Lancer Tactics

[alpine sorrel]

Not a full arc. Going to be an anthology of mission arcs by various writers

[frigid shale]

Could an NHP be introduced the first time you install them into a mech?

[pastel flax]

yeah the issue with NHPs-as-characters is the same as basically any companion or hireling. giving them time to be personified as people. The bare minimum you could do is give them an introduction scene and then if your characters have quips, let them quip instead i suppose.

[frigid shale]

Like “hello, Lucifer reporting for duty”

[pastel flax]

you can't garuntee a build path either

so the writers can't include a garunteed interaction either

[frigid shale]

Yeah that’s why I suggested doing so when a player confirms installing the NHP, or first accesses it through licensing

“I’m here if you need me!”

[deft rapids]

I think a potential option would be to have NHPs present in the story as characters from the get go? Like in your first mission or something have a couple NHPs on call, talking to you

[pastel flax]

the issue with that i could forsee is "Why is that one speaking, but mine never speaking"

A happy medium could be the downtime screen

your terminal or something has a method for chatting with NHPs

[tepid temple]

Now I'm thinking about how you handle the Technophile NHP

[pastel flax]

Pick from a precanned list of personalities

[deft rapids]

I don't know what your plans are for the LL level up interface but potentially you could have the nhps associated with specific frame being like, "hey, I'm scrupulous Jim, you should take the swallowtail license because I can help you free the colony of bajablast!"

[pastel flax]

this is a game, you cannot have the infinite possibilities of the space modeled unfortunately

[deft rapids]

Not fully car salesmen but like. Present trying to chat

[alpine sorrel]

There's a good number of NHPs and doing writing+art for all of them multiplies the effort of any approach we take... the ideas that seem most manageable and effective to me so far are:

• say a line when they do their thing
• misc combat barks throughout
• a little introduction cutscene on first install (bg3 has something like this on the start screen for all companions)
• maybe include their portrait along with their lancer in various UI locations

[pastel flax]

is that satisfying to you?

[alpine sorrel]

Dunno, it's hard to predict how stuff will land and if it will have the intended effect of like helping with our cultural understanding of lancer vis a vis the aforementioned ludonarrative D.

But I think these are promising approaches

[deft rapids]

Is there room for the combat bark approach to have the pilot say something too? Assuming some randomization in the NHP activation lines, would it be feasible for the pilot to ask for help sometimes/based on the NHP?

[pastel flax]

This way, i think you get personality and desires across, without upping your caseload offensively. But in a simulation of a ruleset like this, i think these problems can occur by accident

[deft rapids]

"Sekhmet, can you hop in?" "Since you asked so nicely!" Or the like

[alpine sorrel]

We haven't figured out silent/speaking protag yet, which would affect that

[naive yacht]

[...]

xD

[pastel flax]

[...!]

[tepid temple]

One option that I'm unsure on the work-to-payout ratio for is having a dedicated "talk to your NHP" button where they get to react to the battlefield dependent on the tactical situation + potential narrative hooks

[naive yacht]

emoji keyboard for the silent protag

[fresh dagger]

i always prefer speaking protagonists, for whatever it's worth

[pastel flax]

Fire Emblem Awakening in japan had a silent option

"Not very chatty, hm?"

[neat wolf]

"[...?]"
"Wilco."

[alpine sorrel]

Speaking protag is a lot harder with open ended systems like this. Games with them like mass effect have "who are you" pretty established. Even BG3 wasn't able to swing it

Beyond like direct dialogue choices

[alpine sorrel]

High work to handle the infinity situations, low payout because it's very missable

[lone cliff]

i mean

tbh

i was under the impression youd just be commanding a bunch of preexisting characters

[pastel flax]

As was i

[flint portal]

You know what I’d say you could do ?

[lone cliff]

like

idk

[pastel flax]

i figured the create-a-friend was for instant action hah

[lone cliff]

in a lancer game you just command your own mech

[tepid temple]

Figures

[ripe radish]

Voice quips when you use their abilities and a distinct personality when they controls the mech

[lone cliff]

but this tactics game has you commanding more than one person

[flint portal]

Maybe have a character be an nhp, comes installed in the mech by default

[lone cliff]

unless you make literally everyone else on the player side allied NPCs that cant be controlled

[tepid temple]

Same here

[flint portal]

Nhps you unlock through the leveling is them using different abilities

[lone cliff]

which

idk

[tepid temple]

And as an athology dealio different sets of missions would have different protagonists

[flint portal]

Getting permissions for specific stuff

[lone cliff]

maybe its more accurate to lancer ttrpg buuuuut for a tactics game its boring

[pastel flax]

I like that actually

that's really neat

[flint portal]

This makes sure that nhp isn’t accidentally dehumanized

[pastel flax]

that's going on the list of lancer characters for real

[lone cliff]

you dont need a self insert character really, im already fine commanding badass grandma and the 2 starry eyed newbies

like, if you really need a player insert character make them the nhp? lmao
sending commands to the characters who are in the mechs

[flint portal]

Kinda like it’s the nhp equivalent of unlocking talents

[wraith cradle]

Actually, that could be really cool.

[lone cliff]

youre playing as an nhp who was originally part of the corpo side but you escaped and decided to help the revolutionaries fight back

[naive yacht]

I got no problem with the self insert character/silent protag fwiw

[alpine sorrel]

I like this... that opens up space to have a relationship that precedes the mechanics.

[lone cliff]

would be compelling enough

it even works well with being exposited to

since you wouldnt know the history and such

[flint portal]

Yup !

[alpine sorrel]

Re: self insert characters, I haven't ironed it out with the writers yet but our current approach is the BG3 Tav situation. You have a bespoke lancer that you can take between the anthology missions and an array of predefined characters that are embedded in the narrative threads

Hadn't thought about the possibility of skipping the tav and just playing the predefined ones

[frigid shale]

Eld’s approach sounds clever, I like it; reminds me a little bit of BT in Titanfall and how the mech has different kits. Basically make the “kit swap” an “NHP talent” and such

It’s always BT, just with different skills

[alpine sorrel]

The problem is almost how much more space that opens up.

Where do you put the scenes?

[lone cliff]

honestly thinking on it more i really like the idea that you're an nhp lending tactical help to the various protags of the anthologies

[deft rapids]

Would having one NHP pilot learning different abilities preclude other pilots getting those then

[tepid temple]

What do you mean?

[lone cliff]

sort of like a wandering cowboy

or mad max

where the "main character" is a vessel for the actual story's protagonists to enact change etc.

[alpine sorrel]

It's an interesting idea... I'll float it as an idea when I finally have my "what are we doing" writer's meeting.

[naive yacht]

if we use BT as an example, a lot of the scenes, like narratively, would involve the actual mech being present in a narrative capacity

[lone cliff]

you could arguably say BT's the protag and cooper was his like, pet dog

lmao

[naive yacht]

but also, thanks to the power of technology, narrative scenes can happen over comms or video chat

[lone cliff]

like the scene where BT is arguing to the commander to keep jack as his pilot, BT's the one that matters, jack's the puppy he picked up

[alpine sorrel]

I should play Titanfall.

[lone cliff]

titanfall 2's campaign is amazing

like

genuinely one of the best FPS campaigns out there

[naive yacht]

I wouldn't go so far as to say that cooper was a pet dog; but yes I do think that the titanfall 2 campaign would be worth your time

its reasonably short

and evocative

and has great set pieces

[lone cliff]

great mechanics too

ye

in terms of letting people explore the licensing stuff giving each character in each mission their own license level up things with some "recommended" options might be a good idea

[lone cliff]

yeah my brain wasnt giving me the right analogy lol

[alpine sorrel]

I'm thinking through this NHP-relationship-before-LL3 thing that eld mentioned. When do they show up? Do they for every frame that can get an NHP? What happens when you get multiple frames that can?

[pastel flax]

i think it's on game pass

ah killed by scrolldown

[shy spruce]

bit late, but the way super robot wars does it is by having (a) separate portrait(s) for the AI, with periodic/semi-random cut-ins during the combat exchanges and just operating as a regular character in the story scenes

[alpine sorrel]

So you get a cutscene with them... when you unlock the first LL of that frame?

[ripe radish]

Also, whatever you do, watchdog should be introduced like a NHP like 5% of the time

Sow confusion on if its a person or not

[pastel flax]

what is watchdog

[ripe radish]

Is it s glitch? Purposeful? make it rare enough where most people never experience it, but common enough were people talk about it

[ripe radish]

Torguga core power

Either its non sentient and very good at pretending otherwise, or sentient and very good at pretending otherwise

[flint portal]

From the start ! No need to unlock a frame i feel like the best way to get them to be made more than a piece of gear is to have them be a character from the start

Imo

Tbh you could probably get away with them also being a player character you customize when starting off

[alpine sorrel]

OH like you literally have an NHP companion and they can like morph into the various ones via LL

[flint portal]

If you wanted to go that route

[neat wolf]

id say the first LL would be best since otherwise youd be juggling a bunch of new characters from near the beginning

[naive yacht]

In fire emblem terms, they'd be one of the characters you start with, like the paladin or whatever, and serves as the contextualizing force for your presence in the game?

[flint portal]

Yeah ! Like the nhp is unlocking permissions and stuff through leveling

Same way you are

It’s a common way folks who take technophile do it

At least in my experience

[alpine sorrel]

Got it. Fascinating. Thanks.

[flint portal]

Like flavor wise

[alpine sorrel]

Ahhh and that's a great avenue for any downtime exposition. Can always go chat with them.

[flint portal]

Yeah

Can also be the vector for new player tips

[alpine sorrel]

Oh no we just invented Cortana from first priciples

[flint portal]

Lmao

[tepid temple]

lol

[neat wolf]

how are the NHPs going to be named

player, random generated, preestablished?

[warm magnet]

I was going to say, high on the missable content scale, but might be interesting to have an "ask your nhp what they think" button next to 'help' on the battle map

Comedy value in SEHKMET answering "I think we should go hit them with a sword" regardless of situation

[neat wolf]

"SEKHMET, how do I jumpstart this reactor?"
"I think you should hit it with a sword."

[pastel flax]

"You always say that!" "I always think that!"

[shy spruce]

it's bound to work sooner or later

[neat wolf]

"How do I kill this Hive?"
"Hit it with a sword."

[little jetty]

are we gonna have any narrative rolls with pilot skill triggers?

[deft rapids]

Now be fair. Berserker mode is something you have to trigger on Sekhmet and we don't know much of what Sekhmets tend to be like outside of that

[naive yacht]

There is a bit of a challenge regarding characterizing any nhp and the split between conforming to particular fanon, doing your own interpretation, cleaving to what the text gives you, or doing some kind of mix

[little jetty]

I think picking your copilot personality and unlocking abilities by installing the systems might make sense

[naive yacht]

truth, but also having personality options is a notable development target

[flint portal]

unrelated

I got my stickers in the mail

and wow Olive, that letter is the most you core thing ever lol

love it

[mild jay]

Nhp as a single character that does all the things definitely sounds fun. And idk if the anthology mission pilots drop in and out but if they do it gives a consistent companion throughout

[tepid temple]

Isn't there still the issue of multiple NHPs across several mechs though?

