MicroMade - Modded StarMade

[kulbolen]

As to the fleet system...I dislike it. The point of StarMade is to build starships, not be an RTS.

i agree with your opinion personally, but id point out that the point of starmade is to be a sandbox game. you do all sorts of stuff, including rts style fleet management.

Shield Stalemates
Based on my testing my designs so far, I'm pretty sure it won't. 100-mass doesn't seem like you could create a self-perpetuating shielding system, though I'm sure some intelligent player will figure out a way to do that. Pro-tip to any game designer anywhere: If you say, "There's no way a gamer can do X in my game!", give it a week - at least one gamer will, in fact figure out a way to do X.

shield stalemates exist at any mass when ships are poorly designed for combat. they do not exist at any mass when ships are well designed for combat.

Advanced armor is really really good on small ships, especially with anti pierce and punch effects, so I'm a bit unsure if mass limit is good balance or not.

advanced armor in general is too weak, low mass limits bring it to almost useful in general.

- your friendly neighborhood Jester, JumpSuit (also, just my input relating to ship size, do not take this the wrong way, but smaller ship size is kinda what ended mini-made due to players leaving, I am curious if history will repeat itself. the is just me tho )

minimade ended due to several factors the server owner didnt anticipate and probably didnt understand. i dont believe the size limit was the culprit in this case. it was the singular feature that drew people to the server in the first place.

As a former MiniMade player, I have to say this - the problems with MiniMade, weren't due to MiniMade.

i disagree. I, and several others i play with, quit minimade because of its harsh faction point penalties and terrible accuracy settings. while the games definitely flawed, i still play several other servers after a long time, so it cant just be the game.

Faction benefits and costs are tuned to discourage small, one-man factions, as are the threemain factions that you can be recruited into upon joining:

i encourage you not to do this. its the largest contributing factor to everyone i know quitting minimade, and other servers that tried it. i understand the motivation behind pushing people to group up... but most of this games remaining playerbase has established cross server factions they play in, and many of them are their factions last member. joining a premade faction removes your established faction identity. there may not even be enough players to give each faction multiple members without resorting to joining the premades. other issues with the game itself (like you mentioned above) prevent it from being rewarding enough to convince people to ditch their own faction identity to join others factions.

 

[Asvarduil]

Week 1 - "EntityFramework Sucks."
In my original post, I said, "Status updates will be posted every Sunday." This is the first status report on the MicroMade Mod, it's development progress, and ideas I'm floating to create a mod that Makes StarMade Fun! #MakeStarMadeFun

Core Systems
I've spent much of the week devising the core systems of the mod. One of the biggest, justifiable complaints is, "There's nothing to do, no reasons to build a starship in this game." There's also other concerns that require addressing. For instance, the game is still unstable, universes can require a wipe/total reset. Even more to the point, base turtling is a known problem on nearly all servers - the risk/reward calculation in this game makes it at best unreasonable to risk a cool build to go out and do something in the universe.

As a result, I've come up with systems to mitigate these problems. These are early drafts, and I seek feedback on them.

System #1 - "Personal Value/Net Worth"
This system arises out of two concerns - the instability issue, as well as low server populations. Every person who plays the game has a finite amount of time. In the event of a server reset, I want players to be able to rebuild more quickly, so that they continue playing. Additionally, I want to reward people for playing on the server in a useful way. That's what led to the Personal Value/Net Worth system. The two terms - Personal Value and Net Worth - are entirely interchangeable. In my specs, I've written it as Net Worth.

Personal Value is a counter kept track of in my mod backend's database. Each player has a net worth that increases under a number of circmstances; for instance, being logged in during a 'worth turn' means you get more Personal Value. Additionally, defeating another player earns you Net Worth. I need to do more investigation of the server's outputs in order to determine other activities that I can detect, and disperse value to.

At any time, you can issue the !CASHOUT command, to turn your worth into cold, hard Credits. What's more, you can use !NETWORTH ME to have the game tell you how much value you've accrued. !NETWORTH HELP will exist for transparency - you will be sent a message, or messages, detailing how precisely the Personal Value system works.

Admins have some special commands that allow us to manipulate Net Worths, as well. In the event I/we mess something up, we can give everyone some Net Worth as a means of apology, or in the event of celebration - say, a 1-year anniversary - we can give every logged in player some Net Worth. Don't spend it all in one place!

System #2 - "Bounties"
This system arises out of two concerns as well. First, being a server that will at best only have a subset of the game's population, player diaspora is an issue. I need to give players a reason to seek each other out. Additionally, there's the problem of the risk/reward calculation for PvP being just plain awful, as noted above. Long made short, I need to find a way to cause conflict amongst players.

