- Joined
- Apr 27, 2015
- Messages
- 8
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- 61
Q&A from April 17 to May 27 2015
The Q&A will be continuus, but the answers may be apart from one-another.
All these responses are from Schine, responses from the council will be given in the Q&A thread itself
The Q&A will be continuus, but the answers may be apart from one-another.
All these responses are from Schine, responses from the council will be given in the Q&A thread itself
Q: What about the possibility of additional hotbars?
Very high chances. There are several reasons and mechanics that would encourage us to include additional and alternate hotbars.
Additional hotbars are in queue and will come.
Q: Ship Health System, is that a "soon" or a "later?Additional hotbars are in queue and will come.
There's no ETA on this system, so all that's really relevant is that it's a feature that we are very keen to have it implemented. We will get it put it in as we are able to, as some other bugs, systems and features may need to be addressed beforehand.
Ship Health is already WiP and should be done by the end of the month (May)
Q: Are any other sorts of stellar phenomena planned?Ship Health is already WiP and should be done by the end of the month (May)
Yes, we would like to include more stellar objects and events. Jovians, moons, planetary nebulae, etc.
Definitely planned, but I can’t tell too much about them, as we don’t know the details yet of integrating them
Q: Are there plans for something akin to Minecraft's Creative Mode?Definitely planned, but I can’t tell too much about them, as we don’t know the details yet of integrating them
Yes, we plan a sort of creative mode. Aside from a possible creative server setting, we have also been considering a methodology of a pure design mode in the shipyard. You’d potentially be able to design a ship blueprint, building a nonphysical ship that is made up of no actual blocks (and you have an unlimited block selection pallet.) Then, once you are satisfied with your design, you can save the blueprint, and instruct the shipyard to build the ship, which now requires blocks obtained via normal survival gameplay.
Q: What is the estimated time frame before we see the inclusion of wild alien fauna?
Although we don’t have an estimate on when you will get a fleshed out fauna system, we have been developing resources and systems for these. The work to implement these, while a long term project, is already underway.
Q: Are there going to be more variations of landscapes on the different planets?
Within the limitations of the planets plates, we will try to improve the generation of shapes to include more variety. There are also plans to include more variety in the block types of planets as well as including Flora.
Q: Any plans on increasing planet sizes?
Planet size is a setting that can already be customised in the server config file. As for increasing the default range that planets spawn at, this is highly hardware specific. Although many computers can handle larger planets, not everyone has a computer of that calibre. Even those who do have a lower end computer, larger planets can be viewed at a loss of FPS or alternatively they can show the planet, but it would generate much more slowly.
Q: Will we ever see a type of weapon docked or otherwise that can track a target and fire like phasers? (omnidirectional tracking from a fixed weapon)
There probably won’t be a weapon specifically designed to behave like a phaser bank.
Q: Is a cockpit type scheme with designated duty stations (weapons, sensors, piloting) possible or planned?
It will definitely be possible, that will be entirely up to the ship designers in how they lay out their bridge and the ship's control functionality.
Q: Will there be furniture? Real seats, etc?
Probably to some extent. There are complications with starting to implement non block objects. It moves away from the 3-bytes per block method that is currently in use, which is a major factor in allowing the large ships and large player groups that starmade players enjoy. There’s also potential issues with the increase to polygons for rendering, and considerations to the games physics (Does furniture count towards collisions?) These issues might not be insurmountable, but they will take some work and consideration to incorporate them into the game in a way that does not detract from other aspects that you already enjoy about the game.
Q: Do you plan on having a any kind of resource, ingame or otherwise, on the finer points of how everything works?
Yes, as development progresses, focus will definitely be made on any missing explanations, sources, tutorials, missions, etc that more clearly explain the minutia of the game.
Q: Storage and item filtering is a bit clunky. Any plans on improving those interfaces and functionality?
They will most likely get improved as we continue to flesh out various systems of the game. One of the highlights of our recent UI update is that it makes future modification to these systems much easier to set up.
Q: I've read that there are some ideas for shipyards. How are those envisioned so far?
Without getting into too much detail, Shipyards will be the method in which you will spawn in ships that have been saved as a blueprint. You will retain your ability to build ships by hand, but the shipyard will be a place for having a blueprint built. It will also feature access to advanced build mode functions that will be restricted from ship core building. Additionally, there’s the possibility of the creative design mode that was mentioned earlier, as well as plans to hopefully allow factories and inventory to be integrated with the shipyard to allow automation of ship construction from basic resources to completed ship.
