StarMade v0.19538 - New Thruster Mechanics

[SchnellBier]

okay...fine you read and listen...and you implement the EASIEST ones and go for the most wanted ones instead of those which makes the most sense in doing.
all the new system implementations, the mechanics, the stat changes, are there to please, not to refine the game...i've been watching and sometimes playing this game almost from the start...and this is all i see, you can't get your head around what you want to make, so it became a popularity fluffy toy that want to please most and care less about how things work...i mean why go newtonian when you have speed limits because you can't program good netcode to let servers do the calculations of double or triple precision...or even heck getting it run 64bit...or having a decent sense in items and materials...this game could have been so much more refined and defined...and i have seen less amount of people doing way more and better job at doing a game in the same time frame you guys had...it's like you don't want to learn from any other developer's mistakes, so you are doing them again and again, while laughing and pleasing and toying around like a 2year old.
fine have at it...and this is the point for me to not leave any suggestions...you copy stuff from your own community not even giving credit to where it came from, you give yourself the highest appraise of what you have accomplished, like its a big thing...well reality just called, ITS NOT.
so im not giving you suggestion to chew on/copy over...i rather make my own programs...
for a while i cared about this game...it had promising future...which you botched it up and all i can do is laugh in your face and pety try of doing something meaningful.

i am not writing this to you to be mean...i don't hate you...i would feel sorry for you but i don't do that anymore...this is just a flash in the night...a warning for you...because i care that much in this moment...REALISE what you do before its too late and you regret it.

you are all on your knees...thinking that you fly in the sky...im not giving you a hand anymore...you clearly represented that you shut out the most helping part of the community the most talented and creative...so im not wasting time anymore to you...enjoy the empty drakness with all tha fanboys and fangirls...that's all you'll ever have.

Your opinion is the best and the only viable of them all we get it. Now please go and play a game that gets exactly developed as you want. Oh wait there is not even one? Sad story bro.

 

[Criss]

okay...fine you read and listen...and you implement the EASIEST ones and go for the most wanted ones instead of those which makes the most sense in doing.
all the new system implementations, the mechanics, the stat changes, are there to please, not to refine the game...i've been watching and sometimes playing this game almost from the start...and this is all i see, you can't get your head around what you want to make, so it became a popularity fluffy toy that want to please most and care less about how things work...i mean why go newtonian when you have speed limits because you can't program good netcode to let servers do the calculations of double or triple precision...or even heck getting it run 64bit...or having a decent sense in items and materials...this game could have been so much more refined and defined...and i have seen less amount of people doing way more and better job at doing a game in the same time frame you guys had...it's like you don't want to learn from any other developer's mistakes, so you are doing them again and again, while laughing and pleasing and toying around like a 2year old.
fine have at it...and this is the point for me to not leave any suggestions...you copy stuff from your own community not even giving credit to where it came from, you give yourself the highest appraise of what you have accomplished, like its a big thing...well reality just called, ITS NOT.
so im not giving you suggestion to chew on/copy over...i rather make my own programs...
for a while i cared about this game...it had promising future...which you botched it up and all i can do is laugh in your face and pety try of doing something meaningful.

i am not writing this to you to be mean...i don't hate you...i would feel sorry for you but i don't do that anymore...this is just a flash in the night...a warning for you...because i care that much in this moment...REALISE what you do before its too late and you regret it.

you are all on your knees...thinking that you fly in the sky...im not giving you a hand anymore...you clearly represented that you shut out the most helping part of the community the most talented and creative...so im not wasting time anymore to you...enjoy the empty drakness with all tha fanboys and fangirls...that's all you'll ever have.

I think it's interesting that you say we have such high appraisal for ourselves when I personally, and maybe others on the team, fully realize that we cannot keep on the current course. We cannot become a decent indie title if we do not gain momentum. There are other larger similar titles that are doing well and only seem to be increasing in popularity. We aren't blind.

When it comes to the end game for StarMade. This is the area that is questioned the most out of anything we do I think. The only people that really know how the game will look when it is finished is us, Schine and the councilors. Look at the rest of early access, and even larger triple A games. How many times do they give promises and fail to uphold them? Assassins Creed Unity was promised to bring back their franchise, it was a flop in comparison. Elite Dangerous promised players would be a part of a massive universe that they could explore and have an impact on. Yet their universe is so large and full of meaningless space that there is no impact, and players can hardly be in the same instance together even while in the same party.

