New Frames & Inventory Console Features

Major Grubert · Post by **Major Grubert** » Mon Jul 21, 2014 10:41 am

scientific missions/contract/experiences

explorations missions/contract

which needs to travel "far" outside gated systems for bring ore or things or tech parts... whatever

Post by **DaveK** » Mon Jul 21, 2014 3:31 pm

From post: 171827, Topic: tid=10221, author=marlowe221 wrote:I will add a couple of things I would love to see in an expansion or new Evochron game.

1) More commodities. Commodities seem pretty rare in the current game. It may be that the NPCs are buying them but I can fly to several stations and not see a single purple item for sale sometimes. It also makes cargo contracts very difficult at times, more difficult than it seems like they should be.

I think that most cargo contracts require you to go and mine the stuff

2) Contracts. I think the contracts system in the game now is great and I like the variety that are available. Of course there could always be more... Maybe a passenger contract to carry 1 or more people to a distant system (Yeah, I know there are passengers in the crew section at times). Maybe contracts that involve multiple stops/actions across several different systems for appropriate levels of pay.

I think that there are taxi contracts already (or at least there were - they aren't part of the standard contracts available from a station though.) If you missed the arrival deadline your fare got hammered!

3) Buildable jump gates. It's cool to find uncharted systems but it would be good to be able to create a jump gate connection to one of the charted systems. There should be some distance limitations for the connections and limitations for where the gates could be built but it would be a nice touch.

a popular perennial request - some interesting discussions of pro's and con's on previous threads It could be worth raising again - what benefits do you see it bringing to gameplay?

4) Rumors. I know it's clichÃ© but surely the watering holes on these massive trading stations would be crawling with mercenary pilots swapping stories and rumors. They could be rumors about commodities needed in a remote system for good profits. There could be rumors about hidden caches of goods. There could be rumors that give vague-ish hints about the location of some of the hidden systems, jump gates, worm holes, etc. in the game. In other words, some kind of word of mouth system would add even more immersion to the game.

great idea - at the moment you can buy 'info' from NPC pilots about the location of uncharted systems well out of the galactic plane. I've not seen any info on the % that prove to be accurate though. Being offered/shown rumours when you spend some time on a station (R&R) would be good - though what the rumours could be about would need some thought

5) Time! The timers for Distress Calls should be extended so that there is some reasonable chance that the player can actually successfully respond to them.

The stuff that needs delivering is limited to five commodities. The time is so tight that the only way I could make them work was to have a cargo bay of each commodity ready - I spent a play session just doing Distress calls - quite profitable early on I suspect that since most commodities aren't profitable to trade (compared to mine -> sell) compared to trading equipment/weapons they don't get offered very often

Additionally, temporary economic fluctuations should probably last a bit longer than they do now. For example, I will often read about inflated prices for platinum but I don't have any in my hold at the moment. By the time I can go mine some, more often than not, the prices have gone back down before I can capitalize on the temporary uptick. To my mind, it shouldn't be a "hey, I got lucky" kind of a thing - these temporary market conditions should make me strongly consider stopping what I am doing to take advantage of the opportunity. But the opportunities would have to last longer than they currently seem to for that to happen.

The alternative is to sniff out places where the prices are high most of the time. There's a station in Sapphire for example that always pays a (big) premium for platinum compared to other Sapphire stations

7) Weird stuff. What lurks in the blackness of space? Maybe there should be a small chance for Vonari ships to appear in systems that are near warzones from time to time. Maybe there could be a ghost ship or a space monster or something. Not just everywhere, mind you, but maybe the pilot could hear/read rumors about something lurking out there in the inky black between the stars....

Perhaps a Vonari ship incursion could be a trigger for a Distress Call - something extra to go and deliver . . . .There are ghost ships - visual evidence is available in a chapter of the Collected Short Stories book - 'Blog of a Deep Space Explorer' - available from SeeJay's site I think.

More mineable resources and an expanded construction system.

great idea - perhaps some ores only available in remote systems/inside asteroid caves/in the atmosphere of gas giants/on the Vonari homeworld or hostile sytems etc but worth lots in the core systems

All that said, I love this game and the above should not be taken as complaints or gripes in any way.

[Edited on 7-17-2014 by marlowe221]

Post by **DaveK** » Mon Jul 21, 2014 3:43 pm

From post: 171929, Topic: tid=10221, author=Onirim wrote:I'd like to see the "select profile and save" option when connection to a server is lost (in addtion to the "save" button already implemented). I lost connection in my way to sol and I had to save on my actual profile. So now there's no turning back. No 'undo' for me. I hope my fuel be enough or you'll see strange distress calls on chat window every time I get connected to the game...

