Site update, new Stiletto...

powell99 said:
I dont know what you mean about the Stiletto
There are six Stilettos and six Gladii onboard the Lionheart. Every time you lose a ship - whether because you ejected, or because a wingman ejected - it's gone. Vanished. Forever. So, every time you lose a ship, the next mission will be harder, because your forces will have one ship less.

Ironduke said:
Even harder than UE...? :eek: UE's second mission got me so frustrated, it almost made me deinstall the game. Now I really don't want to niggle, but shouldn't a prologue campaign be manageable to rookies and vets alike? (At least the first, say, 2-3 missions.) I think this would help to open up Standoff to a much broader public.
Yep, because a mod for a game that's only played by a bunch of die-hard fans of a six year-old game really needs to be open to the broader public :).

Seriously, though - I don't think Standoff is that much harder, I think it's mainly just different. UE's difficulty was that it tried to wear you down gradually and then kill you. Standoff skips the wearing-down part, and just goes straight for the kill :p. A single Moray in UE barely even registered as a threat, while a single Talon in Standoff can blow your Stiletto away in three-four salvos (you don't play chicken with a Talon). However, the reverse is also the case - your Stiletto, although armed with nothing more than a pair of mass drivers, can blow a Talon away quite quickly, or at least force him to retreat.

The upshot of it is that Standoff is basically quicker and more intense than UE. The first seconds of a fight determine everything. The killing of a single enemy (or the loss of a single friendly) can change so much that victory is sometimes literally just a heat-seeker away.

I like the idea, as long as I don't have to baby-sit my wingmen all the time. (Read: If the wingman AI is good enough to handle non-critical situations without requesting assistance every other second.
Well, I'm afraid we have to disappoint you there. We have no way of improving the AI beyond what WCP offers (although WCP did not always use its AI to the fullest). Oh, if only we did... ;)
 
Eder said:
Here's a random screenshot of me testing the patch I sent to the rest of the team about half an hour ago....

Out of curiosity, what does the patch do? Have you got all the patches from HCl already?

The screenshot is quite dark, I can barely see the Lionheart.
EDIT: heh, my monitor´s brightness needed some adjustments. I can see it now.

Also, I know you can´t improve the AI, but were you able to do some tweaking with it?

Finally, can´t you move that curve-shaped cockpit strut a bit up? I never liked to play with struts in WCP/SO and I was hoping to do so in Standoff. The bottom part of the strut looks great, but that curved thing leaves little viewing space below it. The big space above the curve is not much useful in dogfighting, since you´ll lose sight of the enemy once it enter the curve´s blind spot. So could you increase the space between the VDU´s and the curved strut?
 
Ironduke said:
I like the idea, as long as I don't have to baby-sit my wingmen all the time. (Read: If the wingman AI is good enough to handle non-critical situations without requesting assistance every other second.)
Well, the AI is still the same as it was in WCP/SO, and like Q said, it's not very bright - but that goes for the enemies too. So, yes, I'd say your wingmen are good enough to handle non-critical situations on their own. They can even handle a little outnumbering, and depending on the difficulty level, they'll even rob you of a few kills. But it gets ugly when they're badly outnumbered, when there's capships full of flak turrets around, or when your wingmen are focusing on a objective (ie: bombing runs) and worrying less about their own hide than they normally would.

Quarto just made they seem stupider than they are because he always loses more wingmen than I do while playtesting.

