Singleplayer requests...

[A.G.Jeudas]

This is a great sim and your customer service is exceptional. Would you consider the following suggestions for the next major updates?

Single player:

-Hostiles are more abundant the further from a space or planet station (I recall this being criticize on previous versions) .
-Visible trade ships departing and arriving from stations, not related to station missions.
-Create bonus missions: a player may communicate and ask if a transport or trade ship needs an escort for marginal credits, not related to docking station missions.
-Perhaps a few comets? Can this be a possible creation for the next update?
-all the parts (Ion tail, coma and dust)
-travels over 7.5K, so a player has to have enough speed and shielding to land.
-explore for a limited time (basically the coma) due to shielding of mech suit and it's a comet.
-create story line or mission to find.

I've mentioned some years ago in the community mod about creating a comet, even equipping with an abandoned research station. I made a basic shape and never went forward. I believe the comet will add to the game's exploration feature or possibly features for a sequel (Legacy II) game.

I love this game.

Thanks for taking the time to read.

[Vice]

Giving this its own dedicated thread.

Some thoughts/comments:

-Hostiles are more abundant the further from a space or planet station (I recall this being criticize on previous versions).

Depends on how far out you may be referring to and what kind encounters you may be hoping for/expecting. Currently, the numbers are high near planets, lower within a sector or two, and very low/empty far away from population areas. It probably wouldn't be changed if you are referring to uncharted space at least. To quote an excerpt from an FAQ related to this:

"Uncharted [space is] intended to be unpopulated, undiscovered, and unexplored barren lanscapes that can be first visited by the player if they want to venture out that far."

That said though, you can bring in more hostiles within the realm of intended gameplay by where and when you choose to build (which can attract NPC/AI activity from any side). This was one of the intended gameplay mechanisms developed in Legacy to encourage building, expansion, territory conquest, and exploration. That is, mostly empty population presence in empty space until populated. One of the earlier critiques of the earlier game(s) was too many AI/NPC ships out in empty space (players would ask why they would be out there and shouldn't those regions be more sparse). So in both Mercenary and Legacy, the numbers were reduced to align with population centers in the game and also take into account charted/uncharted space based on those parameters.

-Visible trade ships departing and arriving from stations, not related to station missions.

Might need more elaboration on this as ships already do arrive and depart from stations for trade now (it's actually what triggers inventory updates and notifications as resources are delivered/exchanged by AI/NPC ships trading).

-Create bonus missions: a player may communicate and ask if a transport or trade ship needs an escort for marginal credits, not related to docking station missions.

Interesting, would be curious to hear other thoughts on this (and it would likely have to be restricted to single player only).

-Perhaps a few comets? Can this be a possible creation for the next update?
-all the parts (Ion tail, coma and dust)
-explore for a limited time (basically the coma) due to shielding of mech suit and it's a comet.

To quote my earlier reply on the same subject:

"I like the comet idea (and is something I've thought about myself as an idea, among many other things, lol). In terms of possibility, it's probably beyond the scope of time at this point. It'd be more of a larger scale concept for that kind of dedicated entity setup and the interlinked functional systems it would require. As a visual only element, it would be more feasible, yet still need its own dedicated entity system, activation/deactivation system, collision system, pathway behavior system, and rendering routine to name a few. A couple things could probably be transferred from the asteroid system, but it would need a lot of other things dedicated to it..."

-travels over 7.5K, so a player has to have enough speed and shielding to land.

Might need more elaboration on this as well. Is your goal to just shorten the time it takes to descend in to planets? If so, I probably wouldn't change this too much as there are objectives to keep player speeds limited for gameplay reasons for challenge/risk/reward/combat/etc. Had quite a lot of feedback years ago requesting larger planets that should 'feel' larger by taking much longer to descend, requiring more time and planning, which ultimately lead to changes found in Legacy.

-create story line or mission to find.

Probably need more elaboration on this as well. You mean outside of the scope of the integrated quest system (which is dedicated to single player)? If so, details on how it would differ from the ability to create quests/stories/missions already present in the game.

[DaveK]

Here are my thoughts. Firstly and most importantly the following comments are from me as a player and not as me as a forum moderator.

Secondly ... I've added my comments/replies in yellow within your comments to make it easier to see what I'm commenting about.
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This is a great sim and your customer service is exceptional. Would you consider the following suggestions for the next major updates?

