StarMade v0.19519 Cargo & more

[Deserea]

I believe as stated in the release video (which may not be in the OP) that over-encumbered players would move more slowly. This is an abrupt change to how inventories work so we would not force the loss of blocks or immobility on the player immediately. It is an option that is off. If the option is turned on then this may work however I do not know if it was intended to allow removal of blocks on a full inventory. It's worth discussing though.


There is no new system. It is simply a change in a few values. If it is indeed as broken as players suggest we will look at alternate solutions.

I noticed that on my reread through, i just didnt think it was the case currently in game because i couldnt remove blocks while in build mode with an over encumbered character(unless there is a max limit to being encumbered). My config file states it is off, which is as it should be!

Do note, i am very grateful that those options being turned off to start with!

 

[Raisinbat]

If the power curve is that big an issue maybe see if your server's admin will reduce it in the config?

This shouldn't be in the configs, whats the point of community content if all the ships are made to fit different ballance settings, half the stuff wont work or is terribly ballanced. This is transport tycoon all over again; tweaking the values is not the solution, better mechanics is.

I'd say 1.5mil would be a nice middle-ground to start off with rather than just jumping to 2mil.

that does suck, but i suppose that it could be a good thing, despite the mass amount of wasted time setting up the logic blocks you spent of course, you dont have to do that again(at least for now),

The point of making the ship was to see if you could get a weapon of that scale fitted to a 12k mass ship; now the obvious answer is yes, it's easy.

The reason this doesn't change anything is that this just makes the same ship twice as large; A design that worked before should now be 2x the size to remain efficient, but what you build is completely unaffected. I'll still be doing docked reactors, now they're just twice the size.

There is no new system. It is simply a change in a few values. If it is indeed as broken as players suggest we will look at alternate solutions.

The problem with the power system is that it's far too simplistic to allow diversity in ship designs:

• Alpha weapons like CAN/PUL are at an extreme disadvantage not just because their damage against armor/hull is halved and the slow fire rate makes them impossible to lead, but because you need to add a capacitor per weapon block in order to fire it, making them take up twice the space for the same DPS.
  
• Energy supply beams serve no purpose outside of docked reactors; everything is perpetually power stable unless its taken significant damage; energy production is the cheapest resource in the game, transferring it around is a waste of time.
  
• Capacitors are just there to let you fire weapons; you can't have a ship that uses power capacity exclusively; like a bomber going into combat, unloading a lot of high damage weapons, then returning to mothership to recharge; why would you when at 100-200 mass a capacitor stores the same amount of power that a single reactor generates in 3 seconds? Capacitor size can't be raised or you'd have everyone flying instakill ships with insane alpha, mechanics needs to be changed for this; like limiting capacitor speed so it more like 1000e/sec, while reactors produce much less power and power is stored in the systems like how scanners/jumpdrives work. That way small ships wouldn't need this massive power boost, they could just run off capacity instead. As long as smaller designs get all these advantages chopping your ship into little bits will be preferable over a single entity design.

I still don't understand what this change was supposed to achieve, all it does is make the shipscale twice as large.

 

[Trekkerjoe]

I've been playing around with contact docking, Man the possibilities! I think we need a USDA (Universal Standard Docking Arm) now for grabbing ships

Something like this old prototype?

 

[Bonusinches]

This shouldn't be in the configs, whats the point of community content if all the ships are made to fit different ballance settings, half the stuff wont work or is terribly ballanced. This is transport tycoon all over again; tweaking the values is not the solution, better mechanics is.

Trouble with that is you're trying to dictate how people play a sandbox game. some people want to build ships to a larger scale so you can achieve a decent level of detail etc.

 

[Criss]

I still don't understand what this change was supposed to achieve, all it does is make the shipscale twice as large.

It was certainly not intended to encourage increased shipscale. This alone really doesn't do that past a certain point as many servers have limits, and beyond that the game performs poorly after reaching a certain point. It certainly effects combat though.

