StarMade Dev Blog 17 November 2017

[Zerefette]

I made a thread about this recently, An extension to the new shields.

 

[Comr4de]

Highlighting system clusters is far different than rendering what is essentially a 3D object with countless separate faces/vertices. The best solution would be to have the shield bubble be made out of non-craftable, non colliding blocks that represent the shield's bubble. However, the game will still need to calculate the position, size, dimensions of the bubble. As a test, pick one of your larger ships and check its dimensions. Then, use the build tool to calculate an ellipsoid shape that would fully cover the ship. For most computers, this will cause the game to hang for a few seconds at best, crash the game at worst. Now imagine having to repeat the process for an entire fleet of ships. Granted that ideally this would be a one-time process to calculatr shield dimensions, but it would still hurt game performance.

 

[AtraUnam]

For shield bubbles you could easily just draw it as a bilboard sprite and not have a collision mesh at all, simply decide that a collision has occured if the projectile has a distance to the centre of the reactor <= the radius of the bubble. With a spherical shield this would look and function identially to an expensive 3D render and mesh.

 

[kikaha]

Speaking of shields...

V 0.200.175

 

[Gandrac]

Yep, same Error here.

 

[UndeadPotato]

Basically yes, of course it allows for some interesting things to be done with moving armor plates and rail rotators but in general it balances the system.

At 75% shield share you have the parent ship drained to 25% shields by incoming Ion effect because of the propagation to docked entities, then it stops and suddenly all ion weapons impacting the hull become useless as they are now hitting unshielded blocks. This would be when you have to switch to non-ion weapons to blow a big enough hole in the docked hull to reliably use ion again. You also have to worry about the constant recharge of the parent ship that once it hits 26% cap will render your AP rounds useless and you have to juggle ion again back to 25% then switch back to AP in a vicious repeating cycle until a large enough hole in the armor is made, which is very hard to accomplish with the speed of ship movement, ship rotation, and bullets taken into account.

At 100% shield share you will have the parent ship cap drained to 0% with ion weaponry hitting the docked hull and will induce the "under fire shields cannot recharge for a few seconds" penalty. This would mean that armor and system targeting weapon systems would then be useful and the shields would not be able to recharge if you are hit by AP weaponry.

Graphically:
75%: Ion -> AP -> Ion -> AP -> Ion -> AP -> Ion -> AP -> Ion -> AP -> Ion -> AP -> Ion -> AP -> Ion -> AP -> cycle until the battle is won
OR
100%: Ion -> AP

*Note* AP means Armor Piercing, not a specific effect, just weapon systems that accomplish that task, meaning Piercing, Punch, Missiles, etc.
[doublepost=1511076812,1511075927][/doublepost]To address the problem with floaty bits as well that has been debated for such a long time. Simply introduce a magnet block that must have another magnet block linked to it in the same axis the top is pointing to in order to have floaty bits. If the magnet gets shot then the section that is floating becomes debris, problem solved. This would allow intricate and cool alien looking ships and cool mechanics for rotating things and you know what I'm talking about cool stuff etc., and would also make spaghetti hard to accomplish en mass if the magnets were also viewable through the scanner features implemented in the next update. Of course you could make them a very hard system to scan, as in they need you to have a very good scanner to see, but it would allow floating things to become an interesting and interactive part of the game without embracing spaghetti.

It's been a while since I've tried anything with systems, so forgive me if this is a terrible idea but I just want to ask: what if you apply a debuff to the segment of docked hull, a debuff similar to the recharge one ships get but instead of regen it's capacity?

This way the ship can continue to protect segments/turrets that aren't under fire if it manages to get back to/above 26%. It cannot, however, stop opponents from shooting at the weakened segment for X time. You get closer to a risk-reward concept with docked hull then, and still keep the new shield function Schine seems to want to try.

 

[Chckn Wildstyle]

It's been a while since I've tried anything with systems, so forgive me if this is a terrible idea but I just want to ask: what if you apply a debuff to the segment of docked hull, a debuff similar to the recharge one ships get but instead of regen it's capacity?

This way the ship can continue to protect segments/turrets that aren't under fire if it manages to get back to/above 26%. It cannot, however, stop opponents from shooting at the weakened segment for X time. You get closer to a risk-reward concept with docked hull then, and still keep the new shield function Schine seems to want to try.

Making turrets which are already sore thumbs when it comes to seeing them easier to kill just because doesn't make any sense. They are easier to see, easier to target, and easier to blow up than the whole ship which can have its weapons deep inside its core. 100% shield sharing would make sense in RP and PvP perspectives simultaneously as well as drastically reducing the unnecessary idiosyncrasies of this game.

Also, if you were to implement what you just said that would not fix the problem as it would encourage docked to hull to become even more complex and intertwined than it already is with the current 25% system.

100% shield share is simple, makes sense to noobs, and doesn't break the game.

 

[UndeadPotato]

Making turrets which are already sore thumbs when it comes to seeing them easier to kill just because doesn't make any sense. They are easier to see, easier to target, and easier to blow up than the whole ship which can have its weapons deep inside its core. 100% shield sharing would make sense in RP and PvP perspectives simultaneously as well as drastically reducing the unnecessary idiosyncrasies of this game.

Also, if you were to implement what you just said that would not fix the problem as it would encourage docked to hull to become even more complex and intertwined than it already is with the current 25% system.

100% shield share is simple, makes sense to noobs, and doesn't break the game.

