I’m getting excited about this. I’ve never tried making a height map before. While I didn’t plan to originally, I’ll need a lot of different variants of this dual continent, and height maps are extremely useful for the things I’m planning. It’s not just going to be used for a single time period either, so the political maps will be all over the place depending on the period.
Though … I guess now’s the time to consider if I want to move any islands around or not. I’ve made some changes since the previous version of the landmasses, but nothing major, as I didn’t really have any ideas. I’m starting to get some now, though. We’ll see. There’s still time, since I’m doing the height map in two groups, the “Above Sea Level” or ASL group, and the “Below Sea Level” or BSL group. ALS and most of the big details come first so if I need to move things around later on, I won’t have to change everything in the BSL group to match. The BSL group just won’t be made until the ASL group is finished or near enough.
Keep an eye out for these map posts. The look of this thing is going to change quickly and dramatically.
In a previous post I said I wouldn’t be spending any money on World of Warships unless a special event or a specific Black Friday ship showed up. Well, I’ve got mixed feelings on this, but it looks like the Enterprise B will not be making an appearance this year. They chose Saipan B. Enterprise B was my condition for any and all Black Friday purchases which is disappointing because Yoshino is a ship I’m actually saving coal for in the armory. Just buying the Yoshino B would have saved me a lot of effort and let me focus on a different coal ship like the Immelmann or something. Pommern B would also have looked nice beside my Tirpitz B and Scharnhorst B, but assuming Wargaming doesn’t seriously improve before then, that’s not happening either.
I guess it’s just as well. My wallet has endured enough and my time is precious these days.
Speaking of my wallet and my time, I’m also getting to a point where I may start pulling back from Phantasy Star Online 2 and New Genesis as well. Sega had probably the easiest setup imaginable, but because of terrible release schedules and next to nonexistent player progression, they’ve managed to shoot themselves in the foot multiple times. I’m having a really hard time figuring out why they’re staying on their current course and not switching things up for the sake of the player base. They shouldn’t be banking on the hardcore PSO2 crowd to carry NGS through this content drought. They should be moving things forward as quickly as they can.
Hell, even I’m putting more time into Final Fantasy XIV than NGS and I vastly prefer the latter’s combat and UI. FFXIV is a newer game than PSO2 with vastly more content than NGS, so it falls into a sweet spot that made the switch extremely easy. Now I’m not the type of person to drop a game for good when things get boring. I’ll come back if things get interesting, but in the big scheme of things, I don’t matter. It’s the huge swaths of players that do drop these games for good that matter here. First impressions matter and I really hope Sega doesn’t think that the competition isn’t relevant here. They’re not going to be able to bring back nearly as many players at the end of the content drought if they stay their course. Moreover, the content they’ve let us in on isn’t looking to be anything spectacular or game changing, either. I’m actually worried it’s going to come down to the new Mission Pass system and the new area, because raising the level cap, adding more skills to the existing classes, and introducing one new class, is about 5 to 10 hours of new content at best. What then?
Even Rappy Burst threw in the towel, and I don’t blame them. I’m not quitting, but I’ve been on a bare minimum approach to playing the game for more than a month now. I only log on to buy and sell items on the player market, try out new looks for my characters, and do daily missions and alpha reactor gathering. That’s it. Unless there’s someone to chat with, NGS doesn’t warrant a second more of my time at the moment. I hate to put it that way since I love this game, but it’s just gotten that stale thanks to Sega’s quiet, stubborn, drip feeding of content.
I don’t know why this is so hard for them. I’ve heard spectacular ideas from people who play NGS on how it can be improved at next to no cost to Sega, and I’ve even come up with a few of my own. What we’re seeing from them right now could easily be mistaken for self sabotage. It’s honestly baffling considering PSO2 and the way that game is structured. It’s a huge game and it’s an old formula for success that Sega could shamelessly copy without much if any complaint from the players. Why are they putting all of us through a content drought with no player progression or NGS specific achievements to hold us over in the meantime? Is this an attempt to preserve the PSO2 side of the game? If so, that’s stupidly dangerous because the player numbers in general are going down, not just NGS. There’s no new content coming in for PSO2 so the state of NGS is going to have a direct impact on PSO2 as well. Sega needs to account for the short term and not just think long term because a lot of people aren’t coming back. Why should they? There are other great games out there that will respect the time they put in and reward them accordingly.