This is where the Bounty system comes in. Using OUNTY {PlayerName} {Amount}, you can sacrifice some of your Personal Value, to place a bounty upon another player. The entire server is notified of a bounty being posted, and for whom it's been posted. When some other player kills the marked player, they immediately gain the bounty's value in Credits. You can't issue a bounty beyond your own Net Worth, though - you'll get a message telling you that your bounty wasn't posted, because you can't back it up.

As above, there's a OUNTY HELP command to get full details on how bounties work. Once again, Admins have commands that allow greater manipulation of bounties; we can set bounties without needing Net Worth, we can (non-refundably) clear Bounties on players, and we can even elevate Bounties to a set amount (e.g. OUNTYUPDATE Kupu 1000000 - it's friendly!)

Lastly, might be the most important part of the Bounty system. There will be a Daemon that runs on the backend called the 'Provocateur'. This Daemon will create unbacked bounties specifically to incite PvP warfare. A number of factors will determine who gets chosen. High personal value will be a consideration, since Personal Value is a measure of time played and server activity; a high value player will most likely make a challenging target, and be able to recover more quickly from a successful assassination.

System #3 - "Feedback"
The last system I've committed to this week, is feedback. In Vanilla StarMade, we have to tab out to StarMadeDock or Steam to give feedback...I find this a few extra steps/clicks too many, and worse, it doesn't allow the developers to have a rating to go with the feedback, along with a date for when the feedback was given.

Players can directly issue feedback when playing on the server with !FEEDBACK {Rating: 1-5} {Details}. This will be logged to the database, and as it's queryable, will allow me to see the trend of how the server's doing. If I see ratings going down, I know I need to change stuff. If I see ratings going up, I'll take note of what's going well. Issuing feedback does not have any ties in to any other game systems, it's something I expect players to do at any point that frustrates them, and at some points that make them happy. As a result, I expect to see more low numbers than high, just because humans discuss things that they take issue with most often.

Backend Construction
This week the video for the current build of the power system came out, and pretty much all my faction ships are already obsolete. As a result, I've began construction on the backend of the server.

The server is being written in C#, and is based on the 'Shadow' mod system that scrapes server logs, and uses the UNIX Screen command to issue chat commands to the server. I began work on the Data Core, which will handle all communication with my mod's database - including Net Worth and Bounties.

I made the mistake of using Entity Framework. Now, some might say, 'But...EF is a perfectly good, modern technology!' Not if you're using SQLite. Then, it becomes a nightmare.

So...the data core will get attention this coming week. Still, I learned good lessons, and I've created some data models that are more than salvageable, so in the end, it was worth it.

Conclusion
Been a productive week, but this is probably part of the easy part. We'll see what comes next.

 

[kulbolen]

Iteration time scales linearly to ship size, after all.

i didnt pay this any attention until i actually tried building a *good* 100 mass ship. i gotta disagree, this thing took longer than my 100,000 mass ship to develop, its so much harder to make choices for every single block haha

 

[Asvarduil]

i didnt pay this any attention until i actually tried building a *good* 100 mass ship. i gotta disagree, this thing took longer than my 100,000 mass ship to develop, its so much harder to make choices for every single block haha

That's precisely why I took this idea on!

As to your other points before today's weekly report, you make some strong points on a number of issues, regarding factions.

1. Are 'vanilla' faction turns good enough? Can be, if players are working for AI factions by default which is the plan. Maybe I don't need to change this! In fact, having the more frequent faction turn settings may be good to help discourage players from running custom factions...
2. Speaking of players joining predefined factions: for a number of players, it will doubtless last as long as it takes for them to be issued their starting ship; upon leaving their starting faction's spacedock, there's nothing stopping you from leaving the predefined faction, disassembling your ship down to a core/reactor/thruster, and starting your own faction - more to the point, the game itself doesn't offer any means to prevent it, and maybe I shouldn't either. This raises a number of gameplay questions that I need to consider. Being a part of the three predefined factions needs to confer a non-negligible benefit to playing on the server, otherwise, why stay in the AI factions?
3. Accuracy settings - I'll take a very careful look at those. I welcome any suggestions on ways in which players of MicroMade want to see accuracy tuned.
4. Faction identity isn't something I've ever seen players discuss in any reasonable capacity. What's more, the LvD server - the one that gave me the funny idea about predefined factions in the first place - makes everyone join Light or Dark, and right now it's probably one of the most successful servers in the game, or at least has really good PR. I'm not 100% sure the facts of the state of the game and its community, back up the assertion that predefined factions are a turn-off for players.