Gaming is full of disappointments. I don't want to disappoint anyone. It happens every release because everyone has their own version as to what StarMade should be. StarMade can be all these things because that is currently the nature of the game. It is quite open ended. You can spend time on factions and conquest as some players do, or you can build peacefully alone. Our current modus operandi is that we don't reveal or promise anything that Schema isn't already sure he can figure out. That has changed recently with our live Q&A stream, where we established many plans going forward.

I can open a document with the currently planned features for the complete game. It is extensive. In the past few months we have crossed off 8 or so features. There are over 70 on the list. Some features are massive like intractable NPCs. Some are as small as the flashlight. More can and will be added to the list between now and beta release. This is I think where the frustration comes. Our playerbase raises concerns because they only see a small part of the puzzle.

With regards to netcode; Schema can surely give a better response. What is the point of traveling quickly if you won't actually be able to load in objects fast enough to view on screen or to pass right through them. It's not because we chose the easiest option. There ARE limits. I can't magically make the game work as good as real life because I want it to. Space Engineers has speed limit. Why? Because the alternative is worse. When we take away those limits we start seeing game breaking physics even in triple A titles. That's when the buggy glitchy stuff comes out and ruins the experience. "I can fly thousands of meters a second, yet the game slows to a crawl, or I clip through things, or I don't see anything". There is no point in that, so the limits are in place. This also establishes how the universe scales, which is something we need when it comes to the size we are dealing with. It can't all be endless space.

Lastly, about the copying stuff from the community part. Something that you will realize when you have been on the forums long enough is that nobody is original. A number of us pretty much expect the same suggestions each week. Players have thought of ideas, Schine has thought of the same ideas, my mother has thought of the same ideas (not a joke, I've actually talked to her about the game and had her come to similar conclusions on topics). I'm not sure who to give credit to if it's something a lot of people have talked about. Do we need to? Is it that important that someone get the credit when it's more of a group discussion happening in multiple places over the course of time? If you were talking about something like in game assets then I think I could relate.

I will leave with this. If you want change then voice concerns in a well written suggestion thread. Lancake has his own balance change threads here and here. We are trying to be more open on our end of things. The Q&A is evidence of that, and is the largest release of info in over a years time. If you have more concerns you are free to PM me or other staff members. I won't be responding any further to this thread. We have enough of these discussions happening with every release blog. We respond to one concerned person, and someone new comes along in the next thread. Perhaps we should stop responding altogether, or would that be a bad idea?

 

[cyberus111]

<snipped>

I will leave with this. You want change? Voice concerns in a well written suggestion thread. Lancake has his own balance change threads here and here. We are trying to be more open on our end of things. The Q&A is evidence of that, and is the largest release of info in over a years time. If you have more concerns you are free to PM me or other staff members. I won't be responding any further to this thread. We have enough of these discussions happening with every release blog. We respond to one concerned person, and someone new comes along in the next thread. Perhaps we should stop responding altogether, or would that be a bad idea?

Criss, please don't let one troll derail the current good relationship between devs and players.

As a warning to others about flaming trolls .. all it does is feed the troll and create bad feelings, as this post by Criss demonstrates.

If you disagree please feel free to do so, but *please* try and do it in a logical, positive (or at least neutral manner) so as to not give the troll any fire to feed on and throw back into the conversation to burn the bridges between devs and ourselves AND between each other.

 

[Criss]

Criss, please don't let one troll derail the current good relationship between devs and players.

As a warning to others about flaming trolls .. all it does is feed the troll and create bad feelings, as this post by Criss demonstrates.

If you disagree please feel free to do so, but *please* try and do it in a logical, positive (or at least neutral manner) so as to not give the troll any fire to feed on and throw back into the conversation to burn the bridges between devs and ourselves AND between each other.

I don't see them as a troll. We have dealt with them in the past. Were this type of post being made often then perhaps then I would consider them trolls. I probably won't be responding to comments like those above any more. I gave it a shot and it does very little to reach the next person with their concerns.

I think the main reason we want to keep responding is because often there are posts made where people speak for us, as individuals and as a company. I don't think that is right. You can't tell me what I do or do not know, or how we all feel about a particular subject. ASK me how I feel or what my solution is. Don't assume my lack of comment on a subject is the extent of my knowledge. Know what I mean? For the record most people participating on these forums are awesome. If you guys weren't around why would we bother making this game.

 

[Malacodor]

Criss, please don't let one troll derail the current good relationship between devs and players.

As a warning to others about flaming trolls .. all it does is feed the troll and create bad feelings, as this post by Criss demonstrates.

