We'll have to see, we've been pretty busy working on Weapons 2.0 and other things, hopefully we can come up with something to keep with tradition - DukeofRealms
Is there any particular reason why a block with 0 health is deleted from the entity? It seems like things such as ship repairs/useful astrotech beams would be far easier to implement if a zero-health block was simply 'ghostified' (like a ship core, but also made invisible) rather than being deleted entirely. Also, I'd imagine that not completely removing (instead just state-changing) tons and tons of blocks in combat would perform better.
problem being that a ship of a few blocks could still be the size of a planet if all those blocks are “ghosted”. There will be an upgrade to the astrobeam though, which will eliminate that problem. - schema
Will the weapons update change or remove the weird "firing arc" feature that lets guns fire sideways and makes evasive action pointless anywhere in front of a larger ship?
At the end of the Power 2.0 news post in the weapons update overview you guys mentioned that weapons will have an AOE type of effect based on the dimensions of the array. Does this mean that the visual projectile/beam will become larger based on the arrays dimensions? (ex. a damage beam array that has a Y-radius of 10 and a X-radius of 10 will fire a much fatter beam).
Will integrity values be altered at all? Considering the fact that it was originally implemented as a stop gap fix for spaghetti ships. Is there any hope that its implementation will be relaxed or removed from everything aside power blocks (which are the only blocks that really need it to prevent spaghetti). Or will it remain the same as it is now?
Will manual turret aiming allow for support tools to be used? For instance creating mining turrets with the salvage system or repair turrets with the Astrotech system.
Also, will any attempt be made at updating the game to a state in which the majority of currently implemented features will actually be in a working state?To make playtesting the game at least as enjoyable as it was prior to power 2.0? Basically, will you get shipyards, missiles, logic blocks and a myriad of other issues that were working pre 2.0 back to a working state in this update?
When can we soonest expect a patch dedicated to, or at least putting in the main focus, bug fixing and making sure features that were already implemented, work as intended? I'm mainly asking about the power system, AI behavior (both shipwise and NPC factions), shipyard functionality, asteroid respawning, guided missile targeting, basicly game-critical features that currently have some severe issues.
With the weapons update there will be a bunch of optimizations and fixes already. And there will be another round of fixes in the weeks after the update until we get deep into making the universe update. - schema
Will the StarMade Development Timeline Thread started initially by bench be revived or continued? I believe that is a good representation of the current features status and what not.
Bench is currently facing internet issues, thanks to the “super reliable” and “good price for value” ISPs in Australia. So, unfortunately, he’s been unable to join us for the last while. That thread is solely maintained by him, which is hard work! Lots of different things in that thread have changed.
Whether that thread will be updated and maintained, will be up to Bench when he returns. We do have a trello roadmap here: Trello While the cards don’t move all too often since working on Power 2.0 and Weapons, it is kept relatively up to date.
EDIT: After I finished writing this, Bench popped back in to say he's got most of his issues fixed and will be returning 'soon'.
Are there any plans for controlling Menu GUI stuff such as thrusters, chambers, etc with Logic Blocks?
IMHO all aspects of a ship should be controllable and readable via logic blocks.
Will the weapons update allow admins to create new custom weapons (in addition to the default weapons)?
For example, perhaps we could configure chamber-like effects to the custom weapon, set the values, and then set the damage pattern (including depth), and possibly the in-game graphics for it. (Maybe not set the graphics, but that would be rather awesome)
What is the fate of AI/fleets? Currently, I think of fleet mechanics as one of the most buggy and nonfunctional features of the game. Should we expect some work to be done on this in the weapons update? Or will that wait until the universe update?
Has any further work been done on the stabilizer streams' aesthetics? My personal suggestion would be to turn the purple blue and keep the yellow animation, but any work to improve them would definitely help.
Asteroid bases. Is there any final verdict on those? I see the benefits of having a station set up on an asteroid, but the problem I see is that asteroids are, of course, mobile in the game and can be pushed around. Will they ever come to be a thing, or should we give up on the possibility?
When will the power 2.0 demonstration/tutorial stream happen on Twitch? We have been waiting for this for a while and I'm curious as to whether it will occur before or after the release of weapons 2.0.
Going back to fleet mechanics, will we ever get the possibility for chained fleet commands? It would be very interesting to be able to give a fleet a list of commands to complete in a certain order, as it could allow the player to leave the fleet to its own devices while they go about their own business.
I've heard a few things about the planned minelayers in a private chat, but could you give a detailed layout of the planned upgrade possibilities for them? What I'm hoping to see is a list of what kinds of features are being included and how they are intended to function.
In the upcoming update, damage types will be introduced to the game. From what we've heard so far, each weapon will have a primary and secondary damage type (with none of the third type being inflicted). Will there ever be an option to change/modify the damage type of a weapon? I'm not suggesting a full restructuring of the damage type, but something along the lines of reallotting some of the damage from one type to another (probably max 10% of total damage).
Would it be possible to fix the problems with shops and the trade network during or immediately after the weapon update? Or do we have to work with the mostly-broken shops until the universe update?