Quarto said:
Seriously, though - I don't think Standoff is that much harder, I think it's mainly just different. UE's difficulty was that it tried to wear you down gradually and then kill you. Standoff skips the wearing-down part, and just goes straight for the kill...
Yup, that's pretty much how it feels, and that's what I was trying to say on my previous post. There will be no throwing 60 morays at you for five navpoints, only to then make you and your worn out ship go defend a Marine LC from a wing of Devil Rays like in UE. :p

Standoff's difficulty is different: it's harder to survive if you go head on with just about any ship of comparable class to your own... but on the other hand, you usually won't be as outnumbered as in UE, so if you just take a different approach, not risking yourself so much, you might find the game easier. However, if you do what you did in UE, and ignore a couple morays attacking you from behind just for a few seconds, while you finish off that other moray which you already got to 80% damage... well, you'll probably end up dead. :p

Starkey said:
Out of curiosity, what does the patch do? Have you got all the patches from HCl already?
These periodic patches usually do nothing big, but this one is kinda special. This one adds the new Stiletto, "briefing" versions of some ships meshes, and a new hangar for auto-landings, as far as my work is concerned - that's the kind of thing we're used to getting in these patches. But this one includes a new launcher from Tango (UE-style launcher), and some campaign file tweaks from Quarto to accomodate the first chapter of the main campaign (whose missions have all been coded already, but haven't been tested by the team). Now we should be able to test those Chapter 2 missions and make sure that our Prologue release will be fully compatible with stuff we are going to add to it in the future. Basically we'll be testing two separate releases: Prologue, and Prologue+Chap 2, and we gotta make sure they're both 100% the same up to the last mission of the Prologue.

Starkey said:
The screenshot is quite dark, I can barely see the Lionheart.
EDIT: heh, my monitor´s brightness needed some adjustments. I can see it now.
No, no, don't touch your monitor. :p It's just the angle the screenshot was taken from... you can see I'm facing the system's star, so almost all the light is coming from the other side. We did that so the Lionheart would look pretty on the autopilot sequences, but the downside is that it looks dark from below. :p

(My monitor *is* kinda dark, as this is a complaint I get pretty often on the screenshots I post, but in this case, I'm sure it's more the lighting on the mission than the difference between our monitors)

Starkey said:
Also, I know you can´t improve the AI, but were you able to do some tweaking with it?
Nope, we're not even sure where we'd look for AI tweaking. It's the most obscure part of WCP editing.

Starkey said:
Finally, can´t you move that curve-shaped cockpit strut a bit up? I never liked to play with struts in WCP/SO and I was hoping to do so in Standoff. The bottom part of the strut looks great, but that curved thing leaves little viewing space below it. The big space above the curve is not much useful in dogfighting, since you´ll lose sight of the enemy once it enter the curve´s blind spot. So could you increase the space between the VDU´s and the curved strut?
No. :p I figure people who prefer playability would prefer playability enough to turn struts off altogether (the choice here is the same that was given in KS versions of WC2). People who play with the struts probably want more immersion than playability, so I didn't let the later interfere with the former. Some ships' cockpits don't have optimal visibility, and pilots have to live with it.
 
Ok, if I can kick ass inside the cramped Orion cockpit, I guess I can manage to survive in your Stillettos. :p
 
Starkey said:
Out of curiosity, what does the patch do? Have you got all the patches from HCl already?
Oh, this wasn't a HCl patch - rather, it was TRE-file patch, that added the latest versions of a few files to the main package, so that the non-programmers on the Standoff team can check out the latest version.

As for HCl patches (or rather, Tango patches, since he's taken over that aspect of the project), we've basically got everything we needed. The only thing still left to be worked out is flak guns.

Also, I know you can´t improve the AI, but were you able to do some tweaking with it?
Yes. If you've got the WCP guide, you'll know that each pilot has four AI stats - gunnery, flying, verbosity, and ejectability. During UE, we found out which file contained these, but we couldn't figure out (and, to be honest, didn't try too hard) which number was which, but we did work it out for Standoff. So, unlike UE, where our pilots were merely voiceover replacements, in Standoff we also replaced pilot AI stats.
(this doesn't mean that all our pilots have 5/5/5/5, mind you - quite the contrary, we tried to make sure that there was a noticeable level of variety in AI)

Finally, can´t you move that curve-shaped cockpit strut a bit up? I never liked to play with struts in WCP/SO and I was hoping to do so in Standoff. The bottom part of the strut looks great, but that curved thing leaves little viewing space below it.
I'm almost certain the answer is no. The struts aren't designed to provide optimal visibility, but rather recreate that WC2 feeling (where struts took up so much space).