I'm sure SzaboMartonD isn't a troll, just a veteran player who is pissed by reasons that seem valid to him. Criss' post explains a lot and is very well worded, making me jealous of his diplomatic skill.

 

[StormWing0]

^_^ Now to go add yet another thing to the micro tutorial station on the main server I'm on. XD

 

[Lecic]

Instead of editing the direction of thrust, will it be so that where thrust is allocated is dependent on the orientation and placement of thruster blocks, kind of like real life?

God no. That would make building a massive pain in the ass, and would ruin all existing ships for... basically no gain.

 

[Employee763]

God no. That would make building a massive pain in the ass, and would ruin all existing ships for... basically no gain.

It should at least be an option, for RP's sake.

 

[Master_Artificer]

you can do that anyways...
you can rotate thrusters...

 

[kikaha]

God no. That would make building a massive pain in the ass, and would ruin all existing ships for... basically no gain.

How would that make a massive pain in the bum ? No more than rotating weapons computers and blocks...

 

[Dellexe]

How would that make a massive pain in the bum ? No more than rotating weapons computers and blocks...

First off, it would render 99.9% of existing ships unusable.
Secondly, weapon computers just need one block rotated in order to have that effect, and hull rotation is a fairly simple part of building that requires relatively little thought, at least for me.
Thirdly, this would require players to have to check their thrust stats for every direction/rotation as they're building. The amount of optimization/tweaking required for larger ships would add unneeded hours onto builds. This compared to the current system where optimization of thrust just requires sliding 3 bars.
Lastly, think of the extra coding required for this. It would need to detect the orientation of every thruster block, the size of every group, etc. to determine the thrust characteristics of the ship. That'd be a pain to program and probably laggy to update in real time. Also, what happens when you start losing thruster blocks? Does the game have to stop and recalculate which blocks got destroyed and how that affects your ship's handling?

The current system is logical, easy to use, works well, and allows for lots of ship tweaking. The only change I'd make is to allow for separate forward/backward adjustment.

 

[luizsilveira]

All I know is that after a small time around here I feel like I'm already spoiled. I'm already eagerly waiting for the next update!

Keep up the good work.

 

[badmojo]

First off, it would render 99.9% of existing ships unusable.
Secondly, weapon computers just need one block rotated in order to have that effect, and hull rotation is a fairly simple part of building that requires relatively little thought, at least for me.
Thirdly, this would require players to have to check their thrust stats for every direction/rotation as they're building. The amount of optimization/tweaking required for larger ships would add unneeded hours onto builds. This compared to the current system where optimization of thrust just requires sliding 3 bars.
Lastly, think of the extra coding required for this. It would need to detect the orientation of every thruster block, the size of every group, etc. to determine the thrust characteristics of the ship. That'd be a pain to program and probably laggy to update in real time. Also, what happens when you start losing thruster blocks? Does the game have to stop and recalculate which blocks got destroyed and how that affects your ship's handling?

The current system is logical, easy to use, works well, and allows for lots of ship tweaking. The only change I'd make is to allow for separate forward/backward adjustment.

It would require work to existing ships... therefore it's bad? Also, the current system is not logical in real world logic.

Game is in development, early access and all that, when we start reacting emotionally about our builds, the game can't ever progress. Just my 2 cents.

 

[Borr]

I'm sure SzaboMartonD isn't a troll, just a veteran player who is pissed by reasons that seem valid to him. Criss' post explains a lot and is very well worded, making me jealous of his diplomatic skill.

Well said, but I disagree. Pissed veteran players stopped giving feedback and suggestions a long time ago. I could suggest features like: shield only affecting hull/armor blocks with a little boost, solar shield hull (power hungry blocks for building stations near stars), NOR, NAND gates, adjustable delay, better connection indicators for logic, even some squeezing logic system to one integrated circuit, more powerful explosives, exhaust for thrusters, hull decaying (rusting?), new power system: harvesting stars and planet cores for power (with no negative affecting for those), boosted power capacity (1000x?), limited old power generation (up to 1000/s?), solar panels, and much more. And I suggested some similar ideas in the past, but I was eaten by shallow thinking people. I still play from time to time, but not so much as before, mostly refitting my old designs with new features, testing and debating with myself about playing again or not. Didn't buy the game yet, and I will not buy it and abandon completely when it become not free to play with state as it is right now. I think there is a lot of people feel the same way, and they are passive for what is going on with the game, don't even bother to respond, give feedback, even read the forums.

