|
Post by pancakefury on Sept 9, 2017 15:08:33 GMT -8
This is where I lost it xDDD This is also where is stopped taking this discussion as seriously Yes, i know those things, well, some of them. Like the problem of heat disposal in a spacecraft, and the fact that lasers produce ungodly amount of heat, which needs to be dealt with. Children of a Dead Earth simulates those things pretty accurately. This is, for example, a ship i've made from a basic gunship. It has only one laser, and with even that, the amount of heat produced by the generators and the laser itself demands radiators THIS big: You could take the Space Shuttle and wrap it in those radiators like it's some sort of sci-fi suchi. And the sole purpose of this son of a gun was to shoot down enemy missiles and drones - mostly drones - with that laser. The game also let's you design your own lasers, but i never dared going there, lol. This game made me fall in love with hard sci-fi.
|
|
|
Post by pancakefury on Sept 9, 2017 13:57:08 GMT -8
Bloody hell, imagine for a moment that you are trying to float a solid uranium dildo in a lake of liquid hydrogen, ok? Obviously, on it's own accord, the bloody thing will sink instantly, because it's density is about 20+ times as big. Now, if it din't do so, and floated instead, that would be analogous to launching a bullet at the speed of light in terms of blatanly breaking physics and common sense. THAT WOULD BE MAGIC. However, if you attached floatation devices to it, sufficient to make it float, then it would be analogous to inventing some handwavium FTL drive in a sci-fi setting with expanded physics.
Goddammit, Neppi, you don't get it, you keep missing the point like it's a frikking PACT Support Ryder and you are drunken Kryska standing five hexes away, ARGGGBRAFLGROASKHDKHLKAJDHLJKW *eats keyboard in rage*.
... and yes, i did enjoy the game. Characters are lovable (exept that Mary Sue Chigara), although the battles are often excrutiatingly boring and prone to save-scumming.
|
|
|
Post by pancakefury on Sept 9, 2017 13:00:44 GMT -8
Warp drive vanishes nothing. Warp drive, hyperspace, stutter-teleportation, stargates, etc. - all of those are handwavium devices that CIRCUMNAVIGATE the limitations of real space, not break them. When such technologies are introduced into the setting, they are always assumed to be working on some extended variant of normal physics, using them to cheat or avoid otherwise insurmountable obstacles, like the lightspeed. Warp drives do so by twisting and bending the space-time in such a way, that the ship is technically standing still, but at the same time is moving; Hyperspace ones avoid normal physics by jumping into a literal paralel dimension with different metric, etc. IN every instance, however, the physics are expanded in some vaguely specified way, not broken( at least not at the levels of school physics curiculum). The problem with BULLET being launched at the speed of light (from a rifle, mind you) or even faster, is that no such technology is even possible to squeeze into the situation. It is a solid chunk of metal or whatever, traveling at transluminal speed because enough energy was applied to it with a rifle. It require outright breaking a buttload of physical rules, as well as common sense. And if we accept that, then the whole story and the entire universe loses any kind of meaning, because at the point when so much rules are broken, there is no reason for things to develop in any logical way, everything becomes an asspull.
Now, regarding earlier points:
Sharr of Ryuvia is just a genetically modified human, basically. And there is only that much that a chunk of meat can do, no matter the genetic engineering, unless we assume existence of literal magic in the setting.
See above.
|
|
|
Post by pancakefury on Sept 9, 2017 11:45:48 GMT -8
> Asaga might have anticipated that the shot was coming. Yeah of course laser light is extreme fast but hey, what is a laser weapon? I'm studying >laser technology and even I wasn't mad of it.
It wasn't a laser, it was a bullet. Which Asaga deflected with her sword, so it hit a Ryuvian crusier instead of Chigara. By all reasonable accounts, launching a bullet from a rifle at even one quarter of the speed of light should have vaporised both bullet and Sola in an instant. Besides, it's basic physics that no object in normal space can travel faster than light, right?
>So where do we want to draw the line?
At sodomising basic physics? I have no problem with warp drives and anti-laser shields and other handwavium like that, but accepting "150% OF SPEED OF LIGHT!!!111oneoneone" means just throwing any resemblance of sense into the airlock.
|
|
|
Post by pancakefury on Sept 8, 2017 7:31:05 GMT -8
>They made plenty of references to the time everything actually took if you paid attention.
I stopped giving any fucks after that episode with "OMG THAT BULLET WAS MOVING AT 150% SPEED OF LIGHT AND ASAGA DEFLECTED IT WITH A SWORD!!!!". All numbers in the game are pure asspullium with no consistency or relevancy. I should have mentioned that in the OP.
