incarnate wrote: "I was planning on making ion storm fog fairly dense, but "mining station" type fog fairly light. Again, the screenshot is an early development testing thing that Ray made to show me, don't base too many assumptions on that, there may still be considerable changes (graphical and otherwise)."

Two thumbs up to fog density differences based upon location criteria (station sector v. space anomaly).

Yeah! Nebulas and Fog! Now can we embed Corvus Hold inside the planet Kraz' atmosphere? That would rock.

And there'll be varying amounts of fog in sectors? The given example looks like it might be the upper-end of fogginess, other sectors might have "lighter" fog, eh?

And this fog will be used in ion storms? Sounds great.

Oooh and wireframe radar rendering sounds neat-o. Although, It would be cool to have an actual volume of space have fog, so that it could be used as a tactical combat option, or a special concealment for asteroids or whatnot, but I understand the higher gfx card requirements.

Fog = Zamechatelno!

How about making volume fog...not based on individual sectors but based on systems. When I look on the nav map, I see asteriod fields that span dozens of individual sectors...the density of those riods varies from sector to sector. Do the same with a nebula. It would be really dense in its core sectors and get continually less dense in the surrounding sectors. Ideally, you could make nebulas small enough to fit in a single sector, but this would be good enough for now.

I want to be able to hide a station in a nebula. You'd need to follow an escort to find it and then you could buy a device that would decode the station's transponder signal and display its position in your radar.

Fog ?
Fog ???
FOG?????

I'm now 100% convinced that the devs have completely lost the plot.
So many promises undelivered. Development direction changed more often than pair of underpants. Finding it harder and harder to care.

Remember: Each dev has a different project, and Inc reports on what one dev or another, not the whole team, has been working on.

Actually, let's hear it, Jakob. What would you like the Devs to be working on instead? Let's hear your top three, and the top three of anyone else who cares to answer.

Here's mine:

- Missions. Specifically, interesting missions. Why do people in other MMOs go kill 150 Fel Dire Shadow Wolves to get ears, which they then turn in for some stupid ring? Because there's an engaging story behind why the guy wants the ears, a reason to do it.

- Atmosphere (as in, named traders and roving fleets, a bit of history to everything, notably different nations, etc. In other words, actual characters in an actual world, not serially-numbered or randomly-generated blips on the radar.)

- A bit more atmosphere, for example, when approaching a station, it messages you that your onboard computer has successfully negotiated docking clearances, and that you are clear to approach (or not).

So now that we are getting this fog stuff, how about some creatures that feed off it? I always thought that it'd be cool to have some whale-like things that float around. I'd imagine they'd be about the size of a trident, but there could be all different varieties. You could shoot at them and kill them, but they'd have little to no offensive capabilities. They'd be more eye-candy than anything. They could hang around the mining stations and in storms, feeding off the space gasses and debris. There could also be some space plants/flora too.

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/13836#174835

[directed at Jakob/Lecter]

Good god. <sigh>. I have a long laundry list of things I want to "fix", one of which is the fact that ion storms are stupid and pointless and don't serve their original function at all. Making them achieve this function has value to making the game a balanced whole instead of a large collection unrelated gameplay that exists in various stages of broken-ness. That doesn't make Fog highest on my list of things to do, it makes it something possible right now.

It's easy to criticize how things are prioritized if you have no concept of what's actually involved with game development. Like the fact that capships are *still* impossible to for us to use effectively because of the loads they place on the server and their inherent navigational problems (ie, the capships are idiots, in many different ways). Or like the fact that Deliverator has devolved into an exploding mess over the last month, completely placing the brakes on all related next-generation development (economy, full Hive implementation, plus all the gazillion other things we intended to do with deliverator.. Border Skirmish and everything is run through that too). Fixing that mess, and writing an entirely NEW thing to try and fix the brokenness is sapping all the resources of two of my programmers (Michael and Andy).. so in the meantime I can't really suck up Andy's time with mission editor problems, bot behaviour problems, and all the other things I'd like to have him doing. And of course, Michael can't really be doing awesome new deliverator stuff until the damn thing stops crashing every 18 hours.

So, I focus on what I can on positive new development, new features that *I* at least think are interesting and worthwhile, and have some bearing in the greater scheme of the game.. even if they aren't exactly what would be at the top of my priority list otherwise. Game development, at least in my experience, is not about doing what you actually *want*, it's about doing what's possible given the resources and current state of affairs (which includes bugs, people available, personnel productivity, time, money, and acts of god).

3 things I would like soon.

1. Group stats, as per http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/15431

2. Fixed faction system. So I don't loose my damn itani standing for killing those frakers Roda or Lector in my own itani space, I should get a damn reward for doing the galaxy a great service.

3. Large hive/cappie missions that are actually worth going on. The only things I actually enjoy getting from killing a levi right now is the samo ;)

I think these three things would not only be great for the game but also complement each other very nicely.

The large hive missions should be feasable in the immediate future. I didn't get anything released last night, but I hope to tonight. I should stop posting and go work on that.

ctishman: making more character-driven NPCs is a big part of what's planned for.. deliverator. Which currently crashes every 18 hours. So.. yeah. Good idea though! :).

And well your at it...

