Alright here she is, in all her incredibly iterative glory, the Kaisers’ Admiral Hipper.
Hipper being filmed from a Messer E
I’ve been working on this ship for about a year now. She’s seen two complete rebuilds (from scratch) and over thirty overhauls (and I have the blueprints to prove it). This is one of several poster ships for my Kaiser faction, a group I’ll expound on more as more of their ships and small craft hit the workshop.
The Hipper herself is a ‘moderately’ armed cruiser with a large amount of internal space for small craft. Although I wouldn’t recommend fully loading the ship due to subgrid jitter and potential lag, she can carry 12(+2) compatible small grids at a time. 2 can be docked on the flight deck, 2 more on the aft connectors, and 8 on the newly updated carousel (version 4.0). In addition, the maintenance connector is as good as any other connector for docking. Add in the ventral connector for linking up with other, larger ships, and you have fourteen docking options before mag plates even have to be considered.
As for the ship’s regular weapons, the Hipper has a balanced spread of energy weapons and ordnance. She has a wave motion gun, 4 triple barrel 330mm positron batteries, 4 torpedo launchers, 16 SAM launchers, and a large mix of obvious and hidden pulse lasers for point defense.
Since she uses a wave motion generator (type 1400), her shields are extremely reliable against normal weapons. For example, Hipper can just barely break through her own shields with the wave motion gun, dealing virtually no damage in a doppelganger firing test. In theory, shield shunting could completely absorb the attack, including any preceding turret salvos.
Almost the entirety of the external hull is heavy armor to help a little against shield piercing weapons. Overall, the Hipper is best suited to skirmishes against a small number of large grids. Fast small grids can be a little dangerous at point blank range if shield passage is on, but at longer ranges aren’t a threat; they’re best left to the Hipper’s own fighters or escorts.
Admiral Hipper just prior to the war with the Repatriates
The first and most well known of her class, Admiral Hipper was constructed as part of a plan to reduce the risks posed to the Kaiser fleet’s battleships and fleet carriers, allowing them to operate closer to the heart of Kaiser space. The Hipper and her sisterships just barely fall into the Kaisers’ own specifications for heavy cruisers; nearly every other faction has labeled them as either battlecruisers or (upon seeing nearly a dozen messers leap out of the hull) light carriers. This tends to lead to a disproportionate response whenever these cruisers are sighted.
All Kaiser capital ships are primarily controlled through integrated artificial intelligence systems, massively reducing the ship’s required crew compliment from hundreds to only a few dozen. The Hipper in particular benefited from this system, allowing her to perform extreme duration operations.
Hipper during weapon trials in atmosphere
The Admiral Hipper was also the first Kaiser vessel to receive a carousel style hangar system adopted from Kusanagi Industries models. It is this carousel which allows the Hipper to safely house numerous compatible craft internally. While the system itself is delicate, carousels allow The Hipper to both carry and manage far more support craft than her external dimensions would suggest.
The Admiral Hipper launched with Commander Paul Wilk in the captain’s chair and lead numerous supportive missions for the Kaisers. Most of these missions included long range patrols, convoy escort, anti-shipping raids, and independent investigations.
The Hipper’s most famous action prior to the outbreak of hostilities with the Repatriate Navy was making initial contact with an unknown vessel, and the subsequent operation. The Hipper was initially attacked and forced to regroup with heavy cruiser Hessen, light cruiser Magdeburg, six Type 34 destroyers, and a prototype Type 36 destroyer. The fleet’s counterattack failed to damage the unknown vessel, and the Hessen’s artificial intelligence succumbed to a cyber attack that led to the loss of two of the Type 34s, the prototype destroyer, and severe damage to the Magdeburg. The unknown vessel escaped via jump drive and Commander Wilk was forced to destroy the Hessen with all hands in order to save the Magdeburg and the remaining destroyers.
Check the Bridge Auxiliary seat’s custom data for the remote control (Hipper AI)’s hotbars setup.
The Hipper’s been tested at low altitude on Pertam (1.2G) and can float just fine, but she hasn’t been tested with a fully load of cargo and fighters, so bear that in mind.