Something about update, because I don't wanna be completely off topic:
Its kinda weird to me that we can thrust to whatever direction we want without any engine exhaust and that always bugged me. You should add exhaust block in addition to thrusters that will define direction and speed/acceleration could be splitted evenly for each one of them.
Why you still adding new colored hulls, lights? Why we can't have only grey hulls. transparent lights and option to paint it later or in the build mode?

 

[Criss]

Why you still adding new colored hulls, lights? Why we can't have only grey hulls. transparent lights and option to paint it later or in the build mode?

Who's to say that isn't an option. Personally however I want those colored hulls to stick around. Otherwise it takes two steps to get the color I want; placing a block, and selecting it with a specific paint. I don't see why we can't add the functionality of repainting hull, but trust me, you will miss colored blocks if you need to spend extra time painting your battleship.

Funnily enough some of the things you mentioned are things we've thought about. Not sure about the balance related stuff, considering you're asking for an increase in power by a magnitude of a 1000x if I read that correctly. As for thrusters exahust. I think schema has made note of this many times. The way it currently functions is far more conveniant. We want players flying ships, not spending hours tweaing a system that can be simplified. Building is a major part of the game but it shouldn't become an engineering problem at every corner. The idea makes sense, but since when has StarMade "made sense". I'm sure it can be modded in, and if players truly want this sort of system we can take a look later, but not now.

Players wanted hull colors. The art department acts more independently from schema who is coding. It's not slowing down anything to add a new color of hull.

Players want better faction permissions. We agree that they are not up to par and are already tweaking them in the dev build.

Players want new logic blocks, and Bench has come up with some recently. Is it a priority? Maybe not, but it is there for discussion.

As for past updates, shipyards, blueprint, transporters, new gates, better explosions, ship health system, ship spawning, and boarding are a result of the natural progression that we would have moved toward, player feedback, or a combination of both. Make no mistake however, the player base does not get to decide what the focus of development is. It's a blunt truth. We can't drop everything so that we can add rusting hulls to the game. Cool? Yes. Is it a priority when we have major game features like NPC's that we already have a plan for? No. We have that laid out, but we haven't though about having rusting hulls. We would need to balance it, discuss, and frankly that probably would end up having little impact on the gameplay in comparison.

I'm not saying you're ideas are bad or ignored. We read a ton of stuff. I think my response should be taken as evidence of that. But there is an order to things, and we all have to be patient.

 

[SchnellBier]

Well said, but I disagree. Pissed veteran players stopped giving feedback and suggestions a long time ago. I could suggest features like: shield only affecting hull/armor blocks with a little boost, solar shield hull (power hungry blocks for building stations near stars), NOR, NAND gates, adjustable delay, better connection indicators for logic, even some squeezing logic system to one integrated circuit, more powerful explosives, exhaust for thrusters, hull decaying (rusting?), new power system: harvesting stars and planet cores for power (with no negative affecting for those), boosted power capacity (1000x?), limited old power generation (up to 1000/s?), solar panels, and much more. And I suggested some similar ideas in the past, but I was eaten by shallow thinking people. I still play from time to time, but not so much as before, mostly refitting my old designs with new features, testing and debating with myself about playing again or not. Didn't buy the game yet, and I will not buy it and abandon completely when it become not free to play with state as it is right now. I think there is a lot of people feel the same way, and they are passive for what is going on with the game, don't even bother to respond, give feedback, even read the forums.

Something about update, because I don't wanna be completely off topic:
Its kinda weird to me that we can thrust to whatever direction we want without any engine exhaust and that always bugged me. You should add exhaust block in addition to thrusters that will define direction and speed/acceleration could be splitted evenly for each one of them.
Why you still adding new colored hulls, lights? Why we can't have only grey hulls. transparent lights and option to paint it later or in the build mode?

Your opinion is the best and the only viable of them all we get it. Now please go and play a game that gets exactly developed as you want. Oh wait there is not even one? Sad story bro.

 

[Malacodor]

Otherwise it takes two steps to get the color I want; placing a block, and selecting it with a specific paint.

No, ideally there would be additional sliders/arrows for color and shape like there is for orientation/slabs. We could just produce grey cubes instead of having to make and to carry around 50 different blocks types. The paint tool would only be needed for corrections, pixel art or adapting a ship to specific faction colors.

 

[Borr]

Who's to say that isn't an option. Personally however I want those colored hulls to stick around. Otherwise it takes two steps to get the color I want; placing a block, and selecting it with a specific paint. I don't see why we can't add the functionality of repainting hull, but trust me, you will miss colored blocks if you need to spend extra time painting your battleship.

