Quality Assurance Version 1.0

About asteroids... They erhm... "suck" a bit. Only object that has any kind of reaction when colliding with one is MY ship. Enemy ships go through asteroids just like asteroids go through each other! That just looks BAD. And boy, doesn't that make me mad when I'll have to dodge both asteroids and enemy fire but enemy desn't have to worry about a thing.

And if I try to shoot asteroid which is just in front of my ship, projectiles just keep going into the distance like that asteroid would be a black hole or something. There's also odd feeling in the middle of asteroid field, compared to asteroids looks like my ship is going nowhere and evading asteroids seem to be futile.
 
Back to the repair droid, I took some damage, and the damage to the components stayed the same for the 20 min I tested it. I'm not talking about hull and armor. You may say that's working, I say the little bastage is on strike.
 
I bought that advanced repair-thingy and it even seemed to repair my damaged radar etc. non-armor-related systems. But it's SLOW in it's work and damage % isn't updated until it's 100%. So if repaired system is at 5% or something, it seems like the droid is doing nothing because it takes ages before the system is fully repaired and at 100%. Percents should keep going up one by one as droid repairs the damaged system!
 
Acimus said:
I bought that advanced repair-thingy and it even seemed to repair my damaged radar etc. non-armor-related systems. But it's SLOW in it's work and damage % isn't updated until it's 100%. So if repaired system is at 5% or something, it seems like the droid is doing nothing because it takes ages before the system is fully repaired and at 100%. Percents should keep going up one by one as droid repairs the damaged system!


Ahhhhh..... O.K. I'll see if the 88% turns into 100% after an hour or so. I agree that the % should change 1% at a time until fixed, kinda like the original did.
 
On another note: what's the highest level reactor and shield generator that the various ship classes can mount? Because I'm getting rather upset that my Mercenary Heavy Fighter can only seem to mount a class 3 reactor, and class 3 shields. This really doesn't seem right to me. Also, I find it strange that I can equip two reactors to my stock Demon (one is lsited under "Reactor," the other under "Reactors"--don't know if they both work, but I have two of them). My Demon actually out-performs my Centurion in every fight. I took a 100k+ mission to clean sweep Oxford of Kilrathi. At every nav point, there were about two or three Dralthi, and a Gothri. Going through the mission with the Demon, I took some decent damage; with the Centurion, I was lucky to even survive (no hull showing on HUD, and most systems offline).

This, actually, bring me to another point. Pirates and Retros in their little Talons are far superior to Kilrathi in combat. Facing three Dralthi, I can dispatch them all with minimal difficulty, and in short order. Facing three Talons, and I'll have some fairly serious damage, and it will take forever (it takes way more than two direct missile hits to kill a Talon, assuming your missiles even hit--what's wrong with the guidance AI, less than 50% of my missiles hit when I fire them from close range, and a target straight ahead?). The Dralthi, or at least the Gothri, should be harder to take down than some flimsy little Talons, yet that is not so.
 
Noticed a bug in nav map, it doesn't seem to update my current location after I've died or loaded a game and is still showing the sector I was killed/before loading game.
 
Is reactor power balance a little off?

In the original game, which I'm still playing under DOSBox, I can have reactor power of 3 and shield power of 2, and I can maintain a constant afterburner indefinitely, The energy remaining bar does not decrease, infact after firing my guns I notice that the energy remaining goes up, slowly.

In the remake, my constant afterburn seems to be draining the energy reserves. I think either the reactor needs to produce more power, or the shields and afterburner need to draw less in order to be faithful to the original game.

Also, I agree about the repair droids working a lot slower in the remake. I think the rate of the repair droid was about 1% per second for the repair droid in the original. I'm going from memory, but after my thrusters were damaged in the original, I watched my max speed increase by that much as the repair droid fixed them.

--Brandon Young
 
brandonyoung said:
In the original game, which I'm still playing under DOSBox, I can have reactor power of 3 and shield power of 2, and I can maintain a constant afterburner indefinitely, The energy remaining bar does not decrease, infact after firing my guns I notice that the energy remaining goes up, slowly.
Absolutely right. Back when I redid the reactor and shield stats I forgot a few things. I changed the thickness of the shields and how much energy the reactors put out to the correct values, but I forgot to change how much the afterburner uses, and how much energy the shields use. doh. For the curious, AB went from 42 to 40, and energy per cm of shield went from 54/100 to 1/2.