 

[JumpSuit]

That's precisely why I took this idea on!

As to your other points before today's weekly report, you make some strong points on a number of issues, regarding factions.

1. Are 'vanilla' faction turns good enough? Can be, if players are working for AI factions by default which is the plan. Maybe I don't need to change this! In fact, having the more frequent faction turn settings may be good to help discourage players from running custom factions...
2. Speaking of players joining predefined factions: for a number of players, it will doubtless last as long as it takes for them to be issued their starting ship; upon leaving their starting faction's spacedock, there's nothing stopping you from leaving the predefined faction, disassembling your ship down to a core/reactor/thruster, and starting your own faction - more to the point, the game itself doesn't offer any means to prevent it, and maybe I shouldn't either. This raises a number of gameplay questions that I need to consider. Being a part of the three predefined factions needs to confer a non-negligible benefit to playing on the server, otherwise, why stay in the AI factions?
3. Accuracy settings - I'll take a very careful look at those. I welcome any suggestions on ways in which players of MicroMade want to see accuracy tuned.
4. Faction identity isn't something I've ever seen players discuss in any reasonable capacity. What's more, the LvD server - the one that gave me the funny idea about predefined factions in the first place - makes everyone join Light or Dark, and right now it's probably one of the most successful servers in the game, or at least has really good PR. I'm not 100% sure the facts of the state of the game and its community, back up the assertion that predefined factions are a turn-off for players.

All I can say is good luck to ya.

 

[Dr. Whammy]

I am going to assume you are reffering to the group of PvP players who shut down your balance and anti-pvp suggestions every time you make one because you have no idea what you are talking about.

No, we don't respond to "pick a fight" we respond to discuss the topic which in your case is telling you why you are wrong, we don't pick fights we just tell people that they are wrong and we don't sugarcoat it.

Trying to get Sen Pai to notice you again huh? How nice of you to modify your post for me like that.

When you finally have something substantial to say to me rather than repeat the same tired phrases at every opportunity, maybe you and I can have a discussion. But I won't be holding my breath.

Have fun reinventing your wheel soon. ...twice.


Back on topic:
Asvarduil, Have you decided on a mass limit for player stations?

 

[kulbolen]

makes everyone join Light or Dark, and right now it's probably one of the most successful servers in the game, or at least has really good PR.

i regularly play on lvd. almost no one is actually IN the predefined factions. they all make their own very quickly. they toyed with wiping 1 man factions a year or 2 ago, and it failed miserably, so they got rid of that feature. its a successful server because benevolent and nastral are active admins with tons of experience and create amazing custom content, and because veteran players advertise it when people ask where to play.

 

[Asvarduil]

Asvarduil, Have you decided on a mass limit for player stations?

Not yet. Honestly, knowing that the power update is coming is stopping me from even trying to experiment. Instead of having to use the current system, which may have very different vanilla mass values for its blocks than for Reactors, Chambers, and Conduits, I think what I'd be wisest to do is look for ways to make the gameplay better in any way that it's feasible for me to do.

As I noted before - anything that doesn't improve the quality of life/game, is considered expendable in my designs for the server. That's one of my 'Rule Zeroes', the rules that matter before all other rules.

i regularly play on lvd. almost no one is actually IN the predefined factions. they all make their own very quickly. they toyed with wiping 1 man factions a year or 2 ago, and it failed miserably, so they got rid of that feature. its a successful server because benevolent and nastral are active admins with tons of experience and create amazing custom content, and because veteran players advertise it when people ask where to play.

As noted, I haven't visited the LvD redux server yet. I may take some time this week and do a little research. The last time I logged onto LvD was roughly a year ago, so I'm sure the server has changed in all manner of cool ways. It may give me some ideas.

One important point that needs to be said - I'm going to avoid grifting ideas en masse from other servers, unless I have a darn good reason to believe that they enhance the game. The corrollary to my Rule Zero 'anything that doesn't make the game experience better, is expendable' is 'Anything that makes the game experience better, should probably be in this mod.'

Further, I pledge to be intellectually honest - any ideas I do adopt will have the server I found them on properly credited. I do not dismiss, or worse attempt to take credit for, the hard work that other people do.

 

[Az14el]

Actually i dont think LvD even allows players to join Light/Dark NPCs anymore, like they did on the last iteration
What it does is allow each faction to use an !align command which automatically allys them with other players/NPCs of the same alignment.
The 3 people per faction minimum rule was never really the selling point, and mostly just put people off the server.

