2023-11-30 Vehicle Entry, Location Desync

[Haxus]

I would like to address some comments I read on Steam.

1) Pirate empires could be more advanced and interesting.

I also think it would be fun to play against an AI opponent who plays and acts like a regular player. That is no small task. It is too early to decide if that manifests as smarter pirate empires or an entirely new player AI.

2) Network play.

When I referred to LAN play in the past I meant player hosted network play. The networking will use TCP/IP of course.

I am most curious which of these improvements you would prefer to see first. Each of them is a lot of work.

[Rockinsince87]

I would like to address some comments I read on Steam.

1) Pirate empires could be more advanced and interesting.

I also think it would be fun to play against an AI opponent who plays and acts like a regular player. That is no small task. It is too early to decide if that manifests as smarter pirate empires or an entirely new player AI.

2) Network play.

When I referred to LAN play in the past I meant player hosted network play. The networking will use TCP/IP of course.

I am most curious which of these improvements you would prefer to see first. Each of them is a lot of work.

That's a tough one. Both will be highly rewarding and as you said, both have high time commitments. To me being able to play with friends would be a huge selling point and most likely would be the highest demanded features.

Honestly if network play is easier to tackle, I would do it so you don't rush the pirate AI. The reason I say this is because the requests won't end there with the pirate AI...you know everyone is going to want a living universe. Meaning friendly and enemy empires that are generated and grow with the game overtime (you can use some shortcuts with their growth...as in don't have enemy NPCs running around physically building stuff). That will lead you to diplomatic relations, trade, wars, and general interaction. Yes that is a huge undertaking but it will have the biggest impact on the game a further define and solidify it's place among the other great space games.

So yeah, network first...then the rest you can release in chunks...and the rest will be history 

[Celarious]

I was working to renew the SSL certificate. It turned into a bunch of grief with the provider refusing to renew it for unknown reasons. They jacked around until it expired which pissed me off. Finally I canceled it entirely and saved a bunch of money.

There is no reason at all for my web site to be SSL encrypted. No sensitive information is ever collected or displayed there. Don't spill any secrets in the forum. ;^)

I'll reserve comment on the surveillance aspects of being tracked about the Internet by SSL providers.

Ahh fair enough! Would it be possible to redirect the HTTPS version of the site to the regular one then? Not sure if that would fix the weird error it's making browsers give but figured it's worth asking (also the wiki login seems to still be broken which me and Dean assumed was caused by the expired certificate, but you'd know best, maybe it's just the mediawiki installation broke or something)

I am most curious which of these improvements you would prefer to see first. Each of them is a lot of work.

Personally I'd prefer network play, Steam even provides a function for distributing server software which lots of games use https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/sdk/u...ibuting_gs

[Deantwo]

There is no reason at all for my web site to be SSL encrypted.

Main reason would be because all old links to the website, forum, and wiki that use HTTPS will plain not work.
Try: https://hazeron.com/

Modern browsers also trend to assume all websites should be HTTPS, so they will give some warnings which might scare the less tech savvy users.

[GaelicVigil]

I would like to address some comments I read on Steam.

1) Pirate empires could be more advanced and interesting.

I also think it would be fun to play against an AI opponent who plays and acts like a regular player. That is no small task. It is too early to decide if that manifests as smarter pirate empires or an entirely new player AI.

2) Network play.

When I referred to LAN play in the past I meant player hosted network play. The networking will use TCP/IP of course.

I am most curious which of these improvements you would prefer to see first. Each of them is a lot of work.

That's a tough one. Both will be highly rewarding and as you said, both have high time commitments. To me being able to play with friends would be a huge selling point and most likely would be the highest demanded features.

Honestly if network play is easier to tackle, I would do it so you don't rush the pirate AI. I only say this because you'll also want to add friendly empires too that you can open diplomatic relations with and do trade with and more. Yes that is a huge undertaking but it will have the biggest impact on the game, so you'll want to get that right the first time or at least plan it out in stages that makes sense and focus on that more over time.

I agree with this.  Start with multiplayer first.

I think multiplayer would be a more efficient use of development time because it would give you empires to play against without any need to program new AI systems.  That said, some form of local dedicated server hosting would be the best, but I'd be happy with LAN too.

Improving pirate empires could be done in stages.  Don't try to eat the whole elephant right off the bat.  To start with, just some alien empires clustered in sectors.  I'd mark them either as friendly or aggressive.  Each system would spawn cities on planets with a station in orbit.  Stations should allow some sort of commodity trading, buy low sell high to other friendly empires for profit.  Aggressive empires would spawn ships into your system periodically and attack your cities, but keep it basic at first - there is a lot of depth here that could be done later on.

EDIT: Oh, and Haxus, congratulations on the game launch on Steam. You've already fulfilled a dream of mine. Thanks for all the hard work! If you do nothing else, you've already made my day.

[QuakeIV]

Multiplayer for sure

[Celarious]

In terms of the currently existing pirate AI, one thing I've noticed is the empires almost never spawn in Starship currently. I assumed that's because they expect MMO always-online 24/7 timescales, whereas Starship's universe only runs while the game is up.
So if you opt to work on pirates first, in the short-term, maybe their spawn rates could be increased along with giving the higher difficulty empires some designs to use, which (I assume) would be less work than making a whole new smarter AI system?

[Neils Iyssada]

Yep, multiplayer support seems to be the best choice here. Even without proper PvE, multiplayer gives the opportunity to create our own gameplay (PvP, exploration, roleplay etc).

[Haxus]

I'll look at increasing the pirate base encounters.

[Haxus]

So far it is unanimous that network play be added first. I made that the priority.

Luckily the network code is all still intact. It shouldn't be too much work to wrangle it around into a player hosted configuration.

I suppose the preferred configuration would be a stand-alone server module that could be run on about any old PC with 9000 CPU cores.