[little jetty]

i think the idea is that they work kinda like portal personality core, except instead of changing your personality it gives you special powers (and maybe also subtly change your personality)

[flint portal]

that's just the nhp being able to affect stuff near their squad of pilots

cause I know you love these

lancer stickers next to my paradise killer stickers

😎

[nova nebula]

Have you seen/played Disco Elysium? Perhaps they could be similar to the way a stat will talk to you at times? Also the thought cabinet is a cool concept

[little jetty]

xcom chimera squad has characters have a little dialog between each sitrep, as well as some longer ones between missions

[tepid temple]

I think you can write these games off as business expenses in your taxes at this point

[little jetty]

research material 😌

[mild jay]

Chimera squad is good stuff. A delightful little experiment that just dropped without warning

[lone cliff]

yee can concur with chimera squad being good

also it pissed off a certain subset of chuds so its double good lmao

[naive yacht]

i never encountered the PO'd side of the community, to my good fortune; the game was just good and added on top of a fun framework

[little jetty]

oh i vaguely heard about some people not liking it, maybe that's what that was

[mild jay]

Truly do recommend avoiding the steam community, there’s still a grudge held against it there

[little jetty]

also I am totally going to implement "breach action" in my game as a reserve, where all the players take one free quick action at the beginning of sitrep

[mild jay]

Lots of chuds and people who expect a game 1/3rd the price of its predecessors to have as many or more features

[little jetty]

they're also narratively much smaller scale, which is made extremely obvious by like, everything

[naive yacht]

i like this, this is good. I may borrow this in the future

[deft rapids]

Terrifying prospect. I support it

[neat wolf]

@unborn glen flick your thanks here

[unborn glen]

Ta

Thank you to rpg peps, I really didn't expect the stickers to be as high quality as they are. I'm a bit of a sucker for these things and just looks absolutely amazing to have horus' mantra on my kindle. I'm massively looking forward to the game.

Anyway I'm gonna show it off again because it's just looks wicked

[glad lotus]

That's epic

[alpine sorrel]

🙂 thanks for the kind words, I'm glad you like em!

[lethal leaf]

I'm a simple enby. I think NHPs being characters is a good thing, but I also want UNCLE to say "Kill confirmed" in a robotic voice when it gets a kill.

[void hornet]

You know
When olive offered to send "some" goblin stickers my way for making the meme
I didn't expect a lifetime supply

Still feels wild to have it in physical form

[shy spruce]

lksdjfsdf holy shit

[void hornet]

also, really glad i went for the coin, love the coin

[alpine sorrel]

Listen, my scale of what qualifies as "some" may have been skewed by dealing with these quantities. We went through a few stacks of this size and here's what I have left over that I need to figure out what to do with. Sharpie for scale.

Economies of scale are WILD, yo

[pastel flax]

Sell the excess?!

that's so many

[little jetty]

lancer tactics merchandise

oh an important question
can we see some queer flags in the game

[sullen berry]

Personally, I like all of these. This is pretty much how the Pathfinder Kingmaker companions who are full characters act, and while I saw SOME complaints for that, if you can even pull that off that'd be impressive to me due to the smaller team here. 🙂

[sullen berry]

seeing this makes me want to go around and post these around my city like a true HORUS agent.

[shy spruce]

good golly goddamn

[alpine sorrel]

I have a few in my bag for this express purpose but I always forget until I get home lol

[sullen berry]

hehe

[void hornet]

zamn, thats a lot of goblins

[tough urchin]

Tbh I don’t know if I’m gonna use my stickers so much as put them in protective transparent sleeves or something and display them on my wall. I don’t want to stick them on something permanently that I don’t know I’ll have permanently, I love these things too much lol

They’re so good, when mine arrived it made my day

[alpine sorrel]

Oh hot dang that's rad 🤘

Great energy

[final onyx]

Paint a ship with it

[unborn glen]

Very nice

[alpine sorrel]

Spent this week hooking up the dialogue system to play conversations via these word bubbles. Visual novels deserve more respect, it's mad difficult to manage and localize text.

[pastel flax]

Yeah lots of dialogue systems have dedicated translation management systems

Looks great, thanks for your work!

[sand goblet]

I just checked out the library that you're using for this, and the actual structure/formatting for writing dialogue in it looks like it's really smooth

so often these things are really clunky to write in

[rain cipher]

What's the name of the library (if that's a thing)? I like to collect useful tech things in case I ever need to use them haha

[toxic badge]

I'm not sure if it's the one being used for this project, but Godot Dialogue Manager is one that I see get mentioned every now and again: https://github.com/nathanhoad/godot_dialogue_manager

[alpine sorrel]

Yep that's the one!

[stuck falcon]

whenever you're creating a new build of the project do you tell yourself that you're waiting for godot

[alpine sorrel]

In the Godot discord there's literally a channel called that that's dedicated to asking when the next version of the engine will be out (basically equivalent to folks asking when the next lancer foundry update will happen in #lancer-vtt)

Oh haha they actually updated the name:

It used to be waiting4godot because 4.0 was the next major release

[stuck falcon]

lol nice

[little jetty]

damn what will they do when version 5 comes out

[mild jay]

Godot 4 II

[little jetty]

it's gonna be like one of those 2022 new year glasses that really should have been stopped after 2010

"wtf does waiting 10godot mean"

[alpine sorrel]

4 godot 4 furious

[deft rapids]

waiting 4 godot: tokyo drift

[glad lotus]

I'm in this picture and I don't like it 😆

[plucky helm]

Poor Eranziel.
I wish there was a way to just have a floating tile that just says "it's been X minutes since the last question about version compatibility". It's relentless over there. Discord is great, but it's not good for keeping important info immediately accessible for folks who are new to a channel.

[glad lotus]

Discord pins etc... aren pretty bad for discoverability, but in complete fairness to Discord there would still be repeated questions even if they were more visible, and even if you made people click a thing that said they'd read it. There's always someone who won't read anything before asking. 😉

[naive yacht]

I didn't read any of this and im going to ask a question: (im not this is a joke)

[glad lotus]

I lol'd

[topaz agate]

I noticed that the BackerKit store still seems to be open. Does it still accept new pledges? Been looking to pick up another copy of the game to give away and I've been playing with the idea of submitting another mini-boss name. I wouldn't mind not receiving any stickers

[glad lotus]

I was actually wondering the same, but with stickers. 😉

[alpine sorrel]

Oh hah yeah I guess it is. New orders come through the same pipeline as backers who just are super late in filling out their survey, so yeah feel free to back at whatever level and you'll get your merch. I'll probably close it eventually, but for now it's easy enough to keep bundling new ones in with stragglers.

[void hearth]

Incidentally:

[flat steppe]

YO the character creator looks cool af love the hair options!

[tepid temple]

There higher res images for the engine graphs?

[worn tiger]

so you mean to tell me that not only do I get a game I also get a cool ass character portrait creator

[alpine sorrel]

Ugh looks like Kickstarter automatically resizes the image itself, I was hoping people could right click to view it like they can on itch. Here's the post there: https://wick.itch.io/lancer-tactics/devlog/634012/portrait-maker-dialogue-bubbles-working-towards-a-vertical-slice

And the originals here:

[alpine sorrel]

I've definitely latched onto the sideshave as my favorite

[flat steppe]

woah, the person with the sideshave profile pic likes sideshaves?

no but fr it looks great

[nova nebula]

The official queer cut is a fav? Shock

[little jetty]

love this moment fr

[rain cipher]

Idk how long it's been in there but I like the little hops the units do when moving around 😌

[little jetty]

There's also a bit of dust cloud when moving
Beginning movement seems to create a bigger dust cloud

[pastel flax]

Dialogue is a hard thing to organize

it always felt a bit hacky to me

[nova nebula]

Forgot to say earlier: hell yeah Lancer picrew get

I am genuinely excited

[little jetty]

it would be kinda cool to play lancer tactics then export the same character model for your table

[alpine sorrel]

The keen eye will note

[flint portal]

hell yeah

[worn tiger]

Very excited

[mild jay]

Oh damn Olive one step ahead

[boreal dust]

the updates are really good and thank you for still doing them

[shy spruce]

ohoho

[little jetty]

I recently started playing wildermyth and a lot of their popular mods are just, extra hairstyles
I also see the pick asset directory, which I imagine is for modding support

[alpine sorrel]

Technically it's for specifically Martina to be able to add and preview new assets without having to compile the game or even download godot, but I imagine it could be used for modding eventually. That's still a pretty big unknown for us on how we'll handle it.

[lethal leaf]

Okay, question. How will it work if my Mourning Cloak hits someone with a knockback weapon (or a ram) and (a) they're next to someone, but get knocked away, or (b) they're alone, but get knocked next to someone? In both of those in the tabletop game, you can order the damage and knockback to get the Hunter bonus. Will it choose automatically?

[alpine sorrel]

Good question. I've thought a lot about how I'd let the player choose the order of things but the best example of an existing game giving that control that I could find is magic arena:

Two challenges with implementing it:

• it'd be not an insignificant amount of dev work to have the system collect all possible triggers ahead of time, surface a UI for reordering them, and then do that. There's a cost/benefit there that I'm not fully convinced of in comparison to just having a predefined less-flexible order.
• it surfaces the exact same design challenge of pacing as common triggers like brace. We don't want a screen popping up for this every time knockback happens. The infinite-resources solution is "let the player set their own rules for when they want to choose", but for us that's another cost/benefit I'm not convinced is a high priority.

So short answer: we're probably just going to have knockback applied after damage always. If we run into a situation where that makes a big gameplay difference (like potentially MC hunter) we could jimmy together a specific favors-player fix where it does something like check both before and after knockback and applies if it hasn't already triggered.

[tired aurora]

How about doing it the way Yu-Gi-Oh Masterduel does it? Trigger in that game got 3 modes which players can quickly switch with a mere button press:

Trigger off: Any trigger are automatically ignore and skip

Trigger auto: It will only have trigger pop up when the game deem that it's fitting to ask (like when it favour players)

Trigger on: It will create trigger pop up in every point in time that you can activate a trigger

Like this, player can switch however they want. If they want it to goes quick, they can just turn off the trigger. But if they want to meticulously order effects, perhaps because they got a combo in mind that requires it, they just turn the trigger on (which includes letting knockback be optinal)

[alpine sorrel]

I'm not familiar with that game, but it sounds equivalent to the "infinite resources" solution in the second point.

[crisp pelican]

all attacks will do knockback? Wouldn’t that be problematic if it knocks people out of range/threat?

[alpine sorrel]

No, and no more than it is in the ttrpg

[void hearth]

I think it might be worth cosidering having a... micro version of Masto's suggestion for knockback specifically

because I know there have been times I haven't wanted to apply knockback at all

[little jetty]

knockback is also optional right
sometimes you probably don't want to knock back at all

[void hearth]

exacto

some kind of toggle for "apply before damage/apply after damage/don't apply" that becomes available if you have knockback weapons or such

admittedly that's still probably a bunch of work, but it's come up enough for me to be worth mentioning

[tepid temple]

Didn’t the demo already have knockback control?

[mild jay]

Choosing whether it happens and choosing when it happens are separate issues with different levels of complexity

[little jetty]

Wait the demo had a knockback weapon?

[mild jay]

It did have Ram, which let you potentially choose where you shoved if the target wasn't orthogonal to the rammer

[alpine sorrel]

and war pike for the nelson iirc

[alpine sorrel]

Oh wow I just stumbled on this very early effort to make a lancer crpg port: #colosseum message

They even end up planning to make it in godot. A ton of their planned engine structure is solid and pretty similar to how LT does it.

Though it was pre-godot-4-await-keyword so they'd of had to use an event manager instead of the awaiting anarchy I settled on

[nova nebula]

Oh neat

[final onyx]

When you say anarchy I'm just thinking like

Letting the event system order at random

Let them resolve as the gods demand

[alpine sorrel]

I mean, kind of? Back when I tried having a manager keep a linear queue (like Magic's stack system) I kept running into situations where stuff wanted to be jankily inserted before or after other things. Now it's a cool tree structure where events just wait for anything that reacts to them to finish before finishing themselves. "Let the gods dictate fate writ large; I only care about the events close to me."

