Boss battles- the concept.

Mobile Bosses
Boss battles are a recurring theme that I have seen multiple times through out this forum. because the capability to attack super ship is the distance from the center of the graphic it poses a massive problem for modders . One solution for ‘mobile’ boss battles could be to scale up the physical image size, and by tote the size of the ship in meters, and offset it vertically so that the front of the ship is at the center of the actual image. it might look something like this in an image -


True i haven’t tested it, but in theory it should work. because its hard point are now also offset along the y-axis your ships should be able to get within firing range of the bosses ship, before they do the same. I used the imperial frigate due to shear laziness.

Station bosses
This was something i was particularly excited at coming up with, and massive stations as bosses haven’t really been seen as much as the mobile kind. Because ships with -100% engine speed, and no engines won’t turn the solution for these guys was actually simpler to come up with than the mobile ones. It would involve building a ship graphic that has just a stupidly massive initial size, well depending on how large you want it in the end anyways. It would involve building up a large graphic… And then cutting the station graphic into smaller even pieces. Okay time for an example
hmmm…
Don’t say that no one wants to make a ship of this size, remember the 1gb of awesomeness thread? need i say more?
Say you have a station that you want to be 8000 by 8000 meters long, the center would be 4000 meters. The only weapons i know with that range are modded weapons and those are pretty scarce. divide that in half. now you have 4 ship segments that stand at 4000 by 4000, with a center 2000m in. That’s better some vanilla weapons have that range, same with some modded. or it’s quite possible the soldering fumes are getting to me. Divide those in half again. now you have 8 ship segments each at 2000 by 2000, with a center of 1000, now we are getting some where. divide in half once more, and you have 16 individual segments sitting at 1000 by 1000, and now Most weapons can fire at the centroid at each at 500m. You could go further and have 36 segments at 500 by 500, and have the center of each 250 meters in. plus it would look cool to see ships that are destroyed dynamically one bridge segment at a time. One thing that i considered a theoretical issue of the, graphics wise at least would be that once a segment was destroyed it would leave a shear face on the neighboring ones, and look very VERY ugly. the solution would be overlapping each ship segment, by several pixels, and lining them up perfectly, and tearing the sides so no matter which segment ends up destroyed would look like it has surface damage, the only con to that is that you can’t add burn marks to those rough edges otherwise it would be really obvious that you are being clever. Another fun this about this idea is that you could have ‘overlay’ modules. With a base graphic and make things like bridges, or individual weapons their own ships that would be destroyed individually.

Right now I am working on a station boss, with an NPC race.
Any ideas
[size=50]at this point i don’t really care bout poor spelling or grammer XD[/size]

I like this idea. The big thing that occurs to me is that it could lend itself to one section being a “power core” - give it huge power production, and when it explodes, the shockwave will really rip up the adjacent sections, possibly blowing the hell out of the rest of the station entirely.

On the subject of shockwaves though, remember that even if an exploding section doesn’t damage its neighbors, it will still tend to push them out of alignment (as will any incoming enemy fire with sufficient damage). I have no idea how to solve this - except that as an NPC race, you can perhaps ensure that every module for this station has an insanely high weight (perhaps as high as 1000 per module?), which should make the hull very difficult to move in such a fashion.

As far as i am aware ships With no engines won’t repel each other, but a high weight value is an idea, maybe 10,000 ill make it behave like the brick it is XD

I’m exploring the concept with the traders. I haven’t got around to coding yet, but it should work. The scenario is capture, so it works differently from some of yours. The main hull is a terrain layer of large size with a parallax of 1.0. It moves with the camera at the same level as the ships, but is immobile. (Story-based justification involving powering up its turbocharged hyperdrive.) The hull then has a series of separate hulls, many custom designed for this purpose. Each of the 7 large turret hardpoints, along with the 11 passenger/cargo modules, have their advanced turret, series of normal weaponry, power, shields, armor, etc. The engines could also have their own unarmed sets as well. The way I’m doing the parts, they could have blank hull images, causing only the weaponry to be destroyed while leaving the hull intact, or it can be done the pretty way, with the engine, passenger and cargo sections breaking off. The smaller, yellow bridge acts as the ship’s combat command center (as it ended up very close to the center), with its size containing the whole ship and its shield doing so as well. For story purposes I will need to give it >10% of the total health, possibly having other attackable areas to justify this. It will be escorted, of course. Each turret zones will function independent of each other, allowing proper targeting regardless of location. I could also adjust health values so that the bridge takes the rest of the weaponry down with it, while preferably leaving most other ships intact.

one thing i though of is that if you have weapon bays that can be destroyed individually when you increase the difficulty of your scenario you can add new physical weapon bays, seemingly without increasing the actual number of ships involved.

Right. It’s not so much the engines that do the pushing I’m referring to as the modeled in-game force of shockwaves and weapon impacts. The easy way to see this: put together a near-empty hull with no engines, deploy it on a scenario, and watch the enemy fire push it all over the place. (I had this happen while trying to check some turret placements and found it both interesting and really annoying at the time.) But yes, if the overall ship weight is in the five or six digits for each segment, everything should bloody well stay where you put it.

(Another fun use of this effect is to mod a weapon that does a huge amount of damage and watch it stop enemy ships in their tracks. Really funny if you use a shield disruptor, since the damage still has the same effect even though it doesn’t actually hurt the ship directly.)

status update on this insanity, tried a federation station that had 5 x 5 ship segments, gave up and cursed my stupidity. Now i’m going to do an order station, and just make each segment it’s own ship separated from the others by gravity tethers.

If you are going simply by placement on the deployment screen, then yes, the positioning is going to be nearly if not completely impossible. The potential I see here is for scenarios (or challenges with a saved deployment), where you can fine-tune the ship positions in the text file. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be a huge amount of fiddly work, but I think the result would be worth it.

Player controlled boss battles weren’t what i had in mind, but i had been mulling over the possibility. mostly i would need to know by how much a ship moves on the deployment screen when you alter it’s position on the grid. if i could figure that out, and scale the pieces so they took up 1 4x4 grid space, with the center in the middle getting them to line up would be actually very easy. Just trial, and error i suppose :stuck_out_tongue: But yes the siege of transcendence prime is beginning…

something i had thought of is that when a scenario of this types success depends on tactically removing hard-points from the massive fortress, is that it could make the manual control allot more useful as well.

I have a visualization suggestion for hull placement. Create a blank image the same size as the battlefield. (1 pixel = 1m) Open all the hulls you plan to use as new layers, and scale the same way. (So for a 270m hull scale to 270x270) From there you can align as you wish. Use the layer locations from this image to create your new deployment. This way is simple and requires less trial and error.

That is a great idea Tek, I am going to have to use that. Progress on the Transcendence’s sprite-

When all is said and done it’s going to be 3-6 times larger than it is already.