Awesome, thank you for letting me know! I hope you enjoy it :)

Donate to Help me care for my senior mother and pay bills, organized by Zeke W Hello, my name is Zeke, you might know me by my online handle MesoTroniK. I did… Zeke W needs your support for Help me care for my senior mother and pay bills

I hate to ask, but Meso - you might know him as a Starsector modder/community member, and he's also a contributor to the game - is in debt after caring for his sick mother, and now in real trouble. Any help would be amazing. Thank you for reading this.

www.gofundme.com/f/help-me-ca...

Screenshot of the main map of my goblin game with a new "fog of war" implementation. Instead of splatting sprites all over, there's now two texture layers drawn overtop the map, a "gray" fog (transparent, to show what you know but don't currently see) and a "black" fog (opaque, to show where you've never seen). It basically works! Going to need to add some features and adjust lots of details, but I'm glad the texture method was so simple to implement and I don't have to do the weird fog tile system that I was considering before.

Had a longstanding item to redo the "fog of war" feature, so I did that today. Had to wrap my head around just a little weird math and some shader coding.

(And still need to make the location circles & connection lines go under the fog.)

Also redid font rendering. Everything looks weird!

[Back on my hex bullshit.]

Basically: had some thoughts on terrain hex assets over the past ... (god, 12?) ... years I've been selling these things.

So these have: smaller size, all seamless tiling (not all done in image) (thus fewer biome variants), flat top/bottom, less visually noisy style.

It does as of a couple of hours ago, at least to the bar delivery missions :)

Thank you!

Hmm, it's not something I've specifically been thinking about; if anything with colonies I'd rather focus on what they can DO than what you can do to them, if that makes sense. E.G. support fleets

Indeed!

Hmm, you might want to talk to the scientist's Tri-Tachyon backer :)

(This is about on-pace for what it's been for years! And I prefer to put out releases that are more complete and some stuff just takes longer to iron out than is suitable to faster release cycles. As an added benefit: a more stable mod scene, too.)

Yeah, I mean - I've had the thought to add some flavor resources to some of the core worlds for a *while*, but it's just not something that's ever made it to the top of the todo pile!

Hmm, I could see doing something like that, yeah. Have been thinking a bit about letting the player adapt their fleet to the Abyss in some ways, but not really settled on it!

Right, yeah - I can see adding stuff like that, but the driver for it would absolutely NOT be "wanting to add a new commodity", you know? It'd have to be something I want to add for bigger reasons, and then there'd likely be a way to make it work w/o adding a new commodity, etc etc

Not (much, at least not directly) in this release, and as to later - can't really say, sorry!

I think with resources, it kind of has to go the other way - they need to DO something interesting, a resource just existing isn't very interesting, no?

(And Volturnian Lobster doesn't really do much except for a few specific uses it has, it's mostly just "fun flavor")

Starsector 0.98.5a in-development patch notes:

fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index....

A conclusion to the Sindrian Diktat storyline, alongside a number of smaller features and QoL changes.

(Not yet available for download; this is just a preview of what will be in the next release!)

They do, yeah, and they also benefit from the skill's effects!

Yep, same as it's been for a while!

This is how the map for Scenario 2 starts, more or less. In the upper left are tokens for Jorten the Fighter and Kreeee the Goblin - Kreeee has been captured (note the bars on his hotbar element in the lower left) and Jorten's goal is to sell Kreeee before Wormsy can help him escape. Wormsy, meanwhile, is on the right side of the map, across the river. Based on decisions at the start of the scenario, she can appear anywhere between the Goblin Swamp (lower right, bushy trees) and the Tavern itself, where Kreeee is. Crossing the bridges requires being sneaky, clever, or having lots of resources. And Wormsy starts with *nothing* on this map, so basically the player has to figure out the basic mechanics of exploring locations and acquiring resources in order to solve the problem presented by the map in order to fulfill their objective(s). Like I said: open-ended. _However_ this requires that all those circles have something interesting to do in them! That's a lot of scripting and dialog to write, but: it'll pay off, because once I have something there, they'll be useful for every other scenario I make in the game.

This shows off how the custom CSV scripting system works to set up Scenario 2. Starsector modders will recognize this, some with horror, as essentially a copy of Starsector's rules.csv system. And yeah, I coded my own version of it! Because I'm already using it almost every day to create content for Starsector; my brain thinks in it now. Anyway, just reading through as plain text should tell you more or less what is happening there: setting up the map, the player resources, and character in-play, and the basic properties of the scenario. In the second row the game actually starts, with the "StartScenario" trigger. The script block, the next column over, executes each script in order from top to bottom and in my implementation it is possible to add time delays, or a condition to fulfill, before firing the next line of the script. SetBoardModeTo has a default delay that waits for UI elements to fade in and out before proceeding (0.3 seconds, if I recall correctly.) CameraPanToEntity will pause execution until its at the target position. Wait, of course, simply holds a position for the given number of seconds. (And so on.) -- Because the game is turn-based, not real-time, I can safely script on-map sequences like this using the rules.csv system. The possibilities are pretty wild, but for now it's all pretty simple "move camera here, pause meaningfully, then open a dialog" type stuff.

Here's my token worksheet. I think I've showed this off before, but here I've added a bit more to it - at first I experimented with more naturalistic renders of characters, then figured it'd be better to make them more symbolic, like little carvings on an ancient chess set. This signals to players the board game-like interaction metaphor of the game map.

Happy #goblinFriday!

Working on Scenario 2: "The Small Escape", where the game becomes a lot more freeform after some linear tutorial scenarios.

Need to write a TON of content for locations - much of the 'meat' of the game is random events hit while running around.
(more in alt text for images.)

I just meant being unsure about the "almost always" part being intended / imo good. Agree: re clearer signaling of the ways to get this bonus!

("Being unsure" is kind of the point, actually! And it's s-mods, officers, and reinforced hull, which IIRC also mentions it in its description. I think.)

I can definitely see it! IMO it just has to be that way, I think fighters w/o skills are about as strong as they *can* be without snowballing when massed

... without realizing it's mostly superficial

Hmm - ships being recoverable is such a fringe effect because there's like 3 other instantly available ways of obtaining it that I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense to really focus on? You're right that HR doesn't "need" it but I'd not want people to dip 1 pt into industry just for this effect

Yeah - it's multiplicative, as is generally the case with percentage reductions in the game

"What feels right in playtesting" :)

It's just a very comfy skill, yeah, so I'd say if there's an issue there, it's with the skill, not something systemic, if that makes sense

Yep!

Hmm - to me "realizing that something that intuitively feels bad can actually be good" is not really a negative, it's a rewarding experience the player can have!

Hmm, I don't really see changing it to be OP-based; fighter OP costs really aren't suited for this (as you noted) and it very easily gets into "fleet full of fighters gets full bonus" territory etc

That might be a bit hard due to the 8-bay softcap, but I guess it'll still help :D