[little jetty]

Love to see the term anarchy being used as a positive

[mild jay]

Oh, that does sound very nice to work with

[alpine sorrel]

Design problem of the week: what the heck are we gonna do with skirmish vs barrage. Right now, as in the demo, we're kind of ignoring barrage and treating every attack like a skirmish (no dupe weapons still). It's much simpler to implement both the engine and UI this way. However, this allows you to:

• take movement between weapon attacks
• get skirmish-specific triggers even when attacking with two mounts.

I think skirmishing already kind of outclasses barraging in most instances, so I'm not happy with it getting even more flexible

[little jetty]

What makes it difficult to, say, choose skirmish or barrage, then choose weapons?

[alpine sorrel]

We want the array of weapon actions laid out up-front, so that would imply you choose weapon first

Otherwise they'd be hidden in a skirmish/barrage submenu

Choosing weapon and then maybe a second optional weapon if you're barraging might work?

Weird to choose a second weapon and then go back to targeting with the first one though

[little jetty]

select weapons you want to attack with, then another button to commit attack?
and depending on the selection the commit button can say "this is a skirmish" or "this is a barrage"

[sullen berry]

how hard would it be to implement Choose your weapon, then a little thing pops out that says barrage that you don't have to click. But if you do click lets you do a second attack?

i'm tired and currently cold turkey-ing caffeine so I don't know if that makes sense

[alpine sorrel]

Yeah something like that ui could be probably figured out. It'd be more awkward than just weapon->target.

But this might also be a place where we modify the game rules for the sake of the adaptation... not sure how though.

[flint portal]

Couldn't you make it two skirmishes but treat it as not allowing movement between them ?

or something like that

[glad lotus]

This is what I've had in mind every time I contemplate an action menu for Foundry, FWIW. It is more convoluted than your current attack UX flow, though.

[alpine sorrel]

I guess I'm more interested in hearing if anyone has ideas on this front than specific UI solutions

[alpine sorrel]

That was my first thought, but then when/how does Skirmisher trigger?

[flint portal]

I think its an important part of the balance of barrage that you need to commit to it, imo

[sullen berry]

one second let me put what I'm thinking to image

[glad lotus]

You could maybe keep all the weapons in the UI, then when you pick one prompt the user to pick skirmish or barrage?

[flint portal]

Oh wait you do weapons first ?

[little jetty]

Looking up all the skirmish vs barrage interactions at the moment, and there are some stuff that interact with skirmish specifically that isn't just movement

[flint portal]

been a while since I played the demo

Personally I think it should be two different actions, where you pick if you either skirmish or barrage first

[sullen berry]

okay

[flint portal]

instead of weapons first, it could probably save space too right ?

especially on an aux heavy build

[alpine sorrel]

We're currently taking the approach that it's more important to be able to see all the actions you can take than to save space here

[flint portal]

So you'd have talents like skirmisher that trigger on selecting skirmish itself instead of firing the weapon

[little jetty]

there's maximum potential of 6 mounts (3 mounts, +1 integrated frame weapon, +1 integrated aux, +1 flex mount)
idk off my head if there are any frames with 3 mounts and an integrated frame weapon, so it might be max of 5

[sullen berry]

this is what I imagined

jus a lil guy pop out

jus a lil guy

[flint portal]

That's fair, i'm mostly thinking of how it would look if you have a duskwing with 3 mounts (with a core bonus) that has as many auxes as possible

[glad lotus]

Sherman has 3+integrated

[alpine sorrel]

We've done some worst-case tests (specifically having like 20 invade options) and we think having actions be single icons at the bottom can easily handle it

So saving space by hiding action icons isn't currently an issue

[flint portal]

Maybe you could do it where you gray out weapons and have people select barrage/skirmish which then makes them selectable

[alpine sorrel]

Again I'm not worried about the UI, I think we could shoehorn something in, but I'm polling for any lateral solutions via mechanics

[mild jay]

The half-formed thought in my head that's not a UI thing is that if you use a skirmish-specific bonus, it locks out a second attack. But that only works for manually activated bonuses, I think, like skirmisher bonus move. Anything autmated would still be a problem

Or moving after skirmishing locking out a second skirmish

[alpine sorrel]

What's the main drawback of barraging? Like eld said, committing up front, right?

[flint portal]

Yeah

The main drawback of barraging is you can't move between firing multiple mounts, you commit the action upfront too

[glad lotus]

I think also locking yourself out of all the little skirmish bonuses you can get

[flint portal]

So you can't skirmish and then go "actually I would have gone for a barrage"

[glad lotus]

Like Skirmisher, Duelist 1, etc...

[flint portal]

which is the important part

[alpine sorrel]

Hah we do that in our home games all the time

[mild jay]

I think if a weapon or talent has a movement effect as part of it, like the hunter flight before using an auxiliary melee weapon, that can still be used?

Pretty sure I was able to get away with that as a player before

[alpine sorrel]

Yeah I guess there's not really an alternate drawback that presents itself to me.

Like if we could switch out up front committal for something else

I wonder how skirmish vs barrage looked in early versions of the game

[flint portal]

I think that might be hard because a lot of the drawback IS that

I guess the other way to do it is by defining "skirmish" by the number of weapons you get to fire rather than an action in itself

[glad lotus]

You could add +1 difficulty to the 2nd attack if they move in between, but 1) signposting that well might be even harder, 2) that sounds a lot like saying no while trying not to say no.

[flint portal]

So you only get skirmish bonuses (like moving) if you only fire one mount

but then you run into another problem of like, what do you do with Lunge from Hunter which is all about enabling you to get in range

since that's checked before actually "properly" attacking

[mild jay]

Here's a funky thought, what if barrage is a status? Like you have a separate ability for turning on that status, the status locks out skirmish bonuses and non-weapon actions, and you get to use multiple actions on attacks while you have it, but if you don't have the barrage status you can only use one weapon per turn?

[alpine sorrel]

That's an interesting thought

Like toggle abilities in bg3

[glad lotus]

The other issue with this is it's a significant departure from TT Lancer. How big a deal that is is up to you, of course.

[flint portal]

Here's another thought

[glad lotus]

I like this tbh. It's a stance toggle!

[flint portal]

What if attacking is defined in advance, you always say how much you'll do in advance and the game decides "this is a skirmish" if you only take a certain number of weapons, like uh

okay this is a weird comparaison

you ever played World Of Horror ?

[alpine sorrel]

No, I'll Google it

[glad lotus]

One potential gotcha: off-turn skirmishes (overwatch etc) "should" still trigger skirmish effects even if you're in barrage stance

[flint portal]

It asks you to commit to actions in a bar of action allocation, what i'm thinking is you give certain weapon a "weight" and under a certain weight, it counts as a skirmish, triggering effects for it, which you could then resolve before attacking proper

[alpine sorrel]

Oh I see! You queue up a bunch of stuff and then say launch attack

[flint portal]

go above a "weight" and it counts as a barrage

maybe could have a pop saying "if you stop queuing actions now, you get bonuses from skirmisher"

[mild jay]

I was imagining barrage would wear off after you got the equivalent of the tabletop benefits from it

[smoky glacier]

so e.g. a Main or Heavy has a weight of 1, an Aux has a weight of 0.5; if your weight is under 2, you trigger Skirmish?

[flint portal]

Something like that !

im not a code guy tho but that's how i'm thinking about it

[alpine sorrel]

Cool thanks! We'll play with these. Both "stance toggle" and "queue then fire" seem like promising solutions:)

[sand goblet]

Queue-then-fire has other issues, since sometimes you want to change which mounts you're firing mid barrage depending on the outcome of the first mount

eg. if you're in melee and you destroy your target with the first swing, you might want to switch to ranged to attack someone further away

[tepid temple]

Isn't "You have to commit to your target" part of Barrage's balancing as discussed above?

[sand goblet]

[EDIT: as I've seen it played in practice, but see below for RAW] it's committing to the action itself. You can even change up individual targets in a skirmish between weapons if you have an aux weapon on the mount, you can decide attacks on the fly as you see them resolve

(same for Full Tech, which similarly you have to commit to in advance and locks you in to the full action)

I'm not necessarily suggesting that it's a good idea from an interaction design perspective to commit to the same resolution method as the tabletop game, but there's an element of flexibility there that can come up with reasonable frequency

(Actual play example from the game I played tonight: I needed to hit a particular NPC with balance control lockout, so I committed to the Full Tech just in case I missed the first invade. As it happened, I hit on the first one so the second part of the action I used to target a different NPC entirely, but it had to be a tech action and I couldn't just go "okay I want to skirmish now actually")

[flint portal]

I think you could probably still get the same result for a barrage with queued up "mounts" cause it would only check for if the weight is "low enough" to be a skirmish

[sand goblet]

although, and this is interesting: the actual rules text for Barrage says this:

so IDK, I guess it's possible that every game I've ever played has done it wrong (or not cared enough about the specifics for it to have come up)

[tepid temple]

I wanted to say that was my read of RAW but I didn't want to push it, haha

But yeah, it's not necessarily the best way to run it even if it's the "correct" way

[worldly violet]

I kinda like it because it adds a little forethought, but I don't like it because Barrage doesn't need to be kicked while its down

[neat wolf]

maybe you declare a barrage, then select your weapons and targets as you go, with toggles for things like focusing every attack on one enemy automatically or using bonus auxes?

[alpine sorrel]

Oh, full tech also presents its own issues I now realize because you can choose the same thing twice for it but not for barrage. That'll be a weird thing to try and communicate.

I'd be happy to give barrage/ft a small buff of being able to change weapons... but yeah as you've identified, that would only work with the stance approach, not the queue.

I guess if there's no valid targets by the time you get to the second action, it could be smart enough to let you choose something else

[crisp pelican]

Off the top of your head do you have a list of the mechs you know are too complicated and you won't even try to put in?

I know Calendula is some crazy stupid bullshit

[magic cave]

The Calendula doesn't seem like it'd be too complicated, honestly. Intangible is kinda just an on-off switch for a character. (also we don't know if olive plans to add supplement mechs or not)
Gorgon seems like possible trouble with all those reactions though.

[neat wolf]

gorgon is hell enough on an adaptable human gm, who knows how algorithmic enemy AI or the reaction system itself will handle it

[glad lotus]

Lich would be pretty gnarly. You'd need to add a "do you want to interrupt this?" on nearly every effect.

[tepid temple]

I think it's a matter less of "Complicated or simple" and more of "Corebook or not"

Though I do think both Lich and Calendula are ones she shuddered at the prospect of doing

[rain cipher]

How I imagine barrage/skirmish working:

• Select mounts. If you select 1 it's a Skirmish, if 2 it's a Barrage. A UI indicator shows which will happen (hoverable for rules difference?)
• Confirm mount selection (maybe auto-continue on second selection, with back button to return)
• select target(s), and confirm to attack.
• imagining sequential targeting of mounts in order selected, with weapon icons to select in a different order if needed, and back button to undo if player changes mind before confirming attack.
• if a mount's target dies before its attack can go off, select new target(s) for it.
• Maybe can select targets for just 1 mount, confirm to resolve it, then target with the next, if the player wants more flexibility?

I guess that's just the queue method lol. I hope this wasn't too granular or comes across as telling you how to do your job, I just like thinking about these kinds of things from a UX perspective as little puzzles.

[forest obsidian]

I mean, that's on brand for horus and their pocket dimensions

hoooooly cow scrollback

[worn tiger]

hell yeah, drink deep sticker on the cup

[flint portal]

Hey uh, what ? And also don’t

[alpine sorrel]

hell yeah got my shader working to show weapon/movement ranges and whatnot! It takes whatever random collection of tiles we want to shop, turns it into a teeny 1px = 1 tile heatmap where the color encodes what kind of edge it is (west edge, northwest corner, etc) and the shader turns it into a nice smooth gradient-having shape.

this might seem like a small thing but took me like a week of evenings after day job. It's the first time I've had to write a non-trivial shader from scratch so I'm pretty happy it works.

