I missed last week's progress report. Sorry. Helping a friend move has taken most of the weekend. :P
I am currently working on something perhaps not many has noticed in the past while playing X-Wing: target lead indicator at cannon level.

What does that mean?
Well, some games have a "target lead" widget on the HUD. It is a circle or similar shape that indicates where should you aim at so that your shots would hit your target.
You can see these target leads in games like Freespace, Wing Commander, and many combat flight sims (planes and helicopter ones).
If you cannot remember X-Wing (or any other game in the series) having a target lead, you are right. There was none. Or there was?
Yes, there was one, only that it was invisible. Wait a moment, does that make even sense?

Yes. The target lead in X-Wing and the other games is invisible, however it is there. You can tell because when you aim at where the target lead should be, your targeting reticule turns green, and you can hear a sound.
A green reticle is (almost) guarantee that a shot will hit your target, unless the target changes its bearing suddenly after your shoot.
Also, the X-Wing reticule is composed of the main squarish reticule, and smaller cannon icons around it. These icons also turn green when their represented cannon would hit the target if it shot at that precise moment.
In fact, you could say that in X-Wing there are as many target leads as active cannons, because it is possible that one cannon would hit with its shot, while another cannon wouldn't. This is easy to see with a B-Wing.
So you can have some cannon reticles turning green, while some others remain blue.
The main, square, reticle doesn't actually have a target lead associated to it. It just turns green if any of the cannon reticles is green.

To complicate things further, the target lead (or target leads) aren't just points, like in most games. X-Wing is quite advanced in the sense that the target lead has the shape of target ship's collider as seen from the player's point of view. That means, it is just not a round or square area (or volume) in front of the ship, but an actual precise representation of the shape of the ship.

So for example, it is possible that you were aiming at the precise center of where the target ship is going to be, but your cannon reticle will not turn green, because in that position, there is empty space in the ship's profile. Imagine the space between the engines of a Y-Wing.

All of this may sound too complex or overblown, but it is there, in the classic X-Wing. It amazes me the attention to detail put on a game meant to run on a 386!
MjrParts and I spent some time last week thinking on the cleverest way possible to make all this work, and I think we found it, while keeping it quite low in CPU cost. I will try to upload some screenshot or video later this week to show how it looks.

Sorry for the monologue.
I wonder if I should start a blog instead.

This time I would like to talk about the ELS system, both for documenting purposes, but also for feedback (any feedback).
Thus far, the XWVM demo has had unlimited laser fire (and unlimited shields for the player), but past weekend I started programming the whole energy system.

The Power stat is totally meaningless, as far as I can tell from looking at how the game seems to work. It is only reflected on the dashboard as a number that increases or decreases depending on the amount of power redirected to the engines. This number is a constant per ship, modified by the ELS setting, and has no impact or translation into acceleration, speed or maneuverability of the ship. Later games in the series totally dropped this stat. TIE Fighter didn't have it, and the rebel cockpits for X-Wing vs TIE Fighter reused the space this instrument used to take for something else. Anyway, I have tried to replicate it as close as possible to how it works in the original.

Shileds and Lasers recharge are a little bit more complicated. These are my findings and collection of facts.

- Each laser cannon equipped on a ship has an associated accumulator: the horizontal band of red lights on the dashboard. This instrument represents with red lights the amount of energy stored in that cannon's accumulator. There is two levels of load for an accumulator: undercharge and overcharge.

- The amount of lit red lights in the accumulators doesn't match individual rounds of laser fire left. While there are 8 red lights in an accumulator, you can, however, shoot 16 overcharged lasers and 16 undercharged lasers with a totally full accumulator. That gives 32 total laser rounds. The red lights are, then, just a discrete representation of a continuous (or at least more grained) underlying value.

- It takes 30 seconds to fully load an empty accumulator when the ELS setting has Laser Recharge at full mode. It takes 60 seconds if it is just at "increased" mode.

- It is known that recharging your shields through direct shield recharge, and through recharging your lasers first, then dumping the energy to the shields takes exactly the same amount of time. It might not look so as a first impression, perhaps because we can distinguish the lasers recharging much easier (the red lights lighting up) than the shield bars changing color tone. However it seems to be the case that both ways are totally equivalent.

