Big Black empty sky.

[legionof1]

Okay so my first dozen or so space missions finished and i have some thoughts.

1: can we get some background or more terrain or something so we have a functional reference frame. I've had to flip on debug mode about half the time just to find the dang station. The worst example so far was a prison sat that was near upper z limit in the opposite corner from my ship. I spent about 10 mins with debug mode on before i found it.

2: Content feels kinda weak at least at middle difficulty. I have yet to encounter anything that threatened more then some downtime. Given that the default pod weapon is an aoe with really bad aim just about every pod that fires takes some minor damage so more downtime when the whole crew will have some anyway feels pretty meh.

3: I get that the pods are supposed to be the bad last resort but they have so many charges on the medkits that i feel like im directing a bunch of cyclopes. I will win by attrition if nothing else.  The gun is appropriately bad however.

4: Also minor bug, standard musket balls are valid items. 

[clownagent]

1: can we get some background or more terrain or something so we have a functional reference frame. I've had to flip on debug mode about half the time just to find the dang station. The worst example so far was a prison sat that was near upper z limit in the opposite corner from my ship. I spent about 10 mins with debug mode on before i found it.

I like the space missions lore wise, but I have also problems with the missing frame of reference. It is nearly impossible to do them without the minimap. Trying to find cover I find also difficult, because from the perspective it is totally unclear where the enemy units are (See screenshots).

Maybe reducing the hight levels from 30 to 10 would improve the situation.

[Yankes]

I once think about option to darkening lower levels of battle map relative to current level.
There some experiments:

[Bloax]

Very interesting, though it might be necessary to limit it to only darkening things by 4 levels - as mostly black is not interesting to look at.

[Yankes]

possible, it could ramp more to have bigger contrast. Question is it will be useful in that case.

[Bloax]

Depends on whether it's controllable on a per-map basis.
If it was, then some k r a z y mappers would probably implement it.

Though at that point you run into the issue that the map editor is out of date.

[khade]

Being able to see where you are in the map seems too important, it would be aggravating to have to scroll to a specific level to see where you are.

[Dioxine]

I think it is a good idea in general but 256 colors make it really hard to pull off. Darkening helps with depth perception but makes lower levels harder to see; also it interferes with light perception. Possibly only at levels -1, -2, -3, -5, -8, and -13 to create logaritmic depth but not total darkness?

[Yankes]

Right now its linear +1 to darkness per level but it could be easy change, right now I thin about adding vector of values from with engine will read bonus shade of levels under current one.
Something like that:

Code: [Select]

shadeLevel: [2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 16]
Now with something like that first and second level under will be darken by 2. two next levels by 3, etc until 9th and any lower level where it will be pith black.

Code: [Select]

shadeLevel: [2]
all levels under will be darken by 2.

something like that will be useful?

[Dioxine]

Yeah I like it! It's always better to just experiment until it looks right than to hardcode.