[little jetty]

that's nice! Is there a reason for selecting those colors?

[spring ermine]

Hell yeah! Shaders can be bloody awful, but they're so nice when you finally get them operational. I poured so much time into getting one operational for a game dev project in uni.

[digital maple]

That's a funky and very clever way to encode tiling.

[alpine sorrel]

Just posted an explanation here 🙂 => https://cohost.org/wick/post/3613700-what-do-the-yellowe

[mild jay]

Think I’ll just bookmark that for later…

[little jetty]

oh so the color choice was just because it was next in line for rgb! and you still have blue open for whatever else that may come up, maybe terrain modifiers like dangerous/difficult terrain?

[alpine sorrel]

exactly! and red is still technically mostly free since I'm only really checking if it's > 0

[near linden]

textures: the shader programmers' way of passing a multidimensional array into a program

[mild jay]

The things you can do with shaders get so funky and cool

[near linden]

one of my biggest achievements in shaders was using the bitwise access thing @alpine sorrel used here to delete more than 200 shaders and replace them with a single one

[alpine sorrel]

incredible, that must have felt great

[near linden]

yes, both from a code cleanliness pov and a "no more shader stutter" pov

[mild jay]

I was surprised to find there weren’t built in bitwise operations for shaders in ue5. It’s mostly visual scripting so I had to make a node for it

[near linden]

upside to that is that you're less likely to have nvidia randomly decide to break your game without telling you

[alpine sorrel]

Some fruits of my labor:

[tepid temple]

Dang, I just want to point out the ui is getting snazzy

[flat steppe]

Poggers, though I'm not going to lie I hope we'll get the ability to change the color for the "los shadow"

[alpine sorrel]

mm gonna say almost certainly not without modding on that one

[tired aurora]

Btw, I really love the "card" profile on top of the screen

[lone cliff]

@alpine sorrel sorry for ping but i found this and it sorta reminded me of the granny character
https://www.tumblr.com/queen-vv/734689234060001280

[alpine sorrel]

it's a great archtype 🙂

[lone cliff]

granny and nhp hehe

[alpine sorrel]

oh wow yeah that's a match lol

a pet peeve of mine though using random "bandits" as the generic bad guy. com'on! look at the world around you! it's so much more likely that the people coming to do violence to you are state-backed in some capacity!

just swap em out for idk some kind of IMF repo agents and boom you get infinitely more interesting worldbuilding plus don't feed into the "you need to have a gun to protect you from your neighbor" macho storyline

[lone cliff]

yee

[crisp pelican]

I like the Defias storyline in Vanilla WoW. They're a construction worker union who rebuilt Stormwind after it was razed in Warcraft 2. Then Stormwind fucked them over and didn't pay them, so they rebelled, and gradually got corrupt and became a general gang (IIRC with covert influence from the evil dragon Onyxia).

Then the government sends Pinkertons (i.e. You and your 5-man party) to bust up their shipbuilding plant and kill the union boss (And Cookie the chef).

Like, the Defias have VALID COMPLAINTS! But they're also robbing people and stuff and the State gets to crush them for the latter without addressing the former

[alpine sorrel]

that's pretty rad

[flat steppe]

Historically, at least in medieval Europe, bandits where Nobles stealing from their neighbours or raiders from another country doing that whole "going after soft targets"+ "getting food and money to sustain the war effort" , so arguably you did need a gun to defend yourself from neighbours, just that those neighbours where your lord's neighbours or your king's neighbours.

Practically and generally historically speaking, the best trained, most desperate and best equipped bandits were either state agents or former state agents.

[alpine sorrel]

I was talking about neighbor-as-in-Jerry-across-the-apartment's-hall

[flat steppe]

of course of course.

[naive yacht]

I think lancer's equivalent to historical bandits are generally orbital pirates

and interstellar pirates i suppose too

[crisp pelican]

Are there interstellar pirates? I thought Lancer piracy was just attacking ships shuttling things to and from orbit

[crisp pelican]

Say your prayers Kramer

[naive yacht]

yup, both orbital and insterstellar pirates

[tepid temple]

The Long Rim has a good bit on how pirates come from economic conditions

[naive yacht]

theres also a section on orbital and interstellar piracy in the core book

interstellar pirates tend to be rather sophisticated operations with a lot of material and informational support, usually the figureheads for an interstellar pirate group become legends in their own right in a sort of counter to how albatross patrols take on mythical traits

[alpine sorrel]

In Golden Flame also has a lot of good stuff about pirates, and I like how it describes the economic conditions that create the various groups of moonlighters and sunlighters

[crisp pelican]

(oh I forgot to mention the Defias also went big into piracy. hence the gigantic ship they're building)

[fickle pecan]

Finally took a sticker photo :)

[rapid seal]

I still need something good to put those on

[unborn glen]

If you got a fancy notepad or journal, i feel ISP-N fits really well on that

[torn kite]

I kinda wish I had magnets of shapes of theses so I can move them around!

[worn tiger]

oh man magnets would be sick

[alpine sorrel]

I mean joann's has thin magnet adhesive sheets you can cut to fit whatever shape you want.

Would be a very easy crafts project to convert these to a magnet

[mild jay]

That might be what I do. The problem I’ve been having is “what if I want it on something else later?”

[alpine sorrel]

Another wip! We've been working on what we've been thinking of as an onboard comp/con assist. Instead of having to move and then attack separately, you can pick your weapon, page around the map for a target, and automatically get the shortest path to a spot where you could hit that target from.
Once again we're just copying BG3 where you can move manually if you want but can also just click on an enemy and your character will run up and hit them with a sword all in one go.

[tepid temple]

Real game design hours

[alpine sorrel]

yeah lol it's like this is something you wouldn't even think of as a feature in the game but it's taking me a week to implement

[digital maple]

Huge QOL feature win. Honestly, seeing that kind of attention to detail and care for the UX makes me super excited.

[rain cipher]

Wait you don't have to move then attack in BG3? 😮

[fathom holly]

yea you can just click the enemy to move and attack them in the same action, assuming it's possible.

[glad lotus]

mood

Also I have to laugh - you've got this very cool gif demonstrating a very cool feature which ends with a robot running and jumping across the field to---- Miss!

[alpine sorrel]

The HMG life 😔

[shy spruce]

rngesus is a fickle motherfucker

that's why we savescum

[lone cliff]

speaking of savescumming how are you handling rng seeds?

when someone saves and reloads

[alpine sorrel]

We aren't yet — I haven't even started on the save system beyond following good data organization patterns for serialization

Idk I don't have strong opinions about savescumming. That's actually something I'd be willing to let players toggle as a gameplay option

But like I said I can't say for sure until I get my teeth into that system

[lethal leaf]

I am having trouble playing Lancer Tactics because my screen is too small.

Wait, I had Scale set to 150%. Damn.

Now it works.

[alpine sorrel]

Hive mind query: how many abilities proc some kind of movement before an action (including for NPCs)? So far I have:

• Skirmisher II: 2 spaces of free movement before/after skirmish
• Hunter I: 3 spaces of flight before aux melee attack

I feel like there's gotta be more but I have a head cold and none are coming to me.

[naive yacht]

Siege Specialist 2: Impact - you can get pushed 1 space in any direction after knocking back, prior to attacking with the cannon

Mimic Mesh is a reaction that resolves before the triggering action

[little jetty]

by extension, Overwatch which can trigger those talents

[alpine sorrel]

Great. I'm specifically grappling with abilities that are kind of entwined with standard movement; how to have the automatic attack path planner incorporate additional moves before an action.

Those three can be handled when the thing that triggers them occurs, so that's promising that they'll not be too complicated.

Wait with impact it's tricky. You like declare your attack and target, and then stuff gets moved around?

Or can you use it to get in range for the attack?

[naive yacht]

1/round, before rolling an attack with a Cannon, all characters adjacent to you must succeed on a Hull save or be knocked back by 1 space and knocked Prone. You are then pushed 1 space in any direction.

[quiet meteor]

I always interpreted as "before attack" meaning you can use it to enter range.

Otherwise Hunter 1 aka Lunge makes no sense

[alpine sorrel]

yeah for hunter that makes sense, but it feels like more is going on with Impact? they're phrased slightly differently ("before rolling an attack" vs "before the attack") but I don't know if that has mechanical implications

but good to know, I'll add Impact to my list of things that can be used to potentially get you in range

[naive yacht]

as i read it, all of the text has to resolve prior to rolling, but after the target selection?

presumably target has to be selected while in range?

not sure

[alpine sorrel]

I'll drop it in rules questions

I just had a brief moment of panic when I realized Jager Kunst exists but then calmed down when I remembered that it's its own action so I can handle it as a special case

[naive yacht]

xD

[alpine sorrel]

OK sounds like Impact is its own thing where you have to start the attack first and it procs

so it can get you out of engagement but not into range in the first place

[glad lotus]

Zheng's core passive is a free action, so that could be usable

Also Sunzi's slip trait

Pankrati 2 also gives you a free action charge

[alpine sorrel]

That's a category I hadn't considered... I've just been thinking about having the path planner look at things that specifically have to be a part of an action to proc, and leave things that you can trigger independently up to the player to use

[glad lotus]

Those are what I could think of, haha. They are technically separate actions, so I'm not sure how you'd want to handle those.

[alpine sorrel]

I guess it would be better UX to have the assistant incorporate those as well?

[glad lotus]

(Pankrati is not core or Long Rim, also)

[tepid temple]

This is a fringe case, but Spaceborn II could trigger off of a NPC overwatch or some other reaction when you try to move

[glad lotus]

Prooobably? It's a bit debatable I think. Zheng's core passive does other stuff too (deals damage to an adjacent enemy or terrain after the movement), so that probably gets tricky. Sunzi's slip is a straightforward teleport, at least.

[glad lotus]

Yeah, if you include effects like that there's stuff like Mimic Mesh or Reactive Weave also. I think that's probably out of scope though, since you're hoping for another character to take a certain action to trigger it.

I would think that's in the realm of the player tailoring their movement to try to trigger the effect

i.e. the "move and attack" planner can't account for it

[flint portal]

I believe it is also written like this to get around ordnance restrictions if you want to target the person adjacent to you

[naive yacht]

rules chat apparently had a FAQ on hand that detailed how it doesn't get around ordnance i think

[alpine sorrel]

https://lancer-faq.netlify.app/#d114ab the reverse

[naive yacht]

ohhh

i think its as i mentioned?

the engaged character isn't a valid target, so the push doesn't then make them a valid target

because you have to have chosen a valid target before siege spec 2's text resolves

[alpine sorrel]

oh I didn't read the second faq lol

ty

[flint portal]

oh right

nevermind me then !

[alpine sorrel]

If there's really only two abilities that give bonus movement immediately before a generic action type, I might handle them as special cases instead of building the comp/con attack assist to handle them. It's a super hard problem to be able to change movement types at any point during pathfinding.

Or we'll play the "modify mechanics as necessary for the adaptation" card

and just have them work differently

[placid panther]

Eyyy the stickers have made it to the sub-sub-arctic

[alpine sorrel]

oh dang that took a while! glad they made it 🙂

[unborn glen]

I was surprised how promptly they arrived in Australia

[broken sluice]

yo question, in lancer tactics demo every time i use the goblin tech reaction everything freezes, anyone know why?