- Because every cannon recharges its accumulator independently, and each cannon's stored energy is added to the shields when you dump all energy from lasers to shields, that means two things:
1 - Ships with more cannons are recharging more accumulators at the same time, that means that more energy is stored as laser rounds at the same time. That is, ships with more cannons recover overall laser energy faster, even when all ships reload their cannons at the same pace. For example, it takes the A-Wing and the B-Wing the same time to fully reload their cannons. But an A-Wing reloads only 2 cannons, while a B-Wing reloads 6 in the same time.

2 - Because you can dump energy from cannons to shields, and because we have established that it is as fast to recharge shields directly as doing so by dumping energy from lasers, you can see that ships with more cannons also recharge shields faster.

You could say that each cannon comes with one energy generator. That energy generator produces energy that is passed to either the cannon accumulator, the shield generator, or the engines. The more cannons, the more generators.
You can confirm this hypothesis with the Tractor Beam in TIE Fighter. The tractor beam comes with another generator, whose energy is used to fed the Beam, but can also be redirected to the cannons, the shields, or the engines. So a ship without tractor beam generates less total energy than the same ship with a tractor beam.
In this game, the A-Wing is generating the least amount of energy (2 generators), followed by the X-Wing and Y-Wing (4 generators), and finally the B-wing is the ship generating the most energy (6 generators).


- Through experimentation with the 4 different rebel ships, by dumping energy from the lasers to the shields until the shields fill no more, then checking how many shots are left on the accumulators; it seems that a full accumulator contains energy equivalent to 1024 shield hitpoints. (Remember, 100 shield hitpoints equal 1 SDB).
That means that every laser shot uses up the equivalent to 32 shield hitpoints.
I have decided to measure the energy stored in the accumulators and produced by the generators in "shield hp", because there is anyway a 1:1 relationship between the laser energy and the shields when you can dump from and back both pools.

Comments? Rebuttals? Feedback?

I knew about the laser recharge rate and beam weapon behavior, but not about the connection to shield recharge rate.

I always considered the most useful part about a beam weapon to be the free power it gave you.

Really explains why the TIE Defender was so unbalanced. Equip a beam weapon, transfer all power out of it, and direct it to weapons and shields (which is practically already an exploit). But, oh, your shields are charging extra fast because of all the weapons.

I do think energy management in the X-Wing series could use an overhaul. Retrofitting an ancient Z-95 Headhunter with a tractor beam shouldn't give it [i][more/i] power to work with.

I'm thinking XWVM will probably need to support rebalanced missions (as a mod), since some of the features already implemented will make the game easier, e.g., icons on the sensors and a mission text updates that are actually timely in the heat of battle (instead of being preempted by user commands). Supporting that could then make it easier to justify other optional tweaks, such as weapons convergence and XvT/XWA bolt speeds.

I have not really tested the tractor beam in TIE Fighter thoroughly. And I with that mean, taking notes about numbers, times and all of that. I am just assuming that it behaves like a single cannon with one "generator" worth of energy. It is inconvenient that you cannot pass energy from or to the tractor beam accumulator to check how many rounds of laser fire it needs to totally fill up. That complicates experimentation.
It doesn't matter so much, because we aren't remaking TIE Fighter, and X-Wing doesn't have tractor beams, anyway.

Actually, now that you mention that, I realize that the whole energy amounts subject is not taken into consideration when that energy is redirected to the engines.
I mean, while having more cannons can be translated into a faster shield recharge rate, that doesn't apply to the engines. If you redirect all laser power to the engines, your ship doesn't go faster if it has 6 cannons compared to if it has only 2. The engine boost (or slowdown) experimented depends solely on the ELS setting itself.

About the rebalanced missions:

Do you really think that the replacement of the dots in the radar scopes with icons and the addition of a dedicated message log make the game much easier?
I admit that lack of information makes something more obscure, but not necessarily more challenging. X-Wing suffered a lot of lack of information, or poor quality of it.

In any case, yes. I was totally planning for a "mission polishing" feature that would allow us to enhance missions without modifying the original files. Some sort of patching-on-the-fly, that would let us add radio messages, tweak some settings, or perhaps even adding some difficulty settings to most missions.

