A test of the new code last night (Mon, 6/18) was much more stable. Attacking the stronghold and killing the Leviathan resulted in a new bastion forming and eventually turning into a stronghold. the support bots don't migrate now so there is little chance of overflowing a sector.

I'd like to see if leaving the remaining Queens and entourages alone will result in reforming of the stronghold after the Leviathan is dead.

really?... cuz by the time I logged on, you guys had killed all the leviathans in Sedina... and then Michael's comp crashed, and nothing new respawned :)

We found and fixed the problem with that crash. It was due to a kludge I put in, because I didn't think you guys could possibly kill 10 leviathans before we restarted for other reasons, and/or fixed the kludge. Heh, that'll teach me not to underestimate you:)

There's no bots again. Can you put leviathans in more than one system next time? :P

either that, or make leviathans have a bit more sense of self preservation. Would be kinda fun if you had to chase them around for several sectors before they're too damaged to run.

any update on the eta to a release on the production server(s)?

Well you know BLAK was all over your sissy levis Momer, they really did not have much of a chance. :P

Sorry to anyone trying to have fun on the test server tonight. I've had to restart it several times, and will probably need to again.

Where the heck are the leviathans! I looked around a good part of sedina and I can't find ANY bots. :/ I wanna see a leviathan in game!

just wait for the public release in 6months when it wiggles and actually doesn't crash the sector while your attacking it.

Making the Levi "wiggle" means implementing an inverse-kinematics system in the game and adding IK to our exporter. Thats no small task, and the only immediate benefit would be the wiggling Leviathan. So, don't expect it real soon- it'll happen, but its not the highest priority. On the other hand, the Hive will be encroaching on the public server any day now, and not in, as johnhawl sarcastically says, 6 months :p~~
Also, the Levi and its normal retinue of 50+ bots do *not* crash the sector. In fact, 400+ bots don't crash the sector, just make it really slow. The cases where we saw extreme numbers of bots in a sector were due to the fact that all the remaining bots in a bastion would retreat to the stronghold if their queen was destroyed (and you wonderful testers made this happen en masse). We'll be modifying this behavior for release. We'll also be working on optimizing the collision code in the very near future to improve performance when hundreds of ships are present. You should also keep in mind that the test server is one machine about as fast as most of your desktops, and the production system is many very fast machines.

can you please give a little more details on hardware you are using for production servers?

Other uses for IK-chaining?

1) Crates on the Maud trailing behind it.
2) Hive queen and levi legs, bot antennae can wiggle. (Hell, imagine antennae turning towards you as bots lock on, or the arms of a queen reaching out towards you, grasping).
3) Enveloping claws for capship docking on bigger stations.
4) Whip antennae for ships that respond to acceleration realistically.
5) The prom looks like it should bend at the seams slightly as the player aims. IK Chaining would make this possible.

It's a feature whose uses are not yet obvious, but which add to the immersion of the game. Right now it still feels like static models gliding through space, and more movement within the models would help this.

Holy crap ctishman that's true.

/me starts a suggestion thread

I'm sure someone has figured this out already, but can someone post the stats on the Levi? also the currents stats of the Cap ships and queens? That way we would know what were getting into when we go and fight it.

With out a significant force it doesn't seem posible to kill the Levi in a reasonable amout of time (say 2-3 hours)plus all of its escorts. Maybe i'm wrong though. I only encountered one one and i was with only 3 people. and we didn't plan our attacks we just went at it seperately.

So post any current stratagy here too.

Thanks,

JB

Currently the strategy is to evade enough that the bots bump into the levy and blow it up themselves.

Seems to be effective till they fix it :)

The Test server is a dual Pentium III 700, the production cluster is seven Pentium IV 2.8s. A lot more horsepower to use for bots shooting things. In fact, we hardly use any of it for the current game, which is why we're coming up with creative ways to do lots more cool stuff with those extra cpu cycles.