Fixed, and committed. Thanks for the concrete example, made it easy to test it out!
 
your welcome. I'm glad to help. I want to thank you for creating this great remake.

I just ran another test of the damage repair droid in the original game. I dropped the shields completely to make sure I took some damage during a fight. Since there is no percent indicator for the damage, it is still guesswork except for the thruster repair rate, since I do have a top speed indicator for that, and it increased as the system was repaired. It looks like I was off, it looks more like 1% every 2 seconds. At least that was the repair rate once it started repairing the thrusters.

The advanced droid is twice as fast, so that does repair 1% every second.

It was just a few minutes for a bunch of systems to go from yellow to all green. Certainly faster than the remake.

On another note, I notice that when listing a cargo mission, the mission description only says deliver cargo to "a base" in a system, it doesn't mention the base's name until after we arrive in the system what the base's name is. The original stated the base name in the mission description. It just seems like an annoyance to find out on the last jump that I need to go to two bases in the same system instead of one. I guess in the remake it doesn't make much difference, since we are now allowed to continue a cargo mission after landing, we aren't limited to completing each cargo run on one tank of fuel, which I like.

--Brandon Young
 
Hmmm... Anyone else noticed that enemy Talons seem to behave a bit odd from time to time? I would consider this as impossible to do myself:

Going head-to-head with Talon, suddenly it stops like it's velocity would have dropped from 800 to 0 in a microsecond and looks like it's REVERSING while shooting at me! Their turning is also too sharp which makes anticipating my shots quite difficult, like the laws of space physics that affect me don't affect them at all... Well, after all they are slipping through asteroids too :-)

Reminds me of manoeuvres I've seen in those UFO-documents...
 
Is'nt that normal?
At last I remember somethink like that from the original.
That was the one think that I alway dislike in the Privateer-Univers.
Those extrem drifting.
Actually I prefer it like in WC3/4.
Well....
 
Well I remember that their movement wasn't this crazy-like in the original and asteroids were as dangerous for them as they are for me.
 
Acimus said:
... and asteroids were as dangerous for them as they are for me.
They still are. NPC ships can collide with asteroids, and it does the same amount of damage as it does to you. If you think your ship is hurt more in a collision, you were probably going faster.
 
MamiyaOtaru said:
They still are. NPC ships can collide with asteroids, and it does the same amount of damage as it does to you. If you think your ship is hurt more in a collision, you were probably going faster.

Well it certainly didn't look like that the last time I was fighting in an asteroid field, enemy ships went through asteroids without any kind of sign of collision or damage. At least my ship starts bouncing around when I hit asteroid and I hear that "bzzumm"-sound as my shields go down.

Btw. how does the ship spawning work? Sometimes I don't see enemies for a long time and I noticed that the same pilots etc. were still lolling around when I re-entered the sector I left half an hour ago. Apparently game stores the location of every object, so do killed pirates/retros re-spawn in some place from where they start circling around sectors again etc.?
 
Each flightgroup can have more than 1 of a given ship--usually about 6-12 so you'll probably have to kill 12 of a given flightgroup to nail them all
 
can we get headlights on our starfighters?

I was flying through an asteroid field and because of the position of the sun and the direction I was flying, the asteroids looked completely black. It was hard to see them and I crashed into quite a few of them before I got out. I couldn't tell that the big black space in front of me was an asteroid and not a clear path to the jump point.

Increasing the ambient lighting or adding some headlights to the starships might help a bit.

--Brandon young
 
increasing ambient is pretty easy...though I guess in space things really are blackish...seen apollo 13 the movie? :-) on the dark side things are really blackish
 
Flying the ejection pod is quite useless, takes way too long before I can get close enough to a planet/station so that I could dock and take another ship. I will rather self-destruct and re-spawn than fly to the nearest base with that über-slow pod. Add afterburner to the pod? Increase pod's speed? Make pod to appear closer to the destination after autopilot? And how the heck can I get back in to my ship after ejecting?

For some reason I'll have to tap twice Ctrl-t before turret acquires the target? Alt-t doesn't seem to do anything, why is that combo there? Ctrl-t seems to work exactly like Alt-t is described in the manual anyway, keeping its original target so that I can engage another enemy.

How do I select specific item from my cargo manifest list while in space? Wouldn't it also be more practical to eject the whole cargo item as a single box, instead of ejecting 100 boxes of iron etc.? :-)
 
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