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[Shadow]

Originally Posted by Roswitha

Can I ask what it was?

The short answer: there was a fairly rare case where data would get garbled getting sent across the network.

The long answer: if a negative floating point value, that had nothing after the decimal, and was between -65535 and -1 or so, it would get garbled when sent across the network. In my test case, -135.0 was getting changed to something like 40 million.

[Shadow]

I'm now back to adding things and not knowing how much I should tell people from a spoiler point of view.

[Shadow]

Mini-rant: When your statement starts with "I'm sorry, I don't have anything against group X, but", you probably just lied twice.

[Shadow]

Some things that are sneaking into the mainline Drox build soon: Shadow race ships will use cloaking and Human planets will offer gambling.

[Valgor]

What about Drakk ships using fighter bays?

[Shadow]

Originally Posted by Valgor

What about Drakk ships using fighter bays?

I keep thinking of doing that, but I worry that there will end up being a ton of extra ships flying around all Drakk planets.

[Bluddy]

Originally Posted by Shadow

I keep thinking of doing that, but I worry that there will end up being a ton of extra ships flying around all Drakk planets.

You'd probably want to program them to only send out the fighters on long trips. For their planets, you could have the planet itself have one fighter module, so there would only be a few fighters per planet.

[Valgor]

Do you plan to eventually give all the races' ships different "special abilities" ?
Lithosoid ships, for example, could have more armour and structure by default, the Dryad much faster shield regeneration, Human ships could drop mines and the Hive use some sort of point defense
(like Baylisa do to some extent), etc.

[Shadow]

Originally Posted by Bluddy

For their planets, you could have the planet itself have one fighter module, so there would only be a few fighters per planet.

This is something that I have been thinking about for the expansion.

Originally Posted by Valgor

Do you plan to eventually give all the races' ships different "special abilities" ?

In general, I'm slowly making each of the races a little more unique.

[Bluddy]

I'm glad to see you're working in this direction for the expansion.

What I would suggest (not sure if I mentioned it before) is abandoning the freestyle module system that's currently in place for the races -- it makes them too uniform as well as too tough (in the sense that taking on one race ship is too difficult for the player, and there are no weak race ships to attack other than diplomats and colony ships since they always have the same military ship type).

Have each race have a budget with which to build its fleet. Smaller ships would be cheaper and more plentiful, larger ships would be more expensive and few. Then design each race ship type the same way that monster ships are designed. This way they scale up to be able to deal with the monsters in their sector without being too tough for you to handle.

For technology improvements, you could give a race's ships bonuses, with bigger bonuses going to techs that they specialize in, so for example, Shadow would get a super cloak modifier ability if you research it for them, but would only get a minor shield upgrade if you give them that tech.

A similar option would be to make the base ship designed with stats like monsters, but give them an extra 2-3 slots for modules which can be upgraded with tech.