Also, I was planning for a configuration screen where you can choose to play Classic mode, with everything as close as possible to the original (no goal list, no icons on the scope, no weapon convergence, no ion-laser linked fire, no pilot auto-backup, etc), Modern mode, with most upgrades turned on, or Custom mode, where you can cherrypick what you want enabled and what not (including what 3D models you want, if the classic untextured ones, the textured models from X-wing 98, or the models from X-Wing Alliance Upgrade; what kind of music, the original MIDIs or the synthesized one from Laserschwert; whether the target lead indicator is visible or not; etc).

About the energy management overhaul:

I think the ELS system in X-Wing is one of the things that make the X-Wing games feel like X-Wing games. If we tweak it too much, it will stop feeling like X-Wing.
Nonetheless, I have been thinking on a way to redesign the ELS system so that a modern gamer would understand it better. Now, modern gamers aren't really my target audience. I truly believe this game has little appeal to today's typical gamer (there is no QTE gameplay, awesome graphics, self heal, straightforward gameplay, checkpoints every minute, you cannot hold the trigger and rain your enemies with laser fire nonstop, etc)
Anyway, I have been asking around and many young players find confusing the fact that in the ELS system you have
- one "not charging" state. (okay)
- two charging states, one faster than the other. (okay)
- two discharging states, one faster than the other. (not okay)
Some people they counterintuitive that weapons and shields discharge by themselves. Instead, some have suggested that the ELS system should be like the one in Elite: Dangerous. (weapons and shields either recharge or not, but they don't discharge).
This would need some rebalancing, regardless of my opinion of it.
What do you think?

I'd prefer to stick with the original ELS system with the discharge. Otherwise it wouldn't feel like X-Wing anymore.

I think Freespace 2 has an ELS system without discharge.

I haven't done much experimenting with it, but basically I usually put the beam weapon on full discharge and then have both lasers and shields charging at increased rate while still having "full" speed (as if everything was set to maintenance level).

It always felt like an exploit. But I did it anyway... It depends on the mission.

When your mission is to stop a fleeing shuttle or transport from escaping in the middle of the mission (e.g., B-Wing "attack the ISD" bonus mission), it'd be nice have a couple reliable ways of knowing that a shuttle has launched, like the icons and the ability to see multiple log entries at once.

Basically, less frustrating failures because some piece of information you needed wasn't provided reliably. I'm all for that. Sounds great!

What about the gunship/transport fuselages that sometimes do a 180 when destroyed, slamming into you and likely destroying your ship? They fixed that in TIE Fighter (less collision damage, but, more importantly, less chance of the biggest piece of debris spinning around and going in reverse). Or is that just considered a bugfix? Agree. More on this later. That said, the ability to mod it could be fun.

The biggest gameplay problem I have with ELS right now is that it seems to have some balance problems.

There are other things that I'm not a fan of that I'll mention below, but they affect gameplay but aren't gameplay problems themselves. I just got this hilarious (to me) idea of popping up QTE-like icons to handle game events. Missile launched at you? Show an icon of a joystick being pushed forward to dive when a missile is fired at you. Pop up the transfer lasers to shields key when your shields are damaged. Stuff like that.

And, of course, if you fail to follow any of those QTE prompts: fail the mission.

(As an aside: does anyone actually really like QTEs? As in, prefer games to have them? I know game devs like to put them in and they're associated with flashy animations, but I get the impression most players actively dislike them or, at best, tolerate them.) Never needed the finesse of having a "drain, but somewhat slowly" state. I've only ever used it to fully discharge something.

It always felt weird to me that you keep the power boost after that system is drained. They established that you can transfer the energy from one system to another. So, intuitively, you'd expect there to be a difference between having laser or shield charge left and not. I accept the simplification for predictability and ease of controls, though.

The way you have to cycle them is a bit annoying, though. I liked the way FreeSpace's mapped the controls, at least if you had the standard keyboard layout. I also appreciated the way XWA gave us the ability to set presets.

