Leveling up gives +1 Cosmic Talent and +1 Potentia Talent
A cosmic talent allows you to transverse the cosmos of talents to get bonuses to your character, ship, encounter fortune, favor with alien races, and even rare space wizardry of various forms: Abyssal Horror, Ancient Relic, regular Space Wizardry, High Tech Space Wizardry, Mutant Power Wizardry, Psionics, The Acumen Parthen Projection (psionics aided by next gen neurlink), and there’s so many space wizardy I forget em all.. Anyway, look at the partial talent tree background… The actual Table is 9×8 full screens or 72 screens large! Here’s just a snippet so I don’t spoil it, fog of war is applied so you can only see so far out. I have all 72 screens background done with polish to be applied…But check it out now, my funk soul brethren and soul sistas:
That’s about 4.5 screens of the total of 72 screens or 15,360×9720 pixel image. Saturdays I take off for rest. Sunday I want the nodes populated, and maybe by Monday have it enabled so on level up, you can get your talent point and potentia point. 100 Triderium turns a potentia into a talent point.
This game handles like the best handling space shooter of all time: Xwing vs Tiefighter, but under the hood, people are calling it Space Dungeons and Dragons… The game is all in the stats, and growing up a huge fleet then unlocking arcana to bend the rules and take over the star sectors in the galaxy. Power up your clash base now by pressing the play button. Your clash base directly helps you bring more power into the MMO prime dimension. Be prepared…
Many of you know Diablo 2’s influenced game Path of Exile and their Talent Tree:
Basically it is a big grid you move around as you level at your choosing to get powerups of your liking.
To make leveling more fun, I am being influenced by Path of Exile that was Influenced by Diablo 2 and making one for Starfighter General today and tomorrow… It will help me encapsulate the game’s powerup structure for other things like items and power gating boss battles.
I started laying out the directions people may travel almost randomly by adding in many roles a space farer could maybe enjoy:(please endure my humble sketch)
Then I remembered I have an elemental chart I want to run with from Battlemon:
So I’ll try and align each vocation along the axis of the elemental chart.
I have 400,000 ai art images and about 10,000 free art images, by which I can make the background look really cosmic and neet. I’ll do it like a puzzle by seeing what power ups I want, then surround the background faded cosmos and stars with images similar to that.
Though I have enough to finish already: Creativity is unlocking itself from many angles:
1) I can position the vocations based on their alignment, say totalitarian warlord might be corrupt,joker may be chaos, drifter wind, animal empath nature, etc.
2) I have a list of about 100 power ups, and I could maybe organize it with them or get some more vocations.
3) AI art is good for creativity too.
Long story short, I’m working on a Talent Tree like Path of Exile. I want it at least 3×3 full screens wide,but no limits. This is looking good to have a final design by tomorrow and partial implementation. Again. I chose to do this first to put a nice frame on the over all power ups and power levels ascribed to and plateauing (aka beat stronger monsters because of x/y/z power like any rpg), and for leveling to have a better sense of achievement… Leveling is designed 20 min,60min, 2 hr, then 4 hr intervals for a while, so it’s like a break time and feeling of accomplishment, it’s good to give a player a look up to see where to get ahead.
That said… I think the goal of any MMO is to make the player look like he can build toward something: A better base, save up for a capital ship, gain a bigger fleet, control a star system, have an alliance, etc… Always be looking for something better, and the player will feel what they are doing matters and they’ll want to keep playing.
Yet, we got a couple people on board that can work parallel with me and quite possibly get the galaxy done as well!
I’m not sure how big we want the galaxy… In my mind, I want to out do Elite Dangerous’ 400 billion star systems, and with proc gen, lets be honest, that’s just a number. You could make as many star systems as there are limitations in your random seed tech. If I’m lazy and don’t spend a few hours upgrading it, we could make 340282346638528859811704183484516925440 star systems… It’s not an exercise in anything relevant, just gamesmanship… It’s why Xbox did not sell XBOX2 to compete with Playstation 3, but made it Xbox360… (imagine grandparents buying for their kids,’Why by a 2 when I could buy a 3?’) Anyway, digressing…
I have a few choices when proc genning the galaxy, and I didn’t think through it since I wasn’t on that path, but when you have a team, you can travel many paths at once. Let’s logically look at the proc gen design of Starfighter General. There’s nothing in here, players can’t know, and no spoilers coming.
First Options of Design to look at:
If the galaxy is 10s of trillions of star systems, and I have 10,000 players, that means each player has about one in a billion chance to run across another player in a system…. Like you’d never see someone unless I made hub town systems, summoner/beacons to gather players, or a radar to see player activity…. Suboptimal
If the galaxy is too small, there won’t be anywhere to explore, you’d get bored of lack of stuff to look at.