[little jetty]

That's a known issue in the demo. The demo is probably not getting fixed anytime soon, if ever. The engine is getting rewritten so it will be addressed in future versions though

[alpine sorrel]

You can download the demo and it should be fixed there

[forest obsidian]

I bought a wood lathe so now I have a durrable good to put some stickers on.

[alpine sorrel]

Oh sick! That looks like a fun project, too!

[alpine sorrel]

OK nobody freak out, but I've been really inspired watching this project develop (https://discord.com/channels/426286410496999425/1175871353497338016) over on the Icon side of things and decided to sink a few hours into doing a lil investigatory development into what 3d map/2d mechs would look like in LT. Who knows if it'll come to anything but I thought I'd share.

[torn kite]

not bad actually

[alpine sorrel]

yeah I'm wary of making such a big shift at this point, but also am not immediately opposed

The big advantage would be finally getting things that are higher up to actually look like they're way higher up, something that you can't do without obscuring tiles behind the cliff which brings up its own host of problems if you're working with a fixed 2D camera angle.

[torn kite]

How much more work WOULD it be for assets?

[alpine sorrel]

Mhmm mhmm good question. I've only done one small 3d game ever before so I'm not totally sure. Some things would be easier like cliffs will go from being huge pains to near trivial.

It might end up being a style question; I don't know if we could produce a game at the same level of quality in 3D as we could in 2D. It'd mostly be cubes and pixel art billboards as seen above... which feels like baby steps compared to other 3D games I see?

[flint portal]

Tbh i don't really mind the pixel art with 3d graphics personally ? could probably blend in with some effects on top to make them stand out less ?

[alpine sorrel]

An example of it done really well is this game our artist Martina is doing environment art for. It just looks incredible : https://youtu.be/vSXmqYjSSlc?si=t28bQ9ToKCuj1q0q

You can hardly even tell sprites are billboarding, but that requires front/sides/back versions of the assets

And 4x the angles means 4x the art budget

I guess it helps they have a fixed camera angle

[deft rapids]

i mean. 2d sprites with 3d environments is an absolute classic

it's good enough for DOOM, after all

[little jetty]

Wildermyth 😌

[cold timber]

My lancer group started as a friday night wildermyth and hangouts night. Love that game.

It's a great example of a modern 3d tactics game with a mostly free camera and 2d sprites, though it doesn't do anything with elevation. I think it would work well with that style though.

[shy spruce]

speeeeeen

while i do like the idea of having the option to rotate the camera, over the course of like, 500~ hours of SRW where the option was available, i can count the amount of times i did it on purpose on one hand, just because a couple of recurring maps made it a pain to see behind terrain sometimes

...actually, my biggest annoyance with using that (and the zoom option) was that there was no ability to reset it to the stage default. idk if that'd be a big pain to implement as a button, but my Aggressive Desire To See Things As Intended lizard brain would super appreciate it existing.

[digital maple]

I think the 2d/3d mix is dope as hell, and personally I wouldn't mind if the sprites only had a single static angle. With good art direction, ultra low-poly stuff looks great.

I can imagine lot of potential strengths in having fully and effortlessly dynamic terrain (like those cliffs).

So my instincts say the gameplay advantage of 3D maps would be hugely exciting, and at least worth investigating further. Of course, that is solely my opinion, I don't know if everyone or anyone else feels that way, etc. etc.

[lone cliff]

yeah 2d "pop ups" on a 3d world can work

but you do have to consider youll have to have some even rudimentary low poly 3d modeling for the environment

cause unless you want all you buildings and stuff to have the same shape

youll want some not cube shapes in there

i dunno if your budget can make room for that, thats something youll have to decide

personally if the pixel art/3d blend is executed well then id be for it

[cold timber]

I mean, it's lancer, and all the objects were going to be 2d sprites anyway. you could get away with just a heightmap in 3d with everything being 2d sprite popups, similar to games like disgaea or final fantasy tactics. Any cover is supposed to be targetable and have a set size, after all, the only difference between objects and characters is that objects dont get to take turns

[gaunt jungle]

Video I was randomly watching a few days ago seems potentially relevant
https://youtu.be/20KHNA9jTsE

Was basically a developer working on terrain generation for their game but was unhappy how procedurally generated terrain often lacked that artistic flair they wanted

[alpine sorrel]

Ooo that's both a great video and also intimidating because it's such a big can of worms 😅

[alpine sorrel]

This is the issue exactly. I'm not confident that we could execute well with so little 3d experience.

We could take a swing and probably get it OK but it's not gonna be on the same level as something like phantom brigade or townscaper.

But those might be too high of standards to hold ourselves to, and we could focus on getting something cohesive with the resources we have. Hm.

[tepid temple]

Yeah, I think it really depends on what your standards for "acceptable" are, because there's this sort of space with 3D models where things can be a little crude but charming, and it works, but it might not be what you had in mind for the project

Whereas with pixel art, I get the impression you can get a lot more return for your effort?

[agile lagoon]

There's a WFC library named DeBroglie that I've managed to have running in Godot before, comes with a lot of options and constraint based generation so that maps with specific features can be built and handles both 2D and 3D, but I work mostly in C# rather than gdscript so that might be a technical hindrance.

[alpine sorrel]

C# isn't a problem, but looks like that's only for 3.x and LT is on 4. There's other WFC libs out there tho

[agile lagoon]

Fair. I'm using it in 4.1 at the moment but as a nuget dependency

Also hi, wanted to say really looking forward to seeing this. It's looking great 🙂

[mild jay]

WFC is cool but ime takes a fair bit of work to set up

[uncut scaffold]

is the prototype instantly skipping dialogue and acting like you're mashing the left mouse button making it unplayable a known problem?

or did i stumble into one of those lovely bugs no one can reproduce but me again?

... or is it freaking out because i'm still using a 1360x768 monitor on the grounds that it hasn't died yet

[alpine sorrel]

Nope, that's a new one. Are you playing the downloadable version or in-browser?

Also: huh, mech shadows. The feet don't line up right but it might be fine as an impressionistic effect.

[uncut scaffold]

Either does it, actually...

(And yes I made sure AHK wasn;'t running, haha)

[flint portal]

This does look sick tho

[alpine sorrel]

I don't know if I have any guidance for this, sorry. It sounds like a "godot interacting with your system" problem, but it's not promising that it's in both as the browser is on 3.x and the downloadable is 4, so a major version upgrade wasn't enough to fix it.

[uncut scaffold]

Also I've run other godot stuff and not had pro... blems... wait a sec

i just realized i have a controller plugged in and didn't test unplugging it

YEP

That was it

[worn tiger]

this looks awesome

[alpine sorrel]

ok I need to put this down and take a real weekend day, I'm getting too pigeonholed following the dopamine.

[little jetty]

Is LT your day job for the moment or do you also have another day job?

follow your passions etc etc but definitely take care of yourself
says someone who went to bed past midnight while "trying to fix her sleep schedule"

[alpine sorrel]

I'm 2 weeks LT // 1 week webdev day job, alternating

this upcoming week is a second LT week

[digital maple]

HONESTLY just stopping there with some sprites for objects and getting the combat mechanics in, this would already be an amazingly cool game. I definitely don't think you need to be holding yourself to Phantom Brigade or Townscaper standards.

I hope you enjoy your weekend day(s)! It is good that you are being aware of the need for rest.

[tired aurora]

I agree, if you got a framework down and have the game easy to mod. The Lancer community would do the rest

[alpine sorrel]

It's going well. I've only had like a day and a half to work on it this week and most of that was spent getting the cursor raycasting to the appropriate tile. I feel super vindicated having kept the game logic very separate from the display.

We also considered and decided against supporting overhangs (being able to walk under bridges) and stacking flying units for the time being. It is in most ways still a 2D game being rendered in 3D.

[little jetty]

is there a reason why the mourning cloak is moving zigzag?

[deft rapids]

if you walk without rhythm, you won't attract the worm

[cold timber]

Oh this looks so dang good, I can't believe you implemented this much already!

[torn kite]

gonna be honest, having run several 3D maps with overhangs and bridges, they... didn't bring much.

It adds a level of complexity that's not super interesting to interact with in Lancer.

Overhangs like that usually presumes that you'll have several 'floors', even if one floor is just 'the path that goes below the bridge'. It blocks line of sight, it's pretty! It's neat that things go under another thing!
Tactically, it's about the same as having a really big object in the way: It blocks line of sight and is a cool cover.

But it IS very pretty.

[tired aurora]

Lancer tactics does not use diagonal movement iirc

[torn kite]

ALSO that 3d display is looking ballers, olive.

[alpine sorrel]

It takes a little zigzag step on its second move because the berserker is threatening that diagonal space next to it and if the MC stepped there it'd be end-of-move, so the pathfinder goes around.

It's on our list to make threatened spaces visible

[little jetty]

wait i thought you could walk past an enemy as long as you start movement outside of threat range

[alpine sorrel]

That's good to hear. Hopefully mapbuilders can get the same effect — multiple "levels" of action that's going on — with multiple high levels and just have gaps between them. Maybe if we implement the standard jump action, gaps like that become easily traversable enough that a bridge is uneccessary.

[little jetty]

oh shoot equal size stops movement too

[torn kite]

Yeah. Don't get me wrong, overhangs are cool as heck! As are bridges! But they are, basically, tactically:

Force a secondary 'map' below what they are hanging above, block line of sight mostly from certain angles and make line of sight a bit of a pain.

Now, /tunnels/, that's the really hard one and is much different tactically.

[little jetty]

haha I've been playing it wrong for so long lmao

[alpine sorrel]

I think it's one of the most common rules my table forgets about the most too 😅

[torn kite]

oh man gosh

yeah same.

(it also bring to question some rules of some tags, like Ordinance, but I've played it as 'no different than cover')

[little jetty]

i can't believe I'm learning basic lancer mechanic from lancer tactics channel

[torn kite]

I've also had a secondary issue with Overhangs and Tall Buildings I've worked with 3d, is that it also made flying /really/ strong if you make 3D maps a certain way.

[alpine sorrel]

oh?

how so?

[torn kite]

Yeah, one logical extension I've had of a 3D map is that it was a bunch of catwalks, and between them was further down below a floor. It made flying very good, that's normal.

However, if the terrain is uneven enough -- like if you're in a city, with size 3 buildings spotting the area, it's easy for a flier to go up there.
Similarly, with overhangs, going up and down for a Flier is very easy, or just peeking in and out for shots, or hanging somewhere weird beneath the bridge.

But mainly, when you work with very topographic maps that take full advantage of height, unless you have ways to make that easy to deal with for people that don't have flight, it makes flight very powerful to go from 'ground 1' to 'that height 4 building's roof'.

In short, 3d rules, but if you use TOO many 3d topography in the map challenges, it raises Flight's worth quite a lot.

I had to learn to make it 'yeah awesome to have' instead of 'mandatory'

also yay my 3d map experience being useful

Honestly, a lot of the problems I've had will be a lot lessened with Lancer Tactics, since it handles a lot of things automatically like 'line of sight'.

[alpine sorrel]

god line of sight is so hard, even with the computer. It's what put the nail in the coffin for hexes, and is the reason we've gotta use c# (so the calculations are fast enough), which is why I couldn't update the web-browser build for the demo

http://www.adammil.net/blog/v125_roguelike_vision_algorithms.html

it's big field of possible algos with different pros and cons. Most research has been done on square grids, which is why hexes are out

maybe I could try raycasts again now that we're in 3D... but I don't have much faith they'll be better than an algorithmic approach like those

The problem is that you gotta do some sort of calc from your spot to every other possible voxel on the map, which is hefty but fine until you start needing previews of what you can see/attack from various points as you move your highlighted tile around quickly

the only way to do THAT fast is by warming up/baking a cache for every voxel about whether it can see every other voxel

and you can't do it all up-front before the game starts because terrain destruction and line of sight blocking deployables exist

anyway

that's my mini line-of-sight rant

oh wait no I have more

When I looked to our main reference of Baldur's Gate III about how they handle this, I came to the horrifying realization that they don't do this "who can you attack from this point" preview. They give you a fake one!

