Comments on: The Dawn Star – Build #4, Wide Sectors

By: Orinn

Orinn — Sat, 24 May 2014 22:21:08 +0000

Wide Sectors, so happy to be back
Two the new thruster, the delayed one, feels so good to use. Feels like a jump to warp speed.

By: Cory Pfeiffer

Cory Pfeiffer — Tue, 20 May 2014 02:49:31 +0000

I love that the wide sectors are back, my only complaint is a minor one, you probably are tweaking it for the next build: there seem to be no juliet class ships / stations. I’ve mapped out until there were no more SOS signals. But referring to a previous comment by Zephex, the merging ships cause way too much damage.

By: Drece

Drece — Tue, 20 May 2014 02:40:07 +0000

I have followed this game since captain forever and as a devoted fan have played the latest build of “The Dawn Star”. As I have been playing the build #4, I love that wide sectors have come back into play because it was hard to swallow the idea that if I become too weak down the road it could be hard to find my way back through the gateways to regain my ship’s strength.
The lances are awesome and so are the new boosters, but the problem I find is the arrangement of enemy ships next to stations is unmatched. In certain sectors you have a very powerful enemy next to a weak station, though the station may not have a guardian for it so it can be just a navigation point. That navigation point still has a salvage yard that I could use to boost my exploration into the other sectors but I can not because all ships around that point are too higher up.
Also there is one salvage yard that is red or a Delta-Class which has its access point in a VERY narrow spot, and some of my gaming sessions would require me to dismantle my whole ship, salvage the parts I need to salvage for currency and hopefully make it to the Oxy-Station before I die. Please do fix this station and others that have this problem so that we can play the game as you intended.
Thanks for taking the time to read my comment, I hope that you find it more helpful rather then mindless rambling.

By: Zephex

Zephex — Sat, 17 May 2014 17:24:49 +0000

I love the updates for capt jameson, the one thing that bothers me with the new boosters is that when I hit another ship to fast, my ship is merged with the other enemy ship and I can’t escape unless I completely remove the merged section of the ship which will eventually get me blown in a matter of seconds before I can flee, fight, or do anything else.

anyway you can fix this problem by the next update? :3

By: Chris K

Chris K — Fri, 16 May 2014 17:26:39 +0000

In a way I appreciate the extreme simplicity of the current map. It feels a bit like navigating with a road map. It gives exploration a more adventurous feel when the tools you’re given only provide limited information and it’s on the player to make the most of that.

The actual implementation of the map is currently very awkward though, and I’ve seen a few people get rather frustrated with it. Even something as simple as supporting the arrow keys and adding a button to center the view back on your current location would be helpful.

By the way, I’m really happy to see the return of wide sectors. I always liked them better than the smaller, more focused sectors. Part of the fun for me is in not knowing what kind of threats I’m going to encounter when I go out exploring, and it’s especially thrilling when I find myself faced with enemies far better armed than myself and still manage to take them down, never more than one small mistake away from either dying or being utterly disabled

By: Farbs

Farbs — Fri, 16 May 2014 12:59:31 +0000

Hi Chris K,

Yeah, I do think about that from time to time. TBH, the reason it didn’t happen in the first place was that the current VMEDS implementation doesn’t support colours, and adding colours to flash text fields is a real pain. That said, I’m looking to redo the entire VMEDS render system anyway so yeah, this is definitely on the cards. I could even switch to using more map-like icons rather than letter too under that scheme.

By: Chris K

Chris K — Thu, 15 May 2014 20:28:14 +0000

Hello mister Farbs

This isn’t related to this build in particular, but would you ever consider making the ASCII map colored to reflect the different tiers of ships and stations? I’m sure this is something that you already considered and decided against at some point in the past, but what harm could come of making such a small change to improve the readability of the map?

I know being extremely basic is kinda the entire point of the map, but I don’t see this as a huge compromise to the original intentions, and it would definitely be useful for new players