However, like in WC2, you do get used to it - if you resist the temptation to turn them off when you get into the game, you'll quickly stop noticing them.
 
Quarto said:
During UE, we found out which file contained these, but we couldn't figure out (and, to be honest, didn't try too hard) which number was which, but we did work it out for Standoff. So, unlike UE, where our pilots were merely voiceover replacements, in Standoff we also replaced pilot AI stats.
(this doesn't mean that all our pilots have 5/5/5/5, mind you - quite the contrary, we tried to make sure that there was a noticeable level of variety in AI)
Hey, I thought you had scrapped my changes to the old pilots.iff because "we weren't sure what they did"? Well, now I know why those Talons pitch evade so much. :p
 
Bah, we really gotta learn to not post simultaneously, Eder :p.

Edit: and yeah, once I figured out that your research was right (I was confused at first, because I was relying on the figures from the WCP guide, and your research didn't match up... but then it turned out that, as always, the game guide didn't entirely reflect the reality of the game :p), I went and changed pretty much all the AIs.
 
Great! It would be nice to know the AI status of our wingmen, in order to keep an eye on the bad ones.
 
My guess is that generally, if he/she doesn't say any unique mission-related lines for the first three missions or so that you fly with him, he/she sucks. :p

I still plan to add more of the "important" characters to the website, so that could help too.
 
I bet the Generic Landreich Pilot #2 is the best of all!! - since I´m doing his voices :p , which, BTW, will be submitted next week.
 
Whoa, give me a break! Shouldn't you guys be working on Standoff rather than flooding the forum with your simultaneous posts? :p
Seriously, though, from what I gather from your answers, I think I'll like Standoff's approach to dogfighting after all. I always preferred team-work and a good 1-on-1 over "throw everything we have at him, and then some" slaughters. Target-rich areas can be fun, but if you single-handedly kill 50 enemies each mission and return with merely a scratch in the paint, that kinda ruins gameplay for me. So much the better if Standoff is different... ;)

BTW:
Quarto said:
Yep, because a mod for a game that's only played by a bunch of die-hard fans of a six year-old game really needs to be open to the broader public :).
Now that was one crude way to crush my optimistic feelings about the size of WC's fan community...! :( :D
 
Don´t worry, we´re just the tip of the iceberg. Release a new game, and the fans will awake :)
 
I was wondering why those damned Talons (in the old beta I'm playing, since I haven't updated in forever) kept ruining my shit (other than the obvious fact that one hit beats the ever-loving fuck out of your Stiletto, anyway). What I'd like to be able to tweak about AI is stuff like "Hey, that plasma cannon will damage components", or add new moves to their repetoir.
 
Ship files have what looks like a list of maneuvers in them, so presumably each ship can have it's own set ("Salthis always break to the left, laddie!"). However, since there seems to be no other file referencing these maneuvers, I think they're hardcoded to the exe, which means we can't take a look at them to try to add more variants. :(

Edit: not without going through more hassle than it's worth, at least.
 
Nuts....Wait did I read that Talons will havev plasma guns!!!??
My next remark is the Stiletto is possibly the best looking ship EVER!!
 
Talons have two mass drivers and one particle cannon - but the particle cannon can hurt like a plasma gun when you're in a Stiletto. :p
 
Eder said:
Ship files have what looks like a list of maneuvers in them, so presumably each ship can have it's own set ("Salthis always break to the left, laddie!"). However, since there seems to be no other file referencing these maneuvers, I think they're hardcoded to the exe, which means we can't take a look at them to try to add more variants.

I tryed to mess around with it a loong time ago, but it apeared that adding or removing a manuever from the ship file had no effect at all. Its very likely hardcoded and the listing in the file has no reason to exist...maybe it had in development, but i dont think it has any now.
 
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