "okay" maneuverability (particularly thrust is fairly important to negate the effects of defensive repels and other rushers' repels pushing you back). Tank damage. Use energy infusion or repel if necessary. Leak and/or pressure enemy lanc significantly. Enemy team will almost certainly dedicate too many players to taking the leak down, causing their entire team to move back. Mission successful.

New item set = climb ladder all over again = fun. Yes, I know I've worked on 'sets before and they didn't get finished. Usually because they ended up using mechanics that were overcomplications of the existing system, with very little to gain. Going to not make that mistake this time around.

Go right ahead. I've been waiting for someone with the ability to do this to make a new set of pretty ships. JabJabJab's making some ship models too, but odds are those are for Aphelion. As for the theme I'd personally like to see.. Try going with more detailed versions of what we have. Keep the warbird looking somewhat like a warbird in style, but make it look a bit more aggressive and.. better. Same deal for the rest of the ships, really.