We shall be keeping the "Resource" flags as they are called (i.e. Hydrogen, Oxygen, Metals, Heavy Metals)... and upgrades / ships may be limited to only certain planets in the MV and scenerio that have the needed resource flags. For example, a HMA jump drive might require 5000 resources, a technology level of 70, and Hyper Matter to be present on the planet you are currently oribitng before you can perfom that upgrade of your jump drive.

What will be removed are the seperate resource cargo types such as Heavy Metals, Metals, etc... we shall have only one type of resource that you can transport in your cargo hold.

The next major change is to upgrade levels. Upgrade levels for all gadgets are going to be specified by the ship type. In other words, if you have a cruiser, all your devices might automatically be set to level 7. You will not be able to modify or change a device level, it will be controlled in code only. This will obviously require some re-balancing of the levels for some gadgets so we can have a unified level system.

Modding a ship is will change as well. Each gadget will have between 0 and X upgrade paths. When oribiting a friendly planet, you will simply target a device on your ship and press a button to upgrade that device to another. Upgrades will have a time delay depending on the device, cost planet resources, and cost you credits from your account. The mount types will become unimportant information now, so that will be removed from displays... it's actual use was intended for the AI code so it could evual what type of device is what...

Fleet grouping and voice chat are both going to get implemented in this version. Your group is going to be your clan/fleet. No need to invite / disband groups. Any prestige gain / loss will be shared by all other players in your fleet in the current server. Additionally, I'm going to re-enable voice chat... voice chat will default to your fleet only, also going to allow direct voice communications in-game. Obviously, I'm going to provide the ability for a player to mute communications from another just in case someone gets abusive.

Lastly and most important.... death is going to change dramatically. You will no longer lose ships when destroyed, they will be returned to your storage with 1% hull and all devices destroyed. The only penalty a player will pay for death is the time it takes to fully repair (and that is optional as well) your ship.

The bad thing is, is that if there were no prestige loss (since you say the only penalty is the time it fully takes to repair), is that people can just run into planets, then respawn and have someone whore supply prestige off of it.

Hence, it can be abused.

Ent, your right and it is my intention to keep some prestige penatly for getting destroyed. I just forgot to include that information in my message. My intent is to remove the stupid "Compensation" requests from this game forever and all time, and make death, like in WOW, more of an incoveniance rather than a major setback.

Concerning the upgrade times ... the upgrade timer will be between 1 - 30 seconds at most... (usually about 10 seconds to upgrade). So basically, once you start upgrading a component you can't use it for those seconds.

I just want to try to get some type of grouping system up as quickly as possible... doing it fleet based is practically free. A dynamic grouping system will require a ton more work as that information must be shared between multiple servers in the backend. It's a complicated issue, but this is really a case where some technology limitations are driving the design.

On 2005-08-12 13:15, Faustus wrote:

Modding a ship is will change as well. Each gadget will have between 0 and X upgrade paths. When oribiting a friendly planet, you will simply target a device on your ship and press a button to upgrade that device to another. Upgrades will have a time delay depending on the device, cost planet resources, and cost you credits from your account.