Alright, thank you for responding

 

[Fellow Starmadian]

hey maybe this has been answered already, but wouldnt the simplest thing to fix collision checks on docked entities be to turn off those collision checks? obviously the ship will clip through the main one when it detaches. But there must be some intuitive way to move the child entity out of the main entity that doesn't include costly collision calculations. The best answer I can think of is, as best I can explain it, push entities apart based on their center of mass when they are disconnected from each other through destruction. Maybe you can make it the local center of mass to make it more accurate, honestly I wouldn't know how well it could be coded.

 

[StormWing0]

hey maybe this has been answered already, but wouldnt the simplest thing to fix collision checks on docked entities be to turn off those collision checks? obviously the ship will clip through the main one when it detaches. But there must be some intuitive way to move the child entity out of the main entity that doesn't include costly collision calculations. The best answer I can think of is, as best I can explain it, push entities apart based on their center of mass when they are disconnected from each other through destruction. Maybe you can make it the local center of mass to make it more accurate, honestly I wouldn't know how well it could be coded.

The other fix would be to either let the AI map out where it can and can't turn due to collisions or let the player do that mapping. That and also make it so the AI won't bother shooting at something out of that field of vision it is given.

 

[Jojomo]

The devs are responsible for balancing the vanilla game properly. I have discussed the matter with server owners in the past, but that doesn't matter here. Schine should fix their game.

And they are....shields 2.0 as it currently is makes docked hull too ridiculously large and heavy to be useful.

(For anyone who doesn't understand why please refer to this post)

 

[Dire Venom]

And they are....shields 2.0 as it currently is makes docked hull too ridiculously large and heavy to be useful.

(For anyone who doesn't understand why please refer to this post)

Thats quite informative, thanks for sharing!
So it seems like Using <armour-Shield-Hull-systems> is likely far too impractical to build aroud for the vast majority of ships. Even with the shields being set at the very back of a craft is seems unlikely the craft would be long enough to stick it's nose out the front based on this.
It also seems like the vast majority of ships would have very few shield bubbles as well.
Just a quick Q, what are all the shield bubbles on your Despoiler for:? It looks like they would all be canceled by the mother, unless they are drones or the like:?
Thanks!

 

[Chckn Wildstyle]

And they are....shields 2.0 as it currently is makes docked hull too ridiculously large and heavy to be useful.

(For anyone who doesn't understand why please refer to this post)

You missed the point on what we are talking about almost completely. In my time off being limited I have not been able to finish the diagrams of what would happen with the new shield system and how to fix the last system which I promised schema . After today I won't have any more of the last-minute-before-Thanksgiving tests my professors seem so eager to hand out so the in depth explanation should be coming shortly.

I could spell it out with words right now how you are wrong, but seeing as how a lot of people here only understand things if they see them because of a lack of ability to mentally visualize, I feel that it would be an effort in vain. So expect the response later on this week.

 

[Jojomo]

Thats quite informative, thanks for sharing!
So it seems like Using <armour-Shield-Hull-systems> is likely far too impractical to build aroud for the vast majority of ships. Even with the shields being set at the very back of a craft is seems unlikely the craft would be long enough to stick it's nose out the front based on this.
It also seems like the vast majority of ships would have very few shield bubbles as well.
Just a quick Q, what are all the shield bubbles on your Despoiler for:? It looks like they would all be canceled by the mother, unless they are drones or the like:?
Thanks!

I didn't do any work on it, I just took a vagyr despoiler and spawned it into 200.171 (172?) and the result is what you see.

The shield blocks happen to be in multiple groups which didn't matter before but does now...

 

[NeonSturm]

That's not really the problem though, even if shields under fire penalty is global, you're only draining shield cap out of specific areas. You can actually test how this would work right now on the normal build if you have a mothership with no shields and dock a bunch of entities that have individual shielding. As soon as one entity loses shielding, you can just angle yourself so that it's less likely to get hit, taking damage on areas that haven't dropped shields and allowing that area to regain its cap. This really really hurts missiles, which rely on that alpha, single hit damage; it really hurts cannons, which work best with many projectiles and many successive hits to the same spot, and hurts beams that don't have as many penetration ticks as cannons nor as much raw block damage as missiles but benefit from hitscan. At typical combat ranges of 5km-10km, hitting the same spot on a ship at all is pretty close to impossible.


Word, that sounds fantastic. Docked stuff popping off is one of the hugest strains on performance during combat, so hearing this is super nice.

This gives close-range fighters an advantage which is good (stealth).

It could make the difference between a big and many small ships less.

And I prefer if the stars-shader is fixed and socket timeout. It throws me out of the game every half of an hour.

 

[Non]

This gives close-range fighters an advantage which is good (stealth).

What?

 

[jacabo136]

This happens every time I try to load a world in Dev build version 0.200.181. I've uninstalled and reinstalled three times now and deleted and created worlds each time. Still gives me the same message.

 

[Antikristianos]

View attachment 46419
This happens every time I try to load a world in Dev build version 0.200.181. I've uninstalled and reinstalled three times now and deleted and created worlds each time. Still gives me the same message.

so what its a dev build... expect it to be broken even before you download it.
just revert back to the privious one and wait for the next.

anyway i just updated and have no problems at all... maybe problem is on your end

 

[Snowtiger256]

View attachment 46419
This happens every time I try to load a world in Dev build version 0.200.181. I've uninstalled and reinstalled three times now and deleted and created worlds each time. Still gives me the same message.

That problem is not related to the dev build, I've seen this thing pop up in release builds as well. Try relinking your credentials in the Online Play screen. Sometimes it's just a problem with registry authentication, even if you're just playing SP.

 

[kingreol]

looking forward to the update. i have not touched the game in a while but will return when it happens.. Feel bad for schine getting accusations from the hardcore players. just the tone and attitude people have. lighten up on the direct insults. it accually pushes other people to not want to play. thou i guess they get labeled "casual" :P