That only works since there are no portable ladders, climbing skill or levitate/fly spell in Skyrim. :D It feels pretty stupid if you have played previous Elder scroll with both climbing skill and levitate spells, but mentioning the ladder makes it even worse.
Weird... I always felt like Skyrim and Oblivion actually fixed this exact problem with traditional RPG quests. Admittedly, there are plenty of quests in those games with only one solution (I frigging hate the House Of Horrors quest for this!), but a huge number of them have multiple routes to a solution. In fact, the example you listed is used several times in both games: Instead of killing the target (the obvious solution) you can instead pick his pocket, or persuade him to just give you the McGuffin. I didn't realize these options were available (they're not listed or hinted at in most of the quest descriptions, so perhaps that is the bigger issue) and only discovered them on subsequent playthroughs when my other skills were sufficient; if you don't have enough skill in speechcraft, pickpocket, or telekinesis, the failure of those attempts seem like there just isn't an alternative solution.
I usually don't play as rogue or thief so that pick pocket I would not have spotted. Instead I play usually character with high speech or persuade so I should have been able to spot that. One thing I found funny in Skyrim was that most of the dungeons were loops. There was hidden door at the end of the dungeon so player did not need to walk over whole dungeon when quest was done. This is mixed thing for me. It probably makes the game more player friendly but it shoots realism into knee. Oblivion dungeons player needed to walk back whole dungeon.
If you are interested about Meso-American RPG, there is Worlds of Ultima: Savage Empire, Altough it is turn based and quite old. So UX is not up to modern standards. While playing I find it easier to play full on keyboard and not using the mouse, but learning that it takes time. Game actually has nice feature that each of tribes have their own currency, which is kind of cool. Some of them require blue feathers, some diamons and so on.
I like RPG when you actually can play role so that game does not force you to do things in certain way. There should be multiple ways/methods to solve quests. For example Fallout 2 is good example in this. I think this is the most imporant thing in RPG. I hate quest like Skyrim and Oblivions where you have one single way to do the quest and it is usually killing somebody and getting item from them. Only option is to not to do the quest at all. But more interesting quest would be that item to get would be in safe. Player could of course kill the NPC who has it and then get item. But player should be able to persuade, buy it or steal it without killing the NPC. Or maybe even do another quest for the NPC and then gain that item as a reward. I understand these kind of quest require a lot of work from developping team and are there for much harder to do than simple kill and fetch quests.
I prefer single player game over multiplayer game. If game only has single character and no party then first person view is okay. Otherwise I would like to player from 3rd person or isometric view and turn base game.
RPG should have quite much dialog with choices and things to read, no need for voice acting, specially if it is bad voice acting. Crafting and grinding is one thing I don't usually like in RPG. If these are done well, crafting is okay. There should many different items and make your character unique with some special perks or traits to pick while gaining level or experience.
Party or single character is a bit tough choice. They both have their pros and cons. Single character from first person view can be very immersive. But characters in these games can get overpowerful compared to other characters in the game. Games with party you can usually have more complex builds and try out different things which is good thing. Also turn base combat can be more interesting with party.
Biggest update is new AI difficulty levels: Weak, Normal and Challenging. Weak is pretty much the old AI, just with minor fixes. Biggest difference between these difficulty levels is how AI does the space exploration. On weak it tries to move around the sun by keeping certain distance from the sun. This causes AI to move already explored sectors and isn't effective. On normal difficulty AI also tries to keep distance but same time move sectors which give most of the new unexplored sectors. Finally on challenging AI goes greed and only moves sectors which give most of new explored sectors. Main idea is that with better AI for exploration AI will eventually gain more planets and be more better in game.
There are also some minor changes for example how populations are handled on planets with higher difficulty levels. Challenging AI will not allow blocking planets by moving fleets there, it will try to send another fleet from another planet to destroy that. AI is also more aggressive, since earlier there was issue that AI did not make war against human player if borders were crossed too often. These changes make game more challenging, I probably didn't win once while playing test games if there was ancient realms in game.