A 'save to a different profile' would be good for disconnects.

At the moment (as a work around) if I'm trying out something very risky (like heading into the middle of nowhere!

) or I'm not sure I really want to keep it in my main profile (spending a large proportion of my fortune drawing system wide graffiti with trade stations

), I periodically exit the game and save to the next in a sequence of spare profile and then re-enter the game.

Another version of this is the have two or three identical profiles (a good idea to have backups anyway)

- launch the game from one and them and then exit the game immediately and save to a second one
- re-enter the game; auto saves then go the the second one. The first is there untouched it it all goes pear-shaped

Last job at the end of playtime is to get all the profiles up to the final version you played in before fulling exiting the game

Post by **DaveK** » Mon Jul 21, 2014 3:47 pm

From post: 171938, Topic: tid=10221, author=Major Grubert wrote:scientific missions/contract/experiences

explorations missions/contract

which needs to travel "far" outside gated systems for bring ore or things or tech parts... whatever

I love the idea of having them as part of the game rather than what I just dream up for myself!

Since taking a contract locks up contracts in that sector until the contract is terminated (success or failure), getting long term contracts would have to be from specially designated sectors, perhaps in out of the way systems

Major Grubert · Post by **Major Grubert** » Mon Jul 21, 2014 5:41 pm

maybe it can be coded as "short quest", meaning there could be more than one place to go with or without way back, dunno

example

find a system maybe in this area "coords", coded name contain "23" or "53", here is planet with a wild colony, in this colony you should bring water, in exchange they give you coords on the planet for find very strange sort of plants..., please find this place and plants, then we will tell where to make the delivery

please map this system for getting extra money

we need exoliquid from D598, a planet between sapphire and thuban, some reports very very strange capacity of a liquid on/from this planet, we need to know more about this, you'll need a bioanalyst for this mission and a Federation approved datacollektor (need the equipment or 2 free slot if eqpmt is given by contractors)

there are countless possibility

Post by **Marvin** » Mon Jul 21, 2014 6:42 pm

From post: 171942, Topic: tid=10221, author=DaveK wrote:Since taking a contract locks up contracts in that sector until the contract is terminated (success or failure), getting long term contracts would have to be from specially designated sectors, perhaps in out of the way systems.

Sounds more like a distress call you accept at a trade station or city.

Onirim · Post by **Onirim** » Thu Jul 24, 2014 4:09 am

What if stations would spin? Makes sense for the gravitation effect inside stations and looks nice imo. You would say what about gates. Well just unify them all in a big entrace ring and make 5 "parking lots" inside for every gate dismissed...

Post by **DaveK** » Thu Jul 24, 2014 12:13 pm

From post: 171993, Topic: tid=10221, author=Onirim wrote:What if stations would spin? Makes sense for the gravitation effect inside stations and looks nice imo. You would say what about gates. Well just unify them all in a big entrace ring and make 5 "parking lots" inside for every gate dismissed...

Stations have a mod of the Inertial Damping Tech used in your ship but bigger. For details see the Evochron Technical Guide.
Without the (graviton based) Inertial Damping Tech you would be smeared across your seat every time you accelerated hard . . .

'When you accelerate from a standing start to 2000 m/s
you should be subject to an acceleration of around 280 m/s^2. 1g = 10 m/s^2.

This means that in afterburner acceleration from a standing start you should be
subject to an acceleration of 28g! Even accelerating from 4000 to 5000m/s subjects us to 5g

Trained and selected pilots can withstand 5g for a short period,
though they can't do much under that strain and certainly not handle a ship in a combat situation.
Survival is threatened above about 10g
So, how do we survive (and manage to fly our ships)? - Inertial Damping Technology!

Another cheer for the geeky scientists of Evochron! '

The five entrances were introduced in the Expansion in place of a complete ring. It makes jumping directly into a station a bit harder (you have to set a heading as well as lock onto the station) There could still be docking bays that you have to nose into though - it would add immersion to the present click on station - set heading to an entrance - jump - 'hands off' dock. The docking points would have to be slightly offset from the entrances though or you would just hit them as you jump in without having to do anything.

I think the five entrance stations look cooler than the full ring stations in EM-I

The present system is good for Clan duty pizza deliveries - with the right contracts you can touch 60 contracts per hour making multi-system Clan control possible for a solo pilot who volunteers for the duty

Skylee · Post by **Skylee** » Thu Jul 24, 2014 1:05 pm

Hi guys,

maybe I am the last who should talk about "Things I'd love to see in the future" because I am really a noob here...