Q: I've also read that some kind of shield sharing is in the works for turrets and docked units. Any information you'd care to share on that topic regarding how it'll work?
There will be some config settings that will allow you to customize this. The new default setting should cause a turret, when damaged, to query its primary (the mothership) if it has a specific shield percentage remaining (this is what you set in the config.) If the shields remain, then the motherships shields take the damage and the turret remains unharmed. If not enough shields remain, the turret will take the damage. This still leaves turrets as a weak point, but the will be protected by their motherships shields as long as those shields remain at a high enough percentage.
Q: Loot clouds... We know they're temporary. What kind of system are you envisioning to replace them and make pirate hunting worthwhile?
If or when loot clouds are disabled (which you can do now in your config) then we will most likely include a simple credit bounty upon killing a pirate based on the ships value. You will also then be able to salvage what remains of the pirate ship for additional loot.
Q: It doesn't seem like your design goals for shops are entirely realized yet. Do you have any plans regarding adjusting the availability of goods and spendability of credits?
Yes, we have a goal for the shops, but they are not there yet. We want them to be a useful source of blocks, and a fun option in gameplay, but they should not be the primary source of materials or credits. Shops should continue to improve as we get other portions of the game put in and refined to the point that we can tie them in with the shop economies.
Q: Do you have any changes to mining and salvaging planned, or are those more or less where you expect them to stay?
We have some plans worked out, but as we have not yet decided if we will implement them, or other potential solutions, we have left the mining and salvaging as they are for now.
Q: Will we see new weapons and if so, then when?
Yes, we have a fifth new primary weapon type planned. It’s not at the top of our priority list currently though, so it may be a little while before it makes it into the game.
Q: Can we see a real life picture of Schema?
But in seriousness, this would be entirely up to Schema.
Various aspects of gameplay that are not yet or fully implemented will contribute to contention between factions and players.
Q: What is next after the rail system?
Ships will continue to be the focus after rails are complete. Possible things we may work on next include Shipyards, the shipwide HP and Armor systems, changes to thrust and rotation. Or Schema may choose to work something else completely.
Q: Are there any plans for a consumable?
Yes, we have plans for consumable items, as well as methods to obtain and create them.
Q: What happened with the idea of giving players flashlights and / or putting directional lights on vehicles?
Flashlights and directional light are planned for an advanced graphics update which will use deferred lighting. The reason why deffered lighting wasn’t used from the start is because while it has good performance for an amount of lights in the range of 50-100, it doesn’t scale very well beyond that as at the very least you would have to go through each light once per frame, and a ship can have hundreds of thousands of lights which would shut down performance. That's the reason why I went for a precalculated method. With that I can also add better lighting on top of it later. So in that case the precalculation would basically be used as a Level of Detail to have good lighting for objects far away that would have more lights that deferred lighting can handle. It also means that the graphics settings are backwards compatible for slower computers.
Q: There are many mentions of wheeled vehicle physics in the game files, can we expect to see those available in starmade one day, or are those just testing leftovers?
Those are very old leftovers from the early days of the Schine engine, before Schema decided to make StarMade using his game engine.
Q: What's the status on a working sound engine? Is this planned for the 0.2 milestone or later? Is it possible to get a list of loose milestones from the current release onward to 1.0?Sound is something I want to definitely put someone dedicated on as soon as possible. As it works fairly independent from the rest of the program there shouldn't be much problem in doing so.
Q: Any plans to make a part of the source available for pull requests on something like github, or wherever the project source control is hosted?
As an API for modding gets developed, more and more parts of the code are going to be deobfuscated as needed. It will probably happen gradually on demand of the modders, as I think putting in the full source code at once will lead to a certain amount of chaos and possibly a lot of incompatibility with mods to each other, so I first want to make sure there is an API that is capable to make mods run as compatible as possible, and also make it easy for players to use them. We are aiming for a system where mods on a server would be automatically downloaded to a client (of course the client can always decline) when joining a server.
Q: Are there really any serious steps taken to make the Mod API something more than an afterthought, and will it provide interfaces to write java code directly and possibly override existing systems?
There are serious steps taken, yes. We want modding to be a central element of the game. However at the same time, we always have to ensure that it is done in a well thought out manner, because a messed up modding API can lead to almost unrepairable problems later, if there are serious flaws in its design.
I also will probably be looking for extra people specifically for working on the Modding API soon.
I also will probably be looking for extra people specifically for working on the Modding API soon.
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