[torn kite]

oh gosh

[torn kite]

Yeah line of sight's been a thing to read about. I remember when I read about how the original XCOM in the 90s used to do it and it's... kinda of fascinating.

[alpine sorrel]

there's this white circle on the outside which is the max possible range, sorta, except it gets larger and smaller depending on the relative elevation between the character and your cursor

[torn kite]

Right

[alpine sorrel]

and something can be well within the white circle and not be in LOS! And the game doesn't know whether it is or not until you hover over the target to ask about it!

you can tell because sometimes there's a jitter as it calculates various possible routes before telling you that the attack is blocked

which I've used at least once to move to a place I wasn't supposed to be able to fly to by very quickly moving my mouse and clicking before it changed its mind

This is the only reasonable way to do it in a gridless infinite world like BG3, so good on them for figuring that out, but it doesn't help us

ok that's it for real, I'm done

[torn kite]

Nah, this is fascinating stuff

https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Line_of_sight

What it ALSO did was having a voxel system under the hood for actual line of fire.

https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=LOFTEMPS.DAT

Old XCOM that is.

[alpine sorrel]

oh interesting, thanks, I'll take a look at those

[little jetty]

it's wild to imagine that this is hard, I thought los and cover would be some of the simpler things to code in

[torn kite]

Old XCOM also basically did balistic calculation for bullet trajectories.

[little jetty]

what

[torn kite]

I've tinkered with Open XCOM mapping and what it basically means, is that -- say, a Signpost is something like this in the voxel, basically a line, then 3 cubes.

Objects are assigned what the 'voxel' is and that's what makes them 'solid' and able to be impacted by bullets.

Better representation, thanks to Open XCOM:
https://64.media.tumblr.com/72bf3a66d5338b6ac5fb221d61abe49a/tumblr_mum3g6iLb71qdvhtvo1_1280.jpg

So when a soldier fires, the game basically takes a snap shot from the soldier's position, then calculates according to the aim and direction, if it impacts an obstacle.

It's kind of wild.

this concludes my side gushing about UFO Defense' engine, ahem

[agile lagoon]

Yeah. Every time I've tried doing something tactics based in 3D I've always hit a brick wall with how to handle LOS.

Cause there's no shortcuts for it like with 2d where you've got recursive shadowcasting or visibility fans... you're instead stuck with mostly casting to every point in your sphere for whether it can be seen or not.

[alpine sorrel]

What I ended up doing is using the permissive fov algo from that adammil link (it's symmetrical which is a requirement in lancer; that XCOM link spends a lot of time talking about the edge cases where that's not the case with their method). I run it at every z level as a 2D slice, and count any voxel at you can see at a higher z as being able to see all the ones below it.

I also store all these y/n "can this tile see this tile" flags in a big single int for each row (which puts a limit on maps to be max 60 tiles wide) because that's just under the biggest int with 64 bits. I can then quickly retrieve the appropriate bool with bitwise math.... I should probably write a backer update about this, it's kinda a wall of text without pictures 😅

Hmm on writing this, I could probably skip half the work since it's symmetrical; I could check if we've already calculated the reverse before running the algo on a new tile 🤔

[little jetty]

idk how useful this is, but in relational database we create an intermediate object if there's a many to many relationship, which points to each of the table as well as any data about the relationship itself.

Would that make sense here? Like creating line of sight objects for the relationships between every characters

many differences between the two worlds so idk how applicable this is

[alpine sorrel]

That's a bit like what the cache I mentioned is. A series of arrays that contain the bool for whether two tiles can see each other

[little jetty]

oh yeah arrays are probably way more useful for this

[pastel flax]

Considering the average sitrep is at max, what 40 either side?

i think 60 wide max doesn't sound like a huge limitation

[little jetty]

I think one of the demo missions is huge

[pastel flax]

I mean my gut instinct is to try to use a Long, but idk if you need negative integers for each tile too.

anyway this feels like backseat devving

compelling updates, Olive.

[alpine sorrel]

Oh no, Water 😐 😐 😐

I don't want to do water physics

maybe there's something that just scans the edges of every body of water and if a dam is breached

• the whole body of water lowers down to the lowest enclosed level
• the entire body of water turns into "mud" blocks so they can stay in place without it being weird

and being able to fly once you enter the water if you have an EVA system presents some problems with the pathfinder

[little jetty]

what if the lake walls were just thicker

so you don't have to worry about water flowing down

[alpine sorrel]

I don't think I can guarantee that for all maps

maybe a map can just have a "water level" you can set and everything below that is in water automatically

[little jetty]

or maybe they're only at lowest elevation? This does turn off some potential though

[alpine sorrel]

yeah, no alpine lakes

[little jetty]

oh i was thinking like, water purification plant where there are large objects containing water

[alpine sorrel]

and also I could see wanting other types of liquids like lava or acid that you can stand in

[little jetty]

but that's probably better treated as an object that does something when destroyed rather than actual walls with water in it

[tired aurora]

I don't think I have ever seen any GM done water physics XD. The best way to do it is make it an event trigger that spawn based on what happens

[little jetty]

there is also the whole "lancer doesn't try to simulate reality" thing

[tired aurora]

Like if the GM wants, they would have to put the water block where they want, physically then "spawn" them when an event trigger, like "water container object destroyed"

But in my opinion, just make it water puddle, by making a block with its top part being water texture

[glad lotus]

Yeah, every time I've seen water on a map it's either:

• a river or lake. Covered by the everything lower than X is water approach.
• puddles etc modeled as difficult terrain. Just a texture on a tile, no need for enclosed liquids.

I wouldn't expect you to implement Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress here. 😉

[little jetty]

are we going to get an underwater temple level where everything sucks?

[tired aurora]

Hmm, 0 g combat huh? That would definitely be a pain in the ass to make

[little jetty]

olive yesterday: line of sight sucks
0G combat:

[alpine sorrel]

I think if we go with the "you can set everything below Z to be water" route we actually get zero-g for free; just set that Z to be the maximum map height and have the graphics be space-y instead of underwater-y.

[little jetty]

that's hilarious

i love how things just work out sometimes

Here's space map
fills the map with water

[tired aurora]

Water and vacuum are functionally the same 😛

[worn tiger]

everyone has zero-g, it came free with your water implementation

[flint portal]

Oh wait, i'm realizing but

This would probably also be what's used for Tesseract right

[alpine sorrel]

Sorta; I have it so deployable entities can project zones of terrain (like a smoke grenade), so tesseract would be a weird shape that checks the same "slow without eva" bool that water terrain does.

[flint portal]

That's fair, I guess i'm mentioning it because it does allow people to fly also which I feel would work a bit like how bodies of water do in Lancer

[tired aurora]

"Witness, my power over the fundamental law of reality, my control over gravity itself!"
Summon a water column

[alpine sorrel]

got multi-tile terrain objects importing correctly, even when rotated; those big rocks are 2x2x2 and the hangars are 2x3x2.

[final onyx]

Hot damn that isometric rotation

Gotta put that shot in the trailer

[alpine sorrel]

it's amazing how much visual lifting that shader that puts a chunky-pixel border on the top edges of things is doing. Wish I could take credit for it but it was one of the first ones I found on searching godotshaders.com: https://godotshaders.com/shader/3d-pixel-art-outline-highlight-shader-adapted-for-in-editor-perspective/

[torn kite]

oooooh

Are the isometric 3d thing actual 3d meshe?

[unborn glen]

I feel like this game is gonna be my chill out game when it comes out

Oh yeah, i wanted to ask how or when do we put pilot names forward?

[alpine sorrel]

You mean as the KS rewards? You should have gotten an email with a survey from Backerkit. I can dig up the page to resend it if you can't find yours.

[unborn glen]

Let me have a looksie

Nevermind, i have the memory of a tadpole

Cool, my niece's b-day gift is ready to go

Top billing as "cool uncle" here i come.

[flint portal]

this genuinely looks so good

[mild jay]

Those hangers look real nice

[shy spruce]

[torn kite]

they do

[unborn glen]

I like the lighting

The scene feels very clear

[alpine sorrel]

https://kenney-assets.itch.io/space-kit

[glad lotus]

urge to make some isometric game rising

[alpine sorrel]

do it

again this whole 3D thing was kicked off by being inspired by the IsoCON project here

[pastel flax]

I don't even know where to begin with the 3D isometrics

[mild jay]

Both this and isocon have been very motivational to follow

[uncut scaffold]

my GotY this year (Cassette Beasts) did sprites running around on 3d tiles, so it can definitely work :P

[tired aurora]

Cassette Beasts is gorgeous ngl. And its application of the media, especially how it use the Archangel is genius

[alpine sorrel]

getting the range indicators working again

[alpine sorrel]

fun fact, Cassette Beasts is one of the most recent breakout games also made in Godot. I should really play it...

[tired aurora]

It's worth it for the music alone

[torn kite]

oh this is looking good

[marsh sky]

It’s looking so good

[dull bay]

Cassette beasts is phenomenal

[alpine sky]

Oh damn didn’t know we switched to isometric

[cold timber]

Switching to 3D like this might add a lot of complications but the results are stunning. And the game logic should almost entirely play out the same, unless you weren't thinking of tracking elevation. It's not quite the same, but similar to my experience running Lancer tabletop with isometric graphics, it just adds something fantastic to the presentation.

One thing I've learned from that is you might want to consider giving characters some sort of occlusion effect. Something that shows through when the current camera angle hides a token behind objects or terrain. A glowing outline that draws on top of the world would work, that's what grapejuice's isomertic module does. Honestly it's not nearly as necessary here as it is in foundry; since you're actually creating a 3d world you can rotate the camera (the camera movement is so good, btw, it feels just right), but it might help in some circumstances. It could even just be something temporary, bound to a hotkey, to give the player another tool for understanding where everything is.

[alpine sorrel]

got vertical walls for the range viewer working ++ inset the border from the edge of tiles a bit

[cold timber]

visually it's a little more busy than the last pic you shared, but I think it's worth it? the style is impeccable. the way slopes are given a bounding box? delicious.

[alpine sorrel]

seeing them side by side, you're not wrong

there's more lines without necessarily more information. hrm.

[torn kite]

this is looking good

[cold timber]

I guess... the first way feels more like a game UI, the second feels more like it's mech sensors displaying your options, scanning terrain. It's more diagetic, slightly.

[little jetty]

how reasonable would it be to have a top down view when doing an aoe targeting?

easier to see but also like... this is probably like a whole new feature level work

[alpine sorrel]

we've discussed it, I don't think it'd be too hard on the technical side. 3D means we can just move the camera. who knows how readable it'll be tho

ok, here's moving around WITH the walls and inset:

and here's without:

in motion, I think the former gives a better intuitive sense of how large the area is because there's fewer interruptions to the color

but I'll keep an eye on that

[magic cave]

The latter does hit our eyes a little weirdly.

[cold timber]

Yeah in motion I more strongly appreciate the former. It feels more like a solid area conforming to and smothering the terrain, while the later is broken up a bit. I see a few moments where it's even a bit harder to read which squares are in the area because of the walls not being colored, isolating one edge square. It's only a problem when it's in motion, but it does feel like those edge cases take my brain a few more milliseconds to register than they would in the walls+inset case. It's not enough to case actual problems; I'm not pulling the trigger until I've stopped moving around.. but it's enough to tell me which one I prefer

[naive yacht]

yeah i agree, former seems to be more readable and natural

[lone cliff]

i like the former as well

[unborn glen]

Former is good

[marsh sky]

i also like the former

[shy spruce]

I'm used to the latter from other games, so I'm kinda confused by the former, like is it just for a vibe thing or will walls be targetable?

