Thursday 24 September 2009

Fighter Review - Rapier by Neocrypter Rojyo

Neocrypter Rojyo is one of the lesser known shipbuilder / scripters, which is a shame as his scriptwork is very classy indeed. His range of physical fighters and shuttles is pretty consistent, although his colour schemes do tend to be a bit too dark to see the detailing of. The Rapier continues this very dark theme, though it is beautifully shaped, using more sculpts than his previous fighters. unusually, the landing gear consists of a force field that projects below the ship when it is parked, shimmering slightly as the texture runs across it. The oversized cannons either side of the nose look like they can do some serious damage, and the overall shape is one of repressed energy, like a cat just before it pounces.

The ship flies using Neo's own flight script, a beautifully developed dual mode script that switches between mouselook flight and non-mouselook flight by detecting whether or not you are actually in mouselook at the time. The advanced mode has a novel feature, mapping the left and right arrow keys to rolling the ship rather than strafing - as his script has no vertical attractor to right the ship when it's off kilter, this comes in very handy, though it does feel a bit touchy - perhaps it could be done to be dialled down in sensitivity a little. Cleverly, he has also put in a 'dead zone' in the middle of the screen where you can move the mouse in mouselook and it will not do anything until you reach the edge of the 'dead zone'. Very handy, as it's notoriously difficult to get a mouselook ship to stay still when you're actually in mouselook with older scripts. It's worth noting that the flight system is 360 degrees, too, so another bonus.

The combat system selection has the old stalwarts CCC and PCS built in, but I was a little disappointed not to see VICE support; looks to me like VICE is rapidly becoming one of the more popular combat systems, and with good reason. Hopefully Neo will go back and put VICE compatibility into it at some point - he does have a good track record for updating his older ships. In combat, the guns are armed and the balls of animated plasma that the cannons spew are beautiful, carrying on the slick presentation of his work on this ship.


Build Quality - 80% - Beautiful sculpts, excellent design, the only flies in the ointment are the too-dark textures that don't let us see the prettiness of this slick and original design. If not for those, this would have scored considerably higher.

Scripting - 93% - Can't really fault the scripting here, Neocrypter has done a superb job on this flight script. It is clever, works nicely and feels good to fly. My only suggestion would be to dial down the sensitivity of the roll maneuver, but thath really is all. The ship is a well-scripted treat.

RPability - 85% - What bounty hunter or rogue pilot wouldn't want to be seen with a rare and new exotic fighter ship? Combat systems give you the ability to duke it out with other pilots, though it would have been nice to see an implementation of VICE here.

Gizmos - 85% - Guns that require arming and disarming, missiles that do the same, funky forcefield landing gear, moving artificial horizon ball; all that's missing here is a jump drive.

Value For Money - 80% - At L$800 it's not the cheapest fighter on the market. But it is one of the prettiest, if you don't mind the dark texturing. The sheer joy of flying it however is worth overlooking thaht small detail. After all, you don't look at the damned thing whilst you're flying it...

Overall - 85% - An excellent little fighter craft, well-scripted, nice to fly, with big guns and a combat system...some minor gripes keep it out of the 90's but still a fighter I would heartily recommend!

1 comment:

  1. Thank you for your kind words, I just happend to stumble on to this post, and VICE will be implemented very soon in all my ships along with VCS which seems to be popular in swrp vehicle combat.

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