Test Pilots Wanted

Wiki pages · Post by **Thargoid** » Mon Sep 20, 2010 7:39 pm

I'm coming to the end of an OXP for a new player ship. I've flown it around a bit, but I'm looking for a few others to give it a run and test out it's (fairly extensive) features and capabilities.

OXP and blank-canvas save game provided. Who's up for the challenge?

Ganelon · Post by **Ganelon** » Mon Sep 20, 2010 7:58 pm

I'd be up for giving it a few runs around the block. You can either pm me a link to it or email it to Umbrarium at gmail dot com.

Wiki pages · Post by **Thargoid** » Mon Sep 20, 2010 8:33 pm

OK link is in your PM inbox. Enjoy!

OneoftheLost · Post by **OneoftheLost** » Mon Sep 20, 2010 8:37 pm

As a big fan of your OXP's I'll give 'er a whirl.

Commander Smivs · Post by **Smivs** » Mon Sep 20, 2010 9:45 pm

Yeah, I'll give her a spin!

maik · Post by **maik** » Mon Sep 20, 2010 9:59 pm

Me too

Zieman · Post by **Zieman** » Mon Sep 20, 2010 10:46 pm

Sure, I'm willing to give it a go.

Gnudoll · Post by **Gnudoll** » Mon Sep 20, 2010 11:31 pm

How many pilots do you need? I'd be happy to give it a run. . .

Ganelon · Post by **Ganelon** » Mon Sep 20, 2010 11:43 pm

The Vortex is a fast ship, tight turn radius, flies easy. A little touchy on the controls, so it might be a bit better for aggressive dogfighting than long distance sniping.

There are some really neat new features that I prefer not to "spoiler", so I'll keep the review short and in general terms till more people have tried it.

The innovative anti-missile measures rock, but could make it hard to keep "clean" legal status if anything goes aggro on you near the stations, since they appear to kick in automatically on any targetted hostile, even when missiles haven't been fired. Not that a few Galcop vipers are much of a concern if you're flying one of these, but it might be nice to dock at a main station now and then. LOL From what I can tell, def a "smugglers' dream" ship, since depending on how you store cargo, a bit of contraband doesn't seem to get noticed as you leave the stations..

Since the test-pilot savegame that was thoughtfully provided starts at Lave, I headed for the Academy there first to get used to how Vortex handles and run through the basic courses. A fun ship. Very agile, for having a useful amount of cargo space and packing as much firepower as it does. Then loaded up on cargo and did a quiet run to Zaonce to make a few credits and to buy a few things not stocked at Lave, then back to Lave with some cargo and a few other runs to make some cash for a few extras. It wouldn't be that hard to make your money back with this ship, the rather creative cargo hold allows for hauls like you'd usually use something like a Boa Cruiser for.

Then I headed off to Riedquat by way of Diso to look for some bigger fights. The Vortex did very in combat. I only got my "press space commander" moment after intentionally getting offender status by firing on the seedy bar to try it against some (usually) fellow bounty hunters. I made it through 8 of them before I finally kissed vacuum, and then it was from a collision because I wasn't quite used to the controls and speed enough yet. (Yeah, that's the ticket! That's what it was..)

The Vortex is probably a bit "too uber" for some people's tastes, but you could load up a lot of OXPs with plenty of strong enemies if you wanted to balance that out. A lot of very neat and innovative concepts and more than a few things I wouldn't even have thought possible. I highly recommend at least giving it a spin, but you really should read the "readme" files on this one, or you'll miss out on some of it's best points.

I did kind of miss being able to switch to external view to get a look at the ship while flying, but that little sacrifice was well worth what has been put in place of the external views.

Can't give this fine ship less than 5 out of 5 stars because I lost all track of time after loading the OXP and it was about two and a half hours before I came up for air.. LOL

Hopefully your curiosity is piqued enough now to give it a try. Even if it's not what you might like as a long term ship in your main game, it's definitely a wild bit of fun for test driving.

Wiki pages · Post by **Thargoid** » Tue Sep 21, 2010 5:31 am

PMs are in the inbox of everyone above - enjoy guys.

Ganelon - thanks for the extensive review, glad you liked it. It is a strong ship, but it has a price-tag to match. The external views would be simple to add back in again, but I always find the concept weird as there's technically no camera available to make the view you're seeing (but then that never stopped Star Trek).

And the defense systems should only kick in for attacks specifically on your ship, so won't screw up your legal status (at least that's the theory). Any offender or fugitive status would be from a stray shot or something. Indeed if you're legal status is changing without aggression then that's something going adrift somewhere.

But again thanks, excellent review.