Things have been pretty slow for December. Not only has M.A.S.S. Builder news more or less stopped completely since the 0.9.0 update, but I also haven’t been able to make any headway on things. That’s going to change with the schedule shift in my work; I’ll have three days off going forward. Until now I’ve been needing about a day and a half to physically recover, so any extra time is going toward my projects and studies.
To be frank, I don’t think 2023 is going to be a good year internationally, but regardless of things going on in the world, I’ve got to press forward, or I won’t have anything to pass onto the next generation. With that, a quick update on some things.
Admiral Hipper
I wanted this finished by my birthday, but I can’t work on it right now, so I’ll finish things up tomorrow and, for better or worse, upload the current iteration to the Steam Workshop, along with a link to an article I’m working on here. That’ll be the end of that I guess. Then it’s onto some very important related projects.
Written Projects
My December goals are rolling right over into January with no real changes. My hands and feet are hurting pretty much all the time now and I need to find the right balance of sleep and medication to make it easier to focus. I’m also learning a lot of things, so that has my mind split ten different ways during much of the week. It’s not easy, but I’ll get this all done or go up in glorious flames trying.
Closing Out the Year
I don’t have enough alcohol on hand to do things proper, but Happy New Year anyway!
M.A.S.S. Builder – What’s Next 0.10.0 – Steam News
Hello everyone, welcome back to another "What’s Next" post of the year, albeit only the second one as we’ve only made two major updates this year. Again, we’d like to add a disclaimer that this post won’t go into details of what we’ll be doing for the next coming update, update 0.10.0 …
The first major bit of news is that the multiplayer test apparently went so poorly that plans for PvP are being shelved for the time being. There’s just too much to fix with multiplayer in general right now. I don’t think anyone who’s been following the weekly updates on Steam is all that surprised.
Here’s some good news from VD though.
What we can say right now is: 1. The first and foremost priority is to further develop multiplayer mode, mainly on matchmaking features (we’re still in consideration whether to only matchmake people with a ping threshold of under a number). 2. A reconnection feature must and will be added into the game as it is a core feature for multiplayer that we didn’t have enough time to complete in alpha phase. 3. More information of players in the lobby, more QoL issues in the feature.
Story missions are also getting worked on alongside the multiplayer updates, which is great. I don’t know if they’ll add more after the planned 26 are all done, but they probably will. It’s not like the story feels like it’s wrapping up per se.
The gist of this one is that multiplayer PvP has to wait until the more critical bugs are fixed and everything else is going to get as much attention as it can get. Works for me.
I’m a day late on this one but I kind of just crashed yesterday right after work. I’m thinking of flipping my sleep schedule around to accommodate that post-work fatigue I’m always getting. It would also help me get more writing done. I don’t know why, but I’m much, much more effective, energetic, and creative in the AM hours.
Another thing I want to address (for posterity) is the lack of daily posts. I’m not working from home anymore, at least not for money, so my schedule’s been condensed. My adjustment period has been pretty rough, too, but I’m at the tail end of it. All that to say I’ll be working my way back into my daily posting routine, probably starting next week. That’s assuming I can get my sleep schedule just the way I want it so I’m up from at least 10PM to 4 or 5PM. The more morning hours I can claw back for myself, the better things will be.
Anyway, time for some updates.
The Site
I’ve been poking around with the mobile view for PR, since that’s never looked good and I’m getting sick and tired of it. Testing isn’t easy since I have to use my actual phone and updates don’t propagate quite in real time, at least not consistently. Relying on Divi’s previews isn’t consistent either, so changes that look good from my PC (in mobile viewing mode) look hilariously bad on my phone and vice versa. I’ll figure this crap out, but I’m not even going to pretend this isn’t a frustrating process.
This is one of the big reasons I don’t actively draw traffic to the blog. An audience deserves your best and as far as presentation goes, I’m just not there yet. I’m not going to heap all the blame on Divi; I could probably fix most of this in a few sessions if I focused solely on that, but I haven’t.
