End of year approaches steadily. As we prepare to make a December report we also look back on the year as a whole.
Equipment for spacecraft
Getting combat against NPC working was a major event in VERZ Online’s development, a notable milestone on our road map. What we need to deal with next is equipment. So far it has been predefined for everything – from the ship you fly to what NPC use. While in the latter case that is acceptable, locking players to a specific loadout tied to ship class was barely sufficient for testing.
Equipment plays a wide role in VERZ. Your spacecraft may install equipment types to gain capabilities:
- Sublight drive influences the chrono cycle cost to move from one space to another and enables you to do so in the first place.
- Hyperspace drive permits you to use wormholes to navigate to another sector. Long term plans include the jump gate structure which may provide an alternative.
- Resource gathering equipment like mining drills, particle scoop and photovoltaic panels allow you to mine asteroids, harvest nebula and collect solar energy when sufficiently close to system’s main star.
- Sensors determine range of your viewport in space.
- Defence enhancements help bolster your ship’s hull, armour or shields.
- Finally, guns provide your main damage output.
There is a couple of other types of equipment which do not fall into the above categories. Afterburners, targeting scanner and electromagnetic spectrograph are classified as general equipment at the moment.
The main point is that for any given spacecraft could always use some more equipment but installation space is limited.
Equipment for structures
Another design consideration is to defend anything you build in space you also need equipment. Preparing some weapon emplacements or defence towers for your profitable electronics facility is going to provide you with slots for guns but not the guns themselves. This freedom to choose gun types means one may expect to see a variety of defence arrangements depending on how valuable a building is and possibly on what equipment the owner has access to.
Theoretically one could outfit a building with just missile towers. That might work up to a point. Not only you need missile launchers but also sufficient amount of missiles as ammunition and consequently ample storage space for them. Once you take care of this consider that any foe who learns that anti-missile gear is only type of offence needed is going to have an advantage. Who knows, maybe scavengers decide to attack your towers just to loot all those sweet missiles in storage that did not have opportunity to launch!
Equipment for NPC
In VERZ all the NPC have equipment. No matter if it is piloted spacecraft or natural organic capabilities, everything is also defined as some equipment piece. This lets us have some parity between player and non-player characters in game. The similarity also comes handy for balancing combat aspects.
In future it might be possible to salvage some equipment from space pirates for your own use or to sell it or maybe to break it down for resources should you prefer not to use your loot at all.
Equipment everywhere leads to database re-engineering
We have not started on equipment production yet, being content to have everything sold by planetary shipyards for now. Given how cross-cutting the concept is it has resulted in the need to partially re-engineer the database. So far the schema there was not that large. Soon we expect it to triple in size to accommodate upcoming needs.
This sadly is going to result in yet another soft reset of in-game assets. We knew that would come for all spacecraft with introduction of the ability to swap out equipment. It will affect buildings too. The main reason is change to how modules are perceived. At the moment we merely store quantity of those in your building. There was no reason to distinguish one foundry module from another because their function is exactly the same. However, two defence towers may be vastly different, one featuring twin plasma cannons while the other having a missile battery. To track this we need to alter a fundamental concept.
There was no presentation for two years
One takeaway we have from our weekly team calls is that there was no demo or presentation in 2023 and nothing in 2024 either. While we have had worthwhile progress this is perhaps the most relevant omission we need to fix in upcoming year.
Happy new year 2025!
