After a long road, Naev 0.7.0 is now available on steam! At the current time Windows and Linux (64 bits) are supported.

We note that Naev will still remain an open source project, and no steam-specific changes have been done, i.e., Naev on steam is the same as on github. Finally, Naev will remain free on the steam store and updated with releases.

Steam page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/598530/Naev/

I spent much of last weekend thinking about how the GearHead: Caramel skill system is going to work. This is likely to get a bit long-winded, so please bear with me.

Stats

These define the untrained abilities of your character. They will not change by much over the course of the game.

Health, Stamina, and Mental

Health measures the distance your character is from death. When health drops to zero, or a character is otherwise incapacitated, they are removed from combat. The party gets to make a Medicine roll to see if the character survives. Permanent injuries (which can be fixed by cybernetics) may result. It is based on Body and the Vitality skill.

Stamina is a measure of physical exhaustion; in game terms it is used to power passive abilities. Passive abilities include secondary defense rolls such as parry, block, and use of anti-missile and ECM systems. So, once your stamina runs out, you become far more vulnerable to attack. It is based on Body, Ego, and the Athletics skill.

Mental is a measure of mental exhaustion. Maybe it needs a better name. It is used to power active abilities, such as repair attempts and certain talents. It is based on Ego, Knowledge, and the Concentration skill.

Skills

Skills are trained abilities. These will change quite a bit as you spend experience on them. A skill should be something that your character does. Skills have a rank; if something doesn’t really need a rank, it should be a talent instead of a skill.

A character can have a limited number of key skills. These are skills which the character is particularly good at, and may be improved relatively cheaply. You can learn skills beyond your key skills, but will have to find a skill trainer to teach you at first. Improving non-key skills is more expensive than improving key skills.

There are nine basic skills in the Cavalier Package; every player character starts out with all of these as key skills, and may take a few other key skills in addition. I’ve been referring to the skills outside of the Cavalier Package as Specialist Skills.

Skill usage should be communicated to the player. In previous games, the exact function of many skills was a mystery. This communication can be accomplished in a number of ways: 1) Show when an option is made available because of a skill (maybe even showing options that would be available if the PC had the correct skill), 2) change passive skills to active skills, 3) clearly tell the player when a passive skill accomplishes something.

In general, specialist skills may provide the player with different ways of dealing with a problem. They might get used to short circuit a puzzle or obstacle that can be solved another way. They should not, however, be used to block the player from significant content/rewards.

Also in general, not everyone should need every skill. If your party has one member with a given specialist skill, that should be enough.

The Cavalier Package

These are key skills for all player characters. No matter what other skills you acquire, these can always be improved at the low rate.

Mecha Gunnery, Mecha Fighting, Mecha Piloting

Ranged Combat, Close Combat, Dodge

Vitality, Athletics, Concentration

Specialist Skills

The player will get some of these as key skills- two or three, maybe- and the rest can be acquired as non-key skills (if you can find a trainer). The non-key skills are more expensive to advance than the key skills are.

Repair: The ability to fix mecha and equipment. May allow destroyed mecha to be recovered after battle.

Medicine: The ability to heal people and animals. May allow downed fighters to be recovered after battle.

Biotech: The ability to repair biotechnological constructs and revive downed synths/biomecha. It can be used on dead synths to collect repair parts and other useful items.

Stealth: The ability to hide. This skill will now have to be actively invoked, and will function similar to its use in Dungeon Monkey Eternal.

Science: Used for crafting. You can make robots, improve gear, and so on. It can be used on dead robots to collect repair parts and other useful items.

Computers: This skill takes over Code Breaking and Electronic Warfare. At personal scale it allows doors to be unlocked and computers to be hacked. At mecha scale, it allows the use of active electronic warfare systems. With the right equipment, it may be used to hack certain hostile robots, turning them to the player’s side.

Performance: The ability to play music and get paid for it. This skill may allow Taunt as a talent.

Negotiation: Combines Conversation, Intimidation, and Shopping. Used to activate certain dialogue options. May cause enemy pilots to eject earlier. Improves NPC reaction score. Affects shop prices.

Scouting: Combines Survival and Awareness. This skill passively counteracts Stealth and makes encounters visible on the world map. It helps reveal hidden doors and other concealed things. It may be used on dead animals to collect meat and other useful items.

Dominate Animal: Use it to tame wild animals.

Deleted Skills

Mecha Engineering: Is spending points on Mecha Engineering fun? No, it is not. This skill is nothing but tears and frustration. Instead, I propose that from GHC onward all player characters can modify mecha to their heart’s content without having to learn a new skill.

Cybertech: There were a lot of problems with this skill as well. If a late game character suddenly needed to fix a permanent injury, they were often forced to decide between the injury’s stat penalty and one more skill’s xp penalty.

Weight Lifting, Initiative, Resistance, Spot Weakness: All boost abilities without offering a new play style. This means they are boring.

