StarMade Dev Blog 17 November 2017

schema just curious when it comes to turret aiming What hsppens if you try to aim at something the turret can't point at due to blocked physically? Also will select fire mode still be there or will turret aiming replace it?

Oh, and hope you slept well

So towards the development side of things, it partly seems like schine needs more capital coming in to hire a proper dev team instead of just a handful of people working on the game. I mean I'm fine with waiting till this update is released, But once it hits how many people are gonna hesitate to build real ships in this game because Weapons 2.0 is coming up Soon and they don't want to waste hours building ships that won't be effective? Maybe the solution to everyones problems is that we should setup a Gofundme or something for schine? A little advertising and some fresh game sales? Come on schema what can we do to help you get this game to rolling?

Hi! Thank you schema for making this amazing Dev Blog!

So many of the changes and fixes are amazing! Cant wait for the weapon and other Advancements to come out.

I am against removal of features of the game. Docked hull, Docked reactors, logic jumping, and other advanced mechanics were why i play(ed) starmade. OTHER games don't have these amazing mechanics that increase the difficulty past the standard set forth by the big titles. If you want the limitations of creativity, please go play minecraft or lego world or barbies dream land adventure.

STOP LIMITING MY CREATIVITY.

If the game is too hard/advanced for you to keep up, limit some features on the server YOU host, Not MINE. Please. Thank you.

**** Edited by alterintel to be less inflammatory ****

schema said:

Chckn Wildstyle I definitely believe that most of it is very sincere. And I'm doing my best to communicate here. But as you can see in this thread, it is very hard to do at times. Other schine members have it even harder because they cannot speak freely about planned things.

I would very much appreciate a detailed post outlying the criticisms in detail, and I will hear and read it all. I'm not someone that stands by his own opinion just because. If I see reasonable reasons to change an approach or a system I will definitely do that. But I will also try to argue for the systems that were created specifically to solve the current problems.

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have you considered using an official starmade discord, it would make communication so much easier.

Crusade said:

I'm interested in what the next few major updates will bring - I feel they will make or break this game.

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qft. literally.

schema said:

I still want to make the game of my vision, and I'll do all in my power to do that.

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Lightspeed12 said:

If your whole objective is saying "I dont give a damn, i will make this game my vision ignoring what the only people playing this game are saying" , them everything we are doing here is useless.

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not really. he can make HIS game any way he likes, but some of the information we provide may help him get there, because he doesnt really see all of the unintended shit that happens through gameplay.

schema said:

There is probably nothing worse than me going and saying things that aren't well formulated.

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i could think of a lot of worse things.

schema said:

Lecic probably because they arent building for PvP.

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everyone knows, and contributes to the "we know more about your own mechanics than you do" mentality.

schema said:

kiddan I would like that. However, looking at this thread so far, it cannot get out of hand in terms on how we talk to each other. I'm always willing to listen to criticism as long as people are polite and respectful. Unfortunately conversations often end up with name calling and grudges afterwards.

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that means people are passionate about the subject. discounting information because it wasnt presented how you like is ignorant at best.

schema said:

I want to fix the underlying causes of the problems. This is my approach to balancing.

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this sounds like a really good way to do things, but...

teleporting colliding entities, in combat shield regen, multi output power penalties, asteroids ore density, station pricing, invulnerable homebases, logic input to various pcs, addition of power aux, constant changes to jamming/scanning, stabilizers, shipyard test sector, 5000 other things...

Non said:

Not to offend, but given how ineffective the new shields are at accomplishing what you want, why should we trust you to fix it? Why don't you trust out ideas and solutions to these problems?

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he has no way of vetting who knows what theyre talking about. everyone on smd thinks they know all the games issues.

RB101 said:

God some of the players in this forum have a strong sense of false entitlement... stop raging at schema. Unless you can code or develop a game better than him stop shunting your ideas forward as if they are 100% correct or that schema’s are always wrong.

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maybe read up on the definition of false entitlement. people paid for this game and were advertised their input on its development. regardless, you dont know who the people commenting might be; theres a REAL good chance some of them are professional programmers or developers.

also consider the dev team has made it clear they know almost nothing about actual in game consequences of their design decisions.

RedAlert_007 said:

I am going to say that you are wrong, the alpha games I mentioned are pretty darn comparable to the current state of StarMade. Alpha is a common excuse used by fanboys of this game to sweep any criticism under the rug, it isnt exclusive to this game but it exists in this game none the less.

