I hope everyone is having fun in the new universe.

Last week, I implemented and added the "no save" flag for all spawning things that spawn once an hour or faster. Already I have noticed that things look smoother on the server without having to keep track of all those buggers. I did a few miscellaneous things that were noted in the patch notes here http://www.starsonata.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16590 and here http://www.starsonata.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16660, as well as undertook a facelift for the website.

I have been working on the code for fighters and fighter bays, and realized that it would be very easy to abstract it and get missiles and missile launchers for free. The fighters will be like drones, except that a fighter bay is required to launch them. You use the different fighters you have on board and they enter a queue in your fighter bay that launches them one at a time at whatever rate the fighter bay is capable of. Different fighter bays will launch the fighters in different directions, forward, backwards, or turreted (facing your enemy), and can have electric slingshots or not to give fighters initial velocity. Fighters will use up RC points for their owner or the bases owner if the fighters are on a base, but NPC's with fighters will be able to launch as many as they have onboard. Fighters will have a time limit, after which they have to return to the bay that launched them and will have no stasis ability if they die. Guided missiles will be fighters that don't return and that have a new type of item called a warhead on them that will detonate and do a large amount of damage if they get within proximity of their target.

I will program bases to deploy fighters and launch missiles automatically if they get attacked, so a player doesn't have to be docked in the base using the items, although a player docked in the base could help by selecting the best fighters or missiles to use rather than leave it up to the bases AI to choose.

I know you all will be excited that I also finished up our accounting for last year and sent all the summaries to our tax person.

Voom just sent me a suggestion that I like a lot about the ability not to unaug ships, but to destroy the augs on ships. I can get behind this because it will be good for the economy rather than bad. I'm going to try to add this really quickly tonight and put it in.

This week I hope to keep working on the fighters which are needed for beefing bases and also for one of the new classes and then when I'm done with them do the rest of the code we need for the 4 new classes. Hopefully we can get the new classes in sometime during this universe.

Also, it's become clear that there are just a ton of AI's wondering around the universe. The way we spawn AI's is to spawn a number proportional to the number of galaxies. I put in a multiplier this universe to cut that number by half, but even so, the increase of galaxies and the fact that certain spawning areas haven't increase *that* much in size has made things seem a little crowded. I've experimented a bit on test and picked a better number, so next universe will have a lot less random roamers around.

Have I told you lately that I love you

Awesome, just totally awesome

Wow, this almost makes me want to come back!

Nice work Jeff, you really seem to be pushing SS forward again. I can't wait to see what else is put in during the next few months.

How about making piracy work on slaves, I mean CG and control skills work, why not the owners piracy skill? Any word on the DG drop tables? Clearly it has been demonstrated, that they are broken. And what about the new god augs, any word?
Other then that it's pretty smooth.

I think I gave the slaves half their owners piracy skill, too. Still looking at the DG drop situation. You'll have to Ask Caelestis about the new God augs.

Yay!

Fighters!

Fighters... I don't know... now missles might be fun, if the damage is good enough this can possibly de-nerf some classes.

erm I could be mistaken but if missiles are deployed via fighter bays... isn't the Fleet Commander the only class getting fighter bays?

He mentioned missile launchers so Im guessing they are for missiles and fighter bays are for fighters, so fighter bays will be fleet commander only and missile launcher for everyone maybe?

I have 2 comments:

About this aug destuction stuff: how will it be ? Can you choose a specific aug to pop ? Do you have to get rid of all augs on a ship at once ? What about augs only obtainable once through mission (namely combined ones) ?

About the fighter bay... I think it is a bit harsh to use up RC slots of the base owner. In case the base is locked for safety reasons, the RC slots of the owner may already be used to feed the base. I would prefer to see a separated slot system (not necessarly a new skill, but for instance, RC5 gives 5 slave slots and 5 fighter slots)

I agree on this, I don't want rc slots consumed. Other than that, I'm thrilled about the whole update. Ever since the new uni came around things have improved drastically. I haven't witnessed any rollbacks either. Awsome work Jeff.

why not make a fighter control skill?
just make it as easy accesable as RC

I don't think the fighter bays idea will work until a separation in Trade and Combat slaves is implemented. Even then, though, a player could attack a base in spite of a player to limit the number of fighters they can use during an uber run. This allows a player to indirectly attack another player anywhere in the game, and the target cannot respond to the attack.

A better way to implement 3 slaves classes: Trade, Combat, Defence. Trade is your normal trade slaves that keep your stations operational and make you cash via commodity and item movement. Combat is your slaves used to fight AI and your ship fighter bay's fighters. Defence is your bases' fighter bays' fighters.

Well, I would like to split slave slots into fighting and trading. If fighters are included in the fighting slots, it should be OK. How often are you going to be making an uber run at the exact time that your bases get under attack?

Or else fighters can just take zero slots and each fighter bay has a maximum number it can control. This is how I originally thought, but I was afraid of someone making a galaxy with 12 bases with 16 fighters each for a seriously lagged system. If I bring down the maximum fighters you can deploy, then this would work.

I'm a little confused. Ur talking about the ability to destroy augs (that the player chooses) like dock at an ai base or somethin???

And is there any way u can setup the test server for a whole day or something so we can play with the new class system and really give the proper feedback it deserves?