Will the thruster plume also undergo any update? Like longer trail for larger arrays of trusters. Or a visually large thruster look. I remember a wee while ago there was mention of development in multiple blocks together combining to become a single entity or something. Which would be useful for thrusters, weapons barrels and lights.
We do have the capability of bigger textures for repeating blocks already, although it is not in the game. With the particle system also ready to go it will become a part of the universe update to integrate. - schema
A big update to that has been done in the power update. The main difference between using frame buffer or not is VRAM. Frame buffers are needed for most modern graphics effects. - schema
What is your plan to ensure you are getting sufficient funds to sustain your development to a point where you claim to be able to start advertising campaigns if you have one at all?
We’re currently receiving (and continue to expect) sufficient purchases on both our steam store and star-made.org to sustain development for the foreseeable future. Additionally, we've saved a nice sum of 'emergency funds'. We're not concerned and don't expect to face any significant issues in that department for at least a few more years.
Yes, we do have plans for an advertising campaign. However, we don't expect to be launching one for some time. We have our full release launch on Steam still left (that's the real big one), visibility rounds and other steam advertising options we haven't utilised. That's just covering what we have available to us for 'free'. There's always advertisement agencies, and other services we can invest in. - DukeofRealms
I'm curently working on a 3D shooter game and i would like to know if I would be allowed to use exported 3d models of ships / station as asset, using starmade as a 3D editor.
Of course, I'm speaking of my ships or volonteer's ships.
The game would not necessarily be free, I think it will be, but just in case, you can assume it will not be.
You can use exported 3D models of any user-made creations in StarMade for any purpose provided they do not use any textures or assets from within the game, and you have the permission from the creator of the asset to use them. Just make sure you ask your volunteers that it’s ok. It doesn’t hurt to get it in writing - DukeofRealms
-- END OF ANSWERS --
Below are questions we've scheduled to be answered in subsequent Q&As if there's extra time, due to lack of popularity.
It doesn't seem possible at the moment to create a perma-cloak +jam ship, even if 100% dedicated to that purpose. Is this by intent? Will specialized perma-cloak + jam be possible in the future?
Ever since its introduction I have been a dedicated user (and champion) of Fleet Mining along with fleets in general. Apart from the obvious flaws in the system such as ships that simply spin in space when told to get into formation, carrier recall that turns your drones into over excited puppies that just race to the mothership and usually bump into it multiple times until they give up or fleets that apparently look at their orders and think "bugger that" and go on a random jaunt somewhere.
Can we hope to expect that, at the very least these issues are resolved but can we also expect further embellishments? Based on my wishes and those I have read other players request over the last couple of years...
Being able to command ships to dock to stations.
To be able to spread a mining fleet over an entire cluster rather than have them crowd around a single one.
To be able to send out scout ships/probes and report back their findings providing they are fitted with the appropriate scanner systems.
To task fleets with special roles such as CAP, attack, etc or to task them with attack/defend a certain target.
To be able to group a set of ships in a fleet and give them individual tasks. So for example, if a ship carries 10 fighters, 4 can be set to defend the carrier the rest can be set to attack a particular target.
Auto recall if a ship suffers too much damage or the storage block is full.
Tasking salvage ships to go after asteroids, derelicts or overheating ships.
To be able to group fleets and give them all commands rather than have to do it individually.
For fleets to be able to use jump drives!
To be able to set specific target priorities such as specific systems (reactors/turrets/weapons/engines) but for them to fall back to an "any" if there are no viable targets left or return to holding point.
A simple "comms" system would be good to allow players know what is going on. This can be a semi-opaque chat box that can remain open, resized or moved and allow the player to monitor fleet messages and even have a couple of short cut links to allow commands to be issued on the fly.
I am sure there are more ideas floating around but these would be good for getting along with.
This has basically been asked in an earlier post, but what are schema and the schine team's plans for realistically finishing this game? I have played starmade for YEARS and for the most part have thoroughly enjoyed it. So much so that I feel compelled to make a post out of concern for it's future.
The development team has distanced themselves from their fan base that cares incredibly for their creation. There are grandiose plans for it's future: new power, new weapons, new universe...
The game is buggy and shaky as is. I could care less about the "amazing future plans". How much time will the team be planning on putting into bug fixes and stabilization of current features? If this game is to make it past alpha... It needs to start holding it's shape, not twist and bend until it snaps
Since Power 2.0 failed to deliver on the "we want to support all varaints of shipdesign" part of the goals defined for the update, when will we get a functioning power system revamp?
..also is Pulse being dropped? i know it has got a bad press, but it is only way to increase damage without increasing range -(therefore clear use as part of a battery of AI weapons, for example on a turret...)...what replaces that without just spamming blocks for the extreme-damage end of slow-fire ballistics and nuke-type torpedoes?
Large ships cause lag. From a performance perspective, what sizes of ship are optimal, before performance is impacted? What is the target range that the game is designed to support?
Ouch. This really needs to be fixed. Whether you consider it game-breaking or not, those who enjoy commerce definitely do.