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Criss said:

I'm not going to say that you are "wrong" about those games and their success in those areas, but comparing it to StarMade in our current state doesn't match. I can explain more in depth during the livestream, since you've popped up there recently the past few weeks.

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criss is probably right that youre missing some differences.

it doesnt matter. most people who look at the games comparatively see what you see, not what he sees.

kulbolen said:

he has no way of vetting who knows what theyre talking about. everyone on smd thinks they know all the games issues.

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It cant be that hard to figure it out when half the people speaking cant even calculate dps correctly.

kulbolen said:

he has no way of vetting who knows what theyre talking about. everyone on smd thinks they know all the games issues.

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this so much

Ithirahad said:

Losing the docked entity spam isn't just a matter of "OH NOOO MY CREATIVITY ."

Massive docked entities are partially equivalent to separate ships flying around with the main ship. There are some optimizations that have been done for collision checks against the ship they're docked to, but that doesn't help when it comes to collision calculations against other ships or stations you're coming near. There may be other performance issues associated with so many entities as well, and there's also a nigh-unpatchable exploit with entity clipping that just causes even more performance issues but allows for a much higher effective power output on your ship.

Also, this unintentional system of having separate attached parts be somehow better than more things built onto the main ship might be fun from an 'engineering' perspective, but it seems awfully clunky overall... and furthermore, all of this stuff tends to be outside of Schine's ability to balance using their configs and other tools. I find that reining that in is a necessary part of creating a more balanced (and decently performant) playing field overall.

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The game is not perfect, I have been flying 1+km ships for all my time here. yes, docked things glitch, cause lesser computers and servers to crash, and make the game unstable. They should be repaired not removed.

If we had the mentality of removal instead of repair IRL, we would have nothing other than our hands, or would you have us remove them too when you got a cut? Car is broke, Throw it away and use the bike. Bike got a flat tire, throw it away and walk. .................


Why, can't we, in this unlimited digital world, made by schema, have what ever we think can work, with no limits?

I read a book one time, something about a VR game. the player ultimately beat the game by using the games mechanics, weapon ad-dons in reverse and used the games materials to hold the parts in position. No limitation was imposed by the games critics to eliminate the functionality and say that he could only stick the unit in one hole in one direction and only when the moon is blue with red stars and when you are not on the receiving end of my unit..........

Basically, add features, then fix them. Don't neuter star-made.

AssIn9 said:

Why, can't we, in this unlimited digital world, made by schema, have what ever we think can work, with no limits?

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i agree with your sentiment, but this isnt an unlimited world and the technology that runs it isnt unlimited. theres tons of things we cant have with no limits.

kulbolen said:

i agree with your sentiment, but this isnt an unlimited world and the technology that runs it isnt unlimited. theres tons of things we cant have with no limits.

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What are our limitations?
Please list.

I just want to figure out how we can help schema make the game he wants to that we want as well that will make most people happy. Come on guys, a new charity? Schine Aid 2017?

AssIn9 said:

What are our limitations?
Please list.

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dont be yourself. real world technology, and the mind of the games creator, both have limitations on what they can do.

First of all thanks for an amazing dev blog, really looking forward to some of the upcomming features.

Also for the purposes of Lecic's frontal armor cube and Criss's solution I present the following image:

With blue blocks being shield blocks, orange being armor and red circles being shield radiuses one can essentially create armor that is completely immune to pierce damage thus utterly negating the solution posed by Criss a few pages back.

Lancake

Just wanted to point out that claiming you knew about exploits and meta directly contradicts you asking us to explain them to you. There's not anything to gain by doing that and it's far more graceful to admit you don't have much knowledge in X area and ask for guidance. It also helps repair the distrust Schine has courted by being honest to us from step one.

being aware of 'cheats'/'exploits'/'wonders-of-engineering' is not the same as devoting gameplay to maximizing actual builds in those directions!

devoting gameplay to 'exploits' and stating that in future gameplay will be devoted to finding more 'exploits' can only take us so far - and there will be always exploiters maybe, yes...

the community comments should be noted though as a real assessment of the game - veteran builders and 'exploiters' one-and-all.

kulbolen said:

dont be yourself. real world technology, and the mind of the games creator, both have limitations on what they can do.

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I am very good at being myself. Real world tech, we utilize single servers atm. this is almost the entry level for server based gaming. Distributed computing and clustering works for advancing past the limitations of our current processing level.

