Space Opera

I'd like to recommend Geek to you. He is good people and his writing isn't half bad (especially if he's improved at all since December).

This post has been edited by gray_shirt_ninja : 14 May 2008 - 05:48 PM

I lied. I was too busy playing Colosseum to take screenies. Will try.

This post has been edited by Templar98921 : 01 June 2008 - 01:31 AM

My apologies for yet another double post, but I have an issue that needs clearing up.

All of the weapons are firing the graphics pointed to by spin resource 200. I have checked the weaps, and they all point to the correct spin. Whats going on? Is it fixable?

Yes, the above reason is why there are not screenies.

Very well. I shall have to taunt you with what won't come out if I don't get help.

Behold!

This is the Series 6 Solar Guide Frigate. A hunk of junk, but decent armor and 150 tons cargo. Quite a few flying around too....

Oh, and for clarification this is the old one:

From back when I was worse at using Strata. See, only minor cosmetic changes!

So, does anyone know whats happening?

Oh, and I'm sorry about the checks posts above. Winces. Triple post.

If you have something for me to do, PM me.

I kinda like the Series 6; looks like it means business, and looks like a real ship.

@templar98921, on Jun 1 2008, 02:34 AM, said in Space Opera:

My apologies for yet another double post, but I have an issue that needs clearing up.

All of the weapons are firing the graphics pointed to by spin resource 200. I have checked the weaps, and they all point to the correct spin. Whats going on? Is it fixable?

Multiple posts in a row are no problem in my book if there are days between them; if you had just edited the first of the three, the board wouldn't have bumped your topic up the list, and no one would have known there was anything new to read.

It's hard to tell what your graphics problem is without more detail. There's shouldn't be anything special about spin 200; in stock Nova, shan 200 just points to the Star Liner.

Best way to figure out what's wrong may be to figure out what does work, so I'll look a little in the stock Nova files and a plug of my own.... Ah. I think I see what happened. Despite the tip given in MissionComputer, the spins associated with the "Graphic" field in the weap resource start at 3000, not 200. The Nova Bible gets this right (this time):

Quote

Graphic What graphic set to use for this weapon
0-255 Use this graphic set (i.e. spin resources 3000-3255)

Now I feel stupid. Thanks.

EDIT: Bloody hell. This sounds really rude. Was certainly not intended that way. ._.

This post has been edited by Templar98921 : 17 December 2010 - 09:56 AM

Okay, it's question time!

First, a clarification. There has been no news for a while now because the hard drive in my computer died. But work has resumed, and since I have it backed up, progress has been made. My apologies for the delay.

Now the question:
Is it possible to have a movie for the holovid news system in the bar? I like this idea, but I think the only way to do it is to have a series of missions that are triggered by entering the bar. And that would not be preferable. So, is it possible?

EDIT:
Oh, and here's another pic:

It's the Mantis Shuttle!

This post has been edited by Templar98921 : 11 September 2008 - 04:26 AM

@templar98921, on Sep 11 2008, 09:09 PM, said in Space Opera:

Is it possible to have a movie for the holovid news system in the bar? I like this idea, but I think the only way to do it is to have a series of missions that are triggered by entering the bar. And that would not be preferable. So, is it possible?

No, you can only have movies with descs or in the shipyard. The holovid is just a pic and a couple of strings - no way to change it.

Okay. Thought so. Damn.

Well, I bet you all thought this was vapourware. It's not. It was just on an extended four-month hiatus. Yes, no work has been done since my last post. That's all about to change.

The reasons for this:
Two sets of exams, one hard drive failure, lots of corrupted data, an older back-up copy missing half the systems, a grey cat and a sudden girlfriend and the social life that's associated with that. Work is about to begin anew, however, chiefly on restoring what has been lost (125-odd systems and about 30 planets) before the new content. Sorry to my poor uninformed colleagues, who have no doubt moved on to other projects. Fair enough.

Expect site updates soon, too.

PS: Yes, I know I've promised screenies enough times. I know this has been revived once before. I'm not the worlds most reliable person, but, I want to do this. I promise it will get done. Sometime.

It's good to hear that. Yes I am working on something else right now(AE, OSTC and GG). Good luck and I might be able to do coding every once in a while.