That’s something I’m aiming to fix this month.
Space Engineers
For the time being I’m putting pretty much all of the Kaiser projects on hold, including the entire Admiral Hipper class, the Magdeburg, and anything else related to them. The goal is to wait for three specific releases for Space Engineers and then incorporate them. The first is Grid AI, from Keen, Space Engineer’s dev team, the second is Cheerkin’s general use Autopillock script (the newer one), and the third is Ribera’s SBY thruster mod. I need to see how each of these can be incorporated before I’ll be ready to release them.
I am considering some WIP releases just to get some traction on the workshop, but all three of these are releasing relatively soon, so it probably won’t be more than a couple of months before I’m fully back to work on the Kaiser faction ships. I doubt I’ll have another small grid ready for the workshop unless it’s the Cosmo Messer F2 or maybe the EQ Drone Messer, and the latter would really benefit from the Autopillock script and Grid AI anyway.
Writing
I’m breaking this into multiple sections and addressing the current writing projects in each one.
Lydia’s Golden Treasury
The purpose of this new Chapter 2 was to expound on Enya’s backstory before her regrets started cropping up in Chapter 3, but as the B plot, it wasn’t designed to completely carry the chapter on its own. I wanted a conflict to run alongside Enya’s past coming up and to prompt the use of the titular item, the Lyre of Binding. For that I initially had a medical emergency in mind, but I’ve been rethinking things.
Originally Lydia’s Golden Treasury was going to have a male lead. I changed it to a female lead to completely eliminate a small issue coming up that would get in the way of the story right around Chapter 4 or so. Making the lead female also let me have a little fun with the rest of the cast. That’s something I’ll explain someday, but for now I just want to say that I’d like to include that original male character even if it’s just for this one chapter, essentially as the driver of the A plot.
So the medical emergency plot I had in mind is getting shelved. Maybe I can use it somewhere else in the future, but the Lyre of Binding is now going to focus solely on these two characters.
Artorius
There are a couple of battles in the middle of the story I have to figure out technologically, given how the Aeon setting is with space battles. In a nutshell, it’s very similar to real life. In some circumstances, it’s actually stupidly easy to take out a large warship in one go. In others, it’s next to impossible.
Since Artorius is going to be one of if not the first Aeon stories to feature space battles, I desperately need to get these depictions right. That said, with the rest of the outline done, I just need to start cranking out the story scene by scene. It’s on the horizon.
Remnants of the Elders
There’s less development here on the story I’m trying to write, but like the rest of the things I’ve got ‘queued up’ I am going to be doing at least some work on RotE in December. I want to round out the year by putting down at least a few pages for all of my current writing projects, not just one or two. Everything I want to have released by the end of next year is getting some due attention here and now, and RotE is included in that.
Frame Ops and Riaz Royals
Frame Ops and Riaz Royals have a slight overlap in cast and chronology, but FO is more self contained, while RR affects the Aeon setting as a whole, so while I’m lumping them in together, RR is quickly becoming the higher priority. The first chapter, A Fond Farewell, is about 80% finished. Frame Ops is coming along a lot slower, but I think the further I get into RR, the easier writing FO will be.
We’ll see. At the end of the day, Riaz Royals is about some very important clones making their way in the Jovian Sphere, and Frame Ops is about a team of professional e-sports players rising to prominence.
Fleeing Victory
I’m not adding any new chapters yet. I’m actually going through everything that’s been written so far and doing so major editing to try to clean up the story, trim down some of the more verbose areas, and update the narrative style so it’s more consistent throughout. There might be a few changes thrown in to make the story ‘better’ but in general I’m just cleaning things up and tying things together more closely.
Closing
That’s everything for now. I doubt anything substantial is getting finished this month, but I’ll keep chipping away. ‘Write and rewrite … until it is done.’ If I can reclaim my mornings, things will go a lot more quickly, so that’s priority #2, after survival.
Hello everyone, this is Vermillion Digital team, once again having our postmortem or, in our words, the Afterwords of major updates.