Investigation: It had no use except in Investigation missions; the thing is, we can still have investigation missions without a dedicated skill, and they’ll be more fun if the player isn’t forced to waste a skill slot.

Pick Pockets: Not nearly as useful as it is in Fallout. I don’t want to write the full burglary simulation that this skill deserves.

Taunt: Was less amusing than I had hoped.

Possible Skills

Meditation: Replaces Mysticism. Using Meditation allows a character to instantly regenerate stamina at the cost of mental. Unlocks martial arts/shaolin monk type talents.

Leadership: In GearHead2, lancemates automatically level up their skills after battle to match the PC’s renown. In future GearHead games, lancemates could automatically level up to match the rank of this skill.

Sniper: I got rid of most of the combat-related skills since they are boring choices. Unfortunately, that means there are few skills for a combat-focused character like a soldier or arena pilot. If I could figure out a way to make an interesting combat skill that is not an automatic must-have, I’d add it.

Areas of Expertise: Many pen and paper RPGs have a ton of knowledge skills. That wouldn’t really work in GearHead, but I thought it might be fun to allow the player to choose several areas of expertise for the PC. In some situations these AOEs would provide additional background information or dialogue options; this wouldn’t normally be useful, but it might be fun. The list of AOEs might include pop music, history, mecha designs, mathematics, recipes, arena champions, architecture, fashion, etc.

Added some extra ammo notifications to the HUD, like flashing when low ammo:

Let’s compare this to the classic C-Dogs HUD:

A lot of new stuff has been added since then. HUD improvements was one of the first enhancements added to C-Dogs SDL, with the health bar from way back in 2013. From there we’ve added:

• Reload bar
• Popup animations
• Heads (lives)
• Gun icon
• Optional cash/ammo instead of score
• Ammo gauge
• Gauge animations

And of course, the low ammo flash effect. Look out for the new HUD in the next release of C-Dogs SDL!

I’m trying out a new sprite recoloring method for GearHead Caramel. In the original version (left), colors are defined by a midtone which gets scaled up or down to a particular value. In the new version (right), the brightest and darkest colors are defined and the color gets scaled within that range. This means that color warmth and saturation can change with value, which should make everything look better. The new method seems to make the colors brighter, but also less flat.
The next thing I have to decide is how characters are going to work in GearHead Caramel. The system in GH1/GH2 is an unholy amalgamation of the Mekton Zeta and Earthdawn rules. Many players have complained about the skill specialization limit, wishing it were possible to take all skills. At the same time, the sheer size of the skill list left many players confused. Never mind the fact that it also left me confused- adding enough content so that every skill would be worth taking was a neverending job. Balancing them was pretty much impossible.

Here are some thoughts about GH3e:

How can I allow each character build to be unique without the players feeling boxed in? If the player could count on finding lancemates with any required skills, that would take off the pressure to make the PC good at everything. I think the Harebrained Schemes Shadowrun games did a good job with this.

What’s the difference between skills and stats? How many skills do I need to have? Initially, I was planning to use a stripped down skill list, with each skill representing a career path. This skill would combine with different stats for different uses. For example, a Thief skill might combine with Speed to allow stealth, and combine with Craft to allow code breaking. After playing through GearHead2, though, I’m not sure this is the way to go. The GH2 skill list is smaller than the GH1 list, and you get fewer specialties. This means that from the midgame onward you spend most of your time hoarding XP and have fewer chances to spend it. This is No Fun.

The Shadowrun games largely avoid this problem by having multiple skill tiers. You need to improve Reflexes so you can improve Ranged Combat so you can improve Shotguns. The progression for a single ability is split across three skills, meaning that at any time you will probably have something that doesn’t require an obscene amount of experience to improve.

Before I move on, another thing I should mention about the Shadowrun CRPGs is that they dropped all non-combat skills. This largely solves the skill-specific content problem because whatever skills the player chooses, they should be applicable to just about every mission.

One way to keep different characters different might be to use key skills, as in Fallout. At character creation you choose the PC’s specialties. These skills may be improved cheaply. Other skills can be learned, but those will be more expensive.

It may be possible to move many of the noncombat skills to binary proficiencies- something the PC either knows or doesn’t. Most of these proficiencies would have a negligible effect upon the game, but allow different dialogue options or provide additional background information.

After reading the Rogue Trader rulebooks, I would be interested in expanding the character creation lifepath. The player chooses the PC’s life story, each step altering the character’s abilities. This seems like a good way to set the PC’s initial key skills, if I choose to use key skills.

In GHC, Stamina will be used to power passive abilities (mostly the extra defense rolls like shield block and antimissile) while Mental will be used to power active abilities. I am planning to add talents that act like the spirit commands in Super Robot Wars, allowing the player to boost abilities at the cost of MP.

What do you think?

Official announcement is yet to follow, but.

