UNION Spaceship Command

Terran Stellar Navy Forums (OOC) The Mess Hall UNION Spaceship Command

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  • #1069
    Fish Evans
    Moderator

    UNION Spaceship Command

    A friend of mine just linked me this game now on Steam Greenlight, its still a way away from even Alpha play testing but its seems to be Artemis but new and beeing actively developed πŸ™‚ Still early days but it may be a Viable Alternative to Artemis if development remains … what … it …. is … cluernty… like…

    If you use steam, have a look and think about Greenlighting

    #1072
    Solari
    Participant

    Interesting.
    If this delivers on all of its promises, I’d be up for it. Especially if

    Damn, crashed.

    Especially if Artemis doesn’t get any further ‘active’ development. Mod support is always a bonus, and all of you programmers could be spoilt for choice with TSN-made and/or approved creations. Love the fact that you can put an AI in an open position. (It sucks having to take a position you don’t like, or no one is around to do and hoping you have enough players.)

    But I do wonder what the hardware requirements for this will be. It’s a different beast then Artemis. Also, maps. Need to see if this has the whole package to make sectors and warp/jumps, starbases in certain places, etc, and not just a one dynamic mission type of shooter I’m seeing in the demo screens. Also, more than 2 sides (factions)?
    One thing about the TSN is having a kind of persistence to a story/universe, err right?

    Green-lighting for sure. Back to A

    *^#@&#%* crashed again.

    #1073
    Zephyr
    Participant

    If it doesn’t have good DMX support πŸ™ That’s one of the best bits at a LAN party turning the room into the bridge no amount of fancy graphics can replace lighting up half the street when you get blown up πŸ˜€

    #1075
    Fulvus
    Participant

    Thumb uped!
    You can’t trust AI’s. An empty seat should be considered as the result of a casualty taken, waiting for reinforcements to arrive. Hardcore roleplay! πŸ˜‰

    #1078
    Faerdan
    Participant

    Hi all,

    I’m Mark, lead developer of UNION.

    I hope you don’t mind me dropping in, Fish told me about your community and I am very excited to talk to you guys.

    UNION is being created by myself and two friends (PΓ‘draig, our writer and mission designer, and Dave, who works with me on systems and AI). We’re big table top RPers (D&D, GURPS and all kinds of strange and any number of homegrown games) and we really love the concept of Artemis. As much as we respect all that Thom has pioneered with Artemis, and it is a fine achievement, we found that it lacked depth and variety. Still, the concept stuck with me, and later I started prototyping the kind of systems I would want in a bridge sim. That led to UNION.

    The way we see it there is nobody out there more qualified to advise us on gameplay and features than core Artemis players like yourselves. And so we would love to hear your thoughts on what you’d like to see in UNION.

    DMX support is definitely on our wish list. We will be consulting the community at a later stage on how best to proceed with it.

    Thanks!

    Mark

    #1079
    Faerdan
    Participant

    I forgot to respond to your post Solari.

    We are building UNION in a very modular way. Our campaign missions will have two factions, UNION and Alpha Centauri, but you will be able to tweak them or create your own with as many factions as you want (including ships, structures, and weapons). All of the tools and methods that we use to create UNION’s included campaign will be included with the game at launch.

    We also want to give you as many options as possible when hosting a server, so you will be able to do things like disable AI crew members.

    We have played UNION on an older Intel i5 laptop with 4GB ram and a HD4000 integrated GPU. It ran at above 30 FPS on medium settings, and we will do more optimisation before release.

    I’m not certain what you mean in terms of the map, so I will describe how it is right now and maybe you can give me feedback on that?

    Right now you load a map at the start of the session. The maximum map size is quite large, I did some quick testing there and it would take around 28 minutes to cross the whole map at cruise speed (our version of warp). The map is created by hand, at the moment we have no plans to procedurally generate them (though we have thought about it).

    I have considered supporting larger maps, but there is a good deal of work in that.

    I would love to hear your feedback and ideas.

    Thanks,

    Mark

    #1080
    Solari
    Participant

    Wow Flash, getting someone’s attention eh.

    Ta for the reply here Mark. Oh the maps. Sorry, not very clear of me.
    I mean the basic sector maps we get on Artemis that allows for our missions.
    Artemis overview map

    Kind of like that. The usual grid patterns where a mod could place all the extras (ships, starbases, etc) on certain points on a map. It allows for a GM (Game Master) to basically help control the flow of the game, or add/remove things on the fly.

    #1081
    Faerdan
    Participant

    Ah yes, we plan to have a GM mode. It may be post launch before it arrives, depending on how things pan out.

    Our general plan is, if UNION is successful, to continue supporting it for a good long time, with free updates (we don’t want different versions of the game, everyone should share the same functionality) and paid content DLC (new campaigns, ships, weapons etc.). Our campaigns will be very narrative driven. As I said we’re very RP driven, so I think you will like them.

    And it really is my pleasure, I love talking about UNION. πŸ™‚

    #1082
    Zephyr
    Participant

    By saying ‘older intel i5’ does that mean 5 year old high end laptop or newer? If you can make it work for some stations on older PC’s that would help LAN parties a lot πŸ™‚ When assembling a full bridge some of us have to ‘make do and mend’ πŸ™‚

    Zephyr

    #1083
    Faerdan
    Participant

    Hi Zephyr,

    i5 is the Intel processor type (there are three types, i3 = budget, i5 = standard, i7 = high end). That particular laptop we were testing on is a two year old office laptop, it was never meant for games. You definitely don’t need a high end machine to run UNION.

    Performance, especially on older machines, is a concern for us. We’ll do our best to make the game perform well on a wide range of computers.

    Thanks!

    Mark

    #1084
    Faerdan
    Participant

    UNION entered the top 50 games on Greenlight today, we’re currently at 45. We also have a 51% yes vote.

    We always thought we were making a niche game for a core group of gamers, the success of this campaign has been amazing.

    #1085
    Zephyr
    Participant

    Cool

    #1111
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    Hello Mark,

    I have to say I’m liking what I see so far. I have some concerns if you don’t mind.

    Science and Comms
    In Artemis Science and Comms are separate positions. In what way have you merged them so it does not become too much work.

    Also, in our group we follow the Star Trek model when it comes to command, a Captain and a First Officer, I was wondering if you might provide a station for the First Officer to have an official role, rather than an artificial one through roleplaying.

    Thanks,

    Zelreich

    #1126
    Xavier
    Keymaster

    So, will either of you be joining us to take part in our duty shift?

    #1129
    Faerdan
    Participant

    @Dante Zelreich: Sorry for the delay in getting back to you, it’s been a hectic week for me.

    One of our goals is to give each role an active experience. What I mean by that is each role should never (at at least as little as possible) be completely idle, with nothing to do.

    For that reason we decided to merge Science and Comms into one position. That allows us to really layer the gameplay experience so that they are active most of the time.

    I promise that we will balance this experience so that it is not overwhelming. I would really love to talk about all of the different functions of the Science/Comms position, but I do not have enough time right now. I will do a write up on it sometime soon.

    In regards to the First Officer, other than a title what is their practical role on the ship? I could add the ability to add custom “Command Roles” to a server, which have no attached gameplay but which can be taken by crew members (or assigned by Captains), just like any other role. So you could add “First Officer” as a Command Role and then it would be available as a role on all crews in that server. What do you think of that?

    I would really like to join you guys for a game of Artemis some time. I am not available this weekend though. Do you play every Saturday? I could book myself in for next weekend maybe?

    Thanks!

    Mark

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