 

[Asvarduil]

Actually i dont think LvD even allows players to join Light/Dark NPCs anymore, like they did on the last iteration
What it does is allow each faction to use an !align command which automatically allys them with other players/NPCs of the same alignment.
The 3 people per faction minimum rule was never really the selling point, and mostly just put people off the server.

That seems like a really cool idea. It turns the NPC factions into more of a general alignment, sort of like Alliance vs. Horde in WoW, or the Grand Companies in FFXIV.

I don't know about the !align command, necessarily, or copying the idea wholesale, just yet. I'll make logging onto LvD Redux for research purposes (i.e. me playing video games) a higher priority this week.

I think in addition to mining bonuses being associated to being in a faction and controlling a sector, part of the reason 1-man factions are a thing, is because faction blocks are just about the only way to make a bit of space 'grief-proof'. This may be a fundamental StarMade flaw, and it may be that no setup I come up with can mitigate the existence of many 1-man factions. I'm aware it's possible to turn off invincible faction homes in the config once FP reaches a negative amount, but I'm pretty sure enabling that mechanic would be a fatal mistake for the mod and the server.

 

[JumpSuit]

That seems like a really cool idea. It turns the NPC factions into more of a general alignment, sort of like Alliance vs. Horde in WoW, or the Grand Companies in FFXIV.

I don't know about the !align command, necessarily, or copying the idea wholesale, just yet. I'll make logging onto LvD Redux for research purposes (i.e. me playing video games) a higher priority this week.

I think in addition to mining bonuses being associated to being in a faction and controlling a sector, part of the reason 1-man factions are a thing, is because faction blocks are just about the only way to make a bit of space 'grief-proof'. This may be a fundamental StarMade flaw, and it may be that no setup I come up with can mitigate the existence of many 1-man factions. I'm aware it's possible to turn off invincible faction homes in the config once FP reaches a negative amount, but I'm pretty sure enabling that mechanic would be a fatal mistake for the mod and the server.

lol no wonder why he wants small mass ships...

 

[Asvarduil]

lol View attachment 44840 no wonder why he wants small mass ships...

This also proves that no one - apparently, except you that one time - pays attention to custom titles.

The only reason I am diplomatic and civilizated at the forum is because usually other forms of acting, only tend to hinder the ability to communicate clear ideas.[And the handicap of my bad grammar at english is not helping with that.]

Keep on working on the English, you're doing pretty good; I can make sense of what you're saying, even if I have to decipher the occasional thing. Time and practice will really improve your skill at English.

And, please, let's all stay diplomatic and civilized. Making a mod that's pretty much StarMade's equivalent of the Unofficial Skyrim Patch is hard enough, without having to sift through a bunch of drama. Please keep the conversation focused on ways A) to make the MicroMade modded experience great, and B) things that need to be addressed by this mod (also, the corrolary, things I really shouldn't touch in this mod.)

If worse comes to worse, I will ask Crusade to force all drama participants into a Trial by Mariachis.

 

[JumpSuit]

This also proves that no one - apparently, except you that one time - pays attention to custom titles.



Keep on working on the English, you're doing pretty good; I can make sense of what you're saying, even if I have to decipher the occasional thing. Time and practice will really improve your skill at English.

And, please, let's all stay diplomatic and civilized. Making a mod that's pretty much StarMade's equivalent of the Unofficial Skyrim Patch is hard enough, without having to sift through a bunch of drama. Please keep the conversation focused on ways A) to make the MicroMade modded experience great, and B) things that need to be addressed by this mod (also, the corrolary, things I really shouldn't touch in this mod.)

If worse comes to worse, I will ask Crusade to force all drama participants into a Trial by Mariachis.

I am quite skeptical if the actual server will even be a thing than speculation.

 

[Asvarduil]

I am quite skeptical if the actual server will even be a thing than speculation.

As well you should be. That is why I also need to quickly get to a beta point. The longer I take with actually having a playable server, the bigger the risk that MicroMade only ever exists in our minds.

 

[NaStral]

Yeah, that old minimum members per faction rule on LvD is long gone. I really like this MicroMade Idea though. I'd definitely come and play there.

What sort of mining bonus do you plan on having? Since we're talking such a small scale I imagine it would need to be a tad lower than vanilla.

Regarding the play from NPC factions; yes, it is 100% possible to embed players in said factions, the only only issue is that all players that join could just grab an NPC ship and take it over for themselves. This alone isn't a bad thing if you are aware of that and structure the game play accordingly. I actually proposed such a thing and even had Veilith test it for a bit but I was ultimately not beneficial to what were going for with LvD.

