| Note to self, never mention any expansion pack details until we're ready to release the whole announcement since people will read in all kinds of things. |
that's about where i stopped reading. you're funny, brad, and right of course.
when i voted in the poll, i voted for the thalans because i assumed two races would be gone from the game entirely. i don't think you implied it, but rather people don't think outside boxes unless their prompted to, which is really only thinking into a different box. anyway, in hindsight i'd change my vote. i was thinking the thalans and korx would be "removed" (rather than killed in a story) because they lack personality (even though, the iKorx bit in the cultural victory movie is GREAT! i love your sense of humor in this game).
however, now i feel the dead races will be based on dramatic value. altarians for sure. you can kill off their empire without killing off the race, vis-a-vis a "reunion" with their long lost bretheren. after that, i'd be at a bit of a loss to guess who'd go. i could see it being the drengin, simply because of the dramatic potential of a foe stronger than the drengin. but they're too enjoyably hate-able to kill off. so i'm going with the yor.
at any rate, does this mean we'll see sandbox games with up to 12 players? i want more players!
well, actually i want more trade revenue, but that's beside the point. i'm also making inferences based on something in the 1.2b update log, about improving performance to gear up for really big galaxies...
as far as the expansion goes, i remember you saying there would also be a huge re-vamp of espionage. i hope you also can re-vamp the diplomacy. a lot of people would really enjoy more options, including the ability to make threats and demands. i just dropped a post somewhere about how it'd be nice to be able to specify a duration of certain loans, such as trade goods. i know you, collectively as a group, do catch most of our feedback and wishes.
i was thinking about the art the other day. i have some (more) ideas to improve it. maybe they're too much for GC2, though, but i think they're at least good ideas for art in GC3.
add a color base for windows. i find myself picking many of my jewelry pieces based on the color of the base hull's windows (on most of the jewelry, they're yellow in the drengin model or bluish white in the terran or just white in the other models).
you'd really knock my socks off if you could do this. add sliders for effects in addition to just color: for hull colors, add a dull/shiny slider that wil cause the hulls to reflect other ships, stars and nebulae; for engine and my suggested window colors, add a luminosity slider that renders visual halos.
now that would be full use of shader model 3.0. okay, maybe beyond it, but only if you were trying to render 10,000 ships. it's the battles i really want looking good.
i had an idea the other night for a couple ideas you might consider to streamline the memory and processing requirements needed to render ships, but i don't know how workable it is because i don't know how dependant on hardpoints your ship rendering is.
if you had a protocol for final ship design that allowed players to remove invisible components, it could cut down a bit. i know i can spend a lot of time building very elaborate large and huge ships, and i often use small structural pieces to get everything in just the right place. i never see these pieces.
instead of calculating the position and appearance of every piece connected to each other, might it save some space if a player could remove those invisible pieces before finalizing a ship design, and have the game rander the used pieces relative to the center of the base hull rather than a series of hard points?
you could even take it a step further, by having the game comapct a final design into a single, unique 3D frame and texture. if it could intelligently remove any wire framing and texture that would otherwise be rendered in the visual negative before finalizing a ship design, wouldn't that cut down considerably on system use?
only downside to that would be that upgrading designs later would be impossible. but i've suggested a "prototype" idea in the past, where a hull design can be saved completely free of tech requirements (except for the necessary hull sizes) to be upgraded later. actually, that's my biggest hesitation in creating a new ship design on the spot in a game. if i really like it, being able to use it again in another game is based on having all the same tech that went into the ship. actually done this all ready to a large extent: rewrote raceconfig.xml, gave myself all the component techs and nothing else, and spent a night designing and naming empty but pretty ship bases.
anyway, i know your neurons are all ready firing over there, and you're producing a fantastic product. thinking back to 1.0, the amount of progress you've made in so short a time is quite honestly staggering.
