The Praedian Records

J.G. Phoenix

M.A.S.S. Builder: WIP 0.11.0 New Energy Shooter PRISM

That’s kind of weird but it reminds me of that chain lightning mechanic you sometimes see in games. Basically an AoE with more steps.

Prism has a secondary firing acquired by holding down right click for around a second. It deals no damage at all, but attaches a prism onto every lockable points within an area. This means every enemy that can be locked by homing missiles are susceptible attachment points of this secondary fire. What does it do? Well… let’s have this next clip explain it as it’s worth more than a thousand words.

VD

It sounds a tad complex at first but it’s probably just like alternating between firing modes to set this effect off. Use secondary fire as a lockon mechanism, then the primary to blow everyone up at once. Pretty nice, actually. Looking forward to trying it out myself.

Especially on these guys.

Yamato Progress

Oh my goodness … well, things may have slowed down exponentially compared to the first 24 hours of working on this thing, but that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been major progress.

Check this out.

The exterior is nearly finished (minus coloring)
The catapults work

There are a ton of other things I need to go into more detail about soon, but the gist of it is, we’ve gone from 30% completion to roughly 60%. The interior is going to have all the rooms from the show that I can remember and replicate minus that giant piston chamber just in front of the wave motion gun; I’ll need that space for working components like gravity drives. Once I finish the carousels and place the initial maneuvering blocks, I’ll know exactly how much space I need as well as how much I have to design the interior. That’s when things will get really interesting.

Until then, cheers.

M.A.S.S. Builder: 0.11.0 Energy Single Charged Shot

That shot’s pretty slow, but the blast radius looks good. At that size, it shouldn’t need to be too accurate to deal splash damage to a boss’s weak points. As for crowd control … oh yeah, that’s going to be fun.

I’m also glad we’ll be able to tweak the colors through elemental effects.

Overall, the shooter updates are looking great. Hopefully once my schedule becomes less crap I can get back to covering this and other games the way I want to. Anyway, that’s all for now.

M.A.S.S. Builder: WIP 0.11.0 Single Fire Charged Shot

VD addressed that one issue that bugs me in some games that have charged shot mechanics. A charged shot is supposed to do more damage that you can inflict in the same time frame with regular shots, but the different isn’t always enough to encourage you to do that. Sometimes it just ‘feels’ like the enemy will die faster if you just pepper them to death, even if the hard numbers say otherwise.

Come to think of it, the Megaman X games handled it reasonably well. I always felt like a charged shot was the better option in most situations. That wasn’t just because of the damage, though; you had to run around and jump all over things to avoid getting hit, and it’s easier to just charge up while doing that and then blow up the enemy once there’s an opening.

Anyway, this is nothing but good news and I’m looking forward to it.

It’s not a railgun, but ….

Space Engineers: Space Battleship Yamato

Uh … yeah, I’m not sure why I started making this yesterday. I’ll do ‘inspired’ builds, but I never attempt actual replicas.

For some perspective, this is sixteen hours of work crammed into about a day and a half. It took me a year to get the Admiral Hipper slapped into shape.

I started with just a conveyor tube and a turret and now barely a day and a half later, I’ve got a nearly finished main grid hull. We’re just missing some details on the ventral side, some hull retouching to better match the 2199 version of the Yamato, and the top of the command tower (sensor suite, Captain’s cabin, etc).

Unfortunately, to meet my own standards, a ship like this is going to need a lot of subgrids to look right. They’re hard to see with full ship shots, but there are plenty of little cutouts and inset areas where I’m planning to attach some of the more angular or small grid components.

It really scares me how quickly I can build things when I’ve got reference images to work with. I went from almost nothing to one of the largest practical ships I’ve ever built, and I was severely sleep deprived for half of the actual work. Maybe I should do more of these. It’d certainly bring more attention to my workshop page … not to mention P.R.

Humble beginnings

It’s still going to take weeks to completely finish the build since it’s going to have a fleshed out interior, full crew accommodations, and some programs for basic operation … not to mention my experimental 5.0 hangar carousel which I’m designing specifically for the Yamato. All of that’s going to take a while to figure out and implement. It’s big news though, so I’ll keep the blog updated on my progress.

In other news, Z23 is nearly finished and is likely to be the next workshop upload!

I think I might have insomnia. Send help.