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The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Release / General UQM Discussion / Re: MegaMod: Hard/Easy/Nomad Mode balancing
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on: Today at 01:42:46 am
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Started by Serosis | Last post by Serosis
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And here's the first bug I've encountered in the new version of the MegaMod. The subtitles in Fwiffo's conversation are mistimed - some of them last too long, others change too quickly. Most of them lag behind the speech. I assume this has something to do with the Nomad mode? Just a wild guess, I have no idea why it all changed all of a sudden.
Also, there is another minor problem. The speech sometimes stutters when it starts or ends.
If there were a tool out there that would help me adjust the timings while playing back the audio I would do it. Otherwise I'm not touching those .ts files.
If I were to write some alternate AIs or ship variants, would you use them? I doubt I have the time for yet another Star Control project, but you never know.
If I could get the changes to only show up in the story mode, for sure.
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The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Release / General UQM Discussion / Re: MegaMod: Hard/Easy/Nomad Mode balancing
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on: August 24, 2019, 11:34:38 pm
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Started by Serosis | Last post by Shiver
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Hard mode seems like something to could use a lot of iteration to find just the right level of challenge/misery.
- Slylandro Probes dodge projectiles
Ohhhh dear. It's the super melee Slylandro, invading the campaign. This one might be more fun for people if it has more crew instead of that.
If I were to write some alternate AIs or ship variants, would you use them? I doubt I have the time for yet another Star Control project, but you never know.
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The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Release / General UQM Discussion / Re: SCII balancing "cracked"
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on: August 24, 2019, 11:12:55 pm
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Started by LotBlind | Last post by Shiver
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How many ships in total would need these AI and/or physical behavior changes? How many ships are already well balanced and played competently by the AI?
If we're just talking AI tweaks for the campaign, not too many ships...
Umgah could stand to use its cone for protection against long range missiles a bit better. They let some easily-stopped attacks slip through. It's otherwise a great opponent.
Ur-Quan fighters should be less of a liability. Give them collision proofing against asteroids and enemy ships, and longer fuel reserves to return to the Dreadnought with. They don't need to be immune to attrition tactics, but they shouldn't be going kersplat left and right so much. No AI changes needed.
Kohr-Ah doesn't need to change, yet the amount of wasted potential with this ship is staggering. Why, why does it run straight after everything it fights? It should behave more dynamically. I say that, yet they could very easily become way too difficult for most players with the right (i.e. wrong) playstyle. This would a be a low-priority ship to work on.
Orz AI is terrible, but fixing it isn't important since fights against them are optional and comparatively uncommon.
Thraddash could use just a bit more rate-of-fire and crew or something like that, no AI changes needed for them.
And VUX (already discussed) is the one real offender in the midst of this.
Are there already plans for refactoring ship physics and AI into an Entity-Component-System model and/or moving ship data and AI behavior scripts out of the C files?
I wouldn't know what that means. It's doubtful anyone has a project like that in the works, core team or otherwise.
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The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Release / General UQM Discussion / Re: SCII balancing "cracked"
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on: August 24, 2019, 07:39:41 pm
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Started by LotBlind | Last post by Deus Siddis
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It would take ship buffs or some AI tuning with ship buffs to make VUX fit in nicely.
How many ships in total would need these AI and/or physical behavior changes? How many ships are already well balanced and played competently by the AI?
I do not want to discourage piecemeal hacking, but the broader and deeper the desired changes to ship combat, the more efficient it becomes to first modernize the software architecture of the ship combat code so that these modifications become quite a lot easier to make.
Are there already plans for refactoring ship physics and AI into an Entity-Component-System model and/or moving ship data and AI behavior scripts out of the C files?
Make the laser quickly raster back and forth in a narrow cone? That'd help with shooting down nukes.
Unless the nukes are slipping in "between" the ship facing directions or avoiding the hit-scan detection by crossing the laser beam between frames, the AI might better benefit from a simple improvement of the intruder's turning speed, combined with the AI making nukes a higher priority target and/or better anticipating their movement. The nukes do accelerate and turn a bit, but they are predictable about where they want to go.
And that still assumes that the AI is smart enough to pull off the planet search strategy… but it doesn't need to be as good at it.
I do not know how the "wrapping" mechanic affects the planet position, but otherwise it should be fairly simple vector math to engage in a random gravity whip maneuver. Where it gets complicated is trying to aim for the enemy ship using the gravity whip. There's a ton of variables to getting that remotely right.
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The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Release / General UQM Discussion / Re: MegaMod: Hard/Easy/Nomad Mode balancing
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on: August 24, 2019, 04:30:13 pm
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Started by Serosis | Last post by PRH
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And here's the first bug I've encountered in the new version of the MegaMod. The subtitles in Fwiffo's conversation are mistimed - some of them last too long, others change too quickly. Most of them lag behind the speech. I assume this has something to do with the Nomad mode? Just a wild guess, I have no idea why it all changed all of a sudden.
Also, there is another minor problem. The speech sometimes stutters when it starts or ends.
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The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Release / General UQM Discussion / Re: SCII balancing "cracked"
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on: August 24, 2019, 04:29:56 am
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Started by LotBlind | Last post by Death 999
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Yeah, that's a rough one. Maybe let them escape and re-intrude? But the cruiser captain would still be able to just keep moving.
Make the laser quickly raster back and forth in a narrow cone? That'd help with shooting down nukes.
And that still assumes that the AI is smart enough to pull off the planet search strategy… but it doesn't need to be as good at it.
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The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Release / General UQM Discussion / Re: MegaMod: Hard/Easy/Nomad Mode balancing
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on: August 22, 2019, 06:49:05 pm
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Started by Serosis | Last post by Serosis
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That wasn't a bug per se, for some reason that followed from the HD-Mod and I haven't bothered to correct it.
Perhaps the HD devs were planning on adding another outtake specifically for the Umgah or they felt the Umgah needed a presence in the outtakes.
But I can remove it.
EDIT:
Well I thought it was from the HD-mod but the .diff patch I have for it doesn't show it in there so now I don't know where it came from.
In any case I removed it.
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The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Release / General UQM Discussion / Re: MegaMod: Hard/Easy/Nomad Mode balancing
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on: August 22, 2019, 05:25:52 pm
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Started by Serosis | Last post by PRH
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There was a bug in the MegaMod that I didn't report back when I played through it. The Umgah showed up in the outtakes after the game, even though their dialogue has no lines for the outtakes. They played the HWLD_PRE_ZOMBIE_HELLO_1 line.
I really want to try this hard mode along with the extended lore mod. I already saw how hard the game becomes after the Spathi ships leave your fleet as they slave-shield themselves.
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The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Release / General UQM Discussion / MegaMod: Hard/Easy/Nomad Mode balancing
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on: August 22, 2019, 04:03:42 pm
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Started by Serosis | Last post by Serosis
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So I've been in the process of making several modes for the MegaMod and have come up with a few interesting things.
Hard Mode: Which adds a degree of difficulty to various aspects of the gameplay
Easy Mode: Which removes removes degrees of difficulty
Nomad Mode: Starbase is inaccessible with a few creature comforts added in to make survival mode more tolerable
Extended Lore: This mode is where I decided to plunk down all the extraneous Lore from 0xDEC0DE's Extended Mod plus my old Thraddash survival mod
Here's the changelog with the additions for all the modes: https://github.com/Serosis/UQM-MegaMod/blob/master/MegaMod%20Changelog.txt
What I'm hoping is that we can decide what things are unnecessary or too unbalanced for the different modes.
Possibly come up with even more ideas that we can jam in there to make things more interesting.
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