Spent most of today making a "real" C2 test uni instead of the little two galaxy sandbox we've been playing with. Made the C2 server load up all the custom galaxies that we've finished converting to the C2 format plus make a little layered universe with about 400 galaxies.

Since I was making a new universe, I decided to try out an idea I had for the layout of the universe that might get pushed to live next uni. Basically instead of having links between layers all over the place, there's a central hub running down the middle of the universe starting in Sol. Then in Wild space, i made a new galaxy called "Earthforce Sactuary: Wildspace" which is protected by Earthforce and has a towing station, and also protects about 6 galaxies around it with lots of juxtas running from these middle protected galaxies out to the rest of the layer. In Perilous, there's a single protected galaxy in the middle called "Earthforce Perilous Outpost" that also has a towing station. So it goes Sol->Sanctuary in Wildspace->Perilous Outpost.

I think this will make conceptualizing travel in the universe a lot easier, and also should greatly reduce travel times. Perilous is now just two jumps away from Sol, although if this ever went live, I would want to insert some "deep space" galaxies in between the different earthforce outpost galaxies to give a little bit more feeling of traveling and a little bit of danger traveling between layers.

Getting a big uni on test for our C2 has revealed a lot of work still to do for the C2 galaxy map. The biggest thing is needing to scale the fonts on the galaxy names. One cool thing I added tonight was if you zoom out a certain amount, the galaxy names disappear like in C1, but the name of your currently selected galaxy stay displayed.

Attached is a screen shot showing the galaxy map of Perilous Space on my local C2 uni and the single protected, but here incorrectly named, Earthforce Outpost in Perilous.

So are the map layers still going to be planar (though seen from an angle), or are you planning to implement a truly 3D universe? I ask because I'm not at all sold on the latter idea; it sounds frankly cumbersome.

I do like the introduction of more towing stations and Earthforce outposts.

I see you cheat with adums blocker =O
Reread it : 400 gals O_O?
how many does the current uni have:P

Rosemaries are way too flat...

That aside, this sounds like a great idea and it would certainly help a lot in preventing people from blockading content from others. I for one care more about the lowered travel expenditures, though, now that I can most willingly agree with!

Still with flat layers. I agree a truly 3d universe layout would be a nightmare.



Current live universe has 4288 galaxies.



While they may look flat in a screenshot, I kind of think the flattish ships look pretty good in the actual game, because it makes it really obvious when they bank when turning. Flatter ships also catch the light a lot better when they turn. But I will turn these things over to the artists and let them have the last say.

>_> rosemary should have a cross section of about a 2:1 rectangle, the fuzz should be almost square in cross section >_< that doesnt mean they cant be flat surfaced on top to catch the light... but come on, almost all the ships i've seen look like paper cutouts. only the retro zebu looked good to my eye.

Wow. C2 IS real, news to me.

/endsarcasm

Looks nice

The radar is currently AWOL. I would care if I felt any need for it, but given the floaties on the side for current target and wormholes and AI bases, and being able to tell where the sun is based on the lighting, I'm just never wanting a radar. We'll get it back in at some point. It's fully functional - just no one ever added a toggle button for it in the UI yet.

At the list, we'll put a distance under the floaty of your current target and as tooltips for the other floaties. We may also put distances under every one of them as an option, or else I had an idea I wanted to try out where we scale the size of the floaty boxes based on how far away they are so you can visually get an idea of it's distance. This is pretty low on the priority list, though. Will probably play with it once we're in beta.

dont remove radar, if you think it makes C2 look crap, make it OPTIONAL

one of the biggest things that piss me off about games today is the lack of customisation... is it so hard to give players a choice? "resistance: fall of man" had almost complete customisability in the controls, hands down that was the best part of the game, not being stuck with some fucking shitty control scheme.. pretty much everything else about the game was inferior to more popular titles, but customisability made up for it (except for the widescreen auto left and right split, that was fucking annoying, it shouldve been optional ingame, rather than forcing you to change the screen ratios on the console so it would go top/bottom)

things you consider "not needed" are "Extremely important" to others, whenver you want to remove something, make it optional instead (unless it is broken, or it breaks the game, in which case it shouldnt exist in the first place)

Heh, i get it now and how many of those gals are DGs ? when i said gals i mean galaxies in earthforce, wild space and perilous layer that we see when we shuffle through them on the map

I dont like the idea of only one central link between all layers cos that will just make it easy for pvp'ers to know where to hang out.

also travelling from the rim of wildspace to the rim of peril would be a long journey! i like the radomness of juxtas as they are now.

The new map idea sounds very cool to me. Going from the rim of Wild Space to the rim of Peri shouldn't take any longer than it does now. It sounds like you'd just take a juxta to the central hub, go up to peri, and you're there. You may still have a long journey to get from the perilous hub to a high perilous DF, but we already have that now.

I don't think PvPers would be a problem either, really. The only reason they operate in W0 right now is because the protection in Lyceum is ineffective. In Jeff's proposal we would have a cluster of actual protected gals surrounded by player owned gals, and there would be lots of juxtas into those protected gals. Basically, the iwin types wouldn't be able to attack you there for the same reasons they rarely venture out of W0 / Lyceum now.

I like this idea a lot. I don't see the uni map on your screenshot though, unless it's those 3 boxes sort of floating around toward the left side.

and. . .though I really hate to be critical of this. . .the ships really do look way too flat. C2 is supposed to launch SS to new heights, with a strong point being the ability of the new graphics to suck in new players. I don't think those flat ships will have much suction :/ I'm about the furthest thing from an artist you'll find, but even I can say those ships look terrible. I'm sorry to have to say so, but please just take it as constructive criticism. I want to see C2 succeed beyond all our wildest dreams, so I'll call em as I see em.

Because c1 is flat some ships will just end up looking flat when you get them in c2. Though ofc many of the ships look downright squashed. This allong with the level of detail of certain models is all in a slowish and steady upgrade process. There are hundreds of ships in c2 allong with all the other models and the ones that dont even exist yet are a priority. Expect to see upgrades eventually to the quality of all the models and textures.