Starmourn!!!

Jukilian

Sovereign.

Trey

Wtb configurable ships. Sensor suites, engines, weaponry, etc. @Sarapis how much to oay for a ship significantly faster and more maneuverable than anyone, but no weapon hardpoints. I want to be a smuggler/courier, and I'll name my ship the Chariot of Apollo, or something equally grandiose.

Exelethril

Calling it : Option to pay $2000+ for a really big text spaceship that fucks over anything less than $500.

Ahmet

Honestly I would be 100 okay if the only ship-esque integration was ferry-like between different planets or galaxies etc etc.

Shirszae

Ahmet said:

Honestly I would be 100 okay if the only ship-esque integration was ferry-like between different planets or galaxies etc etc.

And you'd be the only one.

Ahmet

Okay so thinking about it and writing out my response totally turned into more than I wanted it to, so I'mma outline my ideas and put them up without the "one-paragraph-wall-of-text" format that it currently has.

Ahmet

Originally, I'd mulled it over and didn't see any way to handle 3d space in a text-environment, but ya know, now that I think about it in terms of how the universe actually works, you could accurately create a 2d travel system for galaxies or solar systems, since they're almost entirely flat, generally speaking. I'd totally be chill with a system similar (on the surface, at least) to Achaea's sailing.

Some things I'd really like to see:

1. Much lower barrier of entry on all fronts - Especially in the monetary sense. Here in Achaea (disregarding organizational ties), a ship is a huge investment, on top of the lessons for Seafaring if you want decent utility. Make it open to everyone. 1-room tie-fighters that you get early in your career, make it a core travel mechanic, introduce it in part of the novice intro, or tasks, or somewhere along the line. 
2. Variety - If it were to become a core game mechanic (which I'd like to see, but this is just rambling speculation), making everything open pvp would be a real strain on those new to the game or who don't particularly enjoy whatever conflict system is implemented. What I'd very much like to see are "Uncharted" regions of space, where the long arm of the law doesn't quite reach. Fully open combat areas for pirates or vigilantes or whathaveyou. Perhaps ion storms or zones that are heavily radiated by solar flare activity that can hinder or altogether halt your progress. 
3. Encounters - Not in the typical sense for a game, but large meteors or comets that you have to avoid. Very spread apart, slow moving, or very well-announced or obvious. Not like you're moving through chops in Achaea. Maybe they move on a tick every thirty seconds or so. On super rare occasion, perhaps more likely in certain locations, meteor swarms where there will be several in a group. Even better, an asteroid belt that you have to navigate through that cuts the general "central" collection of worlds from an outer or inner region (depending on how it's arranged) that are similar to outer islands for Achaea, or even areas that serve as a "next step" towards the end-game.
4. Encounters (for real this time) - NPC-controlled rogue pirate ships you can come across in the uncharted regions, more difficult invader ship encounters. Abandoned cargo ships that have a chance to hold valuables, or enemies (i.e. deepsea diving, kind of). Maybe even a rare scrapper trading post with some interesting wares that wanders along the edge of the uncharted space, or maybe even deeper. Or outside of it!. Or, salvage scrap from the cargo ships for a currency that can only be used at the trading post.
5. Mechanics! (read: total random speculation with no knowledge of the combat system, but things I'd like to see nonetheless) - When it comes to ship vs ship, EMP weapons. Disable enemy ships for a short time, causing them to stop in place, or to continue careening towards whatever obstacles might be in their way with no control of the ship, temporarily disable certain types of weapons. Perhaps a future expansion via a warpgate or warpgate system (similar to either DarkOrbit gates or Mass Effect relays) into a new galaxy, or a new area of the current galaxy previously inaccessible because of invader blockades or some other confining element.
6. Skillsets - This is the only non-ship stuff I wanna get into, and I'mma keep it brief, but I'd very much like to see a decent saturation of enhanced-ability skills, whether cyborg or energy manipulation (I skimmed the article on kith, I'm assuming this will be integrated well?), as opposed to just standard scifi setting technological warfare. Perhaps even a class that uses gene manipulation and serums to change their physical attributes and gain temporary bonuses. I doubt Tecton and crew would do this to us, but for the love of god, I beg you, don't let us all be running around with assault rifles and pulse bombs. (I'd also very much like to see a sort of "honourable grass-roots" class that sticks with medieval-ish weapons, to great effect, swords and bows and such - think Hanzo in Overwatch, plenty of similar examples)

