Octopus Overlords

Heh, some of those groundside creatures were amazingly hilarious. I hope this one maintains some of that sense of humor.

Daehawk wrote: ↑Thu Oct 19, 2017 3:08 pm Looks good to me except those tiny planets to mine. I prefer a more serious planet mining part. the best ever made was Starflight on the Genesis.

I would argue that "tiny" is a matter of perception and that the area of the planetary bodies in the new SC is far larger than in SC2.

If you look at the screenshot of SC2 exploration earlier in this thread you'll see the 2D view w/ the explorer craft. If I use the explorer craft as a unit of measurement the screen is 20 explorers long and 15 explorers high approximately. That's a total area of 300 explorers squared.

In the new SC2 trailer there is a full shot of a moon just before it gets explored that has a canyon running the vertical length of it. The width of the canyon is roughly the same, so we can use the width of the canyon as a unit of measurement. The pole to pole distance is roughly 2.5 canyon widths. We'll round down to 2 canyon widths as the diameter to make the math easy. In the trailer the explorer jumps into the canyon. By eyeball the canyon is 21 explorers wide.

The radius is 1/2 the diameter, so we'll assume the planetoid has radius = 1 canyon width or 21 explorers. Surface area of a sphere is 4*pi*rsquared. Or in our case 4 * 3.14159265 * (441 explorer squared) = 5,541 explorers squared.

Not tiny at all.

NickAragua wrote: ↑Thu Oct 19, 2017 8:09 pm Heh, some of those groundside creatures were amazingly hilarious. I hope this one maintains some of that sense of humor.

Definitely.

Ars Technica has a great article up about the game.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/10/ ... ming-beta/

Daehawk wrote: ↑Tue Oct 18, 2016 7:53 pm I played both SC2 and Starflight on the Sega Genesis and it was much better. The Starflight one is the best. And you could upgrade your ship with more cargo and weps and all kinds of stuff and one was a better scanner. The Starflight scanning and mining was 1000x better than the SC2 one but it was still better than anything since. I guess the closest since then has been Mass Effect 2 and thats god awful boring. I want to replay Starflight on Genesis but dont have one. Sigh.

May reinstall UrQuan Masters.

https://www.androidauthority.com/best-s ... rs-692225/

In on Steam

New dev journal today which talks about the lore of Star Control!

https://forums.starcontrol.com/485923

I would so love this game if only they made the planet landing and mining less kiddy and more sim like. Like the original Starflight did. That was my favorite. Havign a mineral scanner then landing and scanning along. The better the scanner the deeper the deposits. Loved it. Their version of Star Control is really good but they've kiddied it up a bit much and ruined the planet stuff.

I dunno, the Starflight UI really hasn't aged that well. Plus, Star Control was pretty cartoony as well, so I'm ok with some bright colors and humor. Better than spending the game driving along "generic gray planet #34 looking at my soil density scanner the whole time".

I should say I was thinking Starflight on Sega Genesis not PC...ya Ive seen the PC ones. I own the pc version of pt2. Ugh.

Not to be contrary, but you are asking Star Control to be something it is not. SC2 planetary landings were cartoony and had an arcade game style.

I agree... planetary exploration was a minor sideshow to me. I was there for the ship combat and humor-tinged storyline.

Having said that, I suppose if you're going to have something be a part of the game you should try to make it engaging. I still wouldn't want to spend a significant part of the game on planets.

Star Control: Origins Fleet Battles Beta begins today!

Trailer:

https://youtu.be/a-hhgTxiB8Y

Star Control: Origins is a science-fiction adventure game set in an open universe that puts the player as the captain of Earth's first interstellar vessel on a mission to find allies to help save humanity from certain annihilation.

The beta unlocks the Fleet Battles feature, where you'll assemble ships in a fleet and engage in battle with fleets controlled by either the computer, humans via the Internet, or even friends sitting at the same PC.

You can literally design your own ships to use in combat using the Ship Crafting system, or you can download ships designed by others to play with. Ship Crafting not only allows you to decide what weapons and defenses a ship has, but allows total control of how a ship looks.

Check out CEO Brad Wardell's guided tour to the beta here!

More info here: https://forums.starcontrol.com/485611

*Throws Wallet at Brad*

Brad is having a Discord chat tonight about Star Control, so if anyone is interested feel free to stop by.

Star Control Discord

Brad also accepts thrown wallets?

The February Dev Diary for Star Control: Origins is out! It has updates on the game's progress, answers to your frequently asked questions, and some discussion on the lore and how it fits in with the classic series.

https://www.stardock.com/games/article/487303/

We’ve posted a Q+A regarding the legal dispute with Paul and Fred.

https://forums.starcontrol.com/487690/q ... l-and-fred

What a crock of shit. Saying they weren't the creators is like saying Joss Whedon didn't create Buffy. It's completely disingenuous. Brad Wardell is the scum of the games industry.

General observation: having an enema call you a crock of shit seems a fair bit worse than just a run of the mill crock of shit accusation.

Brad touches on the art of storytelling in a game and shares a little bit about our Adventure Studio feature in this new dev diary.

Check it out here: https://forums.starcontrol.com/487769/s ... orytelling

Ænima wrote: ↑Fri Feb 23, 2018 11:35 am What a crock of shit. Saying they weren't the creators is like saying Joss Whedon didn't create Buffy. It's completely disingenuous. Brad Wardell is the scum of the games industry.

