M.A.S.S. Builder – WIP 0.11.0 Single Fire Charged Shot – Steam News
Last week we mentioned reworking some of our old weapons, right? Here’s the first of those reworks, single bullet shooters. They are now able to charge up for a few seconds to fire an empowered shot. Let’s talk about their concepts first. Railguns is a shooter we’ve been requested since the first pa…
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.
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!
Welcome to the first 0.11.0 WIP update! We’re starting where we left off in our "What’s Next" this week with the improvements towards controls and input mappings. Moving forward, players will now be able to map their inputs to two-buttons-press for controllers. That might not sound excitin…
This looks promising. I’ve actually played the game both with a gamepad and a keyboard and mouse, and to be honest, I’m still not sure which I prefer just yet. Once I start my new playthrough I’ll probably figure out once and for all which one works best for me. I tend to play my shootemups with my PS4 controller, though.
(Good Lord, I really need to go back and finish Code Fairy …)
It’s taking me way too long to finish up a particular blog post I’m working on so I’m going to post it in three or four parts. Later on I’ll compile them into a full article.
This has been a hot topic, and for obvious reasons. My take on it comes after testing a whole bunch of different LLMs, art generators, and voice synthesizers.
A quick note before we jump in. As part of the point I want to make, I enlisted a couple of the AIs I regularly use, GPT-4 and Claude to help outline this article. They also have something to add, but more on that later.
Rise of the Titan
It’s everywhere now and it feels like it happened literally overnight: ChatGPT and DALL-E, Claude, Midjourney, Chatsonic, NovelAI, Autogen, this that and the other thing. The scary part is that you can generate fully realized copy or artwork with these in an instant. The more reassuring part is that most AI is as bad at drawing consistently good hands as most humans, and just as likely to spit out your own questions phrased slightly differently than someone who’s only pretending to listen. Hmm, I wonder how that happened.
What we’re currently shorthanding as ‘AI’ is progressing so fast, it’s nearly impossible to stay on top of it all. Something revolutionary probably slipped right under the radar and we’re not going to realize just how important it was until farther down the road. Now, we’ve got a bunch of people panicking about the potential AI has to replace humans altogether. Or … you know, the classic blow us all to smithereens line of reasoning.
As someone who has to do other people’s jobs for them because they’re not meeting management’s expectations and therefore can’t do my own job, and consequently having to watch day after day as my own work piles multiple meters off the ground, I couldn’t care less if half my coworkers suddenly turned into bots running GPT-4V.
Phoenix ranting on Break
Anyway, I want to weigh in on the AI issue for the record and talk a little about it, the good, the bad, and the downright hilarious. When all’s said and done, I believe that the AIs we’re using today are powerful tools that will help those who are willing to embrace them achieve their goals much faster than they would have been able to otherwise. For others, impossible goals could now become possible, and some people who wouldn’t dare to dream of entering the creative world will now have the means to.
This is more of an introduction than anything. I’ll be really diving in from part 2 onward.
One of the most annoying things about fleshing out these World War II inspired factions is that there isn’t enough territory in the setting to go around. I mean we’ve got America, the UK, Germany, France, Japan, etcetera. There are only a handful of habitable worlds, though. That said, there’s another thing I’d like to touch on another time. It’s the reason my Aeon setting is limited to the Sol System. Back to Space Engineers though!
I was thinking that the Kaiser faction would be a literal empire and not just a relatively large militarized group of colonists. This is where the ‘subfactions’ would come in. Think of Vichy France for example. The Kaisers would have conquered other colonists to reach their current size. This does two things for me. One, it lets me incorporate other factions without having to make them independent forces, and two, it allows me to make ships from other factions in the same style as their host faction.
Two really important ships that come to mind are the Dunkerque and the Jean Bart, which I’d like to make in the style of Star Blazers. For that, they’re going to need to be at least related to the Kaisers.
Anyway, those are just my thoughts and I figured I’d jot them down while I’m on my break.
