

Nick Smart



Creator and Developer of From The Depths

Threads: 857

Joined: Jul 2013

Reputation: Posts: 15,012Threads: 857Joined: Jul 2013Reputation: 279 #1 So a new thread for the on going work and I'm very excited about this one.



Here are the key events / plans for the next four weeks until Saturday 13th October



1) New starts: HerpeDerpeDerp and Rhea have joined the team. Both have done great work with modding and very excited to see what they can do working within the "vanilla" version of the game. Ideally this will soon include the decorations from Rhea's and Gladyon's After Cataclysm mod being added.

2) vehicle AI is being re-worked (see below)

3) Missiles with multiple gauges and more will be released

4) Some "exciting" new mini features (see below)

5) Continuing to update to the new AIs, refactor and test the code, fix the bugs in the bug tracker

6) Balancing



So in more detail



2) The AI

I'm reworking it so that it splits "naval, aerial and land" into three types of components

a) Behaviours (where we are going, and why)

b) Manoeuvres (how we get to the desired location)

c) Additional (control sails, make the tea, etc)



Some examples of these might be

Behaviours: broadside, charge, point at and maintain distance, bombing run, circle, run, evade, move submarine below, hover above.

Manoeuvres: 6 axis stabilised hover platform, boat with rudder, fighter plane, thrustercraft, yawing aerial, submarine,

Additionals: control sails, use activate shields, launch flares.



The way this will work is that the mainframe will have the AiMaster Code running within it, and you'll be able to customise what routines it has from it's own UI. I don't plan on having separate placeable blocks for this neccessarily.. if that does become the case it will simply be to "allow" these routines to run so that battle damage can disable their use. It will be centrally configured and saved.



General reasons why are:

1) to allow dev team and modders to make a load of small modular routines that can be used, swapped between, etc, quickly and easily.

2) By separating a routine into two parts it "squares" the number of combinations possible. I.e. straight off the bat you can use the legacy aerial AI in a ship, or the legacy naval AI, in a boat.

3) additional routines can be used by anyone, which means aerial AI can control sails, etc.

4) modules become testable

5) FTD and FS will use the same AI system, although FTD uses it via mainframes, and FS uses it inbuilt into the ship, as long as the captain is present.



The naval AI card, Land AI card and Aerial AI Card, will become obsolete, but will, for the sake of keeping everything running smoothly, basically do this. I use the example of the Naval AI Card here:

1) Put in LegacyFtdNavalBehaviour into the mainframe

2) Put in LegactFtdNavalManoeuvre into the mainframe

3) Load the NavalAiParameters which were set via sliders, and apply those parameters to the Behaviour.

4) Mainframe runs the behaviour, maneouver, etc, and will, from that point forward, save those parameters.

5) When asked to save the Naval AI Card will not save anything

6) When vehicle reloaded the Naval AI Card will do nothing at all,

Through this 6 step cycle the routine and it's parameters are offloaded from the card (now safely removeable from design) and loaded into the mainframe.







4) Exciting new features. Basically just adding new stuff.

a) steam powered CRAMS that fire a low detectability shell, and use steam to increase packing rate using a Steam Autoloader perhaps.

b) a LASER melee weapon (basically a laser cheese wire between two points on your ship)

c) a PAC melee weapon (a curved PAC cheese wire between special new terminators on the PAC)

d) tank treads on wheels

e) Huge extremely powerful propellers for steam crank shafts





6) Balancing

a) Plans to tied to tie the effectiveness of defensive countermeasures (like LAMs and shields) into the accelerations of your platform, so that unstable movement / high recoil / being thrown about by explosions lowers LAMs accuracy, causes shields to intermittently fail, makes guns less accurate, detection less accurate

b) This will be tied in with probably a general debuff of the APS system to make it less overpowered in comparison to other weapon systems. Recoil based inaccuracy might make a comeback. Bullet speeds reduced and fire rates reduced.

c) Aim point selection totally changed. Ultra Wide Band Radar added which can see through blocks (depth depends on power supplied to it). Radar can see through maybe 2m of blocks. IR can see hot things under some depth of blocks. Visible no depth. Aim point card will need to "see" a specific block before it can aim at it, will gridcast to check depth to block. This will lead to some interesting things like circling your opponents to get the best angles to view their internals, and building out of materials that block the view of certain modalities of detector). Special detection craft to get up close with an Ultra Wide Band radar and relay the location of the mainframe to others in the fleet.

d) Perhaps an on hull buff for weapons built on the hull, rather than on turrets. To be confirmed.

e) Balancing of the new missile gauge stuff to avoid large vehicles spamming the hell out of hundreds of tiny missiles.





Reviewed FtD on steam yet? It's the #1 thing you can do to help FtD (and future games by Brilliant Skies!), so please take the time! Bug tracker - view, "upvote", comment on and add all bugs here. Request tracker - request new features here support - private portal to service desk Website Find Reply

