Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: thought from shug's post on space stuff today...
Quote by Shug_ninx:
Players can target individual components of a capital ship to take out its engines, shield generators, etc. Players can also suffer damage to individual components on their own ships.
If specific systems of a ship can be either destroyed or damaged.. then I think the droid should be included as a system that can be literally "blow away". Everyone go see ANH in the trench scene. Did the droids get hit by the tie fighters? yes.. and the droids sure made an effort to scream and yell about it!
I'll quote something from this site:
http://saxman.xwlegacy.net/Starfighters/X-wing.html
"This unfortunate astromech droid suffered a direct hit from a TIE fighter. However, had the droid not been there, the laser blast may have passed through the cockpit and killed the pilot instead"
The astromechs that are placed in ships should take damage. The devs have to stop the trend of adding craftable items that never decay. (on a side note, im concerned about ships not being able to get destroyed ever).
Above all, I do not want our droids to be just something you 'slap' onto a ship (e.g. shuttle port droids)without a thought as to what is IN the droid. I want the owner of the ship to think about what he wants the droid to do. If he wants more speed out of his x-wing, then he'll ask me to build adroid that has more "speed" modules at the cost of not being able to maximize other ship systems. This will add strategy and decision making part of the game.
Message Edited by neinnunb on 05-20-2004 01:43 AM
neinnunb wrote:
Above all, I do not want our droids to be just something you 'slap' onto a ship (e.g. shuttle port droids)without a thought as to what is IN the droid. I want the owner of the ship to think about what he wants the droid to do. If he wants more speed out of his x-wing, then he'll ask me to build adroid that has more "speed" modules at the cost of not being able to maximize other ship systems. This will add strategy and decision making part of the game.
GrafvonSoden wrote:
Yep. Make the droids donated to the ship and get damage/destroyed like other ship components.That actually, really sounds good, and do-able too.
Ditto. Perfect way to get a little recurring market, and realistic too.
I think that something else we have to consider is whether or not any new module schematics will be available to any DE or only DEs who have bought and installed JTL. I think the devs would probably lean towards the latter, which might make it very frustrating for someone to try and find a DE that is actually capable of making the parts they need.
Also, there's a sick sort of irony happening here if no additional modules are necessary to make ships fly. Why? What am I talking about? Inherant functionality. We've all been begging the devs for chassis-specific inherant functionality for months and months, and it kind of looks like we might be getting it. Oops. 
/bow
OrionsByte wrote:
Anyway, I'm all for SE droid modules, but I also think that anything we see along these lines will be more like SE-utility modules than necessary components. They'd help you out but they wouldn't be mandatory.
This is the way I'm leaning, currently. A ship owner would get base/default functionality from an Astromech unit. If a droid was built using 'enhanced' droid-ship modules, you'd see more betta' functionality, stats, etc.
Best of both worlds, if you ask me. Anyway, the series of posts I'm working up will focus on this type of system since I think it makes (by far) the most sense.
That just seems to be the way the devs think about droids. If we get on their cases now we might be able to affect those types of decisions, but I'm not holding my breath.
Well, we have to lay out our long term vision for droid/ship interaction and relation. The sooner and better we do this, the more likely it might be that some of our items are able to make the JTL beta and/or release.
If nothing else, there will be a template for how things go down in the future.
Respectfully,