The Glade 4.0

Sometime Friday. Not exactly sure of time since I knew I'd be out of town.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

If I am home. If it's during the day, no so much.

Edit Info I found says German evening. I'll probably still be at work.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

I promise to find a recap article later, then steal whatever I think is interesting in that and post it. News!

I'm sure they'll have the whole thing up in a few days and you'll want to watch it regardless of what we post here

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

It's scheduled for 3 est, which means 3:45 at the earliest. Grouse should be home by then, I nominate that he's responsible. I wish they had an audio only stream. trying to stream this in the car would likely devour my bandwidth.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

I think I may be a nerd. This picture (highlighted in today's Around the Verse) of Zane and his work on the Aurora HUD fills me with utter joy:



Look at that! A real, USEFUL radar!

News on other stuff, for those without time to watch: v0.9 might not drop tomorrow as planned -- they're having some difficulties with the leaderboards. The persistent universe team has 3 prototype missions up and in testing. Foundry 42 in the UK is working on additional racing maps. Animation for the Mustang is being worked on; the Idris is "undergoing a review;" and the Mustang, Avenger, and M50 are getting damage state work.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Ill be in my bunk sleeping module

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Well I was doing the one on one fights...I only seemed to get paired with people who thought that space combat should involve flying directly at and then into me and then coming to a complete stop and trying to ram into me again. I managed to avoid and kill them a few times but both times it was like 14 deaths each mostly because of suicidal pilots.

Is this normal?

In the team combat I mostly encountered people who would log in and then out so we either outnumbered them 3 to 1 or they did to us and the most I saw were people who just liked to make one pass then come to a complete stop and blast away. Sit and spin isn't fun. This happened with 5 different players playing Hornets. Is this normal?

Luckily people don't seem to know how to deploy chaff.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Yes. Generally, sit & spin isn't super successful if some better pilots are around. And the drop in/drop out thing is common because some people are still experiencing connectivity issues and/or crashes, and lots of peoples' load times are terrible (mine included) because they haven't ponied up for an SSD yet.

Sometime this week, we should be seeing private matches hit, though.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Fix sit in spin - up missile ability to penetrate shields and damage, but make them easier to miss if in movement.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Tweaking maneuvering thruster power:max forward velocity ratios would also alleviate sit and spin. Relative apparent motion would increase for the turreters relative to their ability to track the target.

Fixing spawn points so they spread out over a larger area and favor points further from enemies and/or out of enemies' fields of view would also make it less attractive as an effective spawn camping method, which is also part of the problem.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

good thing they are doing that in v.9 then eh

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Yup.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Gah.

I had originally pledged for a Caterpillar with the intent to use it as a salvage platform, and then they went and added the half dozen extra ships near the end of last year... Since doing that, and watching AC develop and more and more variants (and ships getting variants beyond the initial 6 pledge ships), I've slowly been coming to the conclusion that they're scaling back their (admittedly hugely ambitious) modularity goals... I've been increasingly wondering whether some of these more exotic roles (smuggling, salvage, mining, etc.) will truly be optimally achievable conversions for non-custom role variants.

The announcement of the Reclaimer as an Aegis ship (which is low on my list of favorite ship aesthetics, from the Retaliator, Avenger, and to some extent the Idris) and the inclusion of drones as a core feature had helped me to stave off lusting after their dedicated salvage ship despite salvage being something that really interests me.

But damn, that looks reasonably cool, which I wasn't expecting.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

You could exchange for credit or sell some of the ships you don't feel you are going to use you know... Or wait till the game goes live.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Yup. I had kind of self-imposed a "no new ship slots" rule, but had earmarked a couple (my Aurora LX for sure) for upgrades. This is just making me rethink what I want to upgrade. Not sure, yet. We'll see the additional concept art posted today when the sale goes live, and the price point, and then I'll have to give it some thought over the weekend.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

It looks like a giant Cutlass.

We should spoiler those monster screenshots.

Just sayin.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Yup. My bad. I normally remember to.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I want one. But not for $350.

Indeed. I'm pretty sure a lot of folks have crossed their "now I'll get stuff in-game" threshold. I'm approaching it, certainly. I still want a Gladius for AC once I can cross-chassis it, for sure, but that'll be pretty minor. I've pushed the ships around on paper, and I think I can rectify my role distribution along with adding in a Reclaimer, but now it's time for me to sleep on the cash differential for a week. This might be something I swap my Freelancer MAX for.

I also listened to this week's Reverse the 'Verse, which was almost entirely Reclaimer Q&A. Coupled with looking up some dev posts on the Phoenix debacle (they're going to try to make things like the hot tub removable, yay), it's looking like they're not abandoning configurability (yet?). Ben's maintaining that you'll be able to run salvage with other ships, this one's just really good at it because it's got a big hold for materials and a bunch of tractor beam-equippable turrets. It also sounds like they're not really planning on variants for the wave 3 stuff because they're already very hyper-specialized, and much of the wave 2 stuff probably falls under that, too. So that's nice to hear.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Yeha my next 300 bucks is going to unlimited yoga signup.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Okay. The new hangar configuration tool is nice. Simple, clean, does what it's supposed to AFAICT.

Tonight, I'll check out the keybinding menu and SLI support. Yay!

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Mmm. Look at that radar. And the EM/Heat signature boxes! Scanning interfaces! Salvage analysis! Looks like there'll be some interesting things to do as a Cutlass RIO.

Also, I really hope this can be ported to a companion app when you sit down in that seat. Having this on a touch interface would be super sweet.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Wow

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville