I had a different picture prepared for this post, but I noticed while making it that several of my crew members looked almost identical. So back to the tailor for some adjustments to hair styles and uniform….

I made admiral a few days ago. I can’t say I have seen all the game, since I haven’t been able to find anyone with which to do the raid mission. I really need to look for a fleet to join, but I really have no idea how to go about it. The tools in game are primitive, and even when you join an open group, it’s hard to figure out if the people in your group are in fleets. Since after the mission everyone separates and goes their own way, you never really get a chance to talk or get to know anyone.

Compare that to EverQuest, where it was very much to your advantage to find people with whom you liked to group, and stick with them, perhaps all join the same guild. So, looking back, I would have to mark that as a failure for Star Trek Online. It’s a great game, but there is absolutely no — zip, nada, null — community. There is almost no difference between STO and some single player Star Trek game.

That said, the game has seriously fun space battles. Pretty much everything you’d ever have wanted in an arcade-style space shooter — constant shifts in strategy, jockeying for position, saving up abilities for a devastating coup de grâce — brilliant. Your bridge officers — that you skill up and train to have the abilities you want them to have — become individuals. And then there’s the photonic fleet — projected images of other ships that do real damage and can even the odds in a tough firefight. I’m not sure if that’s a science officer ability, associated with my ship, or something everyone gets when they become admiral. It’s a lot of fun. Almost all the ships in the picture above are holograms….

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I do enjoy ground missions, but unlike space battles, ground battles tend to be generally rote. Enemies are in clumps. Order your away team to begin softening them up while you do your AE buffs and debuffs, set everyone in good flanking positions and then just let everything run until done. Almost automatic.

In this particular mission, the boss kept disappearing and a wave of adds would rush in. Destroy them, she returns for awhile, etc. That said, I do enjoy ground missions. I get to see my crew in action! In space, they are nothing more than repositories for special abilities. They don’t do anything themselves in space. On the ground, they are team mates.

Next stop for any admiral is the Klingon Empire. I rerolled as a Romulan refugee who had decided to throw her lot in with the Klingons, whereupon she was forced to wear this ridiculous outfit. Seriously? Really?

Nonetheless, I did the Qo’noS quests, got my ship, entered the PvP queues and… wow, the Feds don’t even stand a CHANCE now in space PvP. Straight outta drydock, I’m able to hold off a Fed starship two levels higher than me with almost no damage, plenty of time for the other Klingons to finish their encounters and come help finish it off. Went to the Kahless Expanse to finish some of the (few) PvE quests and was taking on groups of Fed NPCs two levels higher with no trouble. Sometimes I’d blunder into a second group — no problem. Back in beta, the Kahless Expanse was pure death to a level 6 Klingon. I guess they both nerfed the zone and boosted Klingon ships.

I gained nearly two levels just from a couple of PvP matches and the Kahless Expanse quests. Went back to the Federation side and queued for PvP and was not able to get even one Federation space battle going. I guess the Feds understand that it is impossible to win against the Klingons in space.

So, a month or so in, leveling slowly, looking back: STO is a fantastic single player space game. The ground game is more or less on rails, but the team-based fighting is a lot of fun. The plot missions add depth and complexity to the Star Trek millieu, though the inability to actually affect the plot in any way is a little frustrating. There is no community in the game, which doesn’t bode well for its long-term health. Without community, there is no pull to keep people playing.

Space PvP is very unbalanced, with almost every encounter being an easy win for the Klingons. Ground based PvP seems a little more even, with victory going with the team that best sticks together.

I haven’t been able to try the raid mission. I understand it takes other people working as a team, which would seem to run counter to everything STO has to offer to that point.

Will I keep playing? Yes, at least until I make Rear Admiral 5. If they patch the Romulan storyline in by then, I will definitely be re-rolling to play that story out. Plus, their ships are seriously cool :)

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When I started with the 7DRL game design challenge, I’d set a timeline. I would need to get all the game mechanics done by last Sunday, so I could focus on adding content to the game, doing balancing, playtesting the game, polishing it to a fine sheen, until today it would burst on the scene like a supernova. I’d be getting piles of emails from indie game studios asking if I wanted to work on some cool projects, doors would open and angels would fly out begging me to expand the game into some monster AAA title and I….

Sunday came and went, and all I had done was my map generation and a player character and a single rat following each other around, trying not to get in each other’s way, but entirely unable to harm each other.

I managed to get the inventory system in and scatter some items around, bring a few more monsters up and give them a very rudimentary AI. That was Monday; I was so tired from that I couldn’t work on it Tuesday, and Wednesday, I watched American Idol and played Star Trek Online. I was in real danger of losing my will to follow this through.

Why? Because the stuff I’d tossed together in a hurry to get to that point was not a good foundation on which to build a game. PyGame, the graphics engine upon which my game is built, was redrawing more stuff than it needed to do. My game state was scattered all over two dozen classes. Hooks to routines everywhere.

I had to force myself into the chair Thursday after work. I started switching things around, building more, building more; I got back my momentum. When I got home Friday, I sat down and worked on it until 3AM, and got the basic mechanics FINALLY DONE. I collapsed into bed. Saturday morning — this morning — I was up at 8 coding, and by noon I was done. I’d added many different kinds of monsters, a boss battle, and a way to win the game. A dozen playthroughs had brought the game to some sort of balance.

I recorded the last of these playthroughs for the video. I decided it would be even more fun with some background music, so I spent about an hour trying to improvise something on my alto recorder. (The game has sound effects of its own, courtesy of a free sound effects site I found, but no music).

Somewhere in there, I ate brunch, if you can have brunch at 3PM. I brought the raw video and music track in Windows Movie Maker, added titles and credits, shaved off about five minutes of the playthrough because (a) it was boring and (b) it was too long for YouTube, and set it uploading. You can find it at the end of this post (unless you are reading this in Google Buzz).

Post-mortem time.

I am GLAD it’s over! But I am equally glad I did it! I’d been playing around with PyGame for awhile, but never did much more than little things with it. Now I have the confidence with PyGame to be able to move forward and do better things. My initiali design was just to make a map that looked drawn on graph paper and have toys be all the monsters, and it worked wonderfully.

I’m so pumped, now. I am thinking about a next project. I want to do another rogue-like, but a full game this time, one with a plot, boss battles and everything. But first, I’d like to check out either the Ogre3D or Panda3D engine and write a pigeon-based scrolling shooter. Scrolling shooters were my favorite sort of arcade game back in the Golden Age of Video Games — the 80s. I’ve never written one!

Anyway, full source code is at the link after the video. If you want to play with it, you will need Python and Pygame. I used IDLE on Windows, and Python 2.6 on Linux, with the pygame extensions.

So, peace, out. Back to the usual MMO fare here on West Karana :) Thanks for following along on my 7DRL this very long week!

A few days ago, my alt in EVE Online, Etha Preve, finished enough training to fly the Amarrian stealth bomber, the Purifier. After grouping with a friend who had just gotten the skills to fly his own bomber (a Nemesis), I knew I’d want one on my alt to help with level 4 missions.

There’s this time in Level 4 missions where you’ve taken down all the lesser ships with drones, and all you have left are slow, lumbering battle cruisers and battleships. These seem to take the most time, because I am usually ALSO in a slow, lumbering battleship. The ships are gravy for stealth bombers. They can stand out of missile, beam and gun range and just lob missiles and torpedoes into the fray. If they get aggro, they can move out of targeting range and cloak. As a fleet member, they are first-rate damage and, with sensor dampeners, can even take on missions by themselves, using their small signature radius, high flight speed and ability to jam enemy sensors to dance outside of firing range, making their entire lack of any defense less of an issue.

I bought the Purifier, stopped by Dodixie for a Covert Ops Cloaking Device II, and then headed into my base in Aunia and parked it.

The real work was about to begin.

As a pilot who has trained for Amarr ships all her career, Etha had very little in the way of missile skills. There’s no point in sitting at the edge of a fight lobbing missiles if they don’t hit their targets.

It was time to plug the numbers into the EVE Fitting Tool.

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I started my hunt for good fits over in BattleClinic. BattleClinic is THE go-to site for help with EVE Online, if you want a good overview for what is really happening in the game. They are also the #1 destination for sample ship fittings. EVEMON ties directly into their database.

I started with a fairly recent fit that depended upon speed and stealth for its power, and was advertised to be able to solo as well as it performed in a fleet.

It’s important to consider the BattleClinic fits ONLY as starting points. For one thing, they tend to use unrealistically expensive modules or require very advanced training. My alt is still relatively new — just over 6 million skill points — and has a ways to go.

Since I mean for this stealth bomber to pair with my Ishtar, and the Ishtar will fit a target painter, I was able to dispense with that. Since I NEVER plan to let this ship get within range to use the warp disruptor, that went. Nonetheless, I added a Monopulse Tracking Mechanism and a Small Tracking Diagnostic Subroutines to up the chance to hit. I replaced the MicroWarpdrive with an Afterburner as this is a mission running/plex set-up, replaced one of the Nanofiber Internal Structures (add speed) with a CPU Co-Processor because… I needed more CPU. Flip the cap booster with a cap regenerator and it was done — a fit that Etha could put on her ship with the power skills she has trained.

Missiles good out to 40km; I have not seen many NPCs fire effectively from that distance (though they do try). I have also not seen many NPCs with a velocity greater than 500m/s, so at 711m/s cruising speed under afterburners (which this ship can run full time), it should be impossible for any ship to get close enough to do serious damage, especially if the Ishtar is doing its job and keeping aggro and killing stuff with drones.

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I mentioned before that, as an Amarr pilot, Etha had little training in missiles. I took all the skills needed from the list EFT provided and plugged them into EVEMON.

Some of the skills only need level I training, but I go by the philosophy that every skill should be trained up to at least III. It doesn’t take THAT long in most cases, but brings big benefits (or at least, doesn’t hurt).

Eleven days until this thing can be taken out to its first level 4 mission. Those torps and siege missiles are NOT CHEAP. If I’m firing a thousand ISK at something, I want it to HIT. So training comes first. I can wait. Patience is the prime characteristic for the EVE pilot, after all :)

There’s few things that I like as much as getting a new ship and thinking of all the things I could do for it. When I come up with a fit all my own, and take it into the black and see that it works — that’s a great feeling. Few MMOs let you have the freedom to be as creative as you like. And few MMOs have the amazing community to provide the sort of tools you need to really make your mark in the game.

Monday evening, I understood what my game wanted to be about. Tuesday, I realized that the game was horribly, horribly flawed. Coming in, all I really knew I wanted to do was the graph paper-like room generation, and I hoped the rest of the game would occur to me as I was doing that.

And it did — it just turned out to be a different game than the one I was writing.

So my 7DRL is ending up as a game very difficult to extend. By making it graphical, and not basing it off an existing Rogue-like engine, I had to spend a LOT of time on just the basic mechanics. Writing a separate class for every monster and weapon seemed like a good idea at the time — Swords inherit from Melee Weapons inherit from Weapons inherit from Object. Though that is kind of how you would think you would want to implement stuff in an object-oriented language like Python, I think it limited me.

Well, with an evening and a morning still left to go, perhaps it’s too early to do a post-mortem on the project. The unhappy fact is that while I would love to finish this game, to do it properly I would have to rewrite it from scratch, and I just don’t have the time. Chalk this one up to a learning experience.

Day 5 of my 7DRL was all about adding combat. My penalty for dying is not harsh; you just pop back in the upper left corner, and the monsters leave you along for a little while.

The damage done by monsters is sometimes fractional because your wielded weapons add a certain amount of physical and magical damage resistance. Wands tend more toward magic resistance, and swords the physical. The idea is that, since you don’t gain xp or levels in this game, you would slowly build up nearly 100% resistance in certain areas, so when the dragon came at you and did 1000 points of damage, you’d resist 99% of it. Woe be she who drops her sword without another one handy.

Oh yeah, almost forgot to mention: the screen capture utility on my Linux box kept crashing for some mysterious reason, so I ran it on my Windows machine and captured the game with Windows Media Encoder, which worked really well! So, here’s the vid of my 7DRL working on Windows Vista :)