Maybe I want to aim the galaxy size with the premise that you’ll see another player 1 in 100 randomly if the player base is 10,000. I just looked up World of Warcraft and they try and finangle it so each server only has 10,000. I have no cap on players in mine, so WOW has 1,000,000 concurrent players often, and I’ll have about 10 servers, my upper best case scenerio is 500,000 players per server. This would mean randomly players would see each other 1/2 per sector instead of 1/100, but this is not exactly right… Due to bell curve distribution of players not going to cruddy zones, a loner could probably find a system 1 in 20 no one there if desired. So yeah, all those numbers sound good if my premise is to want 1 in 100 to find a player randomly if player base is 10,000.
10,000 * 100= a nice cool boring 1million star systems for our first spit ball estimate
There’s one other reason I do no want quadrillions of star systems… While it costs no memory to create the system, I am allowing players to destroy/alter systems. Even store keepers and NPCS will be growing or shrinking their business or if they get too rich, building a fleet to cause trouble or guard stuff. So there’s a long term memory cost in each system though they require nothing to start. So lets do an estimate on memory costs, for this is the biggest thing with proc gen maps that change, in any genre, not just space.
My server… lets say has a capacity for 50 GB,not huge, maybe move servers if I can’t get it higher, but for starters,its there, def want 1 tb server disk,right? Yeah, lets go with 1 tb since this is a long run game and some hosting solution can drop 400$ on a 1 tb ssd forme, that’s silly if they can’t. Heck there’s a Sabrent 8 TB SSD going for only 2,000$. Alright, going to design around that guy, say we have 8 TB to work with… and I can ask my server team for custom solutions too, but we just spitballing here.
So we have 8 TB and a million systems. This means we can divide the million systems from the 8 trillion storage to get our storage per system, so you drop a trillion to a billion to a millon. So we have 8 meg to store info for each system… And to be honest, that sounds fair. 8 meg a system is more than enough to store CIvilization/Master of Orion style localized data for armies/fleets/economy per system. Great, so 1 million systems looks good on paper! Dr. Evil would approve I guess.
So we did some game design in this blog, I’m going back to coding.
Next patch will probably be the first really really fun patch, but what is better, it will be funner and funner til its chillin as the most funnest of the games trying to be fun. Break it down:
Items Drop/Pickup
Inventory System
Character Sheet
Experience gain + level up
Wandering Monster Attacks
Anomaly Science investigation
Lost ship looting
Merchant Traders
Faction friending some monsters and enemying others
STORY MISSION ADVANCING! (People I tell the Story mission, they tell me it’s better than peak Starwars or Startrek, I get deep heart jerking reaction… Trust, it is gonna be good!)
It may take a while, but this is gonna be the biggie funs patch
I have a friend named Energy Girl. It was raining. So I made a joke,”Rain can’t stop you, it only gets out of your way as you turn into a rainbow made out of lightning.” She smiled and I was like,”Yo, I wonder what that looks like. I’ll send you some AI generated pictures tomorrow…” Well it got out of hand and now we have a video to the Allan Parson’s Project, LOL!
Been word salading Dalle aka piping in random sentence generators.
Somehow this came out which looks like a ballin album cover:
Anyone printing these things out and using em as home art yet?
If you want a word salad generator, I can sell the app for 20$ and you’ll get 7000 randomized images a day.
A Word salad works like this:
You have a format file, and type in some lines of sentences and or syntax.
The java program parses them randomly and pipes to a macro program that inputs them.
The syntax can be $noun $adverb $adjective etc and it grabs from one of those files to put a random word in.
You can even make your own files. I have one called $desdoc where it is my design document of my game.
Format ends uplooking like stuff like this
FORMAT EXAMPLE 1 STATIC STAR GENERATION:
“mega antimatter star” fantasy cyberpunk ultralight chrome dystopia timbale impression bleakly FOG dystopia “muon star” gehenna glow black light trippy “electron star” “neutron star” comet vast
“mega quantum star” fantasy cyberpunk ultralight chrome dystopia timbale impression bleakly FOG dystopia comet “antimatter star” “binary stars”
“mega neutron star” fantasy cyberpunk ultralight chrome dystopia impression bleakly FOG dystopia
FORMAT EXAMPLE 2 Drawing from syntax variables
$color “$noun made of $desdoc” comet moon
$color “$noun made of $adjective” $adjective $adverb noun cyberpunk
$color “$noun made of $noun” $adverb $adjective cyberpunk stars
$color “$noun made of $adverb” $adjective cyberpunk comet
$color “$noun made of $gems” many stars cyberpunk
———-
The $draws a random variable from those files. You can make up your own files. Be warned it takes a 1920×1080 computer with default firefox and uses a macro so when you gather files, you can’t use that computer so its good for sleeping or when you’re out of the house or if you have many computers. It generates about 7000 images a day. I’ll let the whole package go for 20$. It’s written in a custom macro program I wrote for selling MMORPG automaters back in 2002 before Mythic’s Dark Age of Camelot was the first to use microtransactions and ruin the market. PM if you’re interested.
