Re: Announcing Expanding Known Space from Valiant Galaxy Associates
Darren,
In answer to your question, so far the changes are these:
1. We have created an o hot key that replaces the old on hand credits o hot key. This one allows you to see ships not on planets that have no autonav orders.
2. On hand credits was moved to become extra information given with the t hot key.
3. L now gives cursor location, and shift l gives location of last selected ship. This moves cursor location from the hot key u because of the next change.
4. U and shift u now cycle through five purposes for ships: scout, defense, attack, and convoy. The fifth is unassigned. Putting a fleet or ship in scout mode now enables scout mode on it without going into the autonav menu. These purposes are displayed when the player looks at the ship or fleet on map mode.
5. We have prepared a text file that will list all file names in the speech folder, and the contents of each file for recording your own voice pack, or for translation. In addition we've created a utility that converts this string file into SAPI speech. It is not a complete fix, as because of the way our voice sends are written it makes Sapi rather choppy. However, it does provide an alternative. We still encourage the community to record their own voice packs and use those as the recorded speech will be much more effective. We are looking at things we can do to smoothe the SAPI speech out, and might include a pregenerated SAPI folder, but that's still being debated. Our stants is still that we're sticking by our original script, we're providing the alternative, but the onus of use is primarily on the end user.
Those are the completed, or near completed items that we've worked on.
Other items that are under discussion, and will probably be completed are these:
6. Providing an examine square menu that will tell you all ships on the square that are not in fleets, possibly having submenus for each fleet to display its contents separately. We're looking into what options are the easiest and most efficient to code in a short time. This might take a completely different form in the final version.
7. An option to flip the Y axis. I want to say the original reason we flipped it from common usage was due to complaints on the original TKS forum, but I might be wrong about that. For me, I always think of the map as the lower right quadrant of a cartesian plane with the origin in the upper left corner, but we get the confusion factor, and figured out an efficient way to provide a toggle.
8. We're looking into a way to make map mode disappear once you place your final ship, and making this a toggleable option that would be a replacement for the current behavior which is the map hangs around until dismissed. The game used to cause the map to disappear, and it is messing with several beta testers when it doesn't. This might or might not get implemented as it is complicated, and currently not something called for by most customers.
9. We're looking into introducing a second demo mode to provide more combat and/or a regular game experience. We're still debating which way we want to do this. Our original reasoning for using lightning mode was that if we set an arbitrary turn limit, there's no guarantee that a player will actually encounter the AI by that limit. Usually, yes, but not always. This one is going to happen most likely, but we don't know what form it will take.
10. We're looking at adding two more missions. Currently, this is merely a speculative idea, so might or might not happen. one was suggested by this forum, another by beta testers. If others get suggested and we have time, and they are again efficient and easy to code, we will strongly consider including others.
11. We're looking at including three new stats in the game status, end game, and copy text options that would track how many planets out of 40 you have discovered, how many static hazards, and how many mobile hazards you have encountered. The same stats would be provided for the AI.
12. I'd like to rearrange the way the copy and paste text is presented, if I can convince Aaron it's worth doing, but this might or might not happen. I include this one as a side note. This copy text is in line with how our other games have been set up for the most part, so it will probably stay as is, but I had originally wanted a more broken up format that might list for instance how many interceptors we bought, how many the AI bought, and alternate more to make the comparisons easier.
13. We're looking at where we could profitably insert sounds for those who want them, and still put them on a toggle for those who find it too cluttered, slow, or makes the game less responsive. Whatever we do in this direction, the soundscape will still be very sparse and will likely be mostly sounds to indicate small events, and shifts in game phase. As I noted in an earlier post, having individual sounds tied to individual ship events can get spammy and annoying very quickly in certain game situations.
That's the quick overview. Those will definitely happen, and we hope to have this done by the end of August, possibly the middle of September.
What won't be happening in this update are these and I'll explain why:
1. Major changes in maps, units, or other major game elements. Quite simply, EKS is a very complex system, and introducing new variables often breaks the game and requires a long testing process to find the bug and squash it. Squashing a bug of this sort often creates more. We had an issue in beta 20 that came from a similar issue, and we do not want to slow down this update by trying to make the game bigger, more involved, etc, and then have to wait three months or better over one bug.
2. I like the story ideas, but they would require a major overhaul to how the game plays, and again, in the interest of getting an update into players' hands quickly, we are going to hold off on any changes in that direction.
One last teaser, but this is only a teaser and may not happen. We are examining ways to make computer to computer play possible. This falls into the same caviots as above with new units, new maps, new story: if it is taking too long to figure out, or won't work in a way that satisfies us, we're not going to do it at this time. We have always envisioned an online possibility for this game, and we would like to make it happen, but our policy with past updates, and I think it's a good one, is to fix immediately obvious large scale issues that are raised rather than to try and retool the game entirely. In the case of TKS, we have been working on retooling the game entirely, and it took us over two years, and we're not even halfway done with the ideas we want to pursue. It has currently gotten sidelined by EKS and some other projects, and will take even longer now.
One thing, as with any small developer to remember is, it's just two of us. only one of us has extensive coding skills. I can do a little but I learned programming back in the days of Basic and Pascal and so modern programming languages blow my head up. I can do some data entry things like if then statements or hot keys if they're simple,but I just am not useful code wise. As with any small company run part time, RL interferes. SO sometimes we make choices based on how efficiently and quickly can we get this game to work, work right, work consistently, and provide a good play experience. We don't always go for this would be the coolest if ideas. Many of the ideas suggested here have been excellent ideas for places to take the game, and they are ones that we will explore if we ever create an expansion, a further update, or a new game that builds on EKS. However, many of them I estimate would take us five years or better to complete, just because of the inevitable delays we would encounter.
Take care,
Jeremy
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