Devblog May 30th 2017

SkylordLuke said:

Whatever helps me finish the DeathStar..........

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It might help you finish the Deathstar if your imperialist faction didn't insist on maintaining extra military equipment and using it ineffectively :P

Is it possible that you could fix block rotation/texture application problems with the reactor update? (Remember the problems with conduits.)

Bugs affecting the visual position/rotation of textures and physical rotation on blocks such as the Ship Yard Module, Camera, Armor (full cube), and Girder have been driving me insane.

Since reactors will be having us redo ships anyways, I think it would be wise to put these persisting problems in their coffins once and for all.

SkylordLuke said:

Cant wait to see what those other advanced build mode tools are !
Whatever helps me finish the DeathStar..........

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Mate, what are you doing on the forums? Get back to the editing bay!

If you guys are working on new build mode stuff, is there any chance we might see a "tail-sitter" mode that changes all the block texture orientations such that they align with decks that are perpendicular to the axis of thrust (i.e. "forward" is "up")? Under the current system, with gravity orientations, we can build tailsitters, but all the computers and such will be sideways.

Interesting, can't wait to see how those build helpers will be implemented without over complicating advanced build mode, there's already one key you need to keep pressed to get there after all.

On the other hand making different systems visibly stand out is a very welcome upgrade for builders and certainly a must for the upcoming changes.

Keep up the good work guys.

Greets,

Jan

Exozen said:

Is it possible that you could fix block rotation/texture application problems with the reactor update? (Remember the problems with conduits.)

Bugs affecting the visual position/rotation of textures and physical rotation on blocks such as the Ship Yard Module, Camera, Armor (full cube), and Girder have been driving me insane.

Since reactors will be having us redo ships anyways, I think it would be wise to put these persisting problems in their coffins once and for all.

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Assuming these are not the issues you were referring to back in January, I'd advise posting some examples with screenshots in Kupu's thread.

Blodge said:

Assuming these are not the issues you were referring to back in January, I'd advise posting some examples with screenshots in Kupu's thread.

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nope. same issues, I believe.

How about you do something about this screen showing up every month first before spending time telling us what is comming up, but never giving it to us. seriously. Do you realise how frustrating it is having to export my blueprints, ALL of my blueprints, editing all the defaults, restoring all my unsaved projects,... EVERY TIME THIS HAPPENS? And it happens a lot!

MaartenAll said:

How about you do something about this screen showing up every month first before spending time telling us what is comming up, but never giving it to us. seriously. Do you realise how frustrating it is having to export my blueprints, ALL of my blueprints, editing all the defaults, restoring all my unsaved projects,... EVERY TIME THIS HAPPENS? And it happens a lot!
View attachment 42245

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Hey Maarten, That sounds frustrating. We'll need to find out what's happening. Will you start a thread in game support so we can get logs and make a proper bug report for this?

Do you guys have a time line for when you will deploy the power upgrade?

guesstimates are fine

I can't wait for the new system. I'm always open to a new challenge!

this be a very robust tool if *during building* you have the option to devide any work (placed blocks) in own made groups
and being able to name the groups like "outer hull" etc, be able to give each group a color for when you wish to set a group to transparent , half transparent or fully visible, like in photoshop with layers

on top of that add a option to select a group to remove
for things like swapping the old power system with the new one

schema said:

Major concerns

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What about eliminating mechanical design from the game by moving ship's performance into a menu where you allocate points rather than what you're building?

I mean really, now a single ship can be turned into a scanning ship / jumping ship / fighting ship just by moving points around? And for what, creativity? Who on earth would call diablo a cretive game??? Skilltrees, despite having millions of possible ways to fill them, always result in a small amount of best configurations that everyone uses, there's nothing creative about them.

You can't even introduce new systems through the chamber system since there's a limit to how many we can have active anyway: you can't specialize a ship anymore because you can't cut weapons/shielding in favor of a system intended to do something else, like a super scanner ship.

Why not just take the final step, eliminate all system blocks from the game, and just give us stat sliders where we get shield / dps / thrust based on our ship's mass? ULTIMATE FREEDOM

Raisinbat said:

What about eliminating mechanical design from the game by moving ship's performance into a menu where you allocate points rather than what you're building?

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Well as it stands, players get very little depth with about half the systems in the game that they want to use. Things like cloaking, or Ion effect, or overdrive effect, or jump drives.

You want to go faster? Add overdrive. That's it' No choices on how you effect your maneuvering. Nothing on your ship can alter how you rotate or directional thrust without using the thrust menu. With chambers we can transfer that mechanic from something solely bound to a menu to something that ALSO requires a functioning reactor and chambers. Reactors in turn require stabilizers. I think that can get as complicated as the current builds players come up with.

Currently we have no way of changing how you use your jump drive. With chambers you could focus on longer ranges or quicker charge time or even multiple charges (without players needing to fiddle with logic just so they can jump more often)

I don't see a major difference between placing chambers and designating what they are, and placing down effect blocks that are predetermined. I'd say it's equally "creative". If you want to go fast with the current system there is one option; overdrive. If you want to go fast with our proposal then you need a chamber, and then you need to designate how points are spent. There is still a bit of engineering involved, and it has a more direct connection to power than our current system.

Criss said:

You want to go faster? Add overdrive. That's it' No choices on how you effect your maneuvering. Nothing on your ship can alter how you rotate or directional thrust without using the thrust menu. With chambers we can transfer that mechanic from something solely bound to a menu to something that ALSO requires a functioning reactor and chambers. Reactors in turn require stabilizers. I think that can get as complicated as the current builds players come up with.

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But reactor design is uniform regardless of what you want it to do; the actual design part is done purely through a menu, it's as creative as filling out a form.