>The final battle of Liberation Day was basically 2 days long. It took Fontana 14 hours just to get the PACT fleet operational after Alice intervened with her little virus.
If i remember correectly, it was two hours. Anime engineering, blyat.
Anyhow, my point stands - they've made a terrible job portraying space. Good game otherwise, will wait for a sequel.
|
|
|
Post by pancakefury on Sept 5, 2017 12:37:34 GMT -8
>Well to be honest real scifi space settings would be horribly limiting. You'd have to take so much into consideration. I'm not talking about diamond-hard sci-fi, mind you. Such games as Nexus: the Jupiter Incident and Homeworld managed to catch the feel just right, and the hardest sci-fi things in those were that in Nexus ships had retrograde and maneuvering thrusters, and in Homeworld fighters had to refuel in the first game. And both games portrayed space breathtakingly. Especially in Nexus, you always "feel" the space, but never have to suffer through it. The game's exposition does the job: "...after nine month of flight we arrived at Sunflower" or "...with current propulsion technologies and orbital positioning, voyage from Jupiter to Pluto will take us 20 years, but with hyperspace tech, we can make it in 2 weeks" and so on. It really makes you understand how bloody huge are the distances, if even to travel withing a solar system with space-warping alien magitech you need weeks! Now compare it to Sunrider, where Icari can warp from one star to another and back before the bathroom break. Homeworld though made it through pure visuals and soundtrack alone. It embraced big empty spaces, and thre a bunch of collosal nonsense in the background occasionally, just to make you feel that much extra tiny and unimportant. Nexus also did that, just as succesfully, it's just that instead of nonsense, it had actual planets. Some games take those limitations and roll with them, building entire gamepllay mechanics around them. KSP and Children of a Dead Earth do so with orbital mechanics and weight limitations in space travel, COADE adds combat and designing armour and weapons into the mix as well. > Also Mass Effect Andromeda tried to do something similar in preproduction and determined that a vast empty space was honestly not fun. It's >what No Man's Sky turned out to be on release. The failure of NMS was that it polluted all that space with a butt-load of same-ish crap. It was repetative and the space travel itself was just meh. The space was vast, sure, but just like in Sunrider, at no time would you feel like you are in actual space, exactly because of that. Fuck, Freelancer made a better job than NMS in that regard. To portray the space correctly, one does not need to force the player to slog through large open spaces hours on end, in fact, a lot can be done with as much as just adding a calendar and modifying the date. It's something they did in Space Rangers games. The flight from one system to another takes minutes, but in in-game time, it could take weeks. Usual delivery quest gives you about 90 days of in-game time to complete on average. And when you hyper-jump from one pace to another, you can not see the date at all, so there is always the element of surprise when you emerge from hyperspace - "ooh, it took THAT long. I better kick the engine into overdrive". Battles also lasted days. You could sometimes fail an assasination contract simply because it took you a week or two just to bring the target's health into the reds and you've missed the deadline because of that. The spaceship design is also important in this regard, one could use that as well. Ships in Sunrider look more "-ship" than "space-" if you know what i mean. Decks laid out in parallel to the vector of thrust, no propellant tanks even SUGGESTED anywhere, fucking superstructures, etc. NO RADIATORS too. In space, one of the biggest problem is waste heat disposal, since in vacuum, an object can only cool itself down through radiating the heat away in the form of light (visible or invisible), which is inefficient as hell. If one takes that one consideration into account, one can design some cool looking spaceships accentuating with those designs that "Spce is NOT an ocean". If LiS did as much as added messages like "You want to jump to Ongess. It Will take you 2 months and 23 days to arrive" during mission selection, that alone would do wonders. Of course, that would require to write the story with regards to such travel times, but that will only benefit it, methinks.
|
|
|
Post by pancakefury on Sept 5, 2017 8:16:52 GMT -8
Just a random thought that visited me today: A lot of games set in space fail miserably to capture the feeling of it. For example, in Sunrider, at no point in time do we feel the vast, eldritch void that surrounds us. People zoom around the galaxy like it's nothing, to travel from one star to another requires days at most, and the fact that ryders can go hand-to-hand Mortal Kombat kills the feel even more. Instant FTL communication. Spaceships don't really feel like spaceships, more like aircraft carriers in vacuum. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is hard to pull off. All in all, the game could be set entirely on one planet, and it wouldn't make a lick of difference, really.