The timeline appears to show that Paul and Fred were given numerous chances to align with Stardock and coordinate efforts. And Stardock even initially offered to give Paul and Fred the rights to Star Control so they could make a new SC game. According to the timeline they declined all attempts at cooperation.

Plus the timing of the release of their game is suspect.

Many of you here know me as I've been here for...a very long time.

I've been a huge Star Control fan for going on 30 years. That's why we acquired the IP. It's been a quarter century since a Star Control game has been made.

I mostly lurk on OO because I do it via my iPhone which makes it harder to respond. But I know many of you are like me who feel our games have gotten dumbed down.

The classic games, including Star Control but also the old Ultima series, Wizardry games and such were awesome because you felt like you were in an open world surrounded by a well crafted story. You weren't led around by the nose. You were given clues and information and you had to figure things out for yourself.

Now, the new Star Control game does keep an in-game Captain's Log. But it doesn't lead you by the nose. There's no mindless "Just go to X and they will give you Y". Instead, it's about the story and how you will make your way through it.

I'm pretty bummed, on a personal level, to get demonized by my heroes. If you read my emails to them you'd be embarrassed on my behalf because they're so fanboyish, even when they're not being...super nice to me.

Having run a technology company for so many years, I've (unfortunately) had to make sure we have really good IP attorneys around. You guys read about those ridiculous patent cases or those really borderline trademark cases (we were sued for calling a game Entrepreneur once). But we've had to live with them. With Star Control, we know what rights we have (and don't have). It's been thoroughly reviewed time and time again. And despite that, we have gone to every length to try to make sure that the original designers/developers (which is what, until five months ago they called themselves) of Star control II were satisfied.

The legal difficulties with the developers of the DOS game will get sorted out. It has no bearing on the new Star Control game.

What we aim to do is bring back that genre to people. A genre many of you are quite familiar with but have gone many years without seeing new games in that genre because either it's really hard to create a multi-genre game or because game publishers think gamers are too stupid to play a game that doesn't put them on rails.

Here are a few exclusive shots for OO members:

I believe I own every Stardock game ever made, except Rebellion came out before I got around to Trinity, so I never purchased the latter. I look forward to seeing what you guys come up with.

At the end of the day, I really just want to fly around an unexplored galaxy, land on planets and scoop up minerals and life forms while exploring alien ruins and occasionally swapping witty banter with aliens. So, I'm looking forward to this when it comes out.

I had no idea about any of this until I clicked this thread idly a couple of days ago because I think I might have played the original Star Control when it first came out. I'm vaguely remembering a 16-color game that had three zoom levels (interstellar travel, interplanetary, and planetary), but that might have been Star Command or something. Whether it was the same game or not, I like what I read about the upcoming game, and I'm sorry it's tainted with all this legal and personal drama.

NickAragua wrote: ↑Sat Mar 03, 2018 10:16 pm At the end of the day, I really just want to fly around an unexplored galaxy, land on planets and scoop up minerals and life forms while exploring alien ruins and occasionally swapping witty banter with aliens. So, I'm looking forward to this when it comes out.

So something like this?

One more:



So it's coming along. Just iterating on the main "game play loop", adding more stories and adventures, more aliens, more more.

NickAragua wrote: ↑Sat Mar 03, 2018 10:16 pm At the end of the day, I really just want to fly around an unexplored galaxy, land on planets and scoop up minerals and life forms while exploring alien ruins and occasionally swapping witty banter with aliens. So, I'm looking forward to this when it comes out.

Me too, and I have confidence in Stardock doing a good job on this.

Brad Wardell wrote: ↑Sun Mar 04, 2018 4:35 pm

NickAragua wrote: ↑Sat Mar 03, 2018 10:16 pm At the end of the day, I really just want to fly around an unexplored galaxy, land on planets and scoop up minerals and life forms while exploring alien ruins and occasionally swapping witty banter with aliens. So, I'm looking forward to this when it comes out.

screenshot

All that's missing is the "ground crew" report

Whatever the name ends up, I'm looking forward to it.

There are about 3,000 unique planets that are split into roughly 75 different classes. The newest dev journal shows how we create our planet classes through a mixture of procedural generation & designer balance.

https://www.stardock.com/games/article/ ... d-a-planet

April preview trailer

Yeah, I'm pretty much in. When's this coming out?

I think Ill enjoy it as long as I pretend its not named Star Control. Taken as a space game thats like the cutsey wootsey cousin to the real Star Control Ill like it.

Dude, do you even remember what the art for Star Control II looked like?

Yep. But 3 was worse.

Yeah, 3 was pretty weird. Instead of the colorful, animated cartoon characters, we got these weird-ass clay puppets.

I loved Star Control 2. I loved using the paper map and coordinates to search the galaxy for rainbow planets. It was an awesome game.

So far, I like the trailers and the look of the game. It looks like the developers behind this really have the spirit of Star Control 2 in mind. But I am still cautious. I am also leary of all the he said/she said mucky muck on who owns Star Control.

Still, that last trailer looked really good. I'd love to see a teaser trailer of the story. How much of the story is just a rehash of the last game?