There are two new space races in the game too: Alteirians and Smaugirians. Alteirians are bit different to each other space races. These guys are weak but very smart folk. They don't live on planet surfaces but on planet orbitals. This cause that Alteirians are very easy to conquer by simply destroying their orbital. Because they live on orbital they get big negatives on population production and mining which makes them really slow on building at beginning of the game. On the other hand their research can be over 4 times at beginning compared to other races. Alteirians also have challenging time against space pirates since they can be encoutered quite early and are able to destroy Alteirian orbital. In fact Alteirians were the first space race that I actually lost complete during test games. On that I noticed that game is missing own "you lost" screen. This is now added, and player can choose if he/she wants to see results immediately or let AI finish the game.
Another new space race is Smaugirians. These are folk that can place weapons and privateering modules to their freighters. These guys also have two new government types: Syndicate and Pirates. So in short Smaugirians can be played as space pirating race, if wanted. When their freighters have weapons other realms still count them as unarmed.
There are also some minor changes, like auto shoot in combat simply clicking the enemy ship. Also by default human player won't get all the news from other realms before they have had diplomatic meeting. Game can be also configured so that each realm is controlled by AI, so human can just watch how AI is playing the game. This is mostly when doing AI update, but it is there if someone else is interested see how AI plays. There are small changes also for tech trees. In theory each space race could have their own tech tree, but mostly they have shared techs. There are some exceptions for exampl Alteirians do not have terra forming tech since they don't live on planet, but they have bigger orbitals and orbital lifts. Mechions and Lithorians do not have food production tech since those guys do not eat. Instead they have research and mining tech available only for those.
I am using these ships for smuggler race in my 4x game. If you want to use them, they are under same license as are the original ones and no need to credit me.
Hmm, so there is probably something different in Windows 7 and Windows 10. It seems there some people has issue with Windows 10 and Minecraft, but that's probably different since Minecraft does not use Swing but something else for rendering the screen. This could be difficult to fix since fullscreen mode is done with three lines and there isn't much to change.
I was able to reproduce drawing issue with full-screen mode with Windows 7. It wasn't blocking the alt+tab but otherwise it was just showing the white screen. If Windows had scaling set to 150% drawing worked but some of the UI buttons went offscreen and game isn't playable at then. However I was able to get this working with full-screen in Windows 7 with following: Full-screen mode on, disable OpenGL hardware support and set scaling from Windows to 100%. Danimal, could you try if these would work with Windows 10?
Bordless does not affect anyway if you have selected full-screen. I meant that without full screen mode, bordless is the next thing almost full screen if screen is resized for maximum size. Fixing this will be challenging since I don't have Windows 10. I'll try to look if someone else has encounter similar issue with Java. Pressing alt+F4 should still close the game if it is running on top even its not being shown.
Okay, I think I now understood what you mean with auto-cicle. Left-clicking enemy ship would always shoot it with next available when. One whould need to click that many times ship has guns. This sounds like a good feature.
There are quite much news I agree with that. It shows news about each leader doing something or get killed, which can happen often. Reason why it shows even from empires you have not met is because it is being broadcasted by Galactic Broadcast Network Company, which is indepent from all the realms. Elections happen at same time since most of the governments have reign time 20 turns. (Some governments have 40, 100 turns or even life time) If ruler dies before then elections can happen different time. For news there could be settings or choice that it would only show your local news, or news from realms you have met or show all.
Rulers are pretty much like governor but they giver bonuses for whole realm. What ruler/governor/commander actually benefits it depends on his/her/its perks. Scientific gives research bonus if leader is working as ruler or governor. Diplomatic only gives diplomacy bonus if it is on ruler and so on. For the moment only way differentiate leaders are their names. It would be nice to have different leader pictures but since I am working without budget it is very difficult to obtain multiple faces for multiple alien races. Reason why dead ones stay on the list I am planning to make somekind family tree or similar at somepoint, but not sure if that's a good idea.
Hey, that marking route for normal movement is great idea. I could try to implement that on next version.
Hmm, that sounds really bad. Did Alt+tab or similar work either? I have tried game with FullHD resolution and with that it should work. Almost full screen you should be able to get first resize it big as possible and then change to borderless mode. Borderless mode requires restart to be working. What kind of graphical glitches you experienced?
Yes, true building advanced factory/mine/lab and so one could replace basic factory/mine/lab automatically. This is a good suggestion.
Yes, there are quite many clicking in combat, but it matters in which order those weapons are used, if ship has multiple different types of weapons. Do you mean that weapons could cycled for example mouse wheel or with keys?
That only works since there are no portable ladders, climbing skill or levitate/fly spell in Skyrim. :D It feels pretty stupid if you have played previous Elder scroll with both climbing skill and levitate spells, but mentioning the ladder makes it even worse.
