The Importance of Planets

    Edymnion

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    I could see turning regular planets into the gas giant constant resource generation source. Find a planet, build a mining station on it, stock it with NPCs, build stuff the NPCs need, and have them mine fairly low but constant streams of resource for you.
     

    kupu

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    Yeah, but the general point stands, IMO.
    Of course, i'm just noting that a shift towards micromanaging livestock or fishing mini games (or similar) is not a good starting point to build meaningful game play within Starmade.
     
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    IF we could build on planets, that would be an amazing start (without lag and fps loss I mean). After this premisse we could talk about some nice terrain to find on different planets and here a nice random terrain generator would be amazing. After you implemented amazing terrain, we could use some cities to generate on planets, the ability to let the generator spawn in players blueprints as it is allready possible with stations.

    And only after (!) this I would say some other features would be neat for planets, like fauna stuff that walks and maybe flies (!) on it just to spice it up (make a random alien generartor :D ).

    And if we every have fauna I want to be able to get the quest: hunt this or that and bring it. :D

    And for all this stuff that I mentioned in the first paragraph, it would allready be totally worth it, to make planets flat again. If all the stuff in the upper paragraph works but the planet were a disc I would be totally satisisfied.

    Last words: We all allready know that the earth is flat and the universe rotates around it, why make some scifi stuff up about round planets?

    But anyway: why not only render 6 planets surfaces, instead of all 12? I know they need to be loaded for gameplay calculations...but...just make the not faced sides invincible and its allready ok. I just don't see any scenario, where my pc ever will handle 400m radius planets with all 12 plates loaded...

    Or make them a a 6 surface cube, but don't bend them on this sperical thingy. Just make the edge transitions round (dont bend the blocks just build a slope) and have a flat surface after 40m transition.
     
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    Edymnion

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    Of course, i'm just noting that a shift towards micromanaging livestock or fishing mini games (or similar) is not a good starting point to build meaningful game play within Starmade.
    I would disagree, actually.

    Starting with a small concept and then figuring out what to do with it can make for some interesting emergent gameplay. Farming/Ranching is a good example. While players may not need food, NPCs could. Needing to have hydroponics or even better yet a planet growing food for them then becomes a new thing we can build to support a larger goal.

    Especially if it became a thing like in Minecraft where certain types of plants were rare but very useful. You'd want to explore and find some of those plants, get seeds, then bring them back to grow (like the greenhouses in Skyrim from Hearthfire). Could collect and breed animals to have zoos on stations if there was some kind of NPC happiness meter where happy NPCs were more effective at their jobs, meaning building different kinds of recreation areas could become a thing.

    It could even be as simple as "Animal X eats Plant Y, and when you kill the thing it drops rare material Z". I mean, thats what we did in Minecraft, we raised wheat to make bread to eat ourselves and to feed to cattle to make more cattle. We killed the cattle for meat to eat, xp for enchanting, and leather for use in crafting.

    And frankly, that was a hell of a lot of fun in Minecraft, getting systems set up so you go from barely making it through the night to living in luxury with steak and potatoes and cake. Little things that didn't necessarily have that big of an impact on overall game play became very enjoyable ways of playing in their own right.

    ---

    And really, isn't that a goal for the game in the end? To have things to do indefinitely? Or is "ships shooting at other ships" really the only end-goal in mind?
     
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    not gonna lie, duke and kupus responses were super disappointing to hear. While building ships and stations can be a relaxing way to spend an afternoon, I always thought that planets would, eventually fill a more prominent role in this game. I was eagerly awaiting the day I could land my ship on some alien planet and just explore.

    Oh well, maybe its time to put this game on the shelf for a while. I can only hope that the devs change their mind on this topic...
     
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    Valiant70

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    To additionally require and still claim it requires relatively little work and won't shift focus, is naive.
    A "planet environment" object is something I could write in a few days, and Schema is several dozen leagues ahead of what I'm capable of. I don't think these things need large, complex mechanics to be meaningful. Temperature, pressure, and oxygen/co2 can be three 32-bit floats updated once in a while based on how many plants, animals, and running machines there are on the planet. Calculations for certain things like plant growth or animal characteristics/breeding/whatever (I have no idea how your fauna system will work) can query them. If it takes more than a (relatively) small amount of work, it's overdone for a SPACE game.

    entire games are built around solely those mechanics.
    None of them let you take your crops to market on other planets with voxel space ships AFAIK, or make the space part a primary focus of the game.

    Of course, i'm just noting that a shift towards micromanaging livestock or fishing mini games (or similar) is not a good starting point to build meaningful game play within Starmade.
    YUCK! That's not what I was suggesting at all! Just put some simple mechanics in as a side dish to the main course. If it's more complicated than Minecraft's farming and such, it may be overdone. It is a SPACE game after all! There are those of us who would just like to be able to do these things in some capacity. Minigames are something that could possibly be included when everything else is done simply because they'd be fun. If they're left out, just give us a good API and leave minigames to the modders. That's great too.
     