Another thing to be mindful of is that NPC factions are really awful in terms of behavior. They will send the maximum allowed attack and scavenger fleets in their configs to any player identified as enemy and they will continue to endlessly until peace is declared and the player leaves the area for a bit. This can lead to sectors getting stuffed with entities very fast. Also scavenger fleets will de-fleet and leave thier ships to sit in a sector until cleaned up. You will go crazy getting cleanup requests from annoyed players. I would recommend disabling any kinds of NPC fleets that can go beyond their borders, so that would be Attack and Scav fleets. This would lead to players needing to be the offensive component of their faction while the NPCs guard the home front.

 

[JumpSuit]

As well you should be. That is why I also need to quickly get to a beta point. The longer I take with actually having a playable server, the bigger the risk that MicroMade only ever exists in our minds.

Hopefully this gets shipped then.

 

[Asvarduil]

Hopefully this gets shipped then.

That's why I'm not making this all at once. The Net Worth, Bounty System, Feedback, and Mass Limit code is a healthy amount of stuff to do for a first iteration. I'll probably not tune block costs or other settings until subsequent releases.

 

[kulbolen]

this may just be advertising but i figured its a little relevant to some of the questions about combat. shields/speed tanking etc. my ships 100 mass. its extremely hard to pin down enemy ship at those sizes and speeds (2.5 tmr and 50% od) and ping becomes a larger factor because the miss tolerance is smaller. fight only ended because i pinned him with nose mount stop guns aiming w adjustment for lag.

 

[Matt_Bradock]

100 mass limit is barely playable - my Shrike light fighter essentially. No armor at all, just basic hull or decor blocks if you want anything resembling an interior AND decent systems. What's even worse, though, is how your NPC ships work.

Only long-range weapons. On microships. With an AI whose first ever thing to do after spawning and detecting an enemy is to zip back to the very edge of its longest weapon range and stay there.
And then they are impossible to hit. Guided missiles won't hit them because they are too small. Cannons won't hit them because there's no way you can lead your shots at that distance where you don't even see the outline. Beams won't work because they will be in a different sector and cross-sector manual beam hit detection is crap. And AI fleets or turrets won't hit them because it's not accurate enough at that distance against that small target. So the only way to hit them is to have a better thrust/mass ratio to get in close and personal. And they'll still run while shooting you.
It is the most f***ing annoying sh*t ever, even with isanth Zeros which are 3x+ your proposed mass limit.

And you gonna make a server all about that.

Welp...

 

[Asvarduil]

100 mass limit is barely playable - my Shrike light fighter essentially. No armor at all, just basic hull or decor blocks if you want anything resembling an interior AND decent systems. What's even worse, though, is how your NPC ships work.

Only long-range weapons. On microships. With an AI whose first ever thing to do after spawning and detecting an enemy is to zip back to the very edge of its longest weapon range and stay there.
And then they are impossible to hit. Guided missiles won't hit them because they are too small. Cannons won't hit them because there's no way you can lead your shots at that distance where you don't even see the outline. Beams won't work because they will be in a different sector and cross-sector manual beam hit detection is crap. And AI fleets or turrets won't hit them because it's not accurate enough at that distance against that small target. So the only way to hit them is to have a better thrust/mass ratio to get in close and personal. And they'll still run while shooting you.
It is the most f***ing annoying sh*t ever, even with isanth Zeros which are 3x+ your proposed mass limit.

And you gonna make a server all about that.

Welp...

Your reaction is noted, and will be taken into consideration when I get to tuning settings.

Still, since I guess we won't be seeing you based on the response, have fun wherever you choose to play!

this may just be advertising but i figured its a little relevant to some of the questions about combat. shields/speed tanking etc. my ships 100 mass. its extremely hard to pin down enemy ship at those sizes and speeds (2.5 tmr and 50% od) and ping becomes a larger factor because the miss tolerance is smaller. fight only ended because i pinned him with nose mount stop guns aiming w adjustment for lag.

This is also good to know. What I might need to do is tune things so that AIs choose to come closer, for the PvE side of things. Additionally, your experience is consistent with my local experiments - the low mass limit will lead to small profiles that are nigh-impossible to fight at maximum range, so that may also change player behavior a little bit as well (assuming it doesn't cause rages/ragequits like the guy above.)

The potential for ragequits due to being unable to hit stuff is potentially problematic, and a gameplay issue I will be keeping a very close eye on.