Anywayyyy, I'm totally pumped now. I hate you all. :bleep_bloop:

And I swear to Maya if I have to pay 500 credits for an Explorer's tome in Starmourn I'm not touching the damn game

Lucianus

I think single-seater ships or ships that have a small crew size (2-3) won't be that expensive to get into spaceflight and space combat.


But larger ships... generally in the corvette to frigate size may be considered a huge investment. And a big battleship would probably be something only feasibly accomplished through a big org with a lot of players investing and collaborating with one another.

Hyperlith

Blujixapug said:

What are you gonna call your spaceship? Something classic like Serenity, Millennium Falcon, Heart of Gold? Or something more original like Quietude, Thousand Year Eagle, or Diamond in the Rough?

Isolation, Keen-eyed Osprey, and Emerald Spleen!

Trey

As long as I can build a fuckshit fast ship that maneuvers like a champ, I don't care what deathstars ya'll motherfuckers build.

Chael

Ahmet said:

Originally, I'd mulled it over and didn't see any way to handle 3d space in a text-environment, but ya know, now that I think about it in terms of how the universe actually works, you could accurately create a 2d travel system for galaxies or solar systems, since they're almost entirely flat, generally speaking. I'd totally be chill with a system similar (on the surface, at least) to Achaea's sailing.

Just poking in cause this is the most active Starmourn thread. There are MUDs that do include 3d space systems, the general tactic is that they use a coordinate system rather than the 2d room system.

Something like an SWR, which is probably the more common right now, has your target coordinates, your current coordinates, and your speed, there's also the option to track a specific ship which just means your target is their coordinates.

You can check your proximity scanner which will tell you what's nearby, weapon ranges are pretty straight forward (facing also seems like a possibility), the only thing that they can't do as well is mapping but I feel like that's okay for me because I expect a spaceship to be relying more on their instruments than looking around (which is what a map feels like to me)

Ahmet

Chael said:

Ahmet said:

Originally, I'd mulled it over and didn't see any way to handle 3d space in a text-environment, but ya know, now that I think about it in terms of how the universe actually works, you could accurately create a 2d travel system for galaxies or solar systems, since they're almost entirely flat, generally speaking. I'd totally be chill with a system similar (on the surface, at least) to Achaea's sailing.

Just poking in cause this is the most active Starmourn thread. There are MUDs that do include 3d space systems, the general tactic is that they use a coordinate system rather than the 2d room system.

Something like an SWR, which is probably the more common right now, has your target coordinates, your current coordinates, and your speed, there's also the option to track a specific ship which just means your target is their coordinates.

You can check your proximity scanner which will tell you what's nearby, weapon ranges are pretty straight forward (facing also seems like a possibility), the only thing that they can't do as well is mapping but I feel like that's okay for me because I expect a spaceship to be relying more on their instruments than looking around (which is what a map feels like to me)

But why do something more clunkly and less user-friendly when you don't have to? And the "map" totally doesn't have to be "looking out the front window", totally some radar/other detection equipment nonsense you could use to explain it. 

Sarapis

I actually meant to announce this earlier, but there is no way we'd do 3d space. It's clunky as shit in text. Ships will be on 2d maps.

Ahmet

Sarapis said:

I actually meant to announce this earlier, but there is no way we'd do 3d space. It's clunky as shit in text. Ships will be on 2d maps.

@Sarapis saves the day, yet again. :bleep_bloop:

Klendathu

Sarapis said:

...It's clunky as shit in text...

Could you give a less technical explanation please?

Lucianus

I think you can build a larger universe using 2d maps. Especially if you want to build on the scale of a whole universe that encompasses galaxies > star systems > planets.

