Children of a Dead Earth

Started by Jarhead0331, September 23, 2016, 12:09:18 PM

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mikeck

How does the sandbox work? I have not even looked at it. Do you have access to every tech immediately? Seems I saw something that you have to unlock things. Also, once unlocked, is there any type of limitation on what you can design? Meaning costs limiting the type of armor and such? Or can you design things however you want so long as they obey the laws of physics
"A government large enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take everything you have."--Thomas Jefferson

mikeck

Just FYI, if any of you playing this are also reading Lumpkin's "Human Reach" books.
I found his website which has illustrations and specs on all of the Ships from all nations.

http://www.thehumanreach.net/ships_home.shtm
"A government large enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take everything you have."--Thomas Jefferson

Nefaro

Quote from: mikeck on October 06, 2016, 10:57:16 PM
Just FYI, if any of you playing this are also reading Lumpkin's "Human Reach" books.
I found his website which has illustrations and specs on all of the Ships from all nations.

http://www.thehumanreach.net/ships_home.shtm

Turkey Basters of death.

Jarhead0331

Been a LOOOOONG time since I've touched this one, but it got a pretty impressive patch today. I'm thinking I will jump into this again...its like Cold Waters in space.

Quote
Highlights

- Fully Featured Level Editor

- Flattened Ship Armor "Wedge" Shape

- Multibarrel Guns and Preloaded Guns

- Multiengine Gimbals

- Better ship space efficiency

- Sandbox Instant Action

- Pre-aimed guns in combat

- Many, many bug fixes



Full Changelist

1.2.1 (6/1/2017)
- Level Editor
--- Levels, factions, celestial bodies can all be edited and put together into a single campaign, which can be exported to Steam Workshop and played by other players.
--- Existing celestial bodies and factions can be reused, or new ones can be created.
--- Can customize celestial bodies' ring textures, body textures, body model, or can create new bodies which reuse core game textures, models, etc.
- Design
--- Wedge Ships - Ship armor aspect ratio can be modified to yield flattened ship shapes. Only for non-cylindrical armor.
--- Multibarrel Guns - Projectile weapons can have many guns per turret, which can distribute heat and provide scatter fire patterns.
--- Preloaded Cannons - Conventional cannons have all munitions preloaded now, so with multiple barrels, can act as a turreted blast launcher.
--- Multiengine Gimbals - Engines can be stacked many to a single gimbal. This allows very dense rockets, and much higher thrust per area.
--- Space Efficient Attaching Modules - Attached modules fit better. For example, with two propellant tanks side by side, weapons use the space above and below better than side to side with the tanks.
--- Dodecagonal Cross Section - Twelve sided ship armor, which functions as angular but near-circular armor.
- Gameplay
--- Instant Action - New option in Sandbox which starts both fleets out in combat at their max weapon range.
--- Can now use missiles or drones directly in Sandbox.
--- Guns start combat already aimed at their target. Very useful for large, slow-turning guns.
--- Some AIs have the option to ignore range for launchers.
- UI
--- Mod Designs, User Designs, and Core Designs are split apart in lists for easier reading.
--- Option to watch the ending from the briefing menu if you've beaten the game (due to a bug that may have disabled the ending previously).
- Mods
--- Can switch between campaigns in game.
--- Exposed more properties in Limits.txt, including the total number of armor layers allowed.
--- Mod resources and Steam Workshop Items with now have priority over default resources with the same name, including Audio, Textures, Models, and Fonts.
--- Steam Workshop - All resource files can be read in from Steam Workshop, including font files, so language conversions can be loaded from Steam Workshop without any extra steps (if it has the font files).
- Other
--- Countless bug fixes, including missiles exploding as soon as they launch, Blast Launcher being able to reload, incorrect armor mass with partial armor, numerous typos, some material property fixes, ending not playing properly, Saturn's rings rendered wrong, and many, many more.
--- Countless crash fixes.
Grogheads Uber Alles
Semper Grog
"No beast is more alpha than JH." Gusington, 10/23/18


Nefaro

Interesting..

