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Notes on rev 6012

Posted: Fri May 10, 2013 2:13 pm
by Zireael
1) The design screen looks ugly (the slots are all on top of each other) and the Pedia at the top cannot be closed. Resizing doesn't help.
2) I can't use plasma cannon I ship part (it's not showing on the list) in spite of me having researched the tech. EDIT: Plasma Cannon II works fine.
3) Scrolling galaxy map when doing something else on the PC still happens.
EDIT:
4) I suggest making a separate tech enabling Shields, because Force-Fields Harmonics becomes a bit of a hog and MUST-HAVE-IT. However, the idea with shields being enabled later is very good!
EDIT:
5) In fact, N-Dimensional Subspace suffers from the same problem. I suggest keeping the links to N-Dimensional Structures, N-Dim Assembly and N-Dim Engine Matrix, while connecting Quantum Networking to Quantum <something> and Spatial Distortion Generation and Gateway to the Void to yet another tech, with a name incorporating space and void. Quantum <sth> could offer a small boost to industry.

Re: Notes on rev 6012

Posted: Fri May 10, 2013 2:33 pm
by Dilvish
Zireael wrote:1) The design screen looks ugly (the slots are all on top of each other)
screenshot? what ship hull are you talking about?
and the Pedia at the top cannot be closed.
Yes, I believe that's intended. Are you thinking that vertical space would be important for you to use in some other way, even after minimizing the vertical space used by the pedia panel? If you're having trouble with the middle window seeming small for the hull it's showing, that's normally an issue with horizontal space, not vertical, it seems to me.
Resizing doesn't help.
It's hard to know what you are talking about without a screenshot.
2) I can't use plasma cannon ship part (it's not showing on the list) in spite of me having researched the tech.
Until you research Plasma 2 or 3, it is entirely inferior to Laser 4, so if you have Laser 4 it will suppress showing Cannon 1. I've been thinking of adding a 'show all' button or somesuch that would show the full, uncondensed list of parts, but the actual need seems pretty low.

Re: Notes on rev 6012

Posted: Fri May 10, 2013 2:37 pm
by em3
Dilvish wrote:Until you research Plasma 2 or 3, it is entirely inferior to Laser 4, so if you have Laser 4 it will suppress showing Cannon 1. I've been thinking of adding a 'show all' button or somesuch that would show the full, uncondensed list of parts, but the actual need seems pretty low.
So the hiding mechanism works across the weapon lines too? That might become... confusing. There really should be some way to see that a weapon is hidden because of its inferiority to another weapon, either in pedia or in design screen.

Re: Notes on rev 6012

Posted: Fri May 10, 2013 3:11 pm
by Zireael
I'll say that I LOVE the shields revision, it really makes the game more challenging.

Screenshots attached (in 2 and 3 you can see another problem, the Pedia mysteriously describing Mark I in spite of me having clicked the organic hull or large hull).

Re: Notes on rev 6012

Posted: Fri May 10, 2013 3:36 pm
by Dilvish
Zireael wrote:Screenshots attached (in 2 and 3 you can see another problem, the Pedia mysteriously describing Mark I in spite of me having clicked the organic hull or large hull).
And were you not able to adjust the vertical space taken up by the Pedia entry, and then give that space to the middle panel? I know that on my system at one point I had adjusted the default size of that to be a smaller, to make more space for the middle panel (though it looks now like I reverted that to default), but I hadn't recalled needing to adjust the minimum size. I do think it would be nice if there were some smaller slot icons the middle panel could swap to if it detects that it is getting too crowded.

As for screenshots 2 and 3, that's due to a responsiveness issue and is at least partially intentional. I've noticed that on a single click (on a part or hull) the pedia entry will change to that part/hull, but it takes at least a double click for the hull in the middle window to be swapped, because that causes you to lose any previous design work you had done. I say 'at least' because the last few weeks it has seemed like it is more difficult to make that swap happen -- I think it used to be that I could just double click on a hull and that would switch the pedia entry and swap in the new hull, whereas it now seems like I need to click once to swap the pedia entry, and then double click to get the new hull to swap in. And sometimes it takes a couple tries to get the new hull to swap in. Something funky is going on there, I agree.
em3 wrote:
Dilvish wrote: I've been thinking of adding a 'show all' button or somesuch that would show the full, uncondensed list of parts, but the actual need seems pretty low.
So the hiding mechanism works across the weapon lines too? That might become... confusing. There really should be some way to see that a weapon is hidden because of its inferiority to another weapon, either in pedia or in design screen.
It took me a moment to figure it out the first time I didn't see Plasma I up when I expected it. But once you've figured it out once I don't think you forget it. Besides the possible 'show all' button, what did you have in mind?

