markb50k

Just to keep all welcome/introductions threads together, post in here if you want to say Hi to the community. Thanks!

that is something I could tweak pretty easily, if it is agreed that it is a problem.

600m/s means 600m/cycle same for 65 deg/s jump speed is 10 sectors per cycle (thats for a 1.0xL speed ship). 3xL means 3 times faster calc time happens before the jump. so total time to get somewhere is calc time + jump time For those noticing crazy behavior for attack orders, ill see about implementing a nearest target first kind of targeting. it will add more calculations and may slow down the turns but it has its merit.

NEW galsim.zip at http://galsim.nickersonm.com/galsim.zip New Features... You can now give simple formation orders when you assign ships as escort. IF YOU ARE ASSIGNING A SINGLE SHIP you can choose any CLOCK heading (ex. 12 o'clock, 6 o'clock) and a range from the flagship IF YOU ARE ASSIGNING MULTIPLE SHIPS you can choose these formations: CIRCLE (ships are spread in an arc around the flagship at a specific range) LINE (ships are spread sideways around the flagship at a specific spacing) COLUMN (ships are spread front and back around the flagship at a specific spacing) WEDGE (ships are spread to the left and right rear of the flagship (flagship leads) at a specific spacing) VEE (ships are spread to the left and right front of the flagship (flagship trails) at a specific spacing) ECHELON LEFT/RIGHT (ships are spread in a slant with the flagship in the middle of the line at a specific spacing) Have fun.. Turg: good point on the flagship dying, but instead of creating a whole new structure that will be a code nightmare to implement, I can have the 'flagship' switch to an escort should the flagship die, and all the positions will stay the same perspective wise. Its a code nightmare itself but much smaller of a nightmare. I'll look into it.

NEW galsim.zip update at http://galsim.nickersonm.com/galsim.zip New Features: - reports from server now get placed into your "reports" directory off of your main directory. Each report you get is now put in its own file with timestamp. - a new custom.ini file is included in the zip and is to be put in your main directory. This file has defaults for all the colors I am making configurable now: EnemyColor=255,0,0 NeutralColor=255,255,0 AlliedColor=0,255,0 Debris1Color=255,165,0 Debris2Color=255,255,0 Debris3Color=255,0,0 FormationEscortColor=169,169,169 ** this is the color of escorts in the formation display FormationSelectedEscortColor=211,211,211 **this is the color of the selected escort in the formation display each color is a red,green,blue value (RGB) which Java needs to produce a color. you can look up RGB values on the web. Here is a good link http://html-color-codes.com/rgb.html

Append reports: what I can do is have the reports written to a unique filename everytime you login with a timestamp "REPORT.123145.txt" so you can keep every report you want. Allowing you to re-get old reports: Not feasible with the current server setup. If we go to a direct GUI to Engine setup, this may be possible but that is some time off. Formations/Squadrons: In my opinion there is no need for a new thing for the game to track, i.e. squadrons. The game already allows you to group ships into fleets and subfleets, etc, in any manner you wish. Plus you can give orders to groups of ships already. Plus any squadron formation is basically just a escort formation, since every formation is keyed on some single ship position. So any changes I do to formations will be done within the construct of the escort formation. So, what I will look at are some choices that are presented to you when you assign multiple ships at the same time to escort a ship. Either circle, line, wedge, ill see what I can add. They wont be too complicated of formations. If you want complicated ones where you have 6 fighters escort a frigate, which in turn escorts a cruiser, you can ALREADY do that using nested ESCORT orders. ships that are being escorted can escort other ships themselves. Consequently, you then have to give orders only to one ship. If I am not tracking with what you guys are saying, let me know. Debris color: well, i really like the color scheme I use for debris, so the question is what do I change? I think the easiest thing is to let you configure whatever color you want. So what I envision is allowing you to specify colors in a custom.ini file that would look something like this: EnemyColor=R,G,B where R G and B are integers from 0 to 255 representing the red, green, and blue components to every color. Just use MS Paint or whatever to choose the color then you can see what the RGB numbers are. If you dont specify it uses the default.

Did a good number of tweaks to combat.. Earlier in the day, I randomized the order by which units did their orders. Before the change, pretty much orders were done from oldest unit to newest unit, so the newest units always had an advantage, because their moves were done after the other guy. Now its random. Turg brought up that doing that helped but still each turn some ships are just crap out of luck because they are done last. So I fixed that too. Now each ship, as it is maneuvering on a target, if it doesnt use up all of its turn radius, it saves it up for use at the end of the cycle after everyone has moved. Any left over turn radius can be used by the unit to PIVOT further onto the enemy. So for ships with alot of turn radius it gives it an advantage at the end of the moves to bear on the enemy. Its just a pivot, the ship doesnt move any further. In order to implement some variety in dogfighting and maneuvering, I implemented a random modifier to a units turn radius. Basically, the max turn radius for a ship in a cycle can go as low as 75% of its radius or up to 150%. This is a percentage of its spec'd turn radius thus higher turn radius ships have a chance at even more of a bonus. This will also make dogfights not predictable and gives a small chance that a less maneuverable fighter could out-maneuver a more agile fighter for a short time. I also decided not to lower the fighter weapon damage rates as much as I did earlier today, but theres a catch. All LCF, BCF, and ICF are now back at max damage rating, BUT i kept the ROF at 2 instead of 4. So basically all fighter weapons got a 50% cut instead of 83% cut. In addition, Turg recommended a sort of penetration rating so for fighter weapons when they hit a ship, so I put in some code so that damage will be reduced by a ships ARMOR FACTOR which is calculated as such: (armor components to build the ship (rounded down) / chassis components to build it (rounded down)) * 1.5 The rounded down basically makes all fighter type ships have no armor factor since they all take less than 1 armor component to build them, so fighters can still kill fighters normally. Against cap ships, damage can be reduced by normally between 20% and a hardcoded max of 75% (big super ships have the 75% max). NOTE: this does not affect warheads fired by fighter type craft.