If there’s a Chocobo Burst out there I’m sure I’m going to run into it soon.
Shifting gears, it’s good not to sink too much time into these games. I’m more concerned with their health and longevity than how long I can enjoy playing them. No matter how well they are or aren’t doing, I’ll pull back from things if I feel they’re getting in the way of my own work. So this isn’t all bad; I just want WoWs and PSO2: NGS to do well for as long as they can. Live long and prosper and all that.
Those were my instructions (more on that some other time) so that’s what I’m aiming to do. This next week is going to be incredibly busy, but I’m looking forward to it. Sadly this blog post is just a blip to keep my daily posts up. Nothing interesting’s going to happen around here for at least a few more days. What I’ll say for tonight though is that I’m going to be focusing extremely heavily on more near term projects on certain days for the next couple of weeks. There are some very overdue things that need wrapping up.
My recordings did not. Even the audio quality was choppy. It was completely my fault for not running any tests like I normally do. Instead, I opted to go through all my tier 10s for festive tokens. Racked up about 27 containers (including armory token purchases) before we started and opened them all at once. I’d say the highlights were the 7,000 doubloons and the 17,300 coal. Unfortunately we had to call it early since the servers were getting overloaded, supposedly on Wargaming’s end. That’s fine though, more free time for me~
It’s not a big report, but at least I’m caught up, now.
It slipped my mind that I needed to post yesterday, but on the bright side, knowing I had to do two posts today to make up for it was a much needed kick in the butt. So today I’m going to share some screenshots of some Space Engineers builds I’ve been working on during my unproductive hours.
I know what I wrote.
First up is the Prinz Heinrich.
This ship is based on the one-off armored cruiser the SMS Prinz Heinrich. That’s right, this has nothing to do with World of Warship’s upcoming German battlecruiser line! The color scheme is inspired by Azur Lane’s Iron Blood faction, though. So there’s that.
Anyone who’s been playing Space Engineers for any length of time probably recognizes this ship’s distinct profile. That’s because this ship started off as a modified D-37 Timberwolf. If there was going to be a tutorial ship for this game, the Timberwolf would be a great candidate. It’s been used as a base for ships so many times that it’s just shy of becoming a meme. Maybe that’ll happen if more of them get published.
Anyway, let’s take a closer look.
The first picture shows the bow, which is probably the biggest difference from the Timberwolf. It has a beak instead of a shroud for the missile launchers. Also, instead of missiles, the bow has an axial laser. There’s also an ore detector and a camera. I even put a laser antenna on top of the bow for working with scouting drones. Why an ore detector? The ship can operate completely independently as long as it’s got some auxiliaries aboard. It can fit several small ones in the hangar or external connectors. Having its own ore detector means it can find what it needs and then call up the auxiliaries and defend them while they mine the goods. They don’t have to do anything until they’re actually needed.
The second picture is the view just outside the bridge. Not much else to add, but I should probably mention the mods this ship uses. There aren’t a ton, but there are enough that I’m not comfortable publishing the ship yet. My general approach is to use whatever mods I want to speed up the building process, and then study the ship for ways to eliminate as many of them as I can. The trouble with dear Heinrich here is that I’m not really settled on anything about her, yet. Everything from the design of entire areas to her weapons and even her paint scheme are still up in the air. She’s just had most of this configuration for so long that I’m likely to settle on it soon.
The third picture showcases the primary thrusters. There are two nuclear reactors directly behind the thrusters on the flanks, not to mention a slew of hydrogen tanks that feed these hungry machines. Everything’s got a weakness I guess; at least the Heinrich’s shielded~
She’s also packing a decent suite of offensive and defensive weapons. The fourth picture here shows her main offensive weapons, the M48 Archer Pods from the Halo UNSC Ship Weapons mod. These are the one thing I’m not really considering swapping out for heavier guided ordnance anymore.
Not quite a Macross Missile Massacre, but we’re getting there. Give it time.
The 203mm batteries from the Northwind Weapons mod are also keepers at this point.
The AMS lasers are from the same modpack and 10 of these make up the majority of Prinz Heinrich’s close-in weapon systems. The rest is handled by 8 rampart turrets.
With that I think it’s time to take a look inside the ship. It looks completely different from the Timberwolf.