Re: Notes on rev 6012

Posted: Fri May 10, 2013 6:41 pm
by Zireael
I was able to resize the panel with the hull and then it looked normal.

End game (as Humans) turn 442. PP 1.08k, RP 615. I haven't exhausted the tech tree yet - the added shields-related techs make it much harder than earlier. However, PP still suffers from inflation and not being really useful.

1) Terraforming and Gaia should scale with the number of planets owned/terraformed.
2) A high PP reserve should allow you to reduce the turns length of a build.

Re: Notes on rev 6012

Posted: Fri May 10, 2013 7:33 pm
by Geoff the Medio
Dilvish wrote:I know that on my system at one point I had adjusted the default size of that to be a smaller, to make more space for the middle panel (though it looks now like I reverted that to default)...
From the history, it looks like the detail panel was defaulted to 180 pixels tall for quite a while until this change that increased it to 380, though I might have missed some changes before that...

Re: Notes on rev 6012

Posted: Fri May 10, 2013 8:53 pm
by Dilvish
Geoff the Medio wrote:From the history, it looks like the detail panel was defaulted to 180 pixels tall for quite a while until this change that increased it to 380, though I might have missed some changes before that...
Whoops, looks like that snuck in when I had done the work on the parts display. It certainly causes problems on displays like above, so I just went ahead and put it back to 200, nearly its old value. If you think the 180 is a better default I won't argue.

Re: Notes on rev 6012

Posted: Fri May 10, 2013 10:57 pm
by MiniMe
I just finished my first rev 6012 game.
Took a while to get used to the new shields/armor/weapons, but i really like it! Will have to experiment with a new tech-order :)

One suggestion:
Since shields dont stack and are now limited to internal slots, perhaps the ship-hulls or parts need a revision. More than one internal slot is pretty useless now...and the mid tier hulls mostly add these.

Great work, thanks!

Re: Notes on rev 6012

Posted: Fri May 10, 2013 11:37 pm
by Dilvish
MiniMe wrote:Since shields dont stack and are now limited to internal slots, perhaps the ship-hulls or parts need a revision. More than one internal slot is pretty useless now...and the mid tier hulls mostly add these.
I think there should be at least some hulls that would allow a shield, cloaking device, and fuel cell to all be loaded up, but most of the hulls only need 1 or 2 internal slots, yeah.

Re: Notes on rev 6012

Posted: Mon May 13, 2013 12:23 am
by yandonman
I agree that with the non-stacking shields have rendered more than one internal slot useless with current content. My initial thoughts on this would be to add some additional internal-only ship parts such as a science station (adds RP per turn), command station (buffs offensive or defensive stats of nearby ships) or repair module (repairs 1 or more ships in fleet).

Re: Notes on rev 6012

Posted: Mon May 13, 2013 12:33 am
by Geoff the Medio
yandonman wrote:ship parts such as a science station (adds RP per turn)
As long as the effect doesn't stack and has some location dependence (ie. you can put a research ship over an archaeological site or at a black hole, not just anywhere, and extra ships don't add any more benefit at that location).
command station (buffs offensive or defensive stats of nearby ships) or repair module (repairs 1 or more ships in fleet).
Again, non-stacking and location restrictions would be needed.

Re: Notes on rev 6012

Posted: Mon May 13, 2013 8:40 am
by em3
Geoff the Medio wrote:
command station (buffs offensive or defensive stats of nearby ships) or repair module (repairs 1 or more ships in fleet).
Again, non-stacking and location restrictions would be needed.
A mobile asteroid proccessing facility that can repair ships while in a system with asteroids (might affect rock hulls only).

Re: Notes on rev 6012

Posted: Tue May 14, 2013 2:33 pm
by MiniMe
Noticed a minor bug, happend in 6012 and also just now in 6030 and both times with the Nano-Robotic Hull (perhaps coincidence).

These ships spawned without structure (despite them having neutron armor). Next round they get repaired by the drydock.
Not really a problem since you need the drydock anyway to build them, but it wastes one turn:

Image

Attached is the save-game, Win7, 6030 with Full Installer.

Re: Notes on rev 6012

Posted: Tue May 14, 2013 9:37 pm
by unjashfan
These ships spawned without structure (despite them having neutron armor).
This happens to bio-adaptive hulls as well. It seems this has something to do with their special ability to fully regen structure every turn.