I haven't played E:D, but it sounds similar to FreeSpace's setup. X-Wing's ELS does present a more pronounced risk vs reward system. If you need speed, you must sacrifice combat ability. You want to travel 10 km quickly? You'll have reduced shields and/or weapons when you get there.

FS gives you greater ability to fine-tune your energy management. e.g., you can safely reduce power to guns with most loadouts in most situations. As long as you can't taking damage, it's completely safe to stop charging shields. If you need to get somewhere fast, you can put all power to engines (which often gives a significant increase to your booste recharge rate and not as much to your top speed) and get there with the same gun/shield charge as you started.

The FS way is more intuitive (and has default settings that have everything charging), but it changes gameplay.

Any overhaul should strive to keep the same risks and rewards the current ELS system does. Which would be hard. I certainly don't have any ideas for that at this time. Rebalancing (maybe that's the word I should have used earlier) would be easier.

(That said, I wouldn't mind the ability to mod an overhaul in or to have one. At some point. But it would feel different and not everyone would want it.)

I like the idea of adding icons onto the radar display and other improvements, and I don't think these will break the game or something. A bad design/ux is a bad design and should be fixed/improved. The player should not be handicapped imo. For example one thing I really dislike in Tie Fighter is that in an escort mission, when the ships/stations you're protecting are attacked, the game only says "Mission critical craft under attack." But it doesn't tell you which one(s), or where they are, how far they are from you, etc. If we can have "Cruiser X is under attack" and hitting spacebar (within 5 sec?) targets that ship, it would be a much better experience.

I think it is a bug. In the X-Wing series, ship models are subdivided in parts. You can see them from TIE Fighter and on, but they were there also in X-Wing. These parts are assigned a behavior for what to do when the ship blows up: fly straight, or break off.
I have a strong suspicion that the fuselage turning 180 degrees and crashing against the player was a bug related to the "playercentrism" in the game. I don't want to go technical, but I will say that that bug is being "fixed" (or actually, not introduced at all) in XWVM. When a ship blows up, the Fly Straight parts keep flying straight and spinning.
Also, I am all in for adopting TIE Fighter's policy with collisions. You get some damage depending on the size of the other ship, and you are sent spinning in the opposite direction, without control, for a couple seconds.

I start from the end: if they keep creating games with QTE gameplay it must be because there is a market that is avid for them. Flashy animations is 80% of the AAA games today.

I actually like the idea of the hint icons. For real. They could serve as a tutorial of sorts. It could be used in many situations.
Not to the point of failing the mission if the player misses them. But like an optional (you can disable them in the options menu) reminder of the most important keys to use.

I understand that the engines are working faster not because the lasers and shields are draining their energy towards the engines, but because the ship's reactor doesn't need to feed those systems and all power goes to the engines. The energy drained from lasers and shields is just lost or dissipated or something.

I was planning something to mitigate this, basically since the beginning of this project.
I wanted the critical ships in a mission to be tracked at all times. Somehow.
First I thought on adding one or two extra panels to the cockpit dashboards (just like I did with the the event log), now that cockpits would be much wider thanks to the new 16:9 aspect ratio (or VR view). One of this panels would be for showing the most critical ships all the time. Like a little screen with 5 or 6 lines of text, each line showing the name, IFF, status and closest attacker. Next to it, a keyboard binding to quick-target it.

If that was too confusing, I was thinking on adding some special outline to these ships' icons on the scopes. Like a yellow outline. Then the player could quickly know where they are. If they were attacked, the outline could blink or somehow attract the players attention.

Do these solutions sound like too much?
What would you propose?

Hello!

Just wanted to chime in about a few things:

1) QTE: I like them (not just tolerate them) in the right context (highly cinematic games)

2) Please Azrapse keep posting here... You do not need to start a blog or anything - I personally love each post you make, sharing ideas and asking for feedback from the community

3) Customization is practically always good... In theory, I would not like it if every game aspect suited my own taste but it is practically impossible so I am all for it in every game

4) A visible target lead would be very welcome

A little progress update:

I am currently on vacation, but my girlfriend has been talking with my X-Wing muse and they have agreed to let me use her laptop to program the game during the vacations. So have got some things done.
Instead of listing them, I will link two screenshots. The first, belonging to my previous progress update, the second, taken today.
Let's see how many new things you can tell apart by comparing these screenshots. Hint: most of my time has been spent implementing ship systems and instruments to display their statuses.