The bridge has four operating stations in a diamond arrangement. The captain’s seat is in the back and just has some basic control and monitoring functions. The forward most console is the helm for the ship. It also has controls for the axial laser and some of the weapons. The engineering console is on the right and can mess with things happening down in Engineering. The console on the left is the weapons console. This console has access to and control of all of the Heinrich’s weapons.
I put a picture of Elly Van Houten in the captain’s quarters of all my Kaisermarine and Kriegsmarine inspired ships as an old inside joke. She’s probably Dutch, but when did that stop Germany?
Onto more serious aspects of the ship.
This is the General Information Center. Since the Heinrich’s capable of operating as a warship or as an explorer, the CIC is referred to as a GIC. To be perfectly honest, I’m a bit iffy on the naming conventions regarding parts of the ship since there’s also a data center. It’s a server room for all but one of the programmable blocks on the ship, but server room isn’t exactly fitting either, at least I don’t think so.
The Data Center in question.
Cryo Room with monitoring.
The ship’s gravity generator is in here, too. A holdover from the Timberwolf.
The hangar.
It’s somewhat large, but not quite big enough for the current iteration of the Messerschmitt. Both of the original versions could fit in here easily, but the new version isn’t a mosquito and also doesn’t have folding wings. Fortunately they can dock to the ship from the outside and the hangar can be reserved for carrying small auxiliaries/drones.
This hangar used to have modded doors which actually gave a bit more wiggle room for large fighters, but I removed it when I realized that even with those I wouldn’t have room for a cosmo style fighter, not unless I made some huge changes to the front half of the ship. Heinrich’s not a carrier so making such a big change just to be able to keep one extra fighter onboard isn’t really worth it. I think it’s better to have a reasonably large hangar just for auxiliaries or whatever cargo needs carrying.
From left to right: Walkway above the hangar, cargo area near the forward auxiliary ship controls, portside officers quarters, and the WIP Engineering section renovations.
From left to right: The exit ramp at the bottom of the ship, auxiliary ship controls, the axial laser and its console, and the crew quarters.
So that’s the majority of the ship. There are a few more areas and things I could go over, but I’d rather save those for another time. Things like the landing gears and the far back area of the engineering section are always subject to change, especially with how quickly they were built.
I hope this tour of the Prinz Heinrich was interesting.
I’m trying to reduce the number of mods the Heinrich needs to both look and function as intended so I’ll make a complete list of the mods involved when I’ve got more time and I’m closer to finalizing the ship.
Next up is the BF-109 Messerschmitt reimagined as a Cosmo Fighter from Space Battleship Yamato.
I built this from scratch last night so this could be my fastest build ever if I stick with the general design. The picture below is the model it’s based on, but I decided to go my own way in a few areas since I’m not making a Cosmo Falcon; I’m making a Cosmo Messerschmitt.
For an idea of the scale.
She’s armed with plasma accelerators and some ridiculous/cool torpedo launcher Akiad came up with. For standard armaments across all the models, I think those work just fine. A scout variant might ditch the torpedoes, but in general these will have more weapons, not less. I’m just glad the Heinrich’s external connectors can easily accommodate these large fighters.
Like I said, the fighter’s base model still needs a lot of work, but for idle building, she’s coming along great. I’m seriously considering going for something more conventional for the tailfin unfortunately. The shape is nice but I think even a subgrid with some finagling to get some of the same angles would be a better idea at this point. I would have leaped at the chance to try that if subgrids didn’t make gameplay exponentially more complicated. I just figured since I used subgrids for the landing gears it should be on the table; in for a penny, in for a pound. We’ll see.
I’m thinking I might flatten out the nose to more closely match the cosmo falcon’s shape but for now I’m mostly satisfied with its appearance. It’s just the tailfin and some landing gear issues I need to work out. After that I might try to change a few things since I don’t have to worry about cramming this thing into the Heinrich’s hangar. Any ship that houses these internally is going to have to need 9×7 blocks of clearance at the bear minimum. I could make a ‘carrier’ version with folding wings but there area few issues I’d have to work through first and for now I just want a base version to work off of. Finishing that comes before making any specialized carrier equipment for them.
With that, we’re done for now. That’s the Prinz Heinrich and the Cosmo Messerschmitt, both works in progress, but further along than I would have expected a month ago. Thanks for reading.