P.S. Focus on your girlfriend and not on EVN it has cost me my girlfriend in the past.

Bump. Again.

Guess what! I've been stealth-developing. Mainly models, but hey, whatever you can get, right.

Here is the fruits of mah labours:

J/k. That one's about 15 months old.

Here's the rebuilt version:

Which I'm still not entirely happy with. It's the Mantis light cruiser, by the way. I haven't got a naming system for the Mantis, like I do every other set of ships.

Here's a Mantis freighter:

All the Mantis ships need slight re-texturing. I've done far more Human military stuff than the other races, like this:

This is the Vespan Shipyards T94 Onyx Light Carrier. Yes, it's not completely textured yet. Yes, those are four Silvers hanging underneath it (There's a new Silver model, too, btw. That's not it). There are two main Human shipyards, UNX and Vespan. UNX make the heavier stuff, including Super-Heavies like the UT32 and the UB89 Moonsplitter. Vespan make light capitals and anything smaller and hold the majority of the licenses, despite UNX having a higher average turnover, due the the cost of producing the Super-Heavies.

In case you think I've only been doing modelling:

That's about 80% of human space. Most of the uninhabited systems there will eventually be inhabited. I've got the rest of the map sorted, but you can't see that.

Here's a quick overview of some slight gameplay mechanic differences with Vanilla:

You cannot beat anything but the smallest military ship in a civilian ship. That's not "It's gonna be hard.", that's "It's impossible." The civilian ships suck. Paper-thin armor, almost non-existent shielding, crappy weapons. They are only good at carrying cargo and meeting deadlines...and not always both at the same time.

Actually, they are good at one other thing, the expensive ones anyway...comfort. Some of them are basically floating mansions, with no purpose other than to look good.

Good luck trying to do anything with one of those.

Before anyone decides to mount cannons bigger than the ship on them, here's some news: You can't. You might have the space, you might have the slots free, you might have the (illegal) software patch disabling weapons limitations. Hard luck. Your ship will refuse to mount the gun, knowing the first time you attempted to fire it, your crappy civilian hardpoint will collapse under the strain, your hull will breach, and you will undergo explosive decompression, your ship maybe looted, then scrapped, along with your AI.

Your AI does not want this to happen, thus no military weaps for you.

Another thing about civilian vessels; there's some production ones, like the Solar Guide on the previous page. The rest are hodgepodges of tech from all four races, mainly scavenged off battlefields or decommissioned wrecks pre-detonation or recycling. Apart from the production ones, everyone is unique. You will not see anything else flying that looks the same, you will not see another in the shipyards. They all have separate names, too.

Of course, some of them carry stuff illegal in normal space, so you might want to fly them in the less patrolled center...or do a sprint out to Machintor space, home to no laws and the ships available to those whose only clearance or license is cash. Sure, buying a Machintor ship means you merge with your AI and become a transforming nano-machine hive who becomes their own ship, you might be outlawed from Human and Man'Thor space, but it's the only near-military strength tech that's gettable without doing a main storyline.

A note: Your AI comes with you from ship to ship. If you want a ship with non-civilian tech, not including Machintor ships, you'll need the patch to run it. Which may or may not be illegal, depending what it unlocks.

Another thing civ ships will have a difficult time against is Star Eater Pirates. The biggest group of pirates in the galaxy, they are also the only people who have access to First Species War femtotech. Sure, they're still less powerful than standard military weapons overall, and no-one has any idea how they work, or they only take orders from those in Gerhold's direct bloodline, but they hit hard and fast... at least once. Femtotech weapons can be difficult to use, due to their obnoxious power requirements, but are dangerous, and hey, you're only other choice is amplified civilian weapons, and you might as well shoot cake at them.

Femtotech is also the only reason the Star Eaters have a system to call their own, Diamondhead. Diamondhead is surrounded by femtotech defences, and even joint military strikes have failed. The main four races now mainly ignore all the activity going on in Diamondhead, including the recent shipyards and their custom-built raider ships; the Hammerhead and Barracuda. Rumour has it they are now working on a cruiser class frame.

So, basically, have fun beating this in a civilian ship.

EDIT: Holy crap. 11 months? I should post more.