VD’s no happier with the multiplayer release than the rest of us, but I personally don’t think it’s that big of a deal. This was their first attempt and it actually works. PvP’s going to be an absolute nightmare to get right, but at least the basic concept works.
I got around to trying out the multiplayer coop the other day and though the boss had way too much health (that and we didn’t have enough players for a 4vE) it was still alright. This is just the beginning, so I expected bugs and iffy balance, and I got bugs and iffy balance. My biggest complaint is that the M.A.S.S. units themselves are easy to miss at a distance. Sometimes it felt like I was fighting alone and I’d really have to lean back and take in the whole arena to find my teammates. They should be marked on the HUD for convenience.
Anyway, I think it’s better if I just quote VD from here. All of this is in the linked article.
Now! Let’s us use this time to explain how and why it took… almost 10 months to work on 0.9.0. We might have mentioned this before but as 0.9.0 was the update we worked on Multiplayer; the development process was us basically rewriting 50% of the whole game. Before this time, M.A.S.S. Builder was an “offline only game” where every part, every piece of information was calculated and stored within a player’s own PC. They could take that save anywhere, played it offline, and modify things however they like. We still wanted players to be able to do that, but now there’s a catch where multiplayers must not be affected by anyone’s modification of the game.
This made us scoured through every line of code in the game to see if it can be used maliciously. Doing so, we’ve discovered a lot of work that can be optimized, works that our past inexperienced selves have found to be worthy before looks to be something that hinders optimization nowadays, and we just cannot allow ourselves to overlook them. Thus began the optimization. The first few months after we started working on 0.9.0 are all about rewriting codes, optimizing them, merging some parts together, and planning we would structure multiplayer codes alongside every part of the game we did in the past.
But hey! Doing so allowed us to perform a much-needed upgrade to the game. Optimizations we never thought we could do, new systems in place such as the boosting curve, new features and functions that were created to further support tech nodes creation, and much more to come (just like that combo attack curve that faced a last-minute cut, we’ll finish it in the near future we promise).
Now, towards the main feature of 0.9.0 itself, multiplayer. We first wanted to just release a non-playable showroom with no endpoint in playing just for players to show off their units. However, with the rewriting of codes taking that long and speculated to take many more months, we discussed among ourselves if it would be worth the wait to just have a mode like that, and decided it was not. We assigned one of our six to start working on more aspects towards multiplayer immediately, and the best solution was to create a co-op mission that we might use to fully test out our features.
Well, the results are as expected, a buggy mess that took months to finish, an unoptimized mode of play, but at least, a playable multiplayer in the most basic sense. The problems stemmed from using P2P networking, but as we deemed this is the best method for us as an indie developer, it required much more countermeasures in place to make it a good system. Currently, players are mostly being kicked out of a session left and right, mostly because we did not have any locks or thresholds on pings, thus players from regions across the world can still connect to each other with extremely high ping, resulting in the network being faulty enough to disconnect players from each other, kicking people into the lobby itself. Looking at every bug, every complaint, every suggestion, and every discussion made by you, we know this is a long road to walk towards and that it cannot be done within a few weeks to fix for sure, so we’ll leave 0.9.1. in the state it is. We’re sorry how our anticipated update turned out to be, but we’ll strive to make it better by the next major update. There will be systems to better match players into each other, there’ll be more features in the multiplayer system, there will be many things coming to our game.
On one final note, we know that game balance is something that’s controversial in a game like this where we wanted to have a fun game where anyone could just take any build to play in any mission. We still stand by that mission of ours and will be turning easy and normal mode difficulty into some sort of a story mode where it’s almost impossible to fail. We’ll keep hard and very hard where it’s at that players making a mistake can cost a life immediately. Basically, easy and normal will be easier, hard and very hard must achieve what they set out to be, an aspiring content where one can aim for. Everyone must be able to have fun in some kind of way. That’s what our game will be.
Next week, we’ll talk about what’s coming next in 0.10.0. Please have fun with what 0.9.1 can provide for now and as always, feel free to send in your suggestions and discuss the game with us through the official discord channel.