As for movements it used to be linear, but i just put a code change to randomize what order stuff does its orders, targeting and attacking, so that should be minimized. i havent done an indepth study of how the turnrates would affect things but my guess is that with dogfighting, it will have a major effect on who can get in a firing position. i wonder what will happen if two TDs target eachother and get in a dogfight. its a good test. do they get into an infinite dogfight?

two tidbits: I had a code bug that prevented ships on ATTACK, DEFEND, or PATROL order from moving towards their targets, they just sat there. if they were in range they would fire. thats why the Hammerhead killed some TDs over the last few turns. The TDs and ACTISs were just sitting there until i fixed the code then they immediately jumped into battle and the ACTIS were just in a better position to start with. Sorry about that. Also, remember the usefulness of Interdictors. It will slow down battles a bit because it will prevent tactical microjumps. It also provide a nice defense barrier for when you go to sleep.

the accuracies were pretty bad already for the HTLBs, so their improvement still makes them alot worse than TLC and LCs, but maybe we should run some tests. Position MNFRGs at around 28KM from each other, not in ATTACK mode so they dont close the gap, and let them fire at eachother. See how often they hit. IMHO if they hit around 50-75% of the time then the accuracy is good. As for fighter weapons, I saw how quickly those TDs destroyed those SACHN's earlier, like a couple of cycles, so I went with this. Now, lets test it out to see how it goes. Your TDs are making mincemeat of the ACTISs in that last turn, so they can be effective anti-starfighter platforms. I welcome your thoughts. The penetration idea has merit but I would like to get more combat reports.

We have a pretty good dogfight going on between a bunch of TDs and ACTISs. The ACTISs looked like they got into firing position first and killed a few TDs, but now it seems to be going both ways. The view of the battle is very chaotic. Its awesome!

NEW GALSIM.ZIP AVAILABLE at http://galsim.nickersonm.com/galsim.zip Changes: You can now assign a ship category to your priority targets. Current options are: Any SMALL CRAFT (any ship with an onboard size > 0) Any SMALL CAPITAL SHIP (any non-structure ship with an onboard size = 0 w/ length < 400) Any MEDIUM CAPITAL SHIP (length >= 400 and < 1000) Any LARGE CAPITAL SHIP (length >= 1000 and < 5000) Any SUPER CAPITAL SHIP (length >= 5000) Any STRUCTURE (any structure) Any LAND UNIT (when i make land units)

i upped accuracies for the following weapons TLB and HIC went from accuracy of 1 to 0.75 HTLB went from accuracy 1.5 to 1

CJ, read above, the fire rate of HTLB was messed up, its fixed now. Also, FYI, i adjusted the damages and ROF for fighter based weapons. They were insanely deadly so I tweaked them way down. I have not updated the website yet, but these were the changes: for all BCF, LCF, and ICF damage divided by 3 ROF divided by 2 so overall their weapons are 6 times less potent. They should be good at killing eachother but not so good killing big ships.

my comments: - yes, the lack of missiles definitely affects the combat, which should be something considered from now on. but with all of the salvage sitting around, you can scoop up some weapon material to restock your magazines. - ill check the HTLB fire rate but i am positive it is firing every other cycle. EDIT: yup it was screwed up, HTLBs will now fire every other turn - any other opinions on HTLB accuracy? I have been thinking of making them a bit more accurate.

Well, I did have an error last night that I am trying to reproduce, but it didnt show up again, so I'll just have to keep an eye out for it. Other than that, the turns are running VERY quickly, now, like about 4 minutes tops, so users should have no probs getting their orders in. I will look at putting in generic ship descriptions for the priority targets, but i dont think I would be able to get as detailed as you want since i dont classify the objects in the game that way. I could do things like "any small craft" -- meaning any ship that can go onboard another "any capital ship" "any structure" -- meaning any building or non-tactical unit like oil mines, assembly plants i could even do "any cargo ship" i think, which means any non-structure ship with no weapons but it starts getting hard to understand since some cargo ships have weapons like Star Galleons, so to make it work logically I would have to assign ships to each ship type which means that I would have to change those every time I added a new ship. So ill think about it. The idea has merit. ALSO, I will raise the unit limits to 150000 today.