This post has been edited by Templar98921 : 23 November 2009 - 07:39 AM

QUOTE (pipeline @ Jun 9 2008, 05:00 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I kinda like the Series 6; looks like it means business, and looks like a real ship.

gasp pipey said something good about this project? It must be worth looking at...

QUOTE (Templar98921 @ Nov 23 2009, 04:35 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Bump. Again.
<snip>

Pictures look good, although it seems a little hard to see some parts of the ships, due to the lighting.

I've never followed a TC before, but I like the looks of this one.

I really like some of the premise ideas, like the AI, Machinators and Pirates

Once again, huge long delay between posts, but hey.

A Chrysanthemum Kossetsu Yuukaku Cruiser takes on 2 Man'Thor Nidhogg Corvettes.

Yes, those two races have undergone a massive style shift. Yes, the background was made very quickly.

That's the carrier I showed you last time, except fully textured and with the new Silver models hung from it (wings retracted, they have wings in-game).

What else do I have to show you... Aha!

The new Hammerhead model. Looks much better, but I removed the link to the now-defunct website, so you can;t see how horrible the old one was, amoung other reasons.

So yes, work proceeds apace.

Anyway, Space Opera was really only ever intended as a placeholder name, so I've been tossing up some ideas, and basically I like the name "A Banquet of Stars", but I'm sure you guys can come up with some good ones. Help, plox~

Moving on... Today we're talking about weapons! Yes, the big boomy cannons alluded to in my last post. Generally, each of the races specialises in one type of weapon:

Humans specialise in unguided projectiles. They have huge battleship cannons, similar to the WW 1 and 2 battleships, and are covered in mini-gun turrets as point-defence. Yes, I'm aware this is ridiculous from a practicality standpoint, but I think it's awesome, so there. These deck guns come in a variety of sizes, and are turretted, with varying blind spots depending on the size of the turret. Humans also have railguns, and these have fast moving and powerful projectiles, but aren't turreted, are really heavy, and have almost no spread making them somewhat hard to hit things with. There are missiles and torpedos, but they aren't as prevelent and as weird as the...

Man'Thor, who specilise in guided projectiles of all shapes and sizes. These include your standard missiles, point-defence missiles, multi-warhead missiles, teleporting missiles and teleporting multi-warhead missiles. Very good at long-range warfare, as you'd expect.

The Chrysanthemums are their antithesis. All they have is speed and beam weapons. Very hard hitting and manouverable, but very fragile, they're most certainly nothing you want to tangle with. Some of their beams include are "overload" beams, which take advantage of the beam bug to increase the damage as you fire them (very slightly, I'm wary of making these OP), but drain a lot more energy.

The Mantis have aspects of the other three, but they really specialise in the odder stuff, tractor beams, cloaking and ionization fields. This helps make up for the fact that they just don't do as much damage as the other races. The other thing that helps is their huge amount of carried ships. I mean huge.

So yeah. The Pirates and Machintor also specialise in the trickier stuff, ionization/hit and run warfare and regeneration, respectively.

And that's the post for today!

This post has been edited by Templar98921 : 25 June 2010 - 11:23 AM

Is it still a gravedig if the creator of the thread digs it up?

Nice graphics, Templar, and those weapons sound interesting. Not sure what you meant by Human weapons being impractical, it makes sense to me we'd master point-and-shoot weapons before we master guided stuff or beams. Sure, they're inaccurate, but just so damned effective!

I've got nothing on names right now, and it's hard to come up with any when I know next to nil about your TC. I'll read through this thread a bit and get back to that once I know more about it. Alternatively, you can make it easy for me and give a quick summary.

Sure, now that I removed the website, here's you quick and easy summary.

Humanity's capital world is Jerhico (spelt wrong on purpose :p), and they're centred in the south- east galactic corner. A theocratic monarchy in theory, in practice it's ruled by a bunch of corporations, with the only main power left to the monarchy being the military, which has enforced military service for a year (their 19th). Most people choose to spend the year loading at the military landing facilities, or doing other menial tasks on their home planet. Some spend it in service as fighter pilot trainees, where they are added to multi-system patrols and expected to serve in emergencies. Very few decide to increase their compulsory service by three years, and enter an officers course.