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    greatmatt

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    I would like to note that even though this is a space game, one cannot possibly dream of exploring space if all planets are equal and all that's left to explore are different colors of asteroids and a few pirate stations. Pirate stations are really cool now that we have NPC ships but without proper planet content, one should not give himself the trouble of building colossal ships to explore something he can find in his own asteroid based solar system or explore something he CAN'T find like planets with different biomes and animals.

    Players are not asking for massive planet mechanics like those of god games, they are asking for something truly interesting to do on planets because right now they are only resource dumps because most of us can't even dream on landing on them to build a simple base without having massive fps drops or freezes. So basically planets are useless right now.

    Simple mechanics like water (with fluidity similar to that of minecraft), animals (we don't need complex mechanics like genetics), human NPCs (they can have 3 levels of "intelligence": Tribal [will never build big cities or go to space], advanced [will build big cities and build small space structures similar to those of today] and stellar [they will behave like current NPC factions but will be able to build on planets]) and for ME that's enough to play starmade for an entire year without any new content. I'd be very busy anihilating all intelligent like on my galaxy.

    I personally think fishing and advanced ranching aren't required but the ability to bread animals EXACTLY like minecrat is NECCESSARY and it's not complicated.

    Starmade has insane potential, limiting it to ship VS ship combat is a waste of time and money. I understand that you are not as resourceful as most space game developers but if you listen to your reasonable players (because i admit that there some ideas that would ruin starmade) you can make history with starmade as probably the best space sandbox.

    Spoiler: For me it is the BEST space game, i love it. It's the game i play the most, it's potential is unimaginable.
     

    nightrune

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    Simple mechanics like water (with fluidity similar to that of minecraft), animals (we don't need complex mechanics like genetics), human NPCs (they can have 3 levels of "intelligence": Tribal [will never build big cities or go to space], advanced [will build big cities and build small space structures similar to those of today] and stellar [they will behave like current NPC factions but will be able to build on planets]) and for ME that's enough to play starmade for an entire year without any new content. I'd be very busy anihilating all intelligent like on my galaxy.
    Those are simple to talk about, but amazingly complicated to work on a grand scale correctly. Any mechanic like this also needs to mean something in the overall game. Otherwise we have just another mechanic tacked onto the star-made experience.
     

    Edymnion

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    I think the main reason we don't have flowing water/lava is due to gravity.

    Gravity seems to be tied to the character instead of the planet/ship/whatever. There was (may still be) a bug I would abuse when setting up a starter ground base in that if you exited a docked core on a planet, you'd be in zero gravity. I'd use that to build a giant defense tower and then float up on top of it in astronaut mode to build my anti-pirate turret.

    Aka, the planet itself had no gravity, it was me as the character that had a downward momentum being applied at all times. This also seems to be backed up by the fact you can have two players on the same station, one in gravity and one not.

    So, that goes back to the water/lava in that if gravity is done on a character basis, the water/lava wouldn't "know" which direction to flow in.

    Entire gravity system would likely need to be rewritten.

    Maybe we could link water/lava to a gravity block to let it know which way "down" was though?
     
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    Valiant70

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    Those are simple to talk about, but amazingly complicated to work on a grand scale correctly. Any mechanic like this also needs to mean something in the overall game. Otherwise we have just another mechanic tacked onto the star-made experience.
    A lot of the framework will already be in place from the crew and NPC systems. A complete lack of towns would be... odd. It's a matter of putting something there so it doesn't feel like a missing piece in the experience, but not overcomplicating it and spending too much time.
    [doublepost=1492026001,1492025916][/doublepost]
    I think the main reason we don't have flowing water/lava is due to gravity.

    Gravity seems to be tied to the character instead of the planet/ship/whatever. There was (may still be) a bug I would abuse when setting up a starter ground base in that if you exited a docked core on a planet, you'd be in zero gravity. I'd use that to build a giant defense tower and then float up on top of it in astronaut mode to build my anti-pirate turret.

    Aka, the planet itself had no gravity, it was me as the character that had a downward momentum being applied at all times. This also seems to be backed up by the fact you can have two players on the same station, one in gravity and one not.

    So, that goes back to the water/lava in that if gravity is done on a character basis, the water/lava wouldn't "know" which direction to flow in.

    Entire gravity system would likely need to be rewritten.

    Maybe we could link water/lava to a gravity block to let it know which way "down" was though?
    Quite frankly, gravity needs to be trashed and redone before release. It's just less pressing than adding the rest of the game.
     
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    DukeofRealms

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    If its going to be an entirely space based game, then there is no point in having planets as actual objects
    Whether planets will ever be able to achieve what you want doesn't mean they can't add to the game in a meaningful way. I'm confident we can have planet based mechanics add another layer to StarMade gameplay, instanced planets, do not add another layer. Adding instanced planets would be like putting a layer next to the existing layer and tying it together with a string. It's two different environments or two different games existing in the same program, that's not something we want to ever get into. If it requires a loading screen to do, it's a no.