Funnily enough some of the things you mentioned are things we've thought about. Not sure about the balance related stuff, considering you're asking for an increase in power by a magnitude of a 1000x if I read that correctly. As for thrusters exahust. I think schema has made note of this many times. The way it currently functions is far more conveniant. We want players flying ships, not spending hours tweaing a system that can be simplified. Building is a major part of the game but it shouldn't become an engineering problem at every corner. The idea makes sense, but since when has StarMade "made sense". I'm sure it can be modded in, and if players truly want this sort of system we can take a look later, but not now.

Players wanted hull colors. The art department acts more independently from schema who is coding. It's not slowing down anything to add a new color of hull.

Players want better faction permissions. We agree that they are not up to par and are already tweaking them in the dev build.

Players want new logic blocks, and Bench has come up with some recently. Is it a priority? Maybe not, but it is there for discussion.

As for past updates, shipyards, blueprint, transporters, new gates, better explosions, ship health system, ship spawning, and boarding are a result of the natural progression that we would have moved toward, player feedback, or a combination of both. Make no mistake however, the player base does not get to decide what the focus of development is. It's a blunt truth. We can't drop everything so that we can add rusting hulls to the game. Cool? Yes. Is it a priority when we have major game features like NPC's that we already have a plan for? No. We have that laid out, but we haven't though about having rusting hulls. We would need to balance it, discuss, and frankly that probably would end up having little impact on the gameplay in comparison.

I'm not saying you're ideas are bad or ignored. We read a ton of stuff. I think my response should be taken as evidence of that. But there is an order to things, and we all have to be patient.

Not asking for such big increase in power, it was an example how limited power generation and the need to refuel from time to time in new power system, could be compensated.
For thruster exhaust, if they would have to be not covered by any blocks they could add a weak points to the ship. We could cripple our opponents by targeting their exhausts. Just another thought.
For colored hulls, nope, I'll not miss them. Adding 1 hull color to my hotbar and save my hotbar slots for other blocks instead of 3 or more, and gathering/producing one hull color instead of 3 or more, will be so much more complicated... Even further, why we have to gather/produce 5 different shapes instead of 1 to build our ships? The same for lights. And it was also suggested a long time ago.

 

[nightrune]

I'm gonna have to agree with the devs right now. Many of the small things are fiddly and will likely change widly between now and release. They have limited time and resources, so strategically they need to be spending time on big gameplay staples, because those are the most risky.

Building what they are going to do with NPCs is gonna be damn hard, it needs to get broken down, and worked on over time as soon as possible. It'll be a one of a kind system, and that's awesome. They also need us to break it at scale. Yeah there's a bunch of small stuff broken, but looking at it from the companies perspective they are doing the right thing.

Thanks for the awesome response Criss .

 

[Lecic]

It would require work to existing ships... therefore it's bad? Also, the current system is not logical in real world logic.

Very little engineering in this game makes logical sense. Your point?

It would require work to existing ships for very little gain, would limit the creative options a player has, and it would add pointless hours to the time it takes to balance systems. Not to mention, it would likely add more load to the game to calculate thruster locations and orientations constantly.

If people want thrust to be based on physical orientation of the blocks for "RP reasons," as I've heard so many times, perhaps they should build their ship to look like it uses it, and let everyone else build how they want too?

Well said, but I disagree. Pissed veteran players stopped giving feedback and suggestions a long time ago. I could suggest features like: shield only affecting hull/armor blocks with a little boost, solar shield hull (power hungry blocks for building stations near stars), NOR, NAND gates, adjustable delay, better connection indicators for logic, even some squeezing logic system to one integrated circuit, more powerful explosives, exhaust for thrusters, hull decaying (rusting?), new power system: harvesting stars and planet cores for power (with no negative affecting for those), boosted power capacity (1000x?), limited old power generation (up to 1000/s?), solar panels, and much more. And I suggested some similar ideas in the past, but I was eaten by shallow thinking people. I still play from time to time, but not so much as before, mostly refitting my old designs with new features, testing and debating with myself about playing again or not. Didn't buy the game yet, and I will not buy it and abandon completely when it become not free to play with state as it is right now. I think there is a lot of people feel the same way, and they are passive for what is going on with the game, don't even bother to respond, give feedback, even read the forums.

Speaking as a veteran who has posted many suggestions- get over it. You (and everyone else) needs to understand that not every suggestion is something the devs can implement or WANT to implement. You're being extremely arrogant by feeling your suggestions are any better than anyone else's and that "shallow people" are the reason they don't succeed.