The mind of the creator is not limiting us. schema do you feel limited? I feel limited. I want to make a nomadic base, but am limited by what i can put on it. The new power update is at-least allowing factory ships now. Not sure how the shielding system will work with docked ships though.
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GnomeKing said:

being aware of 'cheats'/'exploits'/'wonders-of-engineering' is not the same as devoting gameplay to maximizing actual builds in those directions!

devoting gameplay to 'exploits' and stating that in future gameplay will be devoted to finding more 'exploits' can only take us so far - and there will be always exploiters maybe, yes...

the community comments should be noted though as a real assessment of the game - veteran builders and 'exploiters' one-and-all.

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Its only an 'cheats'/'exploits'/'wonders-of-engineering' as defined by the community. In the hex-box and other potato device world, any mods are labeled as cheats or exploits by the community. You could list any secondary app that modifies blueprints as an 'cheats'/'exploits'/'wonders-of-engineering'.

Criss said:

somewhere, someone mentioned how pierce and ion are effectively useless with these shield changes. I'm assuming because of your diagram, you can create a ship that becomes harder to penetrate either the shields or the armor due to the shield mechanic, and the layer of armor in front of it. Why wouldn't a player simply use both effects until they got through whichever obstacle was in the way? If the first thing you hit is going to be the layer of armor, why is pierce useless when it's not even hitting a shielded structure?

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Because pierce is useless if all it's doing is shaving some armor off. Pierce is good because it can penetrate through armor into systems. If there are shields in the way of that, then that just leaves punch and overdrive as the only viable weapon effect choices, because ion cannot get through the armor, pierce cannot get through the shields, and explosive has debuffs versus both.

"Using both effects" is impossible or pointless. A player cannot fire two weapons at the same time. Staggerfiring two weapons right after eachother is useless at average combat ranges (3-10km) because there is no chance of the second weapon going through the first one's hole, and is nearly impossible even during a close encounter (500-1000m) because that will almost definitely be in a joust maneuver where both ships are flying towards eachother at 100+m/s. Using the new turret features it might be possible to fire two weapons at the same time, but it averages out to completely pointless.
Let's say pierce and ion both do double damage to their intended target and 0 to the other. So, total, we've got a a pair of 2 damages and a pair of 0 damages, which averages out to 1 damage. Ooooor, I could take plain weapons, which already have 1 damage versus both. Or I could take punch, which will have 1 damage vs shields plus, say, 1.5 damage versus hull. So why would I bother with a more complicated weapon set up for the same or worse effectiveness?

aceface said:

Just FYI, vaygr never used docked force fields, they were always of the main entity. They existed to block missile explosions

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Sorry, my mistake.

Jojomo said:

Could anyone still complaining about docked armour please go out and build some with shields 2.0, then post the ship here for critique.

The docked hull will have to sit outside the parent shield range bubble. It's going to be huge, and very heavy. It won't be like shields 1.0 docked hull (mass-wise).

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This assumes you NEED to have a full covering hull. As discussed earlier, this is not necessarily the case. A rear-set shield generator allows you to have a large bubble and keep a large amount of hull on the front of your ship as well.

Lecic said:

Maybe this should make things clearer.

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At combat ranges, weapons are only going to be hitting the front face of your ship anyway. If you don't care about aesthetics, you could even do a partial dome over just the front quarter of your shield sphere, and have your turrets be orbital designs rather than docked to the actual hull.

Lecic said:

"Using both effects" is impossible or pointless. A player cannot fire two weapons at the same time. Staggerfiring two weapons right after eachother is useless at average combat ranges (3-10km) because there is no chance of the second weapon going through the first one's hole, and is nearly impossible even during a close encounter (500-1000m) because that will almost definitely be in a joust maneuver where both ships are flying towards eachother at 100+m/s. Using the new turret features it might be possible to fire two weapons at the same time, but it averages out to completely pointless.
Let's say pierce and ion both do double damage to their intended target and 0 to the other. So, total, we've got a a pair of 2 damages and a pair of 0 damages, which averages out to 1 damage. Ooooor, I could take plain weapons, which already have 1 damage versus both. Or I could take punch, which will have 1 damage vs shields plus, say, 1.5 damage versus hull. So why would I bother with a more complicated weapon set up for the same or worse effectiveness?

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Perhaps he means punch through like an effect that is not debuffed from shields or armor, so both, i dunno.