Signal Nine Dev Diary #5: Cyberware

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Dec 062020
 

Cyberware is, naturally, a pillar of the cyberpunk setting. This is certainly true in aesthetic terms, and it’s also often part of the theme — a corporation’s product invading your body itself, flesh directly meeting metal, exploring the border between human and machine, and when one might become the other. Signal Nine explores this in a few ways as well, and more to the point right now, it has cyberware!

As you may have gleaned from the combat dev diary, we model body parts fairly extensively, and part of our reason for doing this is to be able to properly model the advantages of cyberware. Fragile skin becomes armor, a limb’s function is boosted, and all new abilities are added. This also synergizes with combat damage and the long-term injuries and scarring that can result. A limb permanently losing function, while certainly consequential to your character, is less of a big deal in a world where you have the option to completely replace it.

This dev diary will be a little different. Instead of summarizing the different things we’re able to create with the cyberware system, we’ll pick a few finished products to show to you, and you’ll certainly begin to get the idea. Let’s start with some of the most ubiquitous pieces and work our way toward the more exotic.

Continue reading »

 Posted by at 1:45 am

Signal Nine Dev Diary #4: Combat

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Aug 312020
 

Just as warfare is an extension of diplomacy, a nicely roleplayed conversation will occasionally end with somebody getting punched in the face. We will also feature what we call “heists”: occasions where, as a group of criminals or corporate operatives, you go somewhere you shouldn’t be and take something that isn’t yours. You will have to account for the fact that people will want to stop you, and plan to either avoid combat entirely or make sure the odds are in your favor.

Indeed, engaging in combat at all will often be something of a failstate. If you find yourself in a pitched battle, likely to catch a bullet at any moment, then things have probably not gone according to plan. Even if you’re victorious, you probably won’t escape such a situation unscathed, and your character will be dealing with the aftermath for days, weeks, or forever. Needless to say, this will lend some extra weight to many of your character’s decisions.

For these reasons, we’ve given Signal Nine a thorough and full-featured combat system. Let’s talk more about what all this really means and how we arrived at these decisions.

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 Posted by at 12:24 am

Signal Nine Dev Diary #3: You

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Aug 172020
 

Signal Nine is designed to focus in on a particular rather small scale: you! Or rather, your character. In these dev diaries, you won’t see us bragging about the huge ships you can own, the light-years your adventure might span, or the infinity of procedural worlds we can generate — we have done all that before, and while it has its place, it isn’t in this game. Instead, we are focused sharply on individuals, on your own unique character, in as much detail as we can reasonably muster.

We’ll go through a few of the things that, in addition to your own roleplaying, will help to define your character and set them apart. For the most part, we’re just about to give you a broad overview of things you can decide at character generation. Other ways of setting yourself apart will probably deserve their own dev diary sooner or later. Continue reading »

 Posted by at 1:34 am

Signal Nine Dev Diary #2: The Environment

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Aug 062020
 

How is the world represented? Where does the player exist? For traditional Multi-User Dungeon games and their descendants, this question has a simple answer: the room! And there really isn’t anything wrong with this answer. You can represent all sorts of environments and systems with this construct. But let’s examine the traditional room… and why we decided it wasn’t suited to our needs. Continue reading »

 Posted by at 12:05 am

Signal Nine Dev Diary #1: City Simulation

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Jul 252020
 

A key aspect of cyberpunk is the idea that the main character is just one minor player in a very large setting. There are lots of other people around and every one of them has a story, even if you don’t necessarily ever learn it.

One of our design goals for Signal Nine is to create this feeling that everyone, not just you, has a part to play in the world. Also, in terms of game mechanics, certain systems will benefit from involving non-player characters with knowable and consistent identities.

In other words, our goal is to simulate an entire city. At the same time, we want to avoid the overhead and bloat that could result from an overcomplicated system. So we’ve built our city out of basic building blocks — each simple by itself, but creating complexity when combined. Continue reading »

 Posted by at 12:44 am

Signal Nine Dev Q&A

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Jun 082020
 

We asked players of our current text-based roleplaying game Star Conquest to give us their questions about Signal Nine, our upcoming cyberpunk roleplaying game! And here they are (reworded for brevity) along with our answers!

Q. Where does the name Signal Nine come from?

In Unix-based systems, a process that receives “signal 9” is terminated. The signal cannot be ignored and kills the process immediately. Signal 9 can also be represented ominously as SIGKILL. In the wider context of cyberpunk, we hope it evokes the image of a cold and unfeeling machine sending this SIGKILL down the line and straight into a hapless decker’s direct neural interface.

But mostly, naming a game is hard and we thought it sounded cool. Continue reading »

Announcing: Signal Nine

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Oct 122019
 

The can fell into the receptacle with a heavy clunk, and as he pulled it out, its reflective surface shone with the light of the vending machine’s constantly swirling advertisements. Four hundred milliliters, one hundred Calories, eighty milligrams of caffeine, seventy milligrams of sugar, he thought, then cursed to himself. He only knew that because of the Deepsearch datachip, which told him a lot of things he didn’t particularly care about, like a second brain producing intrusive thoughts of perfectly memorized useless facts. He should’ve left the thing at his desk, but it was a pain to get back into the proper headspace if he took it out, and it wasn’t like it was classified or–

His train of thought was derailed as he turned to see a short, dark-haired woman standing extremely close to him. He glanced from side to side. He had at least a foot on her, but somehow he still felt trapped. It was something in her eyes. “Uh, can I help you?” he asked.

“Probably.” The woman tapped a spot behind her ear, where chipsockets usually were installed. “That datachip. Give it to me.”

“Uh, I really can’t, I–”

The woman grabbed him under the arms, lifted him up, and shoved him back against the vending machine. It did not seem to particularly strain her. Seriously augmented, he thought. Oh shit.

“I don’t have time to debate it with you,” she said. “You’re going to give me the chip, and you’re gonna say you never saw me. You just lost it.”

He was breathing too fast. His hands were shaking. The only thing he could control was whether he held onto his soda can, and so he gripped it with all his might. “Listen, I can’t just lose it, my supervisor would–”

She sighed and transferred her grip to his throat. His eyes widened with a sudden certainty — that the last few moments had been a series of minor fuckups on his part that were about to culminate in a very sudden escalation. He opened his mouth wide, trying to find the breath to apologize, to make it right–

And she squeezed. Hard. Continue reading »

Squidsoft MOO Server Updates: The Approach to SQ-1.0.0 (SQ-0.1.12a to SQ-0.3.1)

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Oct 152011
 

Things in the server code room over the past year (but really, the past month more than anything else) have been hectic, but I suppose that the changes should also be listed here as well, for posterity.

Overall, on Star Conquest, this pretty much meant a 66% reduction in CPU utilization, though before all of the performance improvement changes were put in we were running over 120 simultaneous AI pilots in a sector without the server missing a beat.

Still, we could probably use an upgrade some time in the future.

Detailed changes after the break.

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 Posted by at 11:24 pm

Server Status Upgraded to “Not Airborne”

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May 022011
 

Everything should be well now, just waiting for the DNS to propagate, which seems to take about two minutes these days.

 Posted by at 8:08 pm