M.A.S.S. Builder – WIP: Multiplayer Party Features Preview – Steam News
Hello everyone, today’s WIP will be something different as we’re still working to polish and optimize Multiplayer modes to be presentable. Today, we’ll be talking about a complimentary function of Multiplayer works, namely the party feature.
I hesitate to call a party feature ‘complimentary’ these days. It’s closer to a QoL master stroke than just a neat little feature. One really inconvenient thing in a lot of multiplayer games is not being able to group up before heading into a pre-game lobby. A lot of games nowadays just ignore this and they’re a lot worse off for it. Just knowing that M.A.S.S. Builder is going to have something like this makes me want to buy it for some of my friends.
The Admiral Hipper’s exterior is almost done. Normally when I get this far I get a strong urge to start chipping away at a sister ship. That’s when my understanding of the external layout is at its strongest so I make smaller messes changing things around. Unfortunately I can’t do that because the Hipper’s internals aren’t even close to finished. If I just copied the ship as is and tried to make any of the sister ships on the side, I’d wind up having to make an interior twice.
On a ship this size?
(The current main gun turrets are just place holders)
No thank you. Whether they turn out the same or one winds up being better, that’s way too inefficient. I’m just going to have to finish the Hipper first or get fairly close.
As a side note, there are some specific ships I want to build before any of the others, including the Prinz Eugen, Scharnhorst, and Belfast. I’ve got some SE lore coming together that might help me scratch that writing itch while I sort out LGT, Artorius, and Remnants.
One other thing to mention is that I did try to build some rotor turrets for the ship yesterday. It didn’t go well. While the SBY weapons mod is fantastic, the fixed versions of the shock cannons are extremely heavy, way too much for unmodded rotors to handle. Just placing them nearly destroyed the turret frame. This is a problem I’m going to have to put off a bit longer, maybe until late August when the next phase of weapons comes out. I wanted the Kaiser faction to be using red colored energy weapons wherever possible anyway, so maybe that will help. Otherwise I’ll have to ask the mod creator if they’d be willing to look into the problem.
★★★★ Unicorn Gundam LV1 (General Unit, Ground/Space Use, Cost: 700)
Mobile Suit Features:
General Unit with Cost of 700.
One of three RX-0 models built by Anaheim Electronics on commission from the EFF.
Since it has hidden aspect as hunting machine for anti-Newtype, starting with special NT-D system, it is installed with various systems.
Equipped with Beam Magnum, which is an enhanced offensive weapon carried by MS, a Live-Ammo Bazooka, shield with I-Field function, and other armaments that are high effective both in offense and defense. It is an Ultra-High performance Unit that can demonstrate its best performance under any circumstances.
Furthermore, due to being Psyco-Frame Unit, it demonstrates an amazing combat power when NT-D is activated, while it has burden on both the Unit and the pilot, having the risk. that Unit’s HP will continue to gradually decrease. However, if certain conditions are met, Awakened Mode can overcome this disadvantage.
Can be deployed both on Ground and in Space.
These 700s are no joke, but with this, we’ve reached the titular MS in the Gundam Unicorn lineup. I’m still waiting on the other ReZEL variants, but the Unicorn is pretty fun from what I’ve seen.
This is a new format I’m trying out; I figure these occasional GBO2 entries would be more interesting if there was more info coming directly from the official website. Anyway, I might get lucky and pick the suit up. There’ll be a follow up to this sometime in the week if I manage.
I miss my early morning creative bursts. It’s much harder to chip away at things when you don’t sleep well enough to be up and alert at those hours. Anyway, today was more of a contemplation day; I’m–
[INTERMISSION: It’s Raining]
I’m a little wet now but rainy weather gives me tons of energy and some much needed focus. So today was more of a contemplation day. I haven’t been making any progress on my stories and I’ve been trying to work around that by brushing up on my digital art skills (I mentioned this before but making character and setting art does help me with writing). Getting back into doing my own art comes with its own hurdles though, and that’s slowing me down even more. So I spent a good chunk of the day trying to figure out how to get things done more quickly.