Sarathai

Hyperlith said:

Blujixapug said:

What are you gonna call your spaceship? Something classic like Serenity, Millennium Falcon, Heart of Gold? Or something more original like Quietude, Thousand Year Eagle, or Diamond in the Rough?

Isolation, Keen-eyed Osprey, and Emerald Spleen!

The Culture books have the best ship names:

- Irregular Apocalypse
- A Ship With A View
- Ultimate Ship The Second
- Frank Exchange of Views
- Lapsed Pacifist
- Outstanding Contribution To The Historical Process
- Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath

(No, that last one is not made up.)

Kinilan

I feel like those ship names need more ...Gravitas

:D:D:D:D:D:D

Ahmet

Lapsed Pacifist xD

Chael

Ahmet said:

Chael said:

Ahmet said:

Originally, I'd mulled it over and didn't see any way to handle 3d space in a text-environment, but ya know, now that I think about it in terms of how the universe actually works, you could accurately create a 2d travel system for galaxies or solar systems, since they're almost entirely flat, generally speaking. I'd totally be chill with a system similar (on the surface, at least) to Achaea's sailing.

Just poking in cause this is the most active Starmourn thread. There are MUDs that do include 3d space systems, the general tactic is that they use a coordinate system rather than the 2d room system.

Something like an SWR, which is probably the more common right now, has your target coordinates, your current coordinates, and your speed, there's also the option to track a specific ship which just means your target is their coordinates.

You can check your proximity scanner which will tell you what's nearby, weapon ranges are pretty straight forward (facing also seems like a possibility), the only thing that they can't do as well is mapping but I feel like that's okay for me because I expect a spaceship to be relying more on their instruments than looking around (which is what a map feels like to me)

But why do something more clunkly and less user-friendly when you don't have to? And the "map" totally doesn't have to be "looking out the front window", totally some radar/other detection equipment nonsense you could use to explain it. 

Eh, I've never actually found them clunky or less user-friendly, especially in comparison to Aetherships from Lusternia. In something like LOTJ it's something you can do straight out of character creation and is kinda effortless (and far simpler to navigate). Though that said, most of the muds I started out on didn't have in-game maps, they were mostly a convenience that came along later, so being able to point your ship at a planet or tell it to jump to a certain system was an incredibly convenient way to get around in comparison.

Of course, potentially having a universal north is just kinda weird to me. But we'll see how the system shapes up.

Blujixapug

The 3d issue is interesting. I was thinking about how it would work in Achaea if they ever did airships. If they used the same wilderness map, but layered it up on a third axis to represent elevation, it seems like it would end up being very empty. You'd have several times the map size, but presumably without the content to fill it, unless you added about 100 areas. Your various floating archipelago and cloud fortress areas would be distributed across however many elevation layers you use, but each individual layer would presumably not be densely packed with areas. So what's the point of that much empty space? What's the benefit?

Achaea's oceans demonstrate the careful balance you need to find between the perception of vastness - the illusion that there's a wide open world out there for you to explore, brave captain in your trusty ship - and the necessities of gameplay. It's not actually fun to sail around for 2 hours without finding anything, and then have to turn around and spend 40 minutes sailing home before you can even quit the game safely. It's not fun when the discoverable content is scattered like needles in a haystack.

Let's say you had enough content/areas to spread evenly across a wilderness/space map of 1,000,000 tiles. If that map was 2d, you get 1000x1000 tiles. If it's 3d, that's 100x100x100 tiles. I don't know, I guess each has their advantages. The 3d one would be much faster to navigate. Maybe that's not an advantage.

It's speculation at this point because we haven't seen how they plan to do space travel. Whether it will resemble Achaea's Seafaring and Lusternia's Aetherspace with a tiled ASCII map, or be something different.

It seems like skipdrives mean player activity will be focused within star systems - possibly limited to them? - rather than spread across an entire mostly empty galaxy or universe, which seems like a good thing.