Thanks for the heads-up, Jarhead.  Have had this on my wishlist for awhile.  This update moves it up on my Estimated Time To Purchase scale.  :)

Jarhead0331

Quote from: Nefaro on July 02, 2018, 02:46:20 PM
Interesting..

Thanks for the heads-up, Jarhead.  Have had this on my wishlist for awhile.  This update moves it up on my Estimated Time To Purchase scale.  :)

It is a FANTASTIC game...but, caveat emptor...It is complex, unforgiving and very very difficult. If you can get passed all that, though, it gives a much more authentic feeling experience to what deep space ship on ship combat will most likely be like at a time when such things are in their relative infancy.
Grogheads Uber Alles
Semper Grog
"No beast is more alpha than JH." Gusington, 10/23/18


Skwerl

I've tried to learn this game twice, but gave up in frustration both times.  Apparently I lack the necessary mental acuity.  That's a shame, because I love the concept. 

CaptainKoloth

I decided to necro this today, because I decided, you know what the world really wants, really needs, today? My hot take on an abandoned five-year old game that no one's buying and that's on sale on Steam for 90% off.

I was really excited about this game for years because space is my day job, and I thought, finally a game with real physics. The description of this game is my dream game. Didn't get around to it with work and real life but finally made some time over the holiday this year... it is an  awful game. Important point- I didn't say it's a bad simulation, or an inaccurate one, or that the developer didn't work hard on it, have good intentions, etc.- but I will die on the hill that it's a bad game.

Fundamentally, it has three problems from a game design point of view:

1) The designer has all the fun

Sid Meier, the famous video game developer of Civilization, PIrates, Railroad Tycoon, et al. fame, has a number of axioms for good video game design. One of these is that you need to be cautious that the player is the one having the fun rather than the designer. This is a perfect example of a game that fails that rule. If you read the game description, you'll see that, for example, the game has an extremely accurate orbit propagator. I am certain this is true. But where do I see that in the game? There is no visibility into how orbits are being calculated, what forces are being taken into effect, or into what the orbital trajectories would look like with a less accurate propagator. The orbits might as well be completely abstracted and not physically calculated at all. I'm not sure a typical player would be able to tell. The designer had a lot of fun coding a highly accurate propagator, but the results are invisible and ultimately irrelevant to the player.

Even more important is what this does to the combat phase. On the game's website it will talk about how each projectile is being physically simulated with real equations, the force generated by magnetic coils, the torque it imparts to the firing spacecraft, etc. Again, I'm sure this is true. I'm very excited by this as a theory. But there is no layer connecting the physics to the gameplay. As a player, all you see is a confusing mass of colors, some slowdown, and then some messages about what got damaged. You have no idea what weapons damaged what, how, where, when, or why. You have very little capability to do anything to really affect the combat, and again, while I'm sure all the physics of the engagement are highly accurate, they are totally invisible to the player. The designer clearly had an enormous amount of fun coding an extraordinarily accurate physical simulation of space warfare. I'm sure it IS accurate. But he forgot to include an intermediate layer actually connecting the player to any of the calculations occurring or allowing him to meaningfully affect it, or even see it.

2) Game is driven entirely by post-action luck

In game design, there are considered to be two kinds of luck: pre-action luck, where the luck occurs before the player action and you get to make a decision informed by that luck (e.g. you draw a set of cards and then choose which one to play), and post-action luck, where you make a decision and then whether it works out or not is based on luck (e.g. you decide to attack something and the outcome is based on a die roll). To make a ridiculously broad, over-generalized statement, pre-action luck is generally considered by the game design community to be a desirable characteristic of game design, and post-action is generally considered to be an undesirable characteristic.

This game is 100% post-action luck. You design your spacecraft in the designer, but you then have almost no control over what they do in combat other than select a subsystem for your ships to target. You can do other things like modify their homing behavior, but it's not entirely clear to me if those other things even work. Whether your ships actually hit the enemy, or why, is basically completely out of your hands. And it lacks an Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts style hit probability calculator or a Gunner, HEAT, PC, AAR function, so not only is it pure, non-player related luck whether, for example, your railgun hits the other guy, but if it doesn't, you won't know why, and if it does, you might not even know it did! It's an extraordinarily frustrating state of affairs.