A few days ago I posted about this project on the XWAU forums.
It has not triggered any response, positive or negative. :(
Considering how much I was fearing they would be mad at us for using their models, I guess it's not a bad thing, after all. They seem not to care at all.

Activity on the XWAUP forums seems to be a bit low currently. Some threads take days or maybe a week to be answered.
My thread about my retro models for instance (http://www.xwaupgrade.com/phpBB3008/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=11608) received a reply 7 days after it had been opened.

It may take some time until someone replies on your thread. :-)

I see that you added a link to my post there. Thanks for that. ;)

Anyway, regarding our project, I have gone back to work after a week of vacation and progress has slowed down a bit.
Not only because my daily work, but also because I got stuck at some startling bug that took me several days to solve.
When the Epsilon group shuttles reach frigate Vehemence, they entered its hangar bay, and then immediately they flew away from it in random directions instead of just disappearing. :D
Gladly, that is fixed now.

I am currently working on everything around the ionizing of a ship.
We have identified how much damage an ion blast deals to shields. What is not clear is how does it work against the hull.
Well, of course, enough hits disable a ship. But how many are "enough"?
In the same sense that a ship has a Hull health pool and a Shield helth pool, it must have a Systems health pool. In TIE Fighter we could see a percentage reflecting how much or how little of this System health pool was left.
What I don't know is what is the real amount of it.
How many ion hits does every ship need to be disabled?

It is hard to find out in X-Wing because there are only 3 different states displayed on the targeting computer: Ok, Shields Down, and Disabled.
Also, there isn't a Systems stat listed next to Hull and Shields in any of the many ship editors that were available for X-Wing. So I wonder if it exists at all, or if it is, instead, derived from somewhere else.

I know that a TIE Fighter blows up with 3 ion blasts, and is immobilized with 2. Only TIEs blow up when totally disabled. Other ships don't.
(I guess the reason is to prevent a exploit from the player: you could disable an entire wave of fighters, and no following waves would spawn because the current wave has still ships "alive).
Many other ships also get immobilized when they have got enough ion damage, but before they are marked as disabled.
I would need to find out all these figures.
From which threshold a ship becomes immobilized?
How many System hitpoints every ship has?

Once this is done, we can disable ships, and the final part of the test mission can be implemented: the capture of Ackbar's shuttle by the rebels.

I have been trying disabling different ships and counting how many strong ion blasts they take before they get disabled, after the shields have been removed with lasers or torpedoes. Some of these ships seem to regain shields very quickly (like Shuttles), while others doesn't. These are my results (Hull, Shields, and Armor stat indicated for potential correlation purposes):

- Tug: 3 ion blasts. (H: 500, S: 0, A: 1)
- Gunboat: 3 ion blasts. (H: 3000, S: 10000, A: 1)
- Shuttle: 4 ion blasts. (H: 2500, S: 10000., A: 1)
- TIE Bomber: 3 ion blasts. It explodes. (H: 3000, S: 0, A: 1)
- Container: 8 ion blasts. (H: 1000, S: 5000, A: 4)
- Freighter: 8 ion blasts. (H: 3000, S: 12000, A: 4)
- Corvette: 11 ion blasts. (H: 5000, S: 10000, A: 4)
- Frigate: 8 ion blasts. (H: 10000, S: 16000, A: 16)

I have tried relating that amount of ion damage with these ships' Hull or Power stat, but I cannot see any correlation.
One ion blast deals 400 shield damage, or 200 shield damage if it is a weak blast. Because of some ships regaining shields really fast, it might be that some of these results are wrong.
The only trend I can identify here is that Armor 1 ships seem to resist around 3 ion blasts before getting totally disabled, while ships with higher armor than 1 take 8.
The corvette taking 11 and the shuttle taking 4 could be a bad accounting due to shields regaining.
I need to try disabling a Star Destroyer, a Cruiser and some rebel fighters to confirm this trend, or to deny it.
I'll keep you informed.