1: How does this change effect weapons such as cannon/pulse? Maybe I am missing something. Going over the patch notes indicates that nothing aside from missile/cannon changed.
2: I agree here. Power is important and to some extent should be harder to manage than other systems. Although I didn't really have a say when this change was taking place.
3: I need clarification here.

 

[Crimson-Artist]

Something like this old prototype?

i was thinking more along the lines of an actual Arm designed to extend out to either dock odd shape ships or grab a overheated ship to bring back to salvage.

 

[Raisinbat]

It was certainly not intended to encourage increased shipscale. This alone really doesn't do that past a certain point as many servers have limits, and beyond that the game performs poorly after reaching a certain point. It certainly effects combat though.

But what WAS it supposed to do? It sounds like people just whined about not having enough power and then they got more power.

1: How does this change effect weapons such as cannon/pulse? Maybe I am missing something. Going over the patch notes indicates that nothing aside from missile/cannon changed.

No this wasn't changed, it's just a result of how the game's power works.

3: I need clarification here.

I'm just saying the only viable power system is one where you constantly produce massive amount of power, which is spent as fast as possible and capacitors are a necessary addition in order for your weapons to shoot. You can't have a ship ingame that relies on capacity, charges in doing a lot more damage than the first design could do, then withdraws and recovers it's power/recharges at base; it's far too weak by comparison.

Trouble with that is you're trying to dictate how people play a sandbox game. some people want to build ships to a larger scale so you can achieve a decent level of detail etc.

We end up playing different games like this. I like sharing the ships, wont work if the rules are completely different. You should be able to make large ships that aren't completely power starved without chopping them into little bits, and you should be able to have interiors on ships without crippling them; you can't do this in starmade because a lot of the game's systems for mass/power/effects are poorly done and actively punish ships for adding cosmetic blocks, not because some variable isn't set right.

I want to make good looking ships too even if i suck at it, but i also want the ships to have function to them, and in order to do that you need a consistent set of rules; making a 50k mass ship that can reach max speed with overdrive is tricky on old settings, but if we just tweak configs around a bit it's pisseasy.

 

[Criss]

You can't have a ship ingame that relies on capacity

I never really enountered this type of play style at all actually. It is theoretical stuff that Saber proposed for his racing and that is about as far as capacity based ships went. I will ask why this was changed. I don't have their reasoning, as I mentioned in my last comment.

 

[Enepttastic]

It was certainly not intended to encourage increased shipscale. This alone really doesn't do that past a certain point as many servers have limits, and beyond that the game performs poorly after reaching a certain point. It certainly effects combat though.

Was that the intention of cargo then because even though I just started playing the game a few days ago, dealing with the, "increase the cube" mechanic of power and building around weapon modules automatically linking made bloated areas of ship size enough to begin with.

While I understand the desire to have better inventory management over the limited slot/unlimited weight/volume situation we had, I personally feel this method's worse. Ships now need to allocate a decent chunk of space to cargo areas to handle salvaging, which means they have more mass, that then increases once they actually have a load. Bases have now gone from requiring a modicum of inventory management to, "Make a massive amount of cargo spaces, slave em to a single Storage and slave/connect that to everything else."

Now? The only reason to have more than one Storage on a ship or base is if one wants to micromanage what goes into what container or to separate stockpiles by player on a shared base.

In addition, while the variable cargo container sizes are visually interesting, I do wonder if the calculations for that(especially since it seems that the cargo spaces seem to fill as if they're holding a liquid instead of one filling up then the next in the chain begins to fill), plus the extra blocks each player is going to be using to hold their resources are going to end up causing additional strain on servers.

In short, it really just feels like inventory management was turned into block management in order to give bases some additional purpose(granted I really do not understand why factories and the like aren't allowed on spacecraft).

That said, if there's absolutely no chance of reverting this, I have one suggestion to add:
Change the name of the Storage module to "Storage Interface" and allow more than one to connect to a set of cargo spaces. Since Storage modules are pretty much nothing but interfaces for cargo spaces now anyways, it's not unreasonable.