Anyway here are my dreams that I am looking for since many years ago:

Since I am one of the (very) few players of Derek Smart's Universal Combat series...I love the idea of being a captain of a capital ship.
That's not just because I love bigger ships but because all of other stuff coming with the command of a bigger ship.

For example:

-The ability to carry and manage few fighter squadrons ( not too many, let's say from 4 fighter ships to 12 )
this means issue orders like a wingman ( escort, follow, attack, scout, s.a.d. and so on )
manage maintenance and repairs of the fighters

-The ability to manage space marines commandos as an away team for any mission who needs them such as: exploring an abandoned station/ship/colony, boarding and seize of a station/ship/colony, keep on security onboard...The result of this away team missions, could be something really easy, something like in "Nexus:The jupiter incident", the player will receive radio messages during mission, receive some reports, and the final result of the mission, no graphic needed,all is handled by the CPU, you become just the commander who receive mission status and debrief report ( maybe with some choiche to take answering the away team radio messages, such as "keep on with the mission" / "abort and come back" / "kill all the enemy" / "capture survivors" / "blow up everything"...so on.
Eventually the away team could never come back, of course...

-The crew management is a great feature to me, it gives you the sense of growing and getting experienced as far as you go on.
maybe this crew could take care of some issues using it's own A.I. on several circumstances ( an XO could manage fighters?, an Engeneer could take care repairs and other stuffs? etc...)

-The ability to send down on a planet/moon an away team in order to mine resources by their own ( pheraps using your crew Engeneer Officer A.I. ?)

Above all if a player or a clan could be able to own a small capital ship, the other clan mates could become their fighter squadron, or mix up with the AI fighters squadron mixing AI tactics and human piloting, it would really help forming a small battallion to launch against enemy pirates/army/clans etc...

In a universe like the one of EM, all these stuff would be just perfect to me...

I know it's sooooooo much but, as I said, these are my dreams

[Edited on 7-24-2014 by Skylee]

Post by **DaveK** » Thu Jul 24, 2014 1:34 pm

Everybody's ideas/dreams/wishes are welcome. New players don't make assumptions that more experienced players do. A fresh look is always useful!

At least I think so, anyway

I like the idea of a clan being able to 'own' a carrier (AI defence - flak and missiles only) - lose the system, lose the carrier! Make it really expensive to buy and run but as a way of maintaining/repairing/refuelling/re-arming it's flight of fighters would be great! Opposing clans would have something other than stations at attack to weaken a clan. With multi-profiles being available 'killing' a clan's cap ship could be avoided, but if a proportion of the clan's stations and/or system control was destroyed it would at least hurt them since it's recorded server side!

Skylee · Post by **Skylee** » Thu Jul 24, 2014 1:55 pm

Thank you DaveK

Well, tell me if I understand it correctly please.
If I'm killed during an online session I will not lose my ship, and I will be able to re-log in the session with everything I had before?

This could be avoided this way:
when a player commanding his capital ship is destroyed, the game will autosave, storing info about the server, the capital ship destroyed on the profile.

If player reconnect to that server, his capital ship will be no longer available, but the rest of the hangar will. So he will be able to play as "normal" fighter...?
The cap ship will instead be available if he moves to another server or play locally...
This will continue until the player will "buy" a new capital ship again, then he will restore the old one "ressurrecting" it

[Edited on 24-7-2014 by Skylee]

r4gegaming · Post by **r4gegaming** » Thu Jul 24, 2014 5:06 pm

Capital ships!

I love the idea of huge ships getting taken into battle. Also for carrying massive amounts of cargo.

Post by **Marvin** » Thu Jul 24, 2014 5:29 pm

From post: 172004, Topic: tid=10221, author=DaveK wrote:Everybody's ideas/dreams/wishes are welcome. New players don't make assumptions that more experienced players do. A fresh look is always useful!:)

As long as you don't imply or assume that your ideas would be easy to implement (program).

Onirim · Post by **Onirim** » Thu Jul 24, 2014 5:46 pm

From post: 172014, Topic: tid=10221, author=r4gegaming wrote:Capital ships!

I love the idea of huge ships getting taken into battle. Also for carrying massive amounts of cargo.