It also means that any ship with functioning reactors can be repurposed into any other function provided by chambers, just change your point allocation. You no longer build ships to do anything.

It's just as bad as the thrust menu, except its taking over a lot more than just thrust.

Criss said:

Currently we have no way of changing how you use your jump drive. With chambers you could focus on longer ranges or quicker charge time or even multiple charges (without players needing to fiddle with logic just so they can jump more often)

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You could do that in a way that doesn't involve putting points through a menu. These skill tree systems always turn out with a few best setups, like if i want a ship to be good at jumping i'll put ALL the points into jumping instead of speed or defense, which i can just change around later anyway.

It's also limiting the possible tradeoffs, like what if i want a ship that's good at scanning AND jumping AND defense AND speed, at the expense of not having any weapons or cargo capacity? That's not possible now because the chamber system gives you fixed limits on what you're able to do with chambers that can't be exchanged with non-chamber parts of your ship.

Oh and adding jumpdrives to everything... why? Do you just really hate carriers?

And since all the chamber blocks will cost the same resources the economy is also getting even less interesting.

Criss said:

I don't see a major difference between placing chambers and designating what they are, and placing down effect blocks that are predetermined. I'd say it's equally "creative". If you want to go fast with the current system there is one option; overdrive. If you want to go fast with our proposal then you need a chamber, and then you need to designate how points are spent. There is still a bit of engineering involved, and it has a more direct connection to power than our current system.

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Then you can't tell the difference between building a ship and filling out a form. Really encouraging coming from the community manager.

Raisinbat said:

reactor design is uniform

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Is it really any less uniform than the current system? Right now the system is build power reactor or capacitor blocks to acheive your power requirements. Build them wherever. Put defenses on them if you wish. Done. You are not going to convince me that our current system has even twice as much depth as our proposal. We've been mulling it over for around 2 months now? Even if they are equally dense, I still prefer our proposal, because without tearing my ship apart entirely, it is possible that I can change how my ship functions to some degree with the chamber systems.

Raisinbat said:

repurposed into any other function provided by chambers

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Not entirely. If say you focused on mining initially, with both chambers and mining systems installed, then switched to weaponry enhancing chambers, they do squat if you don't actually have weapons on your ship. They are enhancing nothing at that point.

Raisinbat said:

AND jumping AND defense AND speed, at the expense of not having any weapons or cargo capacity? That's not possible now

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Who said that? We haven't begun to balance out how much of each tree you should be able to use in comparison to every other tree. That's a big undertaking, and likely not going to be balanced properly on the first pass either. With what I've currently seen, it should be okay to allow a few trees to get fully maxed out. You won't be spending all your points in one tree alone unless you want to sit on unspent points.

Raisinbat said:

building a ship and filling out a form

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Again, I don't find that any different in it's current state. While there are some excellent techniques to maximize longevity of reactors and ship health, etc, it still boils down to placing blocks until you have enough, at least for a more casual player. I think I'm very casual with my systems. I spend some amount of time asking players their thoughts when fitting ships on livestream, but I have not, say, built my weapons to ensure the last penetration level on my cannon was enough to fully destroy a block as opposed to damage it. And my opinion, along with most of the other developers; putting systems into a ship can be some of the most boring aspects of the build.

I won't speak to how much better or worse our proposal is until I see it in action, but I like the possibilities. I like chambers and the options they provide. I am very excited to know that specific systems will get customization of any degree, even if it's based around a skill tree. That's more than what I have right now.

Maybe I missed something but could you please explain how a chamber is configured? Is there just a generic "chamber" block that can be used for enhancing jump drives or shield strength, etc. Or are there individual chamber blocks that would require swapping out different block sets for the different enhancements? Could you easily adjust a chamber to either enhance jumping or shields, or thrust, etc?

Mr.Steam said:

Maybe I missed something but could you please explain how a chamber is configured? Is there just a generic "chamber" block that can be used for enhancing jump drives or shield strength, etc. Or are there individual chamber blocks that would require swapping out different block sets for the different enhancements? Could you easily adjust a chamber to either enhance jumping or shields, or thrust, etc?

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The plan right now is to have one chamber block type for each branch type. So a ship strong in jump will have lots of jump nodes connected in various ways. Then you'll configure each chamber to it's specific node. The exact flow is not known and will be looked at closely during play testing.

I guess I don't understand what RAISINBAT is worried about. He makes it sound like you can just change what a chamber does through a menu system. Whereas to me it sounds like you would need to remove and replace specific chamber blocks in order to change the enhancement.

Criss said:

Again, I don't find that any different in it's current state. While there are some excellent techniques to maximize longevity of reactors and ship health, etc, it still boils down to placing blocks until you have enough, at least for a more casual player. I think I'm very casual with my systems. I spend some amount of time asking players their thoughts when fitting ships on livestream, but I have not, say, built my weapons to ensure the last penetration level on my cannon was enough to fully destroy a block as opposed to damage it. And my opinion, along with most of the other developers; putting systems into a ship can be some of the most boring aspects of the build.

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Then you have never built anything remotely resembling a combat ship, so how would you know anything about it?

Please explain to me how i've spent over a thousand hours building ships that are mechanically completely distinct from each other in a game that supposedly doesn't allow any difference in ship design, and how i'm supposed to spend even one doing that when i can't even trade one system for another?
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Mr.Steam said:

I guess I don't understand what RAISINBAT is worried about. He makes it sound like you can just change what a chamber does through a menu system. Whereas to me it sounds like you would need to remove and replace specific chamber blocks in order to change the enhancement.

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Sure did, my bad.

The point still stands in that there is no reason to design ships differently, because the design requirement is totally uniform;

You have one ship and if you simply replace one block with another the ship fits a completely different purpose. Why would you have more than one ship instead of just different versions of the same one?