@MedicineStorm:
Weird... I always felt like Skyrim and Oblivion actually fixed this exact problem with traditional RPG quests. Admittedly, there are plenty of quests in those games with only one solution (I frigging hate the House Of Horrors quest for this!), but a huge number of them have multiple routes to a solution. In fact, the example you listed is used several times in both games: Instead of killing the target (the obvious solution) you can instead pick his pocket, or persuade him to just give you the McGuffin. I didn't realize these options were available (they're not listed or hinted at in most of the quest descriptions, so perhaps that is the bigger issue) and only discovered them on subsequent playthroughs when my other skills were sufficient; if you don't have enough skill in speechcraft, pickpocket, or telekinesis, the failure of those attempts seem like there just isn't an alternative solution.
I usually don't play as rogue or thief so that pick pocket I would not have spotted. Instead I play usually character with high speech or persuade so I should have been able to spot that. One thing I found funny in Skyrim was that most of the dungeons were loops. There was hidden door at the end of the dungeon so player did not need to walk over whole dungeon when quest was done. This is mixed thing for me. It probably makes the game more player friendly but it shoots realism into knee. Oblivion dungeons player needed to walk back whole dungeon.
If you are interested about Meso-American RPG, there is Worlds of Ultima: Savage Empire, Altough it is turn based and quite old. So UX is not up to modern standards. While playing I find it easier to play full on keyboard and not using the mouse, but learning that it takes time. Game actually has nice feature that each of tribes have their own currency, which is kind of cool. Some of them require blue feathers, some diamons and so on.
I like RPG when you actually can play role so that game does not force you to do things in certain way. There should be multiple ways/methods to solve quests. For example Fallout 2 is good example in this. I think this is the most imporant thing in RPG. I hate quest like Skyrim and Oblivions where you have one single way to do the quest and it is usually killing somebody and getting item from them. Only option is to not to do the quest at all. But more interesting quest would be that item to get would be in safe. Player could of course kill the NPC who has it and then get item. But player should be able to persuade, buy it or steal it without killing the NPC. Or maybe even do another quest for the NPC and then gain that item as a reward. I understand these kind of quest require a lot of work from developping team and are there for much harder to do than simple kill and fetch quests.
I prefer single player game over multiplayer game. If game only has single character and no party then first person view is okay. Otherwise I would like to player from 3rd person or isometric view and turn base game.
RPG should have quite much dialog with choices and things to read, no need for voice acting, specially if it is bad voice acting. Crafting and grinding is one thing I don't usually like in RPG. If these are done well, crafting is okay. There should many different items and make your character unique with some special perks or traits to pick while gaining level or experience.
Party or single character is a bit tough choice. They both have their pros and cons. Single character from first person view can be very immersive. But characters in these games can get overpowerful compared to other characters in the game. Games with party you can usually have more complex builds and try out different things which is good thing. Also turn base combat can be more interesting with party.
New version of Open Realm of Stars is available. 0.20.0Beta is available in Github or Itch.io:
https://github.com/tuomount/Open-Realms-of-Stars
https://reemax.itch.io/open-realm-of-stars
Biggest update is new AI difficulty levels: Weak, Normal and Challenging. Weak is pretty much the old AI, just with minor fixes. Biggest difference between these difficulty levels is how AI does the space exploration. On weak it tries to move around the sun by keeping certain distance from the sun. This causes AI to move already explored sectors and isn't effective. On normal difficulty AI also tries to keep distance but same time move sectors which give most of the new unexplored sectors. Finally on challenging AI goes greed and only moves sectors which give most of new explored sectors. Main idea is that with better AI for exploration AI will eventually gain more planets and be more better in game.
There are also some minor changes for example how populations are handled on planets with higher difficulty levels. Challenging AI will not allow blocking planets by moving fleets there, it will try to send another fleet from another planet to destroy that. AI is also more aggressive, since earlier there was issue that AI did not make war against human player if borders were crossed too often. These changes make game more challenging, I probably didn't win once while playing test games if there was ancient realms in game.