I love convoys

Onirim · Post by **Onirim** » Thu Jul 24, 2014 5:48 pm

From post: 172002, Topic: tid=10221, author=DaveK wrote:
From post: 171993, Topic: tid=10221, author=Onirim wrote:What if stations would spin? Makes sense for the gravitation effect inside stations and looks nice imo. You would say what about gates. Well just unify them all in a big entrace ring and make 5 "parking lots" inside for every gate dismissed...
Stations have a mod of the Inertial Damping Tech used in your ship but bigger. For details see the Evochron Technical Guide.
Without the (graviton based) Inertial Damping Tech you would be smeared across your seat every time you accelerated hard . . .

'When you accelerate from a standing start to 2000 m/s
you should be subject to an acceleration of around 280 m/s^2. 1g = 10 m/s^2.

This means that in afterburner acceleration from a standing start you should be
subject to an acceleration of 28g! Even accelerating from 4000 to 5000m/s subjects us to 5g

Trained and selected pilots can withstand 5g for a short period,
though they can't do much under that strain and certainly not handle a ship in a combat situation.
Survival is threatened above about 10g
So, how do we survive (and manage to fly our ships)? - Inertial Damping Technology!

Another cheer for the geeky scientists of Evochron! '

The five entrances were introduced in the Expansion in place of a complete ring. It makes jumping directly into a station a bit harder (you have to set a heading as well as lock onto the station) There could still be docking bays that you have to nose into though - it would add immersion to the present click on station - set heading to an entrance - jump - 'hands off' dock. The docking points would have to be slightly offset from the entrances though or you would just hit them as you jump in without having to do anything.

I think the five entrance stations look cooler than the full ring stations in EM-I

The present system is good for Clan duty pizza deliveries - with the right contracts you can touch 60 contracts per hour making multi-system Clan control possible for a solo pilot who volunteers for the duty

Ok, keep gates and docking stations stationary and put the rest of the station into a spin. Whay not. Would look nice too.

PaulB · Post by **PaulB** » Fri Jul 25, 2014 5:21 am

I think I've posted about this in another thread - but another thing I'd like to see is the possibility for Communicating with other AI ships (if they choose to respond) and not at the 1000 range but as long as you can Target them - similar to Wing Commander Privateer.

You would Target a ship and press a key to get a popup screen where you could choose a "canned" message to send -or add it to the Trade Console but at >1000 meters only the messaging would be active - examples:
Hey - how's it going?
Hey - how's business?
Howdy - heard any good news lately?

And the AI would send you a "canned" response.

In WCP it also server the purpose that you could send a friendly message or progressively less friendly and more hostile messages which would have a appropriate effect on the AI's response. I don't particularly propose this since it wold require a lot more work on Vice to implement "appropriate reactions".
But just to be able to send some messages and get a response would make the game in SP see less lonely and more friendly an intersting - IMO.
And the Popup screen would allow you to click on - say - 1 of 10 or 20 canned messages to send. The AI may or may not choose to respond.
I would not care if they were only "text" messages (from the AI) but if the AI sent Voice responses I would ask that a text message be sent also (in the popup screen) for those of use with hearing impairments. I'm sure Vice could get volunteers to donate voice response messages defined by him.

You can hear radio chatter - why not go an extra step and add this ability??? It would even be cool if AI's initiated Messages to the player - but NOT during combat and not so frequently as to become annoying - or possible have a game option to Enable/Disable AI's initiating Messages to players.
The canned messages kinda need to be properly categorized so that a message sent gets a relative reply from an AI if there is one. Some of the responses in WCP were not exactly very relevant and often too repetitive.
And if they were contained in a text file they could be easily expanded and maintained.

Hope others think it an interesting idea.

[Edited on 7-25-2014 by PaulB]

[Edited on 7-25-2014 by PaulB]

-Pv- · Post by **-Pv-** » Sat Jul 26, 2014 7:36 pm

The spinning coriolis stations in Elite and Frontier inspired by 2001 Space Odyssey had their docking ports on the top or bottom of the station aligned with its spinning axis so the ports could be approached from the end rather than the side.

Since generally speaking the so-called Gravitron Inertial Damping is for intents an artificial gravity, I suppose spinning gravity would be considered low tech.

I've always thought the 1000m comm limit arcane and from appearances, unnecessary, even irritating. The ability to taunt/compliment your AI with comms and run the risk they will assist you, attack, offer a gift or black list you would add additional interest to the game.

Skylee:

Excellent suggestions. People have had a lot of fun with these capital ship ideas in other games.

