Banking stations attract wealth, which in turn attracts those who desire it. Most banking stations are therefore heavily shielded. In quaint coincidence the shield commonly installed on banking stations features a cooling pipe arrangement reminicient of the columns that adorned the banks of Earth.
I’ve spent much of the past few days optimizing rendering and gameplay performance, and have achieved an improvement in framerate around 100%. This brings it roughly in line with the speed of the previous three episodes, so if you can play them then you should be able to play Jameson when it’s ready.
<3
Farbs
This is very neat! keep up the good work Farbs!
And it is awesome that you got the Jameson Framrate (about) the same as the last 3 episodes!
I didn’t quite see it at first, but are they something similar to bubble shields?
Very awesome on the framerate improvements, I got worried you’d forgotten about us with the lack of updates over the last couple of days :P
Keep it coming :D
I really like the overall design here. And I also like how the grid makes a little plateau wherever a station happens to be.
Though I’m curious… What exactly is the grid supposed to be anyway? I get why it’s there from a gameplay perspective, but I’m not exactly sure what it is supposed to be in the fiction of the game.
Chris, I think it represents the level of danger. The lower the elevation, the greater danger you’re in.
@ josh, i Believe the grid system is random, at least with successor it appeared to be.
*disregard all that follows
high power turrets that targeted the closest ship would be awesome on stations like this or other “military” stations with valuable info or supplies inside. that gets tricky though cause then you need an aggro system (something similar to higher level ships not attacking unless provoked) and some way to take the turrets out, which currently having the stations be indestructible wouldn’t allow this. maybe a console hack (fallout style?) to bring them down for “x” amount of time and/or the option to control them if you get a friendly passenger into the station? this idea might work for scrap stations to keep you honest and paying for the parts floating around them (if you have scrap stations at all).
Well I get that when it goes flat it means you’re temporarily safe to build, though I’ve found flat zones in CS that I really can’t see a reason for off hand. Either way, there’s no dynamic change based on moment-to-moment threat level.
So then what else could the grid represent? Yes it tells you when you have a moment of safety and it also gives you a sense of movement and speed that you would not get from empty space. However, these are gameplay functions and not actual explanations.
Of course if that’s really all there is to it that would be fine. I’m just curious how it might fit into the game world since so much of it has some kind of fiction to explain on some level.
The grid in Successor is mostly for show, but in Jameson it represents sensor readings of some kind. I haven’t decided whether it’s displaying particulate density or electromagnetic activity, and I’ll probably keep that vague. From a gameplay perspective it simply indicates your proximity to ships or stations (by height), and the level of those structures (by colour). This is particularly useful when you’re out of NAV range, tentatively exploring the sector without a map.
I always just related it to flat and white = no enemies, because whenever I got into a battle, the grid would fall underneath me.
Do you plan to include any new modules apart from station modules?
Probably not in the first release – the station modules are all decorative rather than functional, which means they take much less time to code.
Will the station modules be musical in any way, like some of the ship modules are?
I dont think so, the only modules i found to be “musical” were the weapons. Girders are usually never musical (unless you count the sound they make when they are hit “musical”), so i predict none of the station modules will be musical.
Originally the only sounds you ever heard in the game were sounds that originated inside your ship. Sound isn’t supposed to travel through space, but more importantly I wanted to emphasize the sense of isolation by not letting you hear anything from outside. I made an exception for when you destroy an enemy because it felt too weird not being able to hear it, and the game needed a big payoff moment.
So yeah, since you can’t attach ship modules to yourself there’s no way to hear them :)
You could just say it’s electromagnetic emissions in the radio band being picked up from the explosion.
On the topic of the music/sound my little brother and sister were playing successor this morning, and i hear my little sister (eight) say to my brother (eleven) “keep shooting it sounds so pretty.”
So, how ’bout them Scrap stations?
MY THREAD NOW!
Did you design any more stations?
I have custom layouts for everything except upgrade and repair. Even these have big ID tags with their station type written on them though. Upgrade stations are extremely rare so I kinda like the additional uncertainty when you discover one.