[tired aurora]

prob, there are a lot of effects in Lancer that could affect terrains (Like the underslung from Siege Specialist)

[shy spruce]

ahhhh

[lusty quiver]

Goblin sticker finally has a home on my boyfriend's laptop

[alpine sorrel]

getting a movement line working in 3D

I should really write the KS update announcing 3D, it's probably about time 😅

[deft rapids]

Terrify everyone, make the subject line "we're changing engines!"

[tepid temple]

So you officially feeling good about this direction?

[alpine sorrel]

Yeah

[torn kite]

Hurray!

A brand new dimension!

[little jetty]

5d chess with time travel but lancerfied

[tepid temple]

(Happy late birthday!)

[alpine sorrel]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wickworks/lancer-tactics/posts/3996281

[final onyx]

Aww yeah

I hope you're enjoying the project Olive

[alpine sorrel]

yeah I am! it's fun to learn new things! I just hope we are able to finish on time and budget

[tepid temple]

Full vote of confidence here

[final onyx]

I mean my view has been no project is ever within budget and time but its how well you stick the landing once you go past those :p

When i did my CS course the number they gave me for project that ended in budget/schedule was like 14%

[gaunt jungle]

When I'm asked for a time estimate for any piece of software it's like [reasonable amount of time] +- 2,500%

Software progress makes as much sense as the windows progress bar that says "in 5 years" when copying a small file

[mild jay]

Nothing is ever as long/short as I think it’s going to be

I’ve had big bug lists knocked out in an afternoon, and things I thought would be an afternoon take two weeks

[little jetty]

the current project I'm doing I thought would take couple days
I think I'm like, two weeks in now and realized it's still got some ways to go

[cold timber]

And of course the 90-90 rule... the first 90% takes 90% of the time, the last 10% takes another 90% of the time

[unborn glen]

The 3d gives really cool feel to the game, like a sci-fi pop up book

[lone cliff]

Pop up book aesthetic? 👀

Not too serious but

You could even do a fun vfx animation thing where when you start a battle theres like a holographic display thing fzzting on and then going from a monochrome color to full color when the battle starts

If you were still going for the "player character is an nhp helping characters" then that would be a fun way of visualizing the battlescape and explains the 2d sprites on simplified 3d landscape diegetically

[alpine sorrel]

I've talked with Carpenter a fair bit about how diagetic we want the UI to be, with no strong decision. Even if it comes at the cost of legibility, it can be fun to go full-bore on "the UI is in-universe" — High Fleet is my favorite recent example of a game doing this:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1084264033483501649/1188254482388230164/Screenshot_20231223-145833.png?ex=6599db39&is=65876639&hm=a0b7ed38f139873eb7cccde16b5714031a6a835611b746f6193eb219a4664d14&

Mobius Front is another good example that doesn't go quite as hard but I think struck a good balance:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1084264033483501649/1128545721096884275/image.png?ex=659e1f1b&is=658baa1b&hm=c287adb4c2790f1a0ea171735c253acd8e759ab3bd282e456eb9d89674fceed0&

(I particularly love the printed-out paper style for the tooltip)

I think we need to get a bit deeper into the writing part of the game (to sort out more of what we're doing with NHPs, for example) before we can commit to diagetic UI.

The call will bleed over into the rest of the UI e.g. how we frame the downtime menu. Is it a computer console where you check messages / make work orders (heaven will be mine)? Is it a city map where you click on various buildings/characters (banner saga, darkest dungeon)?

And where do we draw the line about what's diagetic and what's not? BG3 has diagetic downtime and party management as you run around your camp having HR meetings with characters as you shuffle them around + mess with their inventories (ostensibly bags they're carrying), but the character sheets and levelups are in a weird subspace.

(with the cool and notable exception of tadpole powers, which are framed as the parasite physically growing to take up more space across your brain)

I don't think these are load-bearing decisions so I'm probably overthinking it lol

[little jetty]

you did say the frontend is completely detached from your backend, right? You probably have a lot of time to make the decision

[alpine sorrel]

Well as detached as it possibly can be. But yeah, it's a category that can be kicked down the road till way later

Basic box menus can bring us a long way

[lone cliff]

Mech Engineer also has a pretty diegetic UI too, with a lot of fun clunky looking ui elements that you drag and drop with like manipulating cartridges

[tepid temple]

You could always take after the demo and continue using the Lancer house style, which honestly isn't a bad choice with how snazzy it is

[lone cliff]

@alpine sorrel honestly you could probably emulate the Mech Engineer loadout screen for setting up mechs

you drag and drop modules into the slots on the mec

(you also can shift click them to slot them automatically in an empty slot too)

[alpine sorrel]

I think that kind of mech slot UI works better when:

• you have a fixed number of slots on a mech (lancer's SP + extra mount CBs makes it variable)
• which slot you put things in matters (MechWarrior armor placement, Celestial Bodies powered components)
• the stuff you put on the mech is the whole story (your pilot talents are half of your character, and I've never liked how in Comp/Con you have to switch between mech and pilot screens)

It's a fantastic UI scheme for selling the fantasy, but not all game mechanics support it as making sense

If we end up doing mech sprite customization I guess it could end up looking like this though

[lone cliff]

oh yeah, definitely, but the drag and drop stuff is fun, and theres still things you can do to account for adding/removing/modifying slots

eg. setting up the locations of slots ahead of time even if theyre unused, so when the player adds a new slot due to core bonus/etc theyre accounted for in the UI

having pilot talent stuff be only a click away (eg a button to pull up a window) would help too

equipment ofc wont be feasible for this kind of UI

which slot you put things in matters (MechWarrior armor placement, Celestial Bodies powered components)
in mech engineer it doesnt really matter which part goes in which slot either, but it does help tickle the brain making things symmetrical or match up some arbitrary scheme in your mind

[alpine sorrel]

Interesting, I should play it or more realistically watch a LP

[lone cliff]

extra little details can help a lot too, for example the main, heavy, aux/aux, main/aux, or flex weapon mounts and weapon "cards" all having different sprites

for example, the two cannons i have in the upper right and upper left are the same weapon type, but the upper left one one is a "size+" weapon that deals more damage and takes more resources

[lone cliff]

theres a free demo on steam but this is the video that i watched that goes over the gist of the general gameplay (theres a fair amount he gets inaccurate because the game is really fucking obscure and obtuse about its mechanics and stuff)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNwidEf_dCU

[lone cliff]

this can also help make integrated mounts feel more special, like giving each a custom slot look (eg. sherman laser fancy tech/laser doodads vs raleigh's mjolnir having revolver aesthetics

would obvs be more overhead in terms of spriting

[toxic badge]

really late to the party re: line of sight algorithms, but there's an interesting take on this from id software's 2016 DOOM: https://youtu.be/2KQNpQD8Ayo?t=2222 (link is timestamped)
there's some pathfinding stuff in there too, but the most relevant bit is about how they iteratively update point-to-point visibility caches on a repeating loop over the course of many frames for performance reasons, which seems like it might be good enough even in gdscript (maybe that's optimistic), but anyway would help with dynamic changes to the environment (destructible terrain, deployable cover, etc). (direct link to that part: https://youtu.be/2KQNpQD8Ayo?t=2367)
One option would be to pull similar bullshit to how baldur's gate 3 does it, where the preview wouldn't necessarily be accurate (it would be based on the most recent update to the cache) but the actual action itself would behave accurately to the world (i.e. showing you that you can throw with a clear path, and then having your javelin or whatever bonk into a wall). Since the delay between updates would probably be pretty small, I think most of the time the preview would be accurate 🤔
And of course, this is all probably a moot point by now 😅 Sounds like you already are thinking about / are using visibility caches, and I guess it's probably performant enough the way it is 👍

[digital maple]

Hell yeah, I loved the Mobius Front UI, I thought it had really good clarity of purpose and interaction combined with some very nice skeuomorphic material rendering. (also, what a paradox of a game, to have such high production values yet such jank...)

Anyway, uh, I'm sure whatever you and the team come up with will be cool! It's nice to know there's serious thought and consideration going in to so many of the game elements.

Also all the recent 3D tweaks and features and stuff are looking incredible. I didn't use to check this thread regularly but I've found myself visiting more often. Love all the gifs and mini-updates.

[crimson merlin]

At the risk of adding more work for Olive; 3D models for Lancer Tactics? https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2918874293

[alpine sorrel]

lol zero percent chance

we could not make it look good

[digital maple]

My guess was going to be "that's definitely for sure adding a ton more work" but also I don't actually know what godot's 3D tools are like. But I'm not holding my breath.

[agile lagoon]

There's that uncanny valley between sprites and 3D that's the doom of many a project

[alpine sorrel]

exactly

[crimson merlin]

Sure is. That's why I do the models cartoony for TTS. You're not generally looking up close. Better for silhouette identification

[alpine sorrel]

yeah you've done a great job with these! I don't mean that they're not good, I love the style.

they make me think of papercraft versions

[crimson merlin]

Exactly what I was going for

[alpine sorrel]

I just don't have confidence we could pull of a full-3D game stylistically as well as we could a billboard mix

maybe another team could someday

or like mods, gods willing

though I did say that about 3D in the first place, and I was wrong there

[mild jay]

I think a good thing to think about as an example is the old sprite based Pokémon vs any 3d Pokémon game

Imagine if the 3d Pokémon models didn’t have animations, they just got transformed the way the 2d sprites were in the 2d games

[crimson merlin]

Very much so. When you have simple sprites your brain fills in the gaps. The closer to real you go the more likely it will be to be uncanny if you miss

[agile lagoon]

Expectations of animations for everything, weapon loadouts... etc. Yeah. 3D is the uncanny valley of doom

[mild jay]

Yeah bingo. Not impossible to make still 3d look good, but it is more work

[tepid temple]

Something like these is at once incredibly cool and unimaginable amounts of work I reckon (credit to /u/QuadOrion)

[mild jay]

Closest I can think of is darkest dungeon ii’s blending of dd1 animation style with normal animations

[tepid temple]

I have to resist the urge to do a potshot here, because the 3D models have so much less character than the Gen V animated sprites

[mild jay]

Well, the point was less about one or the other being better and more that they not on equal grounds and can’t solve problems the same way

[crimson merlin]

Dang, those are awesome. Were they made for something specific do you know?

[tepid temple]

I think they had planned to do a full set for all the mechs. I also remember there being someone who wanted to do a Lancer videogame, but Massif declined a partnership so they opted to make their own mecha game, but I'm not sure if they're one and the same

[alpine sorrel]

OK so I'm second-guessing my kneejerk "no" reaction because I've been wrong a lot recently vis-a-vis 3D and I've been charmed by your papercraft style. I just threw a few into my art test scene to see how it'd look in-engine

[crimson merlin]

o_o

[alpine sorrel]

it's like not as strong a "no" as I'd originally thought?

I think I need to think about it

[crimson merlin]

Well: The ones I've already done are free to use.

[alpine sorrel]

if we decided that 3D models are something we'd be interested in pursuing we'd absolutely pay you for 'em

but I need to talk to Carpenter about it

[agile lagoon]

Oooo. Very cool

[crimson merlin]

It's worth noting they're a bit junky if you look at them from below, but I don't think that's an issue for you XD

I can see the edgesplit that TTS needs to display hard edges is doing weird stuff in Galdot. *stops analysing for now

[alpine sorrel]

I don't know what an edgesplit is but you might be seeing the fullscreen pixel-edge shader shader I have for terrain

with and without that shader

anyway thank you for reaching out with this! very cool, I feel like I'm being dragged kicking and screaming into 3D land. I'll DM you after we've had a chance to digest it as a possibility

[tepid temple]

I double-checked and they indeed were https://www.reddit.com/r/LancerRPG/comments/n94yoq/mech_3d_model_pack/

[alpine sorrel]

Oh, that was for a lancer video game too? that's very weird that they felt the 3rd party license wasn't good enough.