-Pv-

[Edited on 7-26-2014 by -Pv-]

_-Caleb-_ · Post by **_-Caleb-_** » Sat Aug 02, 2014 7:33 am

A new suggestion for a new game:

- Quest Selector: The user can select a quest for play, with this mode the user can select a "basic" quest (For example the default quest), or others, a combat quest, custom quest, etc. From game.

Post by **DaveK** » Thu Aug 07, 2014 3:37 pm

The ability to incorporate GIF's into HUD mods so that I can add some moving displays and readouts. It would look cool and enhance immersion

RiSKOSD · Post by **RiSKOSD** » Wed Aug 13, 2014 2:44 pm

Echoing whats been asked before, I'd love to see some sort of Survival option, maybe something that limits saving to docked only or swap out Saving to Cloning which can only be done in stations, at a cost and unless your ship is insured its lost. Maybe it should be free if its your own station.

I love the idea of pre-setting escape jump points before entering a new area but Quicksaving is too tempting.

Post by **DaveK** » Wed Aug 13, 2014 4:34 pm

From post: 172008, Topic: tid=10221, author=Skylee wrote:Thank you DaveK

Well, tell me if I understand it correctly please.
If I'm killed during an online session I will not lose my ship, and I will be able to re-log in the session with everything I had before?

This could be avoided this way:
when a player commanding his capital ship is destroyed, the game will autosave, storing info about the server, the capital ship destroyed on the profile.

If player reconnect to that server, his capital ship will be no longer available, but the rest of the hangar will. So he will be able to play as "normal" fighter...?
The cap ship will instead be available if he moves to another server or play locally...
This will continue until the player will "buy" a new capital ship again, then he will restore the old one "ressurrecting" it

[Edited on 24-7-2014 by Skylee]

I have (say) three copies of my main profile. I'm playing from the first and I lose my capital ship and the server autosaves the info . . . point 1: the autosave is of my profile not the server's evoverse file. Would it even be possible for the server side to maintain a list of all pilot profiles? . . . I log off and log back on from the second of my profiles - which tells the server I have a capital ship . . . Point 2: How can the server differentiate between this being a copy of my profile prior to the loss of the capital ship and a profile where I've bought a replacement?

Having access to multiple profiles means that anyone can circumvent any autosaves loss/use of equipment - for example FT's or SD's or the cash cost of building a station. All you actually lose is the experience points/$$$ you gained before the last autosave. It's easy to exit the game, save into several slots and rejoin the game.

Point 4: Many of us don't actually want the harsh reality option. If I lose my cap ship I don't actually want to have to get a new one every time - especially since the loss rate during the learning curve is likely to be high. If you want to lose your cap ship / $$$ / ship each time you're killed then that's fine with me - just don't use a copy of the profile - start a new one

Post by **Marvin** » Wed Aug 13, 2014 4:44 pm

The real problem exists when Vice adds some new element to the game ... or changes an old one. Like black holes. Transiting a black hole is easy once you learn how to do it ... but, for the first guy who tried it ... well, if he'd been auto-saved every time he entered the black hole and exited into oblivion, we'd probably still not know how to do it safely. Not to mention gravity and friction when flying planetside.

CS-ACI- · Post by **CS-ACI-** » Wed Aug 13, 2014 7:43 pm

Hello,

I did a forum search and did not find "geologist" so that is pretty safe, was unsure on the equipment. From a game point of view these should be easy additions and make sense. It would mean that players can mine for all the resources needed.

New crew member and new equipment idea, now I am actually playing and have experienced the ship config settings.

Crew member, Geologist. Only helps when mining, but you can select what ore/mineral to extract. Also tells you what is in the asteroids in an asteroid field. This also opens up having more types of asteroid. Other than the standard Plat/Diam/Metal you could have Gold/Silver and any other normal ore/minerals. BUT as an addition you could also mine for the raw materials for fuel.

Equipment, additional mining beams. Selectable mining beams for different ore/minerals.

Equipment, fuel processor. Converts mined raw materials into useable fuel.

Steve

Post by **Marvin** » Thu Aug 14, 2014 5:55 am

From post: 172490, Topic: tid=10221, author=CS-ACI- wrote:Equipment, additional mining beams. Selectable mining beams for different ore/minerals.

Check some of the higher-tech star systems.

RiSKOSD · Post by **RiSKOSD** » Thu Aug 14, 2014 8:18 am

Comets, I'd love to find and follow comets. Some on set paths, some just randomly generated. The trail could be harvestable much like a ring, maybe even land on it!

[Edited on 8-14-2014 by RiSKOSD]