Combat stats and abilities

[h3]Floaty damage numbers[/h3][p]Because armor, shields, and hull can take such different amounts of damage, and because increased bullet damage is a stat that you can collect, I wanted to be able to see how effective my shots were during combat, so I made a proper system for floating combat text. It adds up all the changes to pixel values from a bullet instance, color codes the number based on what you hit so there are different color numbers for hull, armor, shield, and critical hits, it also tells you when a dodge occurs. The numbers are even sticky and animated to look nice.[/p][p]You can of course toggle these on and off in the settings if you are an aesthetics purist and RPG style combat text ruins your immersion.[/p][p][/p][h3]Defensive stat changes[/h3][p]I've done a lot of fiddling with combat stats and RPG elements. First thing I changed was to consolidate some defensive stats and make them more balanced. For instance, stacking percentage decreases in damage taken could allow you to become invincible, which was bad and it was also confusing as to how the stats were multiplying together when you had multiple sources.[/p][p]Damage reduction stats have been refined into these categories:[/p]

[p]Shield hardness[/p]
[p]Armor hardness[/p]
[p]Glancing hardness[/p]
[p]Glancing chance[/p]

[p]Glancing blows replaces "everything" hardness with a chance to reduce any incoming damage regardless of what was hit. The amount of damage reduced by glancing follows the same formula as the new stats for shield and armor hardness, and multiplies the reduction with them. The formula makes hardness into an integer statistic that you can get an unlimited amount of and its damage reduction follows a constant increased time to live formula as seen below:[/p][p][/p][p]damage taken = damage dealt * (1 - (armor hardness / (armor hardness + 5000))[/p][p][/p][h3]Critical strikes[/h3][p]For the longest time I have wanted to have a statistic for damage dealers that works like critical strike in literally every RPG. The issue, as it were, is that damage in Wayward Terran Frontier isn't simply calculated as a numeric value, but as a damage map applied to the alpha channel of a group of pixels. Simply numerically increasing the intensity of the map, or applying the map multiple times, has problems because it won't always deal consistent damage and it will rarely be visible to the player. Also dealing a bit more damage to some armor tiles doesn't really feel "critical" so I went back to the drawing board.[/p][p]In every RPG that has "critical" damage, the number representing your damage is typically doubled in order to represent the abstract idea of hitting some critical location when your attack landed. Because most RPG characters don't actually have kidneys simulated inside of them, the damage of a dagger strike is just doubled, and the idea of hitting a vital organ is only theater of the mind. However...ships in Wayward Terran Frontier do have simulated kidneys...or at least they do actually have critical systems inside them that can be damaged. As such I have gone through all of our projectile types and added statistics to them representing how devastating it is for those bullets to get past a ship's armor and cause critical damage.[/p][p]Each bullet type now has:[/p]

[p]a number of critical rolls representing how many times the crit chance dice will be rolled[/p]
[p]an amount of critical damage representing how much random tile damage will be applied to a critical system if the roll succeeds[/p]
[p]a base critical chance representing how likely the shot is to crit without any modification from stats[/p]

[p]Bullets roll their critical dice and apply their critical damage only when hitting the soft hull pixels of a target which are not protected by armor or shields, so you can't simply blow up a ship inside out by having a high crit chance, however you will find that increasing crit chance drastically decreases the amount of time that a ship can be shot once you have pierced its shields and armor. Ships receiving critical strikes to their hull will violently explode as their reactors lose containment from the bullets bouncing around inside. Also this has a great secondary effect of allowing the game to estimate how big of a bullet your ship was hit by which it couldn't do before. This aspect will matter later.[/p][p][/p][h3]Items and abilities (captain skills)[/h3][p]Following the trend of adding more loot and RPG elements I have expanded the inventory paper doll with 10 new slots (minus the nano-aura slot which is now gone)[/p][p][/p][p]The slots on the right are for the artifacts mentioned briefly in the artifact crafting profession. They give stat bonuses to your current ship. These will either be crafted or will drop as loot. Primarily these will be found by fighting the various warlords and their minions that have been seeded across the galaxy.[/p][p]The slots on the left however are for captain skills. This is the most recent thing I've been making. Captain skills are items, and currently the plan is for you to find them out in the world. They come in 3 categories that have formal names but I refer to them as red, yellow, and blue because that's the color of energy resource they use for activating. You can only equip skills from a single category, and you only get 5 slots, so you will have to choose between the skills you manage to find.[/p][p]Red skills have a defensive emphasis. Yellow skills have a damage dealing emphasis. Blue skills have an emphasis on support and battlefield control. They can be activated only from the navigation console, and when you have them equipped you will see a new energy resource bar while piloting your ship.[/p][p]Each energy type has its own mechanics that may be familiar to some of you out of the box, but the hope is to make the play styles as different as possible. Red energy decays over time, but it fills when taking or dealing damage. Yellow energy has a small pool that rapidly regenerates. Blue energy has a large pool that slowly regenerates only after not using energy for a while.[/p][p]Here's the first 2 abilities that came up when I debug created the items for the sake of a screenshot:[/p][p][/p][h3]Development status update[/h3][p]I'm very happy with how world engine is currently generating the game world and I have been play testing and debugging all of the new stories. Population cards are working and have been fine tuned a bit in order to get more reasonable worlds generated. I've got NPC agents running around and generally I have been getting the core features debugged and working the way I like, testing warlord battles and mission boards and everything. Also in play testing I realized I needed to expand the exploration system to make it easier to find stuff that you haven't directly visited yet and so I built an upgrade to the map for tracking nearby sensor pings, and also I implemented maps, which are items you can buy to reveal the...map.[/p][p]I've most recently gotten distracted adding player base building mechanics. I think sandbox mode will probably include an element of being able to build your own base. This started as a wave defense type story with loot on the world map called colony ruins, but people asked for base building and so I'm fleshing it out a bit more. More news on that later unless I forget.[/p]