Ok, I'v read all the development hell everything is in right now, part A waiting for part B to get finished so part C can get started and part B needs a bit from part A to work and Part F is a functional walnut of indecency that did work until part D was introduced...

How bout spending a bit of a day tossing in a bunch of ship an weapons varients for us to play with? We already know ships and weapons work, and there's no harm to be done by adding more.

I don't know how your game is set up back end wise, but I would think that adding a ship with an already existing model would most likely be a matter of adding an entry in a table and sticking in a munch of numbers. Even easier for weapons.

So how bout it? Why not a quick smorgisborg of wild varients to play with? Huh huh? Please?

(PS I have written on a piece of paper the player I redict will be the first to enter this thread with a bunch of silly reasons why this is not possible. I've emailed it to 20 others to prove I was right!)

ha!! i know that person wasn't me!!! sorry... um... i like the idea of more ships... but like the idea of working out issues to make this game main stream quicker much MUCH more... sorry

Actually, adding lots of ships and weapons leads to an involved debate about game balance, the merits of each, who can obtain them and how hard / expensive it is, and so on. Ships and weapons do work well, but just dropping more in without a lot of forethought can lead to.. drama. Like the last time I dropped in a new mission which made a new addon available (December?).. and had so much negative feedback on the difficulty of the mission and the "coolness" of the addon that I ended up pulling both out of production. And I *had* put some thought into that one.

Several people have the suggested the idea of algorithmically determining the properties of new content via a general idea of how "good" something should be.. damage per second, mass, and so on. This is a good idea, but needs a few more constraining features to work effectively.. like the "hardpoint" / "powercell power" system I've mentioned on a couple of other threads.

So, yeah. Getting there. The hardpoint thing will be a relative near-term change, so that should make a lot of new addon and ship variants possible.

I say screw balance! Screw requirements! Anything that ends up being a superweapon can be sifted out as we go, in the meantime, tons and tons of new toys to occupy our time!

You wouldn't believe how many gray hairs I already have from balance arguements. Anyway, I am (even now) putting together some specs for the hardpoint / "power distribution" system on the Trac wiki.

There are some variants I can look into next week. Like revisiting the Warthog, possibly a mining moth, the marauder, and those other oft-requested topics.

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/15504#195471

That's not a "coolness" issue. It's a 'why the Hell would anyone want these damn things' issue.

And that is exactly the issue. Coolness, in terms of whether or not you would choose to use them. The widowmakers I made aren't *bad*, I tweaked their numbers so they were slightly improved in some areas and worse in others, I thought they might provide a different tradeoff. They weren't categorically worse than anything else in the game. I used the Neutron IIIs for reference, and slightly improved some values and degraded others.. so it shouldn't have been "terrible" at all. Again, just trying to create some diverse addons, some new stuff to play with.

The problem is, as you've pointed out in the past, that everything we make is kind of the same. And that's true, because I'm already at the upper limit of the real "power" we can put into a weapon, without making something far too devastating.. especially when chained in 3s or 4s on Valks or Hornets. So I end up making "tweaked" variations of what's already there, with some positives and negatives. Making new "types" of weapons would be great, but that's totally a different category from variants, since it requires someone to code new behaviour and test it.. and often ends up being a time-consuming process.

Thus, we go back to the hardpoint thing, which will at least allow me to create devastatingly cool weapons that can't be stacked in groups of 4.. unless you have a really really massive powercell.

What the : "I am a Seeker Missile," missiles?

edit: We could use some cool new powercells inc...

Ah, I understand what you are saying incarnate. Basically, you need another layer of limiting factor to allow the greater variety of weapons and equipment. That makes perfect sense.

And mining moth yes please! Also how bout a 0 port, slow as heck, bigass cargo moth variant too!?

We've been begging for a massive cargo scow (500-1000cu, shit armor, crappy thrust and top speed, high price) for ages now.

It has not been forthcoming; so, don't hold yer breath muter.

I would so like Inc. to check and respond to this thread.

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/15923#201257