In Starfighter General, if you find Easter Eggs, you can hide them. Each hour they go without being found, you get reward types based off the egg. The longer they stay hidden, the greater the reward! When people find them, they get rewards too based on how long they were hidden then you get your egg back to hide again. The following one will require quest stages and bosses to acquire.
Lets try for next week to get the Random Events in! Turns out other space games are doing random encounters too, and I just learned of it today. That means I’m on the right track!
A huge huge huge amount of design happened in the past two weeks. I’ll run over it as I explain I needed a bunch of techs to make stuff happen. One of which is Inventory/Character Sheets which are mostly in:
Star is order by rarity.
M is order by mass.
$ is order by value
dm^3 is order by decimetric volume. Volume in your inventory changes depending on temperature and other crazy stuff. I shelved Diablo 2 stacking in 3d because my friend said people like simplicity in some regards. This inventory is high tech under the hood with Entity/DOTS high tech under that!
Other techs I have put in are:
Spawn enemy monster & wire up damage.
I need to finalize in ‘Random drops like Diablo 2 or Path of Exile’, Tool tips and power up zones you get by flying through. They’re in, just need wired up.
The design is actually AMAZING! Absurdity Trail random events allows for a proc gen galaxy with weights that change depending where you’re at. There are alliances of alien races known as factions. You can get in good one with faction and be bad with another. The center of the galaxy lies a mysterious horror, and as monsters/enemy ship fleets/alliances grow stronger as you try and get to it. You can’t just warp to the center of the galaxy, you need to find trade paths through radiation zones. Once you find radiation zone paths, you can go from star system to star system. Many paths of non radiated zones have choke points where alliance fleets gate keep with warp interdictor technology. So in order to prove your worth, you must win in fights,be friends with that alliance, pay a toll, have a gem, or just hit pedal to the medal baby and pray as you zip by them.
Check points are of two fashion. The standard check point is dimensional signature target check points. This is where you can restart the game coming from your home base with a limited ship. It is costly to jump via dimensional warp gates so you can’t take much with you like a big fleet, but they’re common so you can travel light around the galaxy if you want. Then there is a more uncommon warp gate target check point. This you can warp with you and your entire fleet provided you charted a path of non radiated zones to it and provided no warp interdicting pirates are on the path.
That’s a long winded way of saying in a game of risk/reward perma loss of huge fleets, one of the soft save roguelite features is information. Information of where to warp to, information where to get good trades, information of resource rich zones, information of what player friends to make, information of what enemy factions to favor or unfavor, and information on how to acquire navigation deep into the galaxy via radiation zone scope pathing. I want the player to feel a sense of more permanence, soft saving, rogue lite features than senses of loss when your entire fleet might get risked in the wrong manner. Starfighter General will have the feeling of a Carebear progression game, while having hardcore perma death in some aspects of losing fleets. Since I dis-incentive bullying and mob rule dystopia play, this is gonna be an experience you never experienced.
I’m happy Unity released some sort of basic 4 player multiplayer. That way I don’t have to rush mine to market and I can do these more fun techs which will play like a roguelike. The ground up of the design of the game is multiplayer so it won’t be tacked on though it is added later. My multiplayer breaks so many rules you’re used to. Traditional Client<>Server is O(n^2), mine is sub O(n), yes less than n bandwith,close to O(logn) aka near infinite networked players same zone. I say this with a grain of salt for there will be a limited number of fleet that can come with, but that’s down the road. Just happy Unity released multi so I don’t have to force it out and present it to Unity. I assure you my networking is far superior to Unity’s at this juncture. I typically pioneer algorithms the gaming industry independently discovers later.
So design solidifying on the universe power progression, gates between star systems so going deep is risky and hull/armor/shields of your fleet are at risk if you have to retreat through hostile radiation zone choke point gates. That’s a reason you’d want to power up combat ships in itself and level and all that jazz. Last week we put wandering monsters in with the dragon. This week I made the dragon sound and particle effect when spawning. It’s a matter of whales and bistles (bells and whistles), pacing it. And to conclude, I have health conditions with stress and am just barely food secure, so I’m limiting my bust tail crunch mentality… I just enjoy this so I code basically all day when I am not keeping the house hold in order.
Next 100-300 hours we should have a ROCKING fun Starfighter Game. I missed a self imposed micro deadline, but life isn’t easy when you barely have enough for food. I look at Star Citizen and wonder if God will let me shame their massively funded and large team with a superior product by basically one guy without much help and dealing with malnutrition occasionally living in a place without water. I’m not poor mouthing, so much as starting to enjoy the challenge since I’m up trending.
I’m having a robot pal for every building help you along…
I’m having so much fun generating robot pal art.
technical details: sounds loading in for spawns, particle blooms for spawns
Once adjutant goes in some, I’ll be versed to put story line quests in MMO along with random events.
Boring tech stuff. Once that’s done, proc gen universe, then multiplayer will be placed in. Entire game is designed around multiplayer, that’s why it takes so long to get techs in.