Single player:

-Hostiles are more abundant the further from a space or planet station (I recall this being criticize on previous versions). Once you get into the game you will see how interlinked and complex the Evoverse is ... having a simple distance/NPC aggression relationship wouldn't work because of the complexity of how the three factions you can belong to ... Alliance - Federation - Indie ... interact

-Visible trade ships departing and arriving from stations, not related to station missions. Only single player ships/NPC solo piloted ships can enter and leave because of size restrictions and they already do so. There are larger ships moving around (transport ships) and a detailed background explanation of how the larger scale inter-system cargo transport works (including orbital/surface and orbital/station cargo transport handling) will be available very soon in a new version of the Merc Techy Guide (which will be available from SeeJay's website). Basically, larger transport ships are served by ship/station and ship/planet transport ferry craft.

-Create bonus missions: a player may communicate and ask if a transport or trade ship needs an escort for marginal credits, not related to docking station missions. I'll leave that one to Vice

-Perhaps a few comets? Can this be a possible creation for the next update? This one is is related to orbiting planets/orbiting moons/orbiting asteroid fields ... it'll depend, I suspect, on how far up they are in Vice's priority list. Starwraith games are a one man concern. Vice does it all .... by himself

If you are really interested, you might give some detail about how it would improve gameplay - just a thought

-all the parts (Ion tail, coma and dust) See above

-travels over 7.5K, so a player has to have enough speed and shielding to land. I assume you are talking about planetary approach speeds. For me, the issue is the 7.5K. Why not something faster?. Why not let you accelerate as fast as possible directly down towards a planet and just stop when you meet the surface or the station? Why not just skip the process? - like lots of games do - and miss out the whole landing experience? Limited atmospheric speed is an integral part of the game - part of the game includes atmospheric combat (if you choose it) and balancing your space combat skills in an atmosphere that can burn you up is part of the reason of atmospheric space to surface flying.

-explore for a limited time (basically the coma) due to shielding of mech suit and it's a comet. ? - a comet coma is a very diffuse ionised gas trail blown out from the comet core by the solar wind

-create story line or mission to find. Firstly there are already a number of (player created) quests ... secondly, if you are willing, please create your own quests - there is a set of instructions, but even more importantly there is a knowledgable, dedicated player (Marvin) who has an enormous amount of knowledge about 'questing'

I've mentioned some years ago in the community mod about creating a comet, even equipping with an abandoned research station. I made a basic shape and never went forward. I believe the comet will add to the game's exploration feature or possibly features for a sequel (Legacy II) game. Comets are small and so their gravitational attraction is tiny ... and they are very system specific. You can't hide anything in a comet tail because it wouldn't follow the comet (gravity problems) , nor realistically on a the comet. But!! ... if you are willing to spend some effort on asteroid caves, Vice might be able to create a station inside one!. In Mercenary there is an asteroid cave with a space station embedded inside it that you can see from the outside of the asteroid and enter from the inside! There's tons of opportunity to create a story

I love this game. Welcome to the gang

Thanks for taking the time to read. I very much enjoyed it - it's great to have players interested in expanding the Evoverse and increasing player generated parts of Vice's game. I think that it's one of the reasons that he's greatly increased the potential for quest coding

[Marvin]

Speaking of quests, there are a lot of ways you can make use of the quest engine. For example, I scripted a murder mystery quest a few months ago, making use of the quest's ability for branching. As for exploration, it has come to my attention that this is still the only series of space sims where you can set course for a distant star and then actually fly to that star at normal speed. Without warp FX being used to hide a loading screen.

[A.G.Jeudas]

Thanks for the feedback. I'll elaborate on some of my suggestions in a future post.


To Vice,

The transport missions are great. I was thinking a shipyard will be required to showcase larger vessels docked at stations. When a player is not docked and within range of transmissions, a player may receive chatter on a transport needing an escort. Another concept would involve transport vessels directly contacting players with certain rank or successful mission completion status. All of these transport missions involve a player not docked to a station. As I collect my thoughts, I'll be able to elaborate further. Thanks for reading.

[Marvin]

Most military ships (especially the big ones) will politely tell you to go away. But you can contact other ships and make arrangements to receive otherwise unavailable information. Or have them join your wing to assist in completing combat contracts.