    If planets are going to be made of blocks, then for me at least they need to actually be useful as more than just resource dumps. Y'all keep saying about how you want people to explore, but there is no reason to explore really other than planets. Deep space is deep space. Asteroids are asteroids. Pirate stations are pirate stations. Literally the only reason I can think of why anyone would want to explore the galaxy is planets, but unless there is a lot of cool stuff to do on them, there is no point in having planets in the first place.
    Sure, we want people to explore. What we don't want is for exploration to take away from other game mechanics or to be implemented in a way that's disjointed. I can think of many exploration venues, scripted events playing through the universe, quest and missions using human created objects and lore, NPC interactions. We could create exploration in a game without planets. Planets add another layer to that.

    IF we could build on planets, that would be an amazing start (without lag and fps loss I mean). After this premisse we could talk about some nice terrain to find on different planets and here a nice random terrain generator would be amazing. After you implemented amazing terrain, we could use some cities to generate on planets, the ability to let the generator spawn in players blueprints as it is allready possible with stations.
    We plan to achieve all of this. We are aiming to create the largest planets we can, the focus being on performance.

    with all 12 plates loaded...
    Current planets are heavily unoptimised, ever since we started work on our new planets, little to no work has gone into current ones. Achieving better performance than the current ones isn't a challenge at all. We have a number of potential systems which could see planet size increase drastically, we're not at a stage to be able to tell if that will work just yet.
     

    Ithirahad

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    It's incredibly exciting to generate ideas with no constraint, but let's be pragmatic before loosing sight of what we're trying to make here.
    I wouldn't want to see these kinds of mechanics until the base game is 'done'. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't be considered... unless Schine has another game planned? :D
    [doublepost=1492099594,1492098725][/doublepost]
    If it requires a loading screen to do, it's a no.
    I obviously don't have access to the game's code, but aren't sectors effectively instances without loading screens? In old versions of the game, crossing a sector border could take you somewhere on the other side of the star system (because of the sector rotation system for planets), and jumps and teleports can load-out and load-in tons of stuff on the fly around your character. Judging from the capabilities of that tech as it is, with a robust LoD system or even adequate static cover, you could make a transition to an effectively instanced planet without the loading screens.
     
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    I'm talking out my butt, I'm sure, (one of my specialties :cool:) but I doubt sectors are instances like you're thinking. More likely, they're physics partitions to simplify calculations. Without them, you'd have to compare every ship to every other object in the game which would be very inefficient. Instead, each sector could be a linked list of entities, now the game loop only has to compare your ship to entities which are known via the list to be nearby. That way the game isn't doing collision checks between your ship and a planet situated in another galaxy.
     
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    Valiant70

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    I'm talking out my butt, I'm sure, (one of my specialties :cool:) but I doubt sectors are instances like you're thinking. More likely, they're physics partitions to simplify calculations. Without them, you'd have to compare every ship to every other object in the game which would be very inefficient. Instead, each sector could be a linked list of entities, now the game loop only has to compare your ship to entities which are known via the list to be nearby. That way the game isn't doing collision checks between your ship and a planet situated in another galaxy.
    That's similar to what could be done for planets, although there would be a lot of different specifics and different problems.
     
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    • Farming: Can't we cultivate the plants we find while exploring? (flora system)
    • Ranching: Can't we capture and breed things? (fauna system)
    • Managing a town: Just stick some NPC "crew" on a planet. Minor tweaks might be needed in beta if anything.
    • Industry: Starmade's industry needs work one way or another to make it interesting. Complete omission of planet-related options would be silly.
    • Fishing: A minigame. Just something to throw in if Schema wants to code it sometime late in Starmade's development.
    I think a lot of this could revolve around Industry. Either you or crew stationed there manage crops and goods, which they need to refine and then eat and ship out. These food systems could be linked to how crew need to function.
     

    Edymnion

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    I think a lot of this could revolve around Industry. Either you or crew stationed there manage crops and goods, which they need to refine and then eat and ship out. These food systems could be linked to how crew need to function.
    Which could be as simple as "Each crew member eats one unit of food per day." Have a storage block of some kind designated for food storage, and every X units of time every crew member goes and takes one block out of it. If they don't get one, they "leave" instead of starve to death.
     
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    You know, having a fishtrap for catching underwater creatures (when we get creatures) would be quite neat. We can put them in an aquarium on our ships/stations and watch them swim in circles :P
     
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    I still don't get this 'no loading screen' thing from the devs.
    Jumpdrives are a loading screen imo.
     
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    I still don't get this 'no loading screen' thing from the devs.
    Jumpdrives are a loading screen imo.
    Too many blocks to load. Plain and simple. The game was never designed from the ground up to incorporate such a feature (where-as skywanderers is).

    Ill be honest starmade is not going anywhere fast at the moment (or in the foreseeable future), when skywanderers is released as an open Beta I can see the last remnants of starmades community migrating permanently.

    Starmade is a flawed game, and whilst the dev team is dedicated, I’m not sure their abilities are up to scratch to compete with the likes of skywanderers (which is made by a single person).
     
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