And since I'm already typing up a long post, another suggestion that's not directly connected to the volume change:
It's kinda annoying to not be able to move items to/from the Personal Cargo to player inventory. Adding some way to do so either via having the Personal Cargo open in a new box or some other method would be appreciated.

One last thought, this line in the update announcement made me chuckle due to its absurdity:

Since it’s impossible to organize your things into different little boxes with limited capacity

As soon as I read that, I had two thoughts:
1. Obviously this person has never dealt with putting clothes into drawers or closets...
2. I've never had a problem with this in any game where I could readily make more storage items. Deciding on where to put said storage items on the other hand...

Edit: Forgot to apologize for my first post being more critique than praise. Just learned about Starmade a few days ago and it does seem rather promising but dealing with many flops over the years I've spent gaming has made me wait a bit till I do any major praising.

 

[Criss]

Was that the intention of cargo

Without proper inventory management, there is less of an actual economy. We are striving to reach a point where trade is important, and just as viable an area of gameplay as running missions, or hunting pirates. Future changes include passive resource acquisition and trade routes. How can these things exist and be well done if an entire fleet of materials can reside inside a single ships storage, with no mass penalty, or any penalty of any kind really. A few storage blocks was all it took to hold every item in game in unlimited quantities.

end up causing additional strain on servers.

Schema has already made note with the inclusion of slabs that these blocks do not impact performance any more than normal blocks do. The storage containers adjust to represent the inventory used but there are only 4 different stages to their scaling.

bases some additional purpose(granted I really do not understand why factories and the like aren't allowed on spacecraft).

To be honest I'm not sure this was really about giving bases purpose, although I suppose they do in the sense of being a natural location to store loot. Future changes will impact the importance of space stations and planets much more than this, although this is an important step. Even if you do not agree with these changes, keep in mind a few things. We are in alpha, we can change it if needed. Let's let this pan out a bit first and see how it goes before we jump to a decision. Two, this is one piece of a larger picture. It will take all of them before proper balancing can begin. Until then we will do our best.

 

[Blaza612]

\o/
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No, i think ill just go back a version so that i can finish my ship off. So i can do what i want to do in the order i want to do it. Ship first, Space station second.


Edit: this has completely ruined any plans to get my brother back into the game, he loves roaming around and building as he goes. Now, he *MUST* use a shipyard when building his battleship(Doesnt want to use creative mode, considers it cheating). He hates having to be locked down to a homebase, prefers being that random roaming player.

i maybe will get used to it(highly doubtful, since i too enjoy building as i move around sectors, without having to go back to my home base)

I'll just leave this here...

Nomadic Revolution [Motherships/Capital Ships as Homes]

 

[Jananton]

Well, over all this sounds as a lot to reconsider when designing ships and stations. I certainly like the effect that handling large amounts of cargo will have on planning and transportation from point A to Point B.

The only doubt I have is the fact a storage can hold unlimited types of items. One could argue that not all types of materials can be stored in the same storage area. Think for instance of delicate equipment like computers and heavy metal parts like rails.

Anyhow, lots to experiment again, thanks guys and back to the drawing board for me. :D

Greets,

Jan

 

[spacie]

Interesting update, though I'm wondering why cargo works with "volume units" when it's actually based on mass. Seems like an easy way to confuse people since the cargo volume is not actually equal to the volume that blocks occupy in game. I have seen the config entries that allow you to change the "volume" independently of mass, but to call it volume just seems weird.

 

[Blaza612]

Interesting update, though I'm wondering why cargo works with "volume units" when it's actually based on mass. Seems like an easy way to confuse people since the cargo volume is not actually equal to the volume that blocks occupy in game. I have seen the config entries that allow you to change the "volume" independently of mass, but to call it volume just seems weird.

It could be possible that eventually they'll give every item a volume, and that they're just using mass as a place-holder.