3) Information flow to the player is very poor

As described above, there's a ton going on under the hood, but almost none of it is meaningfully communicated to the player. Your experience playing the game is usually half an hour of fiddling with orbits to get your fleets to meet up (this is mostly trial and error- and my day job is astrodynamics! But the game gives you few tools with which to assess which trajectories will work other than just dragging bars around to see what happens) and then two minutes of flashy lights followed by one of the sides losing for reasons that usually are unclear. The combat phase in particular is disappointing because there's no way to change the rate of time, so it all happens extremely quickly, and you get zero insight into what's hitting what, what's being damaged, why, what you might want to do differently next time to avoid it. It might as well be an auto-resolve. Maybe every atom is being accurately simulated under the hood- that's the defense the fans give of it- but if I can't see any of it, then it might as well all be cartoon physics for all I care. As a player, if I can't see it, can't affect it, can't can't be sure it's happening- then it might as well not be in the game at all.

Again, I'm not questioning whether the developer worked really hard, there's a lot of math happening somewhere- it just doesn't make for a good game. I know no one cares about this game at this point, I'm just really frustrated because I envisioned spending the holidays in this physics-based space combat nirvana, and instead I end up trying to convince myself I should be having fun when I'm not.

P.S. I do actually have a bunch of issues with the physics realism and assumptions too, but I'm not even going to get into that... just focusing on the game design here.

W8taminute

Thanks for sharing Captain.  I've got a few games in my library that were abandoned by their developers yet I still enjoy. 

Although the audience is very small, there are a few of us who desperately want some sort of up to date feedback or even conversation about a game no one loved except for a few.
"You and I are of a kind. In a different reality, I could have called you friend."

Romulan Commander to Kirk

bobarossa

Thanks for the necro.  I bought this a couple years ago cheap but have never played it.  I am a fan of Aurora so I thought this game might be up my alley.  Your comments make me think I would only be frustrated by the utter lack of feedback on what is happening during combat. That is one of the big joys I get from detailed games (I'm a retired engineer so I'm weird).

CaptainKoloth

Quote from: bobarossa on December 30, 2021, 02:51:03 PM
Thanks for the necro.  I bought this a couple years ago cheap but have never played it.  I am a fan of Aurora so I thought this game might be up my alley.  Your comments make me think I would only be frustrated by the utter lack of feedback on what is happening during combat. That is one of the big joys I get from detailed games (I'm a retired engineer so I'm weird).

And I'm an unretired engineer! Great minds think alike...

Jarhead0331

I'm an unretired lawyer and I loved this game. There is very little else like it out there.
Grogheads Uber Alles
Semper Grog
"No beast is more alpha than JH." Gusington, 10/23/18


CaptainKoloth

Quote from: Jarhead0331 on December 30, 2021, 02:57:41 PM
I'm an unretired lawyer and I loved this game. There is very little else like it out there.

It just goes to show, engineers have better taste than lawyers.

Jarhead0331

Quote from: CaptainKoloth on December 30, 2021, 03:07:43 PM
Quote from: Jarhead0331 on December 30, 2021, 02:57:41 PM
I'm an unretired lawyer and I loved this game. There is very little else like it out there.

It just goes to show, engineers have better taste than lawyers.

..and engineers are apparently more anal retentive than lawyers. Who knew?
Grogheads Uber Alles
Semper Grog
"No beast is more alpha than JH." Gusington, 10/23/18


CaptainKoloth

Quote from: Jarhead0331 on December 30, 2021, 03:08:59 PM
Quote from: CaptainKoloth on December 30, 2021, 03:07:43 PM
Quote from: Jarhead0331 on December 30, 2021, 02:57:41 PM
I'm an unretired lawyer and I loved this game. There is very little else like it out there.

It just goes to show, engineers have better taste than lawyers.

..and engineers are apparently more anal retentive than lawyers. Who knew?

Well played, sir.

As a somewhat more serious question, the lack of situational awareness/agency didn't bother your gamer brain? I kind of want to enjoy it, but I'm really struggling to do so. Maybe I'm somehow not thinking about it right.