Missions: very similar to escape velocity or NAEV, every planet/station generates some missions on landing (I think). Every game will have the same prices, players have forums posts about the best/safest/highest-income routes. Trading: like in Elite or Frontier or Escape velocity or NAEV, the player loads up the cargo of his fleet with supplies (metals, plastic, luxury goods.) and sells them to another planet or station. This is actually great in mid/late game for making money instead of trading or doing missions. The player can board ships, and through a simple menu, fight and kill the other ships's crew and take the enemy ship (that requires extra crew to actually drive the other ship). Pirates can board your ship or other disabled ships and steal components and cargo. One interesting feature that is missing in Transcendence is ship boarding. Fleet management is very important as a game mechanic and several buttons are dedicated/tweaked for that (hold fleet, attack target, group/scatter have 1 button each). I have to admit that the ship models are really nice and shaded in a way that you won't realise too much that it's a fixed sprite that it's being rotated.įighting: most of the foes that the player encounters are designed to be fought by a fleet, not a single ship. Transcendence is definitely better for this. : the shadows on the ships won't change with rotations. +: incredibly smooth rotations, AI aiming is perfect at any distance (the player has autoaiming too) There is a nice explanation of this by the game author, btw.
To have smooth rotations, the game uses floating point rotations, it interpolates 2 facings to get a smooth transition between them. Animated asteroids (and other animations, I suppose) have a fixed number of pre-rendered rotations.
Rendering/animations: The game uses 1 single facing for the ships, pre-rendered and the game engine rotates that. Sometimes it's a bit confusing when the player has 15-20 ships and trying to see which one has low fuel or shields down. When the player has a fleet, the HUD will display the ships status as a bunch of lines near each ship. The game tracks armor, shield, hyperspace fuel, electricity and heat. it uses a lot of parts that are transparent and tries to avoid borders (the radar is round, ship armor/shield display has a silhouette that it is just a line) There is no weapon selection, besides missiles, all weapons will fire at the same time. Ship HUD experience: the ship HUD is slick and minimalistic. I can try to give you my impressions on several aspects of the game, I'll try to be as objective as I can. I finished the main quest line and explored the entire galaxy map.
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