Chael

I think that the airship concept doesn't quite work because it's still kinda tied to the two dimensional world and so splitting it across multiple levels does become inconvenient for mapping.

Space is really different from that, it is vast and often empty, the main things that are in there are things that you would be flying towards, as opposed to sailing where you potentially have landmasses, reefs, and the like, which become obstacles to avoid. Aetherspace has different types, some that are faster to fly through, some that are slower, and some that are impassable, and well from what I've seen it seems like players do as much as possible to skip flying (there are artifacts to travel to a "bubble" and another artifact to summon your ship to that bubble)

3d space to me isn't about adding an up down leading to layers of tiles, it's simply co-ordinates. Your ship exists in a system, it has a current x, y, z as does everything else in the system, if you want to fly in a direction then you input your target co-ordinates and turn up the speed. There could be things on the fringe of systems that are less obvious to find, but I'd expect that's where long range scanners come in to play and those work because you can say they can determine anything in a certain radius around you so anything you can detect on that scanner you can easily and directly fly towards.

Aesi

Chael said:

I think that the airship concept doesn't quite work because it's still kinda tied to the two dimensional world and so splitting it across multiple levels does become inconvenient for mapping.

Space is really different from that, it is vast and often empty, the main things that are in there are things that you would be flying towards, as opposed to sailing where you potentially have landmasses, reefs, and the like, which become obstacles to avoid. Aetherspace has different types, some that are faster to fly through, some that are slower, and some that are impassable, and well from what I've seen it seems like players do as much as possible to skip flying (there are artifacts to travel to a "bubble" and another artifact to summon your ship to that bubble)

3d space to me isn't about adding an up down leading to layers of tiles, it's simply co-ordinates. Your ship exists in a system, it has a current x, y, z as does everything else in the system, if you want to fly in a direction then you input your target co-ordinates and turn up the speed. There could be things on the fringe of systems that are less obvious to find, but I'd expect that's where long range scanners come in to play and those work because you can say they can determine anything in a certain radius around you so anything you can detect on that scanner you can easily and directly fly towards.

This would be me:

shot misses
shot misses
shot misses

wtf im right ----ing beside them!

oh, wrong Z value.

I think there's a line to walk between being complicated as shit and technically making sense, to being fun and playable/generally understandable by all.

I mean ill toot my horn and say I consider myself to be reasonably smart and EVE confuses me even WITH a graphical component.

Chael

Aesi said:

Chael said:

I think that the airship concept doesn't quite work because it's still kinda tied to the two dimensional world and so splitting it across multiple levels does become inconvenient for mapping.

Space is really different from that, it is vast and often empty, the main things that are in there are things that you would be flying towards, as opposed to sailing where you potentially have landmasses, reefs, and the like, which become obstacles to avoid. Aetherspace has different types, some that are faster to fly through, some that are slower, and some that are impassable, and well from what I've seen it seems like players do as much as possible to skip flying (there are artifacts to travel to a "bubble" and another artifact to summon your ship to that bubble)

3d space to me isn't about adding an up down leading to layers of tiles, it's simply co-ordinates. Your ship exists in a system, it has a current x, y, z as does everything else in the system, if you want to fly in a direction then you input your target co-ordinates and turn up the speed. There could be things on the fringe of systems that are less obvious to find, but I'd expect that's where long range scanners come in to play and those work because you can say they can determine anything in a certain radius around you so anything you can detect on that scanner you can easily and directly fly towards.

This would be me:

shot misses
shot misses
shot misses

wtf im right ----ing beside them!

oh, wrong Z value.

I think there's a line to walk between being complicated as shit and technically making sense, to being fun and playable/generally understandable by all.

I mean ill toot my horn and say I consider myself to be reasonably smart and EVE confuses me even WITH a graphical component.

heh, that can happen in Lusternia too because from memory all enemies show up as a ? on the map without any more information to identify them with. That said, the text based systems that I've encountered that have 3d flight include proximity so you can always see your exact range from your target and any other objects in the system. I suppose another reason for why you wouldn't necessarily encounter the Z value issue would be that targeting seems to often come with automatic tracking options that keep you close to the ship you want to blow up even if they move from the original co-ordinates.