This results in a seriously well trained, but relatively small elite within the army, with the fighter trainees referred to as "squawks", from the sound the training pods make upon sealing (Their first squawk is a serious endeavour for a trainee. Most have mild claustrophobia, until the holographic projectors boot up. Sadly, the projectors don't work on about 5% of people, and there are recorded instances of people going insane in their closed metal boxes.). The rest are conscripts, serving in something similar to jury duty; randomly drawn from the population for a set period of time. These are generally disdainfully referred to "sklaves", from an old word for slave. They're not, of course. They do get paid, and receive generally good benefits.

The corporations generally treat the population pretty well, as there have been two recorded instances of a general population block bankrupting entire companies by just not buying their products. This has a tendency to work better in this universe than real life, because people have felt far more influence of the corps in their lives, and do not approve of terrible working conditions (or at least, terrible work conditions for them).

The Chrysanthemums are an empire, in which state holds absolute power. They are born within a class system, with no biological differences, but different expectations on class. The military class is essentially a group of hardened battle-addicts, by training. There's farmers, merchants and governors as well, all of which excel at the role they were born into. It is possible to be granted permission to lift your lineage into a higher class, and it's possible to have it dropped by acts of cowardice or extreme failure.

Chrysanthemum tech is well-developed, but has plateaued out. Their military training is however, peerless. Trained from birth, their warriors are pilots, gunners and commanders without match, even though their military is small in comparison to the other major powers.

The Man'Thor are a gender divided race, with the "females" of the race (classed by human as those members of the species capable of bearing children. The Man'Thor are not technically sexually dimorphic, but the classifications are often lost on any non-specialist.) staying behind and caring for the planets, while the "males" run the military. The system works quite well, with the race easily avoiding genetic imbalance with the "males" mating on their patrols with their appropriate "females". Long-term partnerships are common, but they don't fall within standard human understanding of the term.

The Man'Thor military are well-equipped, but their race makes huge technological advancements without understanding how they work particularly well, taking an essentially brute-force approach to science, uncaring about the losses money or personnel wise. This leads to scientists being well-respected among the community, if regarded as a little bit crazy, much like a ice-climber or drag racer.

The Mantis are a hive-mind species, although their ship captains and ground commanders have a degree of independence, and the hive-mind works through them. There is a Queen of the species and although she's vitally important to the continuation of the species, she acts more as a relay for the distributed intelligence net that is the Mantis.

The smaller Mantis ships aren't crewed at all, being sentient fighters. The larger ships are still alive, but are independently crewed to keep the "bandwidth" requirements on the Queen to a minimum, as most of the crew will work through the captain. The ships are just too large to do this without drowning out the crews data, so the link directly to the Queen.

The Mantis military is well trained, well armed and numerous, but they aren't making any true tech innovations any more. They lag a bit behind the other three main races as far as offensive technology goes, but they more than make up for it with numbers and defensive technology. They are the only race with cloaking.

The Keha-achog are around too, and there's a bit of back story, but that's kinda secret~

This post has been edited by Templar98921 : 03 July 2010 - 10:48 AM

The Current State of the Galaxy:

The Man'Thor and the Crysanthemums are at war. They have been for a long time, a very long time indeed. All the living members of both species cannot remember a time when they weren't at war, or even why they're fighting, beyond the list of grudges and hatred accumulated during the war. Given the length of time the war's gone on for, though, the races have come to regard each other was excellent opponents, and each treats the other with their version of respect and honour.

The Mantis and the Humans are technically not at war, but it's a very Cold War-esque situation, with each race trying to out do the other at grand civil and military achievements. Underneath all of the forced niceness lies an undercurrent of hatred, esentially based on the fact that to Humans, Mantis looks like giant man-eating bugs from their nightmares, and to the Mantis, Humans have a similar body shape and colouration to the Stalkers the hunt some of their planets, killing and eating Mantis. It's rumoured that the Stalkers were once star-faring, but their technology was lost any they were reduced to the vicious clawed predators they are now.

Yes, a hive-mind capable of racism. Whoo.

Added to this is the problem of the Storm, an unkown quantity. They emerged several years ago, seemingly bent on nothing but destruction. All they have done since is emerge, annihilate any shipping in the system, and leave. They are awesomely powerful, and seemingly unstoppable. No Storm ship has ever been lost to combat.

So yeah, fun and rainbows for all.

This post has been edited by Templar98921 : 04 July 2010 - 10:59 PM