Skorak's Systems/NPC Development Blog - !Picture heavy!

[Skorak]

The Independent Worlds

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The maps being empty beyond the infrastructure is intentional as I was asked to keep some mystery about system changes intact. I'll go through what changed here and why and leave the details for you to look at and hopefully appreciate. First of you'll notice that both systems were rotated by 90°. That was a continuity fix to match them to the sector map. If you see Magellan and Cortez' layouts, they're the same.

Let's talk about Bering first. That system has received many complaints in the past, so I tried my best to keep its identity intact, asteroid wise and colour wise but enhancing it. There is now massive gaps between each rock and there's larger rocks in between small ones. You could probably cap fight here, though I didn't test that. I also put a lot more wrecks on paths and along the old path the Separatists took during the scouring of Bering. Then with the addition of Bristol and the canonisation of the clean up etc. more wrecks and action here to show that. In the end I was quite satisfied with Bering's looks and it was fun to fly around here.

The wish with Hudson was to make it less of a pass through system. Bering has that by the merit of it being longer, angled and having stuff to explore. With Hudson, the added infrastructure makes it bigger and gives it a bit of scale that way. A few details were tweaked as well but not anywhere as many as Bering.

And now we come to one thing that brings them both together. You might have noticed Hamburg missing a lane. Until Hamburg gets its smaller rework that's the solution to make:
Hudson the shorter route and Bering the longer one. Bering is now considerably longer. But Bering is safer. Why the choice was made like that will become apparent another time. For now though, Hudson has a higher chance for npc lane interruptions and those interruptions have a chance to spawn a level 19(fully equipped npcs) bomber+fighter patrol. If you afk trade through Hudson, you will die. Bering also still has interruptions but just the usual strength. So it's not a time saver to go through Bering on the account of no interruptions either.

So tldr; Hudson faster-Dangerous, Bering slower-Safer

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NPCs

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Finally I got to what I'd promised in my second blog post: Making the basic transports into large_ships again. that means Trains and Transports used by npcs will get a ship name and a tag identifier. I've only went with these ships for now for technical reasons I hope to resolve in a future patch. All in all I'm super happy to have these npcs be more varied and I have a lot more ships to convert and encounters to make. For now I added one more, hopefully fun encounter in addition to the two bomber lane disruptions. Happy hunting.

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World Enhancements

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One thing I'm not sure if people care about I tried when I made the Bristol npcs.I can apparently tweak the ranks npcs get according to level. So Xenos and Bristol npcs currently operate on a 16, 19 setting. Meaning every npc until level 16 is a Rookie, until 19, a Veteran and 19 and beyond are Aces. For Bristol the same. Ens. Cpl. Cmdr.
If this is appreciated it's easy if not a little tedious to apply to all npc factions.

Beyond that I finished adding the nebula loadout to all sirian lanes. Or rather to be precise: to every first lane ring in a nebula. The idea here is that this helps finding the lane entrance in a nebula and feedback with the test lanes in NY, S-13 and Kepler has been positive so far.

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