[tepid temple]

Rare instance of "Fortune favors the bold" when it comes to copyright law here

[glad lotus]

I was about to agree with you re: the 3rd party license, but I wonder if that actually predates the license.

[minor trench]

@alpine sorrel I hadn't been following Lancer much due to life being busy, but I just wanna say that the recent update made me really happy that you had an happy accident falling into the 3D mapping.

[glad lotus]

Mobile reddit is only giving me "3 years ago" as a timestamp, but that's the right ballpark.

[minor trench]

Sounds like you really did a good job keeping this project modular and flexible for yourself .

[tepid temple]

Weird, considering this was posted 2 years ago

But yeah, they were linked the 3rd party license

(Well, 2 going on 3, weird that mobile rounds up while desktop doesn't)

[unborn glen]

Tortuga, my love

[flat steppe]

Just wanted to wish everyone here a happy new year and a happy 3d maps

[shy spruce]

realized the round stickers were just the right size to go on my 2ds' clear shell

[shut horizon]

Oh, nice. That's a good fit

[alpine sorrel]

Very satisfying

[lone cliff]

old lady mech pilot from the trailer inspired this sprite im making for some custom Mech Engineer portrait sprites

[alpine sorrel]

Art test with 3D vs sprite billboard environmental props

[tepid temple]

Those trees…

[little jetty]

i love the sense of scale

[lone cliff]

yeeee

[glad lotus]

Are any of those trees 3D? Billboard looks great for any props which are 1 square and you can't stand on, tbh.

The trees look pretty much perfect

[crimson merlin]

The bottom trees are billboards and the top ones are models

[wraith cradle]

I really like both of them, but I do think the top ones fit slightly better.

[tepid temple]

I honestly had trouble telling the top ones weren't also billboards.

[worn tiger]

the top ones look super good

they mesh really naturally with the surrounding terrain

[alpine sorrel]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1043983236138803311/1191992114138067014/billboard_vs_mesh_trees_short.gif?ex=65a7742a&is=6594ff2a&hm=ef08a72e18ca510b044b7f744bc30857898e24d0041aa77dd8bfc8a22b42204d&

here it is with rotation

Even seeing this, I don't have a strong opinion which direction we'll go yet.

[worn tiger]

tree dimensional threes look very good

[alpine sorrel]

3d tree pros: it makes the mechs pop out more (though that might partially be the difference in lightness in this test)
3d tree cons: they look... more lifeless to me? it's clearer that they're just polygons. Could possibly be improved by adding leaves via shader magic

[smoky glacier]

making them sprite billboards would also allow for easier custom maps, right?

[little jetty]

I think it's pretty cool to have everything 3d except the mechs, since you have 3d buildings already

[tepid temple]

Feeling strongly in favor of the billboards

[fresh dagger]

as it currently stands i like the look of the billboards better but i can largely chalk that up to the aforementioned lifelessness of the 3Ds

[alpine sorrel]

Should be the same either way, there'll be like a forest terrain you can put on a tile and the trees will auto populate there.

[tepid temple]

Re: lifelessness. I think it's that 2D feels more... representational, like a sprite of a tree in this context is not a tree, it is an area of foliage that your imagination imprints on, while a 3D model is what it is, being more concrete and thus "limited". I'm not sure to what extent this is a "problem", or how far you can bend one to go in the other direction, but that's my take on it.

[crimson merlin]

I wonder if a thick layer of ground foliage would do something for that? Not so much a goblin could go missing, but enough that they're wading through

[deft rapids]

i think the billboards work better because theyre a similar style to the mechs, so they feel like, idk how to say it exactly, layer differentiating?

like the buildings and the ground are 3d, they're Ground, they're the Map

and trees and mech are sprites so they become Terrain and Object and Character

it's like how in animation you can tell which book has the hidden door mechanism because of the cell it's drawn on and i like that stylistically

[smoky glacier]

yeah, that makes sense!
I was thinking in terms of "simple pixel art is easier to edit / riff on / make", but that's also true

[alpine sorrel]

@crimson merlin sent me a tree mesh that was a better match for the sprite, added a basic wind shader to get a rough feeling-sense:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1043983236138803311/1192347178920849548/tree_wiggle.gif?ex=65a8bed8&is=659649d8&hm=c9c6e7c9e3bb6137ac672c502026390587516604247b2305e8047c5e25553207&

[worn tiger]

HUGE

[crimson merlin]

I tried the ground foliage idea and not a great idea. >_>

[alpine sorrel]

Having this sort of visual hierarchy makes a lot of sense to me. If visually we come up with something that roughly fits, it's something I'd love to lean into to help with map legibility.

like 3d = obstructions, 2d = terrain information

which would mean jericho cover and kobold slag piles would actually show up as 3D blocks

[crimson merlin]

Oof. Deployables. Drones, false idols, burning craters...

[final onyx]

It's maybe not too relevant but 2d models would make any modding attempts by folks easier, but not sure how practical that would be a thing to consider

[shy spruce]

throwing a +1 for the enjoyment of the idea of sprites being interactive things

[lone cliff]

same here

some 3d stuff is fine buuuut sometimes you cant beat sprites

[boreal dust]

idk why but to me it kinda looks like the trees are breathing, kinda uncanny valley somehow?

[naive yacht]

its because they're synced atm, in terms of animation

[alpine sorrel]

Very very WIP of being able to draw terrain tiles in the mission editor

[cold timber]

that looks satisfying

[alpine sorrel]

being able to paint multiple layers and fancy terrain props is gonna be so fun I think

[crimson merlin]

Looks easy to use so far

[shy spruce]

[torn kite]

be still my weary heart

[primal pivot]

I can't get over how good the shift to 3D looks. it feels so natural for this game

[worn tiger]

Best executed feature creep I've ever seen

[torn kite]

look

if this means I get to make cool little 3d assets and I can get access to the map editor

I'm happy as a bee

[fickle pecan]

not entirely sure how true this is nowadays, when stuff like blockbench exists and people have been making minecraft skins for a decade

simple 3d is a lot more accessible

[final onyx]

Minecraft skins don't need 3d models made

Just the texture

[fickle pecan]

no but they teach how textures work

[final onyx]

My concern is not textures, its modeling

[fickle pecan]

and once you know how textures work making really simple models in blockbench is very accessible imo

[final onyx]

But like I said, it's maybe not worth considering when deciding if they want to go 2d or 3d

[fickle pecan]

cause you also learn how much you can achieve just with a cube and a texture

[tired aurora]

both, both is good

[ember hemlock]

Kinda hoping that the mechs stay 2D sprites tbh, I really like the aesthetic of the sprites running around on a 3D background, plus it makes things like weapon animations or even loadouts easier to justify in my head.

[alpine sorrel]

Yeah that's a big pro to sprites; I think they're more forgiving in letting the mind fill in the blanks

I gave @crimson merlin a Godot scene with our rendering settings and he's been doing some pretty cool model/pose tests, but we still are thinking it through which way we wanna go

(so if he posts some gifs that look like the game, it's not in an Official capacity yet)

[alpine sorrel]

currently making it so it'll only paint one new layer up at a time until you release the mouse button, at which point it recalculates elevation and you can paint on top of your new blocks

[pastel flax]

That's pretty sick. Are player mech spawns static?

[little jetty]

haha i love how you can draw over the existing mech

it just looks funny

[alpine sorrel]

Had just forgotten to also update unit positions after terrain

It might end up being a bit more responsive when I optimize it to only recalculate for the tiles you've actually changed instead of the whole map every time

[shy spruce]

[aggressive simcity terrain noises]

[flint portal]

The fast forward gifs are funny to me

"we're putting you in the box, get in here"

[torn kite]

This kicksass

[pastel flax]

Could it be possible to set terrain to a higher height off the bat?

[alpine sorrel]

probably technically? I'd want to see how a larger brush size works with this system first, because that's another setting I'd need to set and check in the UI

[glad lotus]

That terrain painting looks incredibly satisfying

[crimson merlin]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1190842620985999451/1192606751959289927/barricadetest2.gif?ex=65a9b097&is=65973b97&hm=dd5ebfb625ad88fd411a4e2d9026e1fc08af447feb6736c1dbc8be16843876ef&

Poses are nice and easy to pick in godot, and much less costly in dev time than full animations. Think Darkest Dungeon where you have a static pose, attack pose, and recoiling from damage pose

[little jetty]

omg is this based on the barricade token from retrograde

[crimson merlin]

Yep

[worn tiger]

my beautiful cube-printing boy

[crimson merlin]

I love the concrete mixer sprite that Olive has been using too

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1190842620985999451/1192711771753021530/archertest.gif?ex=65aa1265&is=65979d65&hm=ad7a4f9908e00e381503412d90f4ddc6abf9108b43760704ae6690076657001f&

Eyes and glowing bits glow. Materials let you change colors on the fly without new textures

[little jetty]

are y'all exploring full 3d at the moment?

[crimson merlin]

@alpine sorrel gave me a copy of the visual scene so I could experiment. A decision has not been made

[little jetty]

did y'all make a rough sketch of the tokens, or is that an asset pack from somewhere?

[crimson merlin]

I'm making them! About a third are done and are available on TTS.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2918874293

[little jetty]

ah so modular coloring would be fairly difficult then

i was wondering if i should maybe use it to make tokens for my table in the future

[crimson merlin]

For TTS I make them primarily white, so you can tint them - with lights and weapons excluded

Godot allows multiple materials, so figuring out a way to set primary, secondary, trim, equipment and lights colors

[mild jay]

Shaders for that kinda thing seem like fun to make

[torn kite]

C_C!

Yeah TTS dont allow for multiple textures and materials.

[crimson merlin]

Not without getting into unity bundles. Have made several attempts at that, but bounced off each time

[torn kite]

I tried too

it uh, took a lot of effort.

Also thoses are swell models.

[alpine sorrel]

Calling it for the weekend, but I'm pretty happy with how it's coming along.

[cold timber]

It looks so good!

[torn kite]

this is beautiful progress

[worn tiger]

Being able to watch this happen is so cool

[alpine sorrel]

It's definitely more fun to work on stuff that gives visual progress than raking data around in the backend

[wraith cradle]

The new Lancer Tactics map looking hot. (Jokes aside, that mapmaker looks really snazzy.)

[alpine sorrel]

Fantastic suggestion from Tumblr

[torn kite]

yeeeeees

[magic cave]

If this gets added, it would also be nice to have an option or two for a basic cursor

[alpine sorrel]

It probably won't be the cursor itself; I'd want to see if I can work one into the UI like how Crocotile3D has its lil guy hanging out working as the axis orientation widget

[crimson merlin]

Static poses test. I can't change them at runtime, so this is just in the editor without the shader. Idea is sort of like Darkest Dungeons you have a frames. Idle. Attacking. Taking a hit.

[primal pivot]

I know it would be quite a bit more work but DAMN those 3D mech models look amazing and would be so cool fully implemented

[torn kite]

They look very damn smooth

[lone cliff]

honestly the 3d models looks super neat but im not entirely sure how to feel about them in this game tbh

for one itd make modding in homebrew stuff much harder to get a foot in the door

compare the number of mods made for Darkest Dungeon 1 (2d sprites) vs Darkest Dungeon 2 (3d stylized models)

[torn kite]

I mean 2 came out last year right?