The Null Pointer exception that I got last night has been fixed. I am still putting in tweaks to speed up things whenever I can. Turns are running again. Thanks for your patience.

i already use a radius to cull out targets, but you still have to check the ships distance each cycle. as for breaking the sectors further into squares, that is a strategy i looked at years ago but as long as people can move from square to square within the sector i would need to check nearby squares for detection, combat, etc. it got too hairy. in fact, before I even had sectors, it was one huge tactical map covering the entire galaxy, and only by splittig into sectors could my processing even work. Lodoss: im working on getting the end turns going faster so that there is more time in NON end turn mode than actual end turn mode. UPDATE: I implemented a few new enhancements in the code and they are working as planned, looks like the turn is going pretty good right now. should be finished pretty soon.

choosing tactics is something I can look at after i speed up the end turn processing. FYI, during the combat phase, even ships that are destroyed that cycle get a chance to fire. I just made a change in the code to allow for that. Previously if a ship was killed before it got to fire, it didnt, but now it does.

the length of the END OF TURN is the major focus of my coding efforts right now. I need to get it smaller. The major time users are: - processing Defend, Attack, and Patrol orders - processing Derelict Detections (still a problem, especially with the number of derelicts being created) here are some solutions I am looking at: - for Defend Attack and Patrol orders, the engine re-figures out what the ships primary target is EVERY CYCLE, meaning it has to search through every potential enemy ship in the sector every cycle and figure which is the highest priority target. My solution: once a ship determines a primary target, it will continue to prosecute that target until the target leaves the sector or is destroyed or becomes a nuetral, etc. To enable this, I plan on giving the player the opportunity to "Clear" the current target during the orders phase so it will do a reevaluation of the possible targets and determine a new priority target only when the player wants it to. That should speed things up tremendously. - for Derelict Detections I need to think a bit more, Currently the logic is so simple I dont see how I could speed it up, unless I do away with fighter derelicts but i dont want to do that. Perhaps I will only keep fighter derelicts around for a certain number of cycles. I'm still thinking about it. I apologize for how long the turn processing is going, but honestly, that is the whole point of this testing phase. I appreciate your patience and want to assure you that your efforts are helping improve this game. FYI, since i run the game off my laptop for now, and I had to leave for work, i had to kill the engine in mid turn processing, so that is why the current end turn is lasting so long. I plan on putting in some quick code changes and restarting the end turn ASAP.

wow, sorry didnt see this thread. good discussion. Some tidbits: when a weapon hits, it does a random percentage of its damage. so the full damage amount doesnt apply. Also, instead of constantly tweaking damage amounts for certain weapons, i have a single damage_modifier which is currently set at 0.5, which i use to globally affect damage rates, given users complaints of battles taking too short, i modified damage down to make it accumulate slower giving ships more time to live and the owner more time to make tactical decisions. i also tell you that you hit another ship if at least one of the weapon shots in that weapon (i.e. LCs shoot four times a cycle). if one of those hits, i tell you, but i dont keep telling you if the 2nd 3rd 4th etc. hit, to keep the battle reports at a reasonable length (bandwidth considerations). you can ALT click on any enemy to see where their shield and hull damages are at, that the only realistic feedback you should be able to get anyway. fighters DO break away from their attack and then return, usually when they get within 500m (whatever the BRKRNG is in their specs) of their target, then they fly away until the ATKRNG in their specs, then turn to attack again. Cap ships just eventually sit at the ATKRNG and dont close the distance. Its my attempt at putting in automated tactics.

we are testing combat, but the alliance code is in place, so heck, try it out too. There seems to be enough people, enemy and friendly, to create some neat battles. Idle Scholar: You are correct, the code is very simplistic when it comes to the escort-jump stuff, so I would recommend, if you have to do a 180 degree turn, I would just have the cap ship do a move order in the general direction of your jump, then go to a jump order after it reaches it. by the time the cap ship reaches the end of the move order, all the ships will be pointing in the same direction. There are other ways of doing it too, like just having the fighters dock, do a wait command that will cover the flight to the sector, then have them do the escort. I will also look at improving the logic as well, when I am not fixing bugs, etc. Appreciate the insight.

if a unit is put into escort, it will check if the flagship starts a jump order, and if so it will initiate a jump to follow suit. once that escort starts that jump order, it wont check again, however, so if you decide to cancel the jump you need to cancel it for all the ships. that logic doesnt work vice versa either.

You can now request new ships using the GUI and they will be placed in your home sector automatically and turn end. First, you must have an alive LDR to do this order. Second, put the LDR in a FLEET! only ships in FLEETS will have their orders processed. There are two ways to access this order. 1. from the main menu select the "Order Unit From GM" link. 2. select your leader unit, Add Order, select "Order Unit From GM" order type All you have to do is then type in what you want, using a number then a space then the unit type: 2 XWING or 1 NFRG etc (the unit type must be the exact abbrev for the ship class) after turn ends, the engine will take your order and place it in your home sector where i created your original ships. In your REPORT.txt file you can see how much of your allotment you have left. These orders will stay around until you have enough allowance to build the ship, so you can submit the order even if you dont have enough space but as soon as you do, they will be created.

great info. definitely drop in if you have a chance.