|
|
|
Post by pancakefury on Sept 2, 2017 10:12:28 GMT -8
Also, as long as you're always watching, Mags, Is there a sunrider discord channel? I've considered making an unofficial one, but if there is an actual one out there, that would be preferable. Oh, and the server is up and (mostly) running. Any interested parties will have to PM me for the IP, because I'm not slapping that information on the internet. That's a terrible idea. You'll need this btw: Mods!I second the question about the Discord channel. It must be a thing.
|
|
|
Post by pancakefury on Sept 2, 2017 5:07:05 GMT -8
>That said the Icari supporters on this forum are near rabid so be careful Well, i'm an Icariote myself, but good god is she useless. Or maybe it's just me and my shooty playstyle. That's why combat-wise, Sola is my favourite.
|
|
|
Post by pancakefury on Sept 2, 2017 4:55:01 GMT -8
i mean prototypes want to stop crow, but alice sorta messed up alpha's plans cause she hates humans for killing arcadius. Was Arcadius a prototype as well?
|
|
|
Post by pancakefury on Sept 2, 2017 1:14:31 GMT -8
Icari is great idk what you are talking about. About how she would get roflstomped on every second/third turn, because for her to do any damage she needs to get right into the enemy midst, and people would just gun her down point-blank? She is basically an overglorified missile on any difficulty past Visual Novel, imho.
|
|
|
Post by pancakefury on Sept 1, 2017 13:31:06 GMT -8
So i've been researching some space-themed board-games for interesting combat mechanics i could use in my fan-game, and i've found this: So i thought: Hey, remember how utterly useless Icari was when dealing with anything that isn't a one-hit wonder ryder? With a combat mechanic like that, she could be of some use against ships as well. We just need to make some modifications, for example, enemies would receive a penalty to hitting her while she is latched onto an enemy ship, and the ship itself would receive some damage each turn, or maybe it would lose some of it's armor as she stomps around, in addition to increased cost of firing it's weapons (or maybe the weapons could be disabled altogether, although that can make her a bit imba.) This boardgame (it's free, by the way) also has some interexting mechanics regarding module damage for ships, i advice to all interested in modding take a look at it, i'll definitely be borrowing from it heavily in my project.
|
|
|
Post by pancakefury on Aug 26, 2017 9:17:14 GMT -8
>how the sunrider crew survived
Well, it barely did. How many men that blasted boat had on board and how many we know have survived? Seven out of how many, hundreds? I think that PACT ship was distracted with blasting other life pods from the sky (potentially hundreds of them), which allowed the girls to snatch the important ones away.
|
|
|
Post by pancakefury on Aug 22, 2017 14:09:24 GMT -8
Well, for starters, what are you planning to do exactly? ... Well, basically the same kind of game - VN/2D tactical TBS, but on different engine (Godot Engine, to be precise), with remade combat system (i plan to get rid of the RNG element, or just reduce it's tyranny drastically), potentially-maybe-propably-yet-to-be-decided featuring a different set of main characters (like a pirate band or a mercenary company). Also, i'll try to expand tactical opportunities on the battlefield, like the ability for ryders to take cover behind ship wrecks, in-combat ressuply for missile-bearing ryders, and so on. Thank you for your answer, tho, it's great news.
|
|
|
Post by pancakefury on Aug 22, 2017 13:57:56 GMT -8
Judging by how the LD ended there is enough potential to make not one, but ten additional arcs. Or, at the very least, two - first, they hunt down the remaining prototypes, then face the Ryuvian guy.
|
|
|
Post by pancakefury on Aug 22, 2017 12:50:18 GMT -8
So, i've played through all the games and i must say that i'm totally in love with this franchise. There is just something about it that i can't simply put my finger on - it's a bit of everything: the story, the aesthetics, the ever-present (and quite pleasant) amateurish feel to it, gee, you name it. But there are also things that i absolutely bloody hate, HATE, HATE, like the combat system. Combat system can french-kiss a voracious oceanic lamprey-eel, while dancing tarantella on broken glass. While being on fire. Strong element of chance worked in such games as Battle For Wesnoth, because there you had a lot of space to maneuver (literally and figuratively) in case an attack goes wrong, but here? You just throw a handfull of dice at your enemy, one by one, and hope that it will not hurt much when they throw a bucketfull back in your face. Because if it does, it's reload time! Also, Ren'py is frustratingly slow in combar mode, for whatever reason. So i decided, that i will at the very least attempt to make my own version of Sunrider, a little fan-spin-off, to adress those issues and see how it will work out.
At this stage, i only have the most general idea of what i want, mostly in regards to combat system and such. But i wanted to know first: when making a fan-game, which assets of the original game am i allowed to use, if any? It would be a pain in the ass to redraw all those units and all.
|
|