Well another month has gone by, so it's time to make another update.
Crandady continues to be away, working hard on his halo armour replica. Here's hoping he makes it for midnight launch of Halo 4!
Froydoy is back in school, which is cutting the amount of time he has to work on models. He has emailed me the few he has gotten done, which I'll post up today or tomorrow. It's a good thing we knocked out what we could during the summer, gave us a nice head start.
As for myself, I've concluded that I have the artistic vision of a bowl of white rice. So I'm sticking to what I've always had a better knack for, the coding. This could lead to us having untextured ships for awhile, but maybe when Crandady comes back to the mod he will surprise us.
I have been thinking a great deal on how to change up gameplay elements. Shields are of course going to be gone. Now this leads to where I am undecided. Either replace shields with 'Armor Plating' which basically works like shields but does not regenerate, OR simply remove the concept all together and work with just the hull. Either way, we want to limit the ability of a ship to repair out in space, making it a requirement for established outposts for resupplying and repairs.
Next up, we were thinking about how to handle damage. Anyone who has read naval combat in the novels, (The ones from the Twilight of the Clans series being my favorite) knows that things get damaged. Guns get knocked out, sensor arrays get taken down, engines get disabled. My first thought is applying a passive effect to weapons fire that has a chance of applying a debuff to the target ship. If possible, this debuff would stack, leading to an increasing loss in ship capability. The effects would vary (Weapon damage, turn rate, fire rate, speed, max HP, etc..) and could only be removed by abilities granted to repair structures such as shipyards.
That about wraps it up. Now that summer is over, we're moving a lot slower. However, we are not dead, just very easily distracted. As always, feel free to make suggestions, leave comments, blah blah blah blah.
Just glad you're still working on it, and if you do drop it at some point, just let us know so we're not guessing. Keep it up!
I don't think you can actually remove buffs from ships. You can add additional buffs but you can't actually remove them using another ability. What I would do is have weapons fire on ships do temporary, stacking debuffs to ship stats but have them go away after a while to represent the crews re-routing systems around damaged sections of the vessel and effecting temporary repairs to damaged systems.
I prefer the armor plating idea, but you'll have to be careful with naming since UI information is global, so unless you're doing a total conversion the Vasari, Advent, and TEC will all start using C-bills and armor instead of credits and shields if you don't take care with modifying English.str.
Thanks for the heads-up on the buffing, and we are removing the original sins races entirely.