I know I’ll finish everything I’m working on eventually, but that’s not good enough. I’ve got at least one more website to build that I’m still brainstorming, two separate programming languages I’m trying to learn, I’ve got video editing practice to sort out (I’d like to make at least some income from this in the future), the digital art, all the writing projects, and then the hobbies like the monthly book reads, WoWs clan battles, and whatever my main games happen to be (usually just Space Engineers).
I’m trying various approaches, or rather have been for a while now. That’s what the monthly goals thing I was doing going into 2022 was about, but what’s really getting in my way is not having a real sleep schedule. If I don’t get a handle on that, all the little work hacks in the world aren’t going to help.
I can’t stand not writing anything at all at least once a week, so sometime this week I’m going to cram something into the works. I don’t care what it is. It could be one of the current projects or something completely new or irrelevant. It doesn’t matter but it has to happen or I’m going to lose it.
Remodeling this ship using the same hull I had before is a real challenge, but mainly in the aft sections.
New Flight Deck
Originally the Hipper was going to only carry about 4 fighters, then my Space Battleship Yamato style carousel hangar upped that number to 8. Then, not being satisfied being able to carry 8 fighters but not have connectors for any of them to use, I added 2 external docks, technically bringing the ship’s carrying capacity to 10. She’s not quite a light carrier, nor was she meant to be, but meine güte this massive cruiser is getting extremely close to one.
Flight Deck Doors Open
Flight Deck Doors Closed
There are two adjacent connectors per side; the Cosmo Messer F models and onward have the connectors closer to the center of the fuselage. The Hipper’s flight deck is supposed to accommodate all 109s, so … redundant connectors.
Now that I’ve added a flight deck for fighters to wait on standby, or to just refuel like the stern docks, that ups the total capacity to 12. Sort of. 4 can be docked with the ship directly while 8 can magnetically attach to the docks in the carousel section, but there’s also a maintenance area a couple of decks below the flight deck, which I plan to add some welders to for fixing or building Cosmo Messers. With or without a connector in that maintenance section, there’s actually enough room for 13 fighters.
Maintenance Area Access
This is a stupid game I’m playing called ‘Preserve the carousel at all costs.’
It’s getting crowded, but the more fighters the Hipper class can carry, the more independently they can operate as a whole, which is nice. For comparison, the Edinburgh class–at least the lead ship–carries much smaller fighters, but still only has room for 4 of them.
Depending on how you view magnetic connectors, there really isn’t a hard limit on what kinds of small ships or how many of them can be ‘carried’ as long as there’s surface area and thruster power for it, but I only count magnetic plate docking for internal docking, or at least ‘common sense’ docking. You shouldn’t have fighters clamped down just anywhere as a standard practice, even if it’s not obstructing anything.
Pesky Main Guns
Another problem I’m having is designing the main guns. They’re going to be twin barrels for a total of 8 guns in 4 turrets, pretty much what you’d expect in a space version of a WWII German Heavy Cruiser. Weaponcore doesn’t play nice with custom turret controllers, though. Occasionally I get them to work, but the only designs that consistently work are those that have only a single elevator hinge/rotor. That’s really difficult to design a multi-barrel turret around and it’s annoying enough that I’ve been putting off committing to a design for almost a month now.
As tempting as it is to just use one of the ‘prefab’ turrets, I don’t want the Hippers using triple barrel turrets. I’ll figure it out eventually but for now it’s one of those minor headaches I’m trying to let my brain tackle in the background.
Closing
The only areas I’m working on currently are the exterior and any areas relating to the fighters, so the ship’s still mostly an empty shell. The plan is to get far enough along with the small craft areas to know how they’ll have to connect to the rest of the ship. From there I can figure out the new floorplan and how the conveyor and vent systems will need to work. After that it’s just filling everything back in. I’m going to make more of the bow section directly accessible for the crew this time around since the previous version had a lot of wasted space.