Wesnoth is returning to iOS.

We're looking for beta testers. Tester will have to PM me their Apple ID and install [url=https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/testflight/id899247664?mt=8]TestFlight[/url].

The 1.14 development version now runs on iPad. Functionality for smaller screens, TinyUI, was deprecated and mostly lost, so iPhone version will run but the experience will be painful.

Some of the past features have been lost in transition, a lot had to be reimplemented, a lot is yet to be, but we're moving!
There is a 64-bit version.

Another good news is that iOS version will not be a separate fork, but will be closely following mainline sources, thus will be updated more frequently.
As a side effect, a desktop version is getting touch UI. Those lucky ones with touchscreen on their PCs will be able to play on it!

update: first TestFlight beta published, thanks to the testers. It should come through in some hours.
The most experimental feature here is context menu pop-up on long-press. Sometimes context menus pop up when they shouldn't.
I'd be thankful if someone finds the steps how to reproduce this.

You're welcome to report issues at iOS fork's Github page: https://github.com/singalen/wesnoth/issues.
Please check if the issue is already registered. Thanks!

Statistics: Posted by singalen — July 14th, 2017, 6:05 pm

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GearHead Caramel can now load a complete SAN-X9 BuruBuru mecha from a text file. I can’t necessarily say everything is functioning yet, but it’s all there. The GHC version is 52.5 tons and is worth $117,280, which fits between the GH1 values (45.0 tons, $106,287) and GH2 values (53.0 tons, $194,368).

Here is the complete text of the mecha description file:

Mecha
    name = "Buru Buru"
    desig = "SAN-X9"
    imagename = "btr_buruburu.png"
    SUB
        Head
            size = 5
            SUB
                Armor
                    size = 4
                Sensor
                    size = 2
                BeamWeapon
                    name = "Intercept Laser"
                    reach = 2
                    damage = 1
                    accuracy = 2
                    penetration = 0
            END
        Torso
            size = 5
            SUB
                Armor
                    size = 4
                Engine
                    size = 605
                Gyroscope
                Cockpit
                    SUB
                        Armor
                            size = 2
                    END
                Mount
                    name = "Collar Mount"
                    INV
                        Launcher
                            size = 4
                            SUB
                                Missile
                                    name = "Swarm Missiles"
                                    reach = 6
                                    damage = 1
                                    accuracy = 1
                                    penetration = 1
                                    quantity = 20
                            END
                    END
            END
        Arm
            name = "Right Arm"
            size = 5
            SUB
                Armor
                    size = 4
                Hand
                    name = "Right Hand"
                    INV
                        BallisticWeapon
                            name = "Shaka Cannon"
                            reach = 5
                            damage = 3
                            accuracy = 0
                            penetration = 3
                            ammo_type = Shells_150mm
                            SUB
                                Ammo
                                    ammo_type=Shells_150mm
                                    quantity=15
                            END
                    END
            END
        Arm
            name = "Left Arm"
            size = 5
            SUB
                Armor
                    size = 4
                Hand
                    name = "Left Hand"
                    INV
                        MeleeWeapon
                            name="Axe"
                            reach=1
                            damage=3
                            accuracy=1
                            penetration=2
                    END
            END
        Leg
            name = "Right Leg"
            size = 5
            SUB
                Armor
                    size = 4
                HoverJets
                    size = 4
            END
        Leg
            name = "Left Leg"
            size = 5
            SUB
                Armor
                    size = 4
                HoverJets
                    size = 4
            END
    END

It’s a bit more verbose than the GH1/GH2 mecha description language, but it gets the job done.

This is a status update on the two first LongTurn games on Freeciv-web. There are currently five LongTurn games running on Freeciv-web, where up to 300 human players can compete at Freeciv playing one turn every day. The two first games were more testing-games, which we can learn from and improve the future games. In this article some statistics about the games will be presented, as well as screenshots of the full game maps showing all the nations.

For some more background information, see LongTurn on the Freeciv Wiki. There is also a blog post on LongTurn Game #5, which you can join now here.

 

LongTurn Game 1:

This was the first LongTurn game on Freeciv-web, started April 18, 2017. See the original blog post here. The game seems to progress nicely still, with many daily active players.
– Turn 81.
– 136 of 150 human players still alive. Some players have given up or are idle.
– 11.000 map tiles

Screenshot from Game 1. Click for full size:

 

 

LongTurn Game 2:

This game was started April 28, 2017. See the original blog post here. This game had more players and a larger map.

– Turn 76.
– 236 of 250 human players still alive. Some players have given up or are idle.
– 30.000 map tiles

Screenshot from Game 2. Click for full size:

 

Please post your feedback as a comment on this article or on the forum.

Anyone can join LongTurn games on Freeciv-web. The fifth game was started June 23, 2017, and we will soon start LongTurn game #6 on Freeciv-web.

Join Freeciv-web LongTurn game #5 here!