Commander McLane · Post by **Commander McLane** » Tue Sep 21, 2010 7:52 am

Thargoid wrote:
The external views would be simple to add back in again, but I always find the concept weird as there's technically no camera available to make the view you're seeing (but then that never stopped Star Trek).

<handwavium>
Actually they're not real external views, but merely the visualized read-outs from a myriad of sensors spread all over the ship's hull which are made into a "picture" of the ship by the computer, overlayed over a shot from the camera on the opposite side of the "view position".
</handwavium>

Ganelon · Post by **Ganelon** » Tue Sep 21, 2010 10:12 am

I didn't run into any legal status trouble, but I wondered if it might happen since I'm pretty sure that the defensive system opened up on a ship that was close to me and went hostile in one fight and I'm pretty sure he hadn't actually fired on me yet. So I was wondering if it might be a possibility of another ship goes red on you near a station.

So far as the external views.. Well, they aren't a realistic point of gameplay, they're just fun for getting a "movie style" screenie to use as wallpaper or to show off. Not actually useful to gameplay in a direct sense, so far as I've ever seen. On the other hand, what you put there on this ship could definitely be useful at times.

Gnudoll · Post by **Gnudoll** » Tue Sep 21, 2010 11:43 am

Thanks for the PM, and certainly thanks for this ship!! The controls seem a bit twitchy to me, which made docking a bit difficult until I got a docking computer. Also the short hyperspace countdown (10 secs instead of 15) played havoc with BGS.oxp v1.0. v1.2 is supposed to have a workaround for this problem, but I'd bet the defaults would still have a problem. As the BGS sound set was still counting down when the ship jumped, I had station chatter ever since. If you are going to take the external views away, perhaps that key could be mapped to get into the Vortex screens? Also the menu at the bottom of that page does not wrap, meaning that you have to hit a lot of keystrokes to fill more than one cargo bay. I tried it out for only a short bit, but I'll certainly be giving it a fuller test tomorrow. I just could not resist trying it out tonight (yes, I have teh same problem on Christmas and my birthday

)

Wiki pages · Post by **Thargoid** » Tue Sep 21, 2010 2:24 pm

I should probably clarify a point here - the turrets are not part of the ship's defense systems. The turrets are entirely controlled by the trunk code, but what may be happening is "friendly fire" incidents of innocent ships getting between the Vortex and it's true target (or just getting hit by stray shots), and so being effectively attacked.

There is nothing that can be done about that other than removing the turrets or adjusting their settings to make them more accurate.

The external views aren't really taken away - the scoop, gun and cargo cam's are really external views. Plus re-mapping keys isn't generally possible anyway (much as I'd love to use a better key for the bay selection).

And no the menu does not wrap, again that's trunk code (mission screen choices in this case). That would be something for the dev's to consider and possibly implement.

Svengali · Post by **Svengali** » Tue Sep 21, 2010 3:59 pm

Gnudoll wrote:
Also the short hyperspace countdown (10 secs instead of 15) played havoc with BGS.oxp v1.0. v1.2 is supposed to have a workaround for this problem, but I'd bet the defaults would still have a problem. As the BGS sound set was still counting down when the ship jumped, I had station chatter ever since.

BGS v1.0 and v1.1 are acting like other soundsets - so it's no surprise that the countdown doesn't match (and I really don't think that it is a problem - it's just the way things are working when customsounds keys are used). And I'd bet that BGS-A1.2 or BGS-M1.2 doesn't have a problem with hyperspace_motor_spin_time of 10 or 50 or 1 .-)

BGS-A1.2 and BGS-M1.2 are using timed countdowns, not a workaround, but if other soundpacks are additionally installed they will collide, because there's no way to detect it (Sound.load() does not work with keys from customsounds.plist). That's why I've implemented the script_info and missiontext.plist stuff, but it requires that oxps are using the keys - e.g. BGS-C disables BGS-A's timed countdown (at least if BGS-M.oxp is not installed that re-enables it and drops the countdown from BGS-C).

Playing the station ambient sound happens if a player reloads a savedgame. SoundSources are not stopped via engine (unlike other things) and a script does not know if a player loads a savedgame. And after that the script can't stop anything anymore. This affects all oxps which are using SoundSources. And the ambient stuff in BGS is looped, so it will continue forever. Funny, eh?

Both problems are already reported and when I've got an answer I know if I have to change BGS permanently or if the engine will be changed.

For BGS there's a workaround - if a player steps to GUI_SCREEN_LOAD BGS could stop the SoundSources at the cost of getting a 'break' (and CPU cycles). I'm already using this fix since 2 days on my machine and it looks ok, even if the 'break' is feelable. But I want to test it a bit more, with and specially without fix - e.g. I want to know what happens if more than 32 channels are used...

@Thargoid: Sorry for hijacking your topic .-)