Naev Development Blarg

Recent developments

It has been some time since you’ve heard from us, so I’m taking it upon myself to give you all an idea of what’s going on with Naev.

The first thing I should mention is that is is summer for Naev, and summer usually means a lull in activity. It has to do with lots of other things happening in summer, many of them outdoor ones. I think you get the idea.

That said, things have been happening since the 0.5.0 release. The original plan for the next version, 0.5.1, was, and I quote:

14:16 bobbens we can do safe lanes
14:16 bobbens for starters
14:16 bobbens although I’m not sure on the safe lane stuff how to procede
14:16 bobbens we can either go safe lane “simple implementation” first
14:16 bobbens for quick release
14:16 bobbens or go quadtrees and asteroids first
14:16 bobbens for a slower crazy release

Once this discussion was over, we promptly started working on completely different things. One of those things is the revised faction standing mechanic, described in a previous blarg post. But there is more.

Disabling

For instance, work is ongoing on a revised disabling system. Up until 0.5.0, ships would become disabled once they sustained enough damage (to be precise, once armour fell below 20%), and that was the end of it. However, one of our team members (it was me) felt that this was undesirable, and designed something different. Rather than always being disabled through damage directly, ships now accrue “stress” damage, which builds up as weapons do damage, and falls naturally over time. Once stress damage equals the amount of armour the ship still has left, the ship becomes disabled. Assuming the ship is not destroyed afterward, it will come back online after a certain amount of time.

The important part in the above is that stress damage needs to reach the amount of armour health left on the ship. The direct implication of this is that ships with low health are more easily disabled than ships with high health, without tying the concepts of “low” and “high” to the ship’s maximum amount of health. This means that a small ship can be reliably disabled without running the risk of destroying it, for example.

The introduction of stress