Black coffee, half a grapefruit, perhaps a little ham, sausage, scrambled eggs, kidneys, a potatoe or two, some cold cuts; chicken, beef, tongue, salami, oh some sort of smoked fish - I'm not fussy. Cheese, white rolls, brown toast, a couple of croissants, honey, pancakes, strawberry jam and some stewed fruit.

Oh, don't forget the cream. (Keep up the good work, guys. I think this game is doing well.)

Regarding your answers, Inc:

I understand that different densities of fog would be tough on graphics for lower end computers, which was the main reason I was asking. I was mainly just wondering at your design path.

I also forgot the one line in my original post, "Is this thickness partly because of it being an early development screen?" but your answer made it sound that way, so I'll trust you guys know what you're doing :)

---

Also I'd like to add my approval to FatStrat's creatures idea. Although I'm sure it would be far off, since there are a lot of things you guys are already working on that need to be finished first, but I think "Giant Space Buffalo" that drops "Space Chips" would be awesome.

The thickness is based on the numbers that Ray probably chose at random when making that shot.. so it has no meaning at all, really. I posted it mostly as a "look! fog!".

I've also always wanted creatures. I had this thing for pods of giant space-whales, back when we started. Anyway, anything like that would be implemented with Deliverator. So, yeah, gotta get that working. Otherwise, a great idea as far as I'm concerned. Not as high-priority as like.. fixing the faction system, or making the "war" more of an actual war, or whatever.. but still something I would like.

I think the docks (and the stations themselves for that matter. Compared to, say, the scenes of combat landings in Battlestar Galactica, it feels like I'm flying a 30-man ship while docking.

[/random]

keep up the awesome work! One thing related to fog that I would like to see is a hidden station inside a permanently foggy sector.

I bet you anything the maintenance crew on Galactica hates combat landings, because they just trash the landing gears completely. Which isn't to say that it's impossible. I've turboed into more landing bays than I can count.

I have to do it regularly in the races.

Hey Inc, any idea about the issue I brought up concerning the bots and their ability to see beyond the radar limits?

inc, without going full volumetric cloud implementation, it ought to be relatively simple to have an odd-shape "puff-o-smoke" object linger(/fade) in very centralized locations. no?

the idea would be to add to this fog thing and leave such fog/proto-cloud where ships (perhaps only large ships) once stood just before going "poof".

it would also be nice, for the sake of pirates, if there would be a way to fog certain sectors. taking back the xith thing, imagine a moth full of xith and another ship blowing it up. thus, the fog pirates would sacrifice a moth but gain some tactical advantage for a while (15 minutes?).

Damn, well there was a thread about things that we rated as important to fix, but I can't find it now.

My three things to prioritize went something like this:
(Based on premise of finish what you've started before starting on something new...)
1. Fix hive (and by extension, Deliverator)
2. Fix faction standing and FF rules
3. Fix and complete the PCC system to allow for more content.

Gavan: that's going to need to be fixed, but it will fall under a lot of general "fixing stupid bots" problems, and it's not going to be a minor undertaking. I mean, we can probably hack something short-term, but there's a lot of other issues (like say, the drop problem we see with Orun Processors, and various other things) that also need fixing soon.. so I imagine there'll just be a big Bot Code Reworking sometime soon.. hopefully after Andy is finished architecting the back-end stuff. If not for the Deliverator problems, he would probably be working on the bot issues.

Lex: I fundamentally agree, but the day-to-day prioritization of things tends to be more fluid, taking into account who has the expertise to work on what, what development is blocking what other development, and if there are some low-hanging fruit we can quickly grab.

Upper: sort of. We're going to be mixing blended sprites with the standard vertex fog, but since it hasn't gotten to the "tweak" stage, I don't really know how good it's going to look. Especially in bulky quantities like a "cloud". It's been my experience that making something like that look good can take practically as long as doing it for "real" (in shaders and so on), but it depends on the subject.. maybe it'll be easy. What's workable and what look decent in the amount of time available (limited, given the other projects we need to do).. we'll have to see how it goes.

Making sectors be dynamically foggable may be possible. It certainly would be interesting. It might look a little hokey though, as you'd be dropping "fog" in one area, and the entire sector (out to an infinite distance) would get foggy.

Anyway, having different sectors of different densities is a certainty, and I'll make what use of this I can. The longtime idea being that if miners really work a lot in a particular sector, it begins to show the byproduct of their work (fog).

For the moment, we'll just have to see how it works. There are no end of cool ideas to do with things, but one has to make the thing work first, discovering the potential limitations along the way. For the moment, it's a relatively quick thing to add that changes the face of the game a bit and opens up a lot of interesting gameplay possibilities that we can work towards (Serco surprising Itani patrols in a dense cluster, missions to steal things or collect recon data while avoiding detection, and so on). If I can open up a lot of options while we're fixing some broken stuff anyway, so much the better. Optimizing development is not much different than optimizing a program: you always want the processor to have something to do, if you focus too intently on one particular task, often you'll end up wasting CPU cycles while waiting for something else to happen. People are similar, tasks are managed to minimize pipeline stalls and maximize output.. even if the output isn't exactly what you wanted right then, it adds up to more elegant utilization.

That's the theory anyway. We do our best.

It's a good theory - I do the same thing at my job and am considered to be VERY efficient.

Luckily I'm not subject to the scrutiny and agendas of hundreds of people.