 

[Lancake]

Interesting update, though I'm wondering why cargo works with "volume units" when it's actually based on mass. Seems like an easy way to confuse people since the cargo volume is not actually equal to the volume that blocks occupy in game. I have seen the config entries that allow you to change the "volume" independently of mass, but to call it volume just seems weird.

It could be possible that eventually they'll give every item a volume, and that they're just using mass as a place-holder.

Each block has its volume set as mass currently as default, we're planning to give each block its own volume but that's for the next release. Cargo is new and it depends on feedback on how we'll change volume numbers.

The cargo system does use volume, and the mass added to your ship is currently 0.1 * volume used. This factor is most likely going to change, all depends on the feedback we get on it.
[DOUBLEPOST=1449316168,1449315298][/DOUBLEPOST]Small ships often don't have a lot of volume inside, we're talking about 60-70% not functional blocks (like hull, decoration) and only 40-30% system blocks (power, thrust, weapons, shields,...).

It's the opposite for "Big" ships, they have way more volume compared to the blocks used for its outer skin. I've seen big, heavily armored ships with a thick outer skin that still have 85% system blocks and 15% non functional ones. At this point big ships can also switch over to external reactors, it gives them great power regen but in turn makes their ship more vulnerable once their shields are down (shoot the reactors and bam, there goes your entire power regen).

That's why power scales so much better at the beginning, to level that out and to make smaller ships actually work well.

The issue we've seen for a long time is that, when certain ship sizes require about 2 mil power regen or a bit more to function well relative to its smaller and bigger counterparts. They would have a *lot* of wasted blocks since power regen was completely linear for that time.

It basically made every ship of that size completely useless, you're better off making a bigger ship, or stick with multiple smaller ships.

Now because power regen still scales well till 2 million, that issue should be resolved. After that point ships usually have enough volume to allow external, on-board reactors.
Obviously this also buffed external reactors but those reactors can be easily re-balanced by tweaking the power supply blocks. How much this is going to change depends on feedback and play testing. Ideally we just need to tweak it without you requiring to change anything on your existing reactors.

I think we can all agree though that changing the same values constantly up and down for every release, is going to be a bad idea so we have to keep that in mind. No one wants to rebuild their ships every 2 weeks.

 

[Raisinbat]

The issue we've seen for a long time is that, when certain ship sizes require about 2 mil power regen or a bit more to function well relative to its smaller and bigger counterparts. They would have a *lot* of wasted blocks since power regen was completely linear for that time.

Doesn't this just push the issue to the 3million mark?

You aren't seriously sugesting this is the power system you expect to have ingame for 1.0?

 

[Lancake]

Doesn't this just push the issue to the 3million mark?

You aren't seriously sugesting this is the power system you expect to have ingame for 1.0?

No, this doesn't push the issue to the 3 million mark. At that size ships have enough volume to fill with functional systems and they don't need a buff.

I'm not suggesting anything, I'm simply providing you the argumentation why it was buffed.

 

[FatCobra]

I am unable to connect cargo blocks to micro assemblers. I am also having issues with salvaging. When the salvage computer is linked to a storage block the salvaged items don't show up in inventory. They also don't show up in my personal inventory.

 

[Lancake]

I am unable to connect cargo blocks to micro assemblers. I am also having issues with salvaging. When the salvage computer is linked to a storage block the salvaged items don't show up in inventory. They also don't show up in my personal inventory.

I just checked the block config and unfortunately it seems the Micro Assembler is the only inventory using block that can't link to cargo space. This will be fixed asap, thank you for mentioning this.

However, I can't reproduce that salvage computer issue. My own salvagers work fine linked or not linked to a chest, could you PM me the details (ship blueprint for example) so we can figure out the issue?

 

[Batavium]

Thanks for the power buff but power use has gone through the roof as well. My ship is 120K as seen in navigation and used about 400.000 power to sit still pre patch. Now it uses 6 milion power just to do nothing. If i throttle up it goes to 11 milion. The ship bleeds dry if i had not installed some power generators i think i might not even have been able to redock.

Are there other people who see a sharp increase in power use? This now breaks my ship.