There are two new space races in the game too: Alteirians and Smaugirians. Alteirians are bit different to each other space races. These guys are weak but very smart folk. They don't live on planet surfaces but on planet orbitals. This cause that Alteirians are very easy to conquer by simply destroying their orbital. Because they live on orbital they get big negatives on population production and mining which makes them really slow on building at beginning of the game. On the other hand their research can be over 4 times at beginning compared to other races. Alteirians also have challenging time against space pirates since they can be encoutered quite early and are able to destroy Alteirian orbital. In fact Alteirians were the first space race that I actually lost complete during test games. On that I noticed that game is missing own "you lost" screen. This is now added, and player can choose if he/she wants to see results immediately or let AI finish the game.
Another new space race is Smaugirians. These are folk that can place weapons and privateering modules to their freighters. These guys also have two new government types: Syndicate and Pirates. So in short Smaugirians can be played as space pirating race, if wanted. When their freighters have weapons other realms still count them as unarmed.
There are also some minor changes, like auto shoot in combat simply clicking the enemy ship. Also by default human player won't get all the news from other realms before they have had diplomatic meeting. Game can be also configured so that each realm is controlled by AI, so human can just watch how AI is playing the game. This is mostly when doing AI update, but it is there if someone else is interested see how AI plays. There are small changes also for tech trees. In theory each space race could have their own tech tree, but mostly they have shared techs. There are some exceptions for exampl Alteirians do not have terra forming tech since they don't live on planet, but they have bigger orbitals and orbital lifts. Mechions and Lithorians do not have food production tech since those guys do not eat. Instead they have research and mining tech available only for those.
I am using these ships for smuggler race in my 4x game. If you want to use them, they are under same license as are the original ones and no need to credit me.
Hmm, so there is probably something different in Windows 7 and Windows 10. It seems there some people has issue with Windows 10 and Minecraft, but that's probably different since Minecraft does not use Swing but something else for rendering the screen. This could be difficult to fix since fullscreen mode is done with three lines and there isn't much to change.
I was able to reproduce drawing issue with full-screen mode with Windows 7. It wasn't blocking the alt+tab but otherwise it was just showing the white screen. If Windows had scaling set to 150% drawing worked but some of the UI buttons went offscreen and game isn't playable at then. However I was able to get this working with full-screen in Windows 7 with following: Full-screen mode on, disable OpenGL hardware support and set scaling from Windows to 100%. Danimal, could you try if these would work with Windows 10?
Bordless does not affect anyway if you have selected full-screen. I meant that without full screen mode, bordless is the next thing almost full screen if screen is resized for maximum size. Fixing this will be challenging since I don't have Windows 10. I'll try to look if someone else has encounter similar issue with Java. Pressing alt+F4 should still close the game if it is running on top even its not being shown.
Okay, I think I now understood what you mean with auto-cicle. Left-clicking enemy ship would always shoot it with next available when. One whould need to click that many times ship has guns. This sounds like a good feature.
Thanks for trying my game and giving feedback.
There are quite much news I agree with that. It shows news about each leader doing something or get killed, which can happen often. Reason why it shows even from empires you have not met is because it is being broadcasted by Galactic Broadcast Network Company, which is indepent from all the realms. Elections happen at same time since most of the governments have reign time 20 turns. (Some governments have 40, 100 turns or even life time) If ruler dies before then elections can happen different time. For news there could be settings or choice that it would only show your local news, or news from realms you have met or show all.
Rulers are pretty much like governor but they giver bonuses for whole realm. What ruler/governor/commander actually benefits it depends on his/her/its perks. Scientific gives research bonus if leader is working as ruler or governor. Diplomatic only gives diplomacy bonus if it is on ruler and so on. For the moment only way differentiate leaders are their names. It would be nice to have different leader pictures but since I am working without budget it is very difficult to obtain multiple faces for multiple alien races. Reason why dead ones stay on the list I am planning to make somekind family tree or similar at somepoint, but not sure if that's a good idea.
Hey, that marking route for normal movement is great idea. I could try to implement that on next version.
Hmm, that sounds really bad. Did Alt+tab or similar work either? I have tried game with FullHD resolution and with that it should work. Almost full screen you should be able to get first resize it big as possible and then change to borderless mode. Borderless mode requires restart to be working. What kind of graphical glitches you experienced?
Yes, true building advanced factory/mine/lab and so one could replace basic factory/mine/lab automatically. This is a good suggestion.
Yes, there are quite many clicking in combat, but it matters in which order those weapons are used, if ship has multiple different types of weapons. Do you mean that weapons could cycled for example mouse wheel or with keys?
Pages