If you'd like to check it out, an SWR like LOTJ features a space system like what I was expecting(the idea that a space mud might use a 2d system didn't occur to me until @Ahmet mentioned it) and it should be relatively easy to jump into a ship there. (There's a taxi mechanic where you can rent a temporary ship that you can fly around for cheap, though it's SMAUG based so commands need repeated usage to practice which is gross)

I suppose a reason I suggest this is because of the implication that such a system would not be fun or generally understandable by all, because my experience with such a system is that it's simpler than the example of a 2d system in Aetherspace, especially in regards to general transportation around the universe.

Tahquil

Noticing that the races in Starmourn have lifespan data - How will that be addressed and incorporated into the game? - While once our wetwiring becomes unable to keep up with our rate of physical deterioration do our mindsims just get implanted into an earlier (younger) clone
 
With the cloning technology will those who die and be cloned elect to be perpetually young or old.

Will cloning have a cost or will it be a public service that everyone has a convenient clone standing by? 

Are there going to be specialised npc units that go out to death sites to reobtain mindsims to implant into the clones? (I think it would be cool to either the death flavour describe a mid-sentience of your mindsim's vague feelings/associations when being collected and transported. Or have the death flavour reflect your originally chosen race and their beliefs about death)

Since mindsims are unhackable and bound to specific brains can we rule out possession/hacked rp and "Oh this is x but I had my mindsim implanted in y's body" rp?

Kayeil

Hello Starmourners,

This week's update is here!

1. Our 4th player-race: the Nath-el, a quasi-insectoid race whose youth are quite prone to drug addiction, sadly. Nothing like the Bushraki, of course, but still....not good, not good. 

2. A page about a few of the technologies in Starmourn. Thrill to tales of the Voidgates! Weep because you're stuck with shitty batteries rather than cool quantum power cells! Wet yourself with delight knowing that soon you will be using these technologies! You paid for your whole seat but you're only gonna need the eeeedddgggeee (and a diaper)!

3. A F.A.Q. page that has some new information buried in some of the questions, though there's a noticeable absence of info on space llamas. Sorry about that. 

Enjoy!

 

Best,

 

Matt Mihály

CEO, Iron Realms Entertainment

Chael

I'm hoping that the mindsim stuff does allow for some hacking/cyberspace stuff. It'd be cool to have augmented/virtual reality concepts, though sad that we might not have the opportunity to hack someones eyes >_>

Tahquil

Sounds like mindsims will just be the explanation for honours, help files, group communications etc.

One of the things I was kinda interested in and thought about in the shower was how I liked introduction systems in other (granted smaller) muds. These were ways were you wouldn't know who a person was until you made a formal introduction. In starmourn it could have been something like a bioscan or DNA test into your PDA  which then you get all the information on the person. Give people the chance to hack and alter your data to sneak into places and spy on people.

Chael

Yeah, I figured it would be something like the neuro linker from Accel World (except without an external component) which overlays an ar image over what you see.

So honours or help files would be files that are projected onto your vision. With such a system and the networking mentioned you could feasibly have everyone wandering around with identifiers that can be used to find out information about them (my brain is imagining things like your standard mmo name plate :P).

The other applications of such a technology could be immersive vr environments, significant use of ar to the point that many things that we interact with daily might not actually be physical objects but AROs. You could potentially cloak yourself by changing the information that you're broadcasting maybe even trying to hack the ar environment to overlay a fake image over yourself, and of course the aforementioned hacking of someone's eyes so that they can't see.

Blujixapug

Chael said:

You could potentially cloak yourself by changing the information that you're broadcasting ... and of course the aforementioned hacking of someone's eyes so that they can't see.

I wonder how far they'll go with that. Playing a hacker in a galactic setting would be cool. Playing a hacker in any setting where hardware offers a bridge to hack neural physiology would be cool.

starmourn.com/technology said:

Two-way wormholes require 'spice'

spit take