^ if you have to ask why, you're not paying attention
On to the main message. To any and all members of Schine, please follow through with this post until the end, no matter how accusatory or generally toxic it may seem to be. Hopefully it will be worth the effort.
I'm here, goodness knows why, because the people who are mad about all of this aren't wrong. I have not actively participated in playing, discussing, or even thinking about this game in... years? During that time I HAVE patiently tried waiting to see how the game progresses, and I can safely say that for all of the needless additions and changes to minor things like logic... nothing has really improved in a substantial way.
The new power system sounds like the first solid and worthwhile update to be thought about in a while, let alone implemented. The last time was when npc factions were being worked on, and those were never finished. The dev team is constantly adding small things or implementing important features only halfway or worse. Things should be finished before they move on, because the result of not doing so is a game full of half-features that don't quite work as promised. Player and NPC fleets, weapon combinations widely known to be useless which receive no tweaks... The reason we often get for these things being done is that they're 'waiting for other features that will integrate with this such and such feature'. If everybody else is anything like me, we're tired of hearing this and we know it's bullshit. When was the last time an unfinished feature was later touched on in combination with a new feature that it was apparently 'waiting on to be finished' or whatever nonsense. Yeah, doesn't sound familiar.
This game is plagued by horrible gameplay design issues and all I see anybody from the dev team talking about are vague ideas or small stuff that could and really should wait until after the major features are complete. Logic didn't even need to EXIST until the basics were down, but there are still consistent updates to logic but not gameplay elements.
-The first person camera is bad. It's just bad. Either give us seats and give us free cam movement while piloting, or find an alternative. Camera blocks are necessary, but also quite terrible in their current implementation, so is viewing from the ship's core. Essentially having a static PoV does not work, it's ugly and jarring and makes gameplay a nuisance.
-The third person camera is even worse. Do I need to even talk about this? Any space game that includes a third person camera could serve as a decent example. The camera should not be fixed directly BEHIND the entity. It should be displaced above the ship, and should give free range of motion without requiring you to stare at your ship from odd angles. (talking about the current 'third person free cam') Fixing this will make third person gameplay viable, and will be especially helpful for capital ships
-Turrets should have a setting to fire toward the direction of the third person free cam noted above
-Add a graphical interface option for shields and hp to the display blocks, rather than only numeric. A simple hp bar is fine. Add a speed indicator and other necessary functions as well. Add an option to add/remove HUD elements from first person flight, while all would be enabled on third person flight (for obvious reasons)
These, honestly, are not huge things (for the most part) that should have been prioritized a very very long time ago. I think a lot of the anger and disappointment stems from the fact that the core game feels clunky and never receives much improvement. This latest build mode addon looks like a nice quality of life update, but building is ABSOLUTELY NOT the weak point of the game at this time. Building works fine, and has always worked fine. Please please please stop working on building already holy fucking hell. Make the game fun to play, easy to interface with, and overall more natural. I promise it will improve the experience by leaps and bounds.
So, with all that negativity, I'm sure it's easy as developers to think I'm just mad and ragging on you because you didn't do what I want. But no, that simply isn't the case. I'm trying to be helpful, so I will hope this message will be taken to heart. I have 280 hours logged into this game on steam, and that is long AFTER I stopped playing this game actively. It's probably less than 5% of my total time spent in this game, most of which was long before it ever saw a steam release. So maybe I don't have a very good grasp of the game as it is now, but I follow the development closely enough even if I do not test it out. I care about what happens to this game, and I stand behind Schine even when they make absolutely no sense, seem to have no sense of priorities, and continue to drop vague and muddled information that is hard to give any feedback on.
If you want us, the players, to be able to help in any meaningful way, stop doing this. Everybody else has already said it, but the point really needs to be hammered in. Tell us things, real, meaningful things. The plans for the power update are, as far as I'm concerned, a dream come true. This is what happens when you ASK. So please, don't implement it halfway and leave it for 'later'. I don't care if this one update takes months, it's important and should be finished properly. Oh yeah, and then finish fleet AI and maybe fix individual ship AI so they actually mean something.
To try to end on a positive note, I'm glad you're still working on this game. I'm glad you're still trying (even if you seem confused about what you're actually trying to do). I think there are a lot of former players such as myself who would love to see this game come back and come back strong. I have to emphasize, focus on the core aspects, even things like exploration should come secondary to ship controls and camera function. Things like AI and weapon systems. Things like power, which I can't stress enough that you finally seem to have a good handle on and should learn from the process used to get to that point.
I could go on all day about why this game is really cool, but no longer much fun to play, but hopefully these things will suffice.
Dear me why are people ripping into these poor devs, just be happy they aren't trying to intentionally murder their own game and try to civilly help them on the right track without stabbing them to death. XD
