Hi everyone – nothing terribly exciting to report this week though lots of progress was made. The focus was primarily on ship equipment vendors, equipping ship equipment, the ship information UI and tying all equipment stats into the combat and ship systems. This was a ton of work and I’m glad it’s behind me.
What I have now is a fully functional ship equipment system that allows for the purchase and sale of all ship equipment types. This includes changes to the NPC AI systems, the ship vendor UI, managing the moving data around between the vendors, cargo and the ship itself and displaying that information in the UI. When ship equipment is looted or purchased, it’s placed in your cargo hold. From there you can drag and drop the equipment to the equipment slots on the right or the ship UI assuming you are docked at a station.
One item of interest is what I’m calling the “Power Bias”. This is rainbow colored bar in the ship UI that displays the combat power state based on your currently equipped engines, shields and turrets. The display calculates the amount of power required to sustain all firing turrets in combat assuming default power settings. A reading to the left of center means that your power balance based on equipped hardware will be effective. Anything to the right of center means that the power draw from your equipment will lead to mis-fires and you will not be able to maintain your maximum fire-power. I’m still doing a bit of work in the screenshot below, tying the correct numbers into several of the fields and moving things around.
I mentioned this before – shields and turrets have a base power cost which reduces your capacitor charge rate. Turrets draw from your capacitor. Your warp engines provide your overall power rating. All equipment displays this information, however, I needed a way to display this so you won’t need to break out a calculator every time you are equipping items. The power bias gauge will help by displaying the current power sustain based on the equipment currently slotted to your ship. I may actually add this to equipment rollover info so you can easily see the effect a shield, turret or engine might have on your power bias. There will be lot’s of equipment variants to choose from and you will always be looking for the best performance at the lowest power cost.
I can say that I am now weeks away from the space combat update, so that should be good news to everyone. No specific date yet as I have quite a bit of coding and testing to do yet.
Have a great weekend and thanks for supporting Stellar Tactics!
Here are a few links to other updates from the last few weeks: