Ascii Sector Comes To Life
Chris Knudsen has made progress with Privateer Ascii Sector, and he's released a new video to show everything off in motion. The 6 meg wmv file reveals the game's new artificial intelligence with an intense dogfight between the player, a bounty hunter and a Kilrathi. What looks like a blob of yellow and red asterisks is actually a triumphant explosion. It might be hard to make sense of the symbols in the screenshots, but the neat ship icons take on a life of their own in the new clip. The third screenshot shows the player evading a Kamekh while piloting a large merchant ship. Chris describes this scene in further detail below.
The ship I'm flying is a Pegasus -- one of the 'capital' ships available to the player for a steep price. I'm running away from a Kamekh while firing the rear turret at it (equipped with two mass drivers and a particle cannon). As you can see, the lower left MFD displays the rear turret's status (all guns are green and thus not damaged), just as it would show the front guns and missile launchers when in the cockpit. The colored '+' around each ship shows which way the ship is pointing. As I'm currently using the turret, the forward pointing '+' is dark grey, while the '+' that indicates where the turret is pointing is the usual green. You switch between the cockpit and turrets with the F1-F4 keys. F1 is the cockpit, F2 the rear turret, F3 starboard turret, and F4 port turret.Another thing I don't think I've mentioned yet is the colors of the ships, both on the main screen and on the scanner. These colors depend on the kind of scanner you've got installed. Just as in Privateer, there are three series of scanners: B&S, Hunter AW and Iris. Each series differs in how ships are displayed. The B&S scanners display all ships in a light grey color (both on the main screen and the scanner), Hunter AW shows friendly ships as blue and hostiles as red, and Iris uses colors to indicate which faction the ship belongs to: Kilrathi are yellow, merchants grey, pirates red, and so on... As you can see, I've currently got an Iris scanner installed on my Pegasus.
Follow or Contact Us