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Agreed.. But i alsofeel like integrity questions were not adequately clarified or addressed. Simply saying "adapted based on how the meta is evolving" does not alleviate the concerns with the myriad of flaws it currently has in which is likely the most detrimental aspect of the game currently. Practically everyone would like to hear that it is being scaled back significantly, if not completely removed from everything aside power systems, shield and hull. But seeing as how that it is clear that this "stop gap" will not be removed. Then serious effort must be taken to address the fact that integrity in its current state forces to many compromises in having to make everything large chunks of blocks to maintain said integrity, which greatly reduces design freedom to the point of being detrimental to the enjoyment of the game itself.
Agreed.. But i alsofeel like integrity questions were not adequately clarified or addressed. Simply saying "adapted based on how the meta is evolving" does not alleviate the concerns with the myriad of flaws it currently has in which is likely the most detrimental aspect of the game currently. Practically everyone would like to hear that it is being scaled back significantly, if not completely removed from everything aside power systems, shield and hull. But seeing as how that it is clear that this "stop gap" will not be removed. Then serious effort must be taken to address the fact that integrity in its current state forces to many compromises in having to make everything large chunks of blocks to maintain said integrity, which greatly reduces design freedom to the point of being detrimental to the enjoyment of the game itself.
My interpretation of it is something along the lines of "we know a lot needs to be done to make this better, but we're not quite sure what will work best to accomplish our goals effectively, so we're going to be playing around with this more in the future and adapting it to any changes that come with future updates." Of course, this is only my speculation of the meaning...
Jeffenuva said:
Large ships cause lag. From a performance perspective, what sizes of ship are optimal, before performance is impacted? What is the target range that the game is designed to support?
This is one that may be best answered by the player base. Ship size is only one factor. If you are talking about a single enormous entity like a space station, a computer with 8 gigs of RAM (which is a good benchmark for most players) seems to be about 10 million blocks. You can technically load in more like 25 million blocks, but the game seems to cache stuff so as you move around and do stuff, you'll quickly crash your game. (these numbers may continue to shift through updates due to complexity and optimisations of the game engine changing).
Realistically though, the game does not handle most ships over 5 million blocks well unless you put a lot of work into optimizing your bounding boxes, and making sure things don't collide or cause lots of collision checks.
Some ships, *cough* spaghetti *cough*, are more limited by surface area because that can cause rendering lag. Animated and specular faces are more more laggy than static textures; so, it's always good to make sure your animated systems on bigger ships are encapsulated in some kind of non-animated blocks. I've had issues with as few as 200k exposed animated textures. Also, white hull seems to cause more lag than darker colors.
Entity count is also a biggie. Lots of small turrets tend to cause more lag than a few big ones. More than 20 turrets is generally a bad idea. It is also important when laying out your turrets to be mindful of what they will run into. Turrets with buried bases and long WW2 style barrels tend to cause the most lag. Orbital turrets are typically less laggy due to not having collisions, but can still result in significant bounding box lag. Drum turrets cause way less collisions and bounding box lag if done right, but you need to be careful to leave a little bit of buffer area between the struts and drum or you may end up with a lot collision checks as the drum spins. Floating turrets are the most performant. A lot of ppl dont like the way they look, but they can do their job without ever hitting anything. They also tend to get better firing arcs than hull mounted turrets.
Zeroing out rails on any non-turret docked entities while they are not moving also reduces lag a lot. This is especially useful for drone carriers.
The current integrity system is the biggest limiter though. I've seen chain reactions on ships as small as 250k blocks crash the game, but hopefully this will be fixed.
This is one that may be best answered by the player base. Ship size is only one factor. If you are talking about a single enormous entity like a space station, a computer with 8 gigs of RAM (which is a good benchmark for most players) seems to be about 10 million blocks. You can technically load in more like 25 million blocks, but the game seems to cache stuff so as you move around and do stuff, you'll quickly crash your game. (these numbers may continue to shift through updates due to complexity and optimisations of the game engine changing).
Realistically though, the game does not handle most ships over 5 million blocks well unless you put a lot of work into optimizing your bounding boxes, and making sure things don't collide or cause lots of collision checks.
Some ships, *cough* spaghetti *cough*, are more limited by surface area because that can cause rendering lag. Animated and specular faces are more more laggy than static textures; so, it's always good to make sure your animated systems on bigger ships are encapsulated in some kind of non-animated blocks. I've had issues with as few as 200k exposed animated textures. Also, white hull seems to cause more lag than darker colors.
Entity count is also a biggie. Lots of small turrets tend to cause more lag than a few big ones. More than 20 turrets is generally a bad idea. It is also important when laying out your turrets to be mindful of what they will run into. Turrets with buried bases and long WW2 style barrels tend to cause the most lag. Orbital turrets are typically less laggy due to not having collisions, but can still result in significant bounding box lag. Drum turrets cause way less collisions and bounding box lag if done right, but you need to be careful to leave a little bit of buffer area between the struts and drum or you may end up with a lot collision checks as the drum spins. Floating turrets are the most performant. A lot of ppl dont like the way they look, but they can do their job without ever hitting anything. They also tend to get better firing arcs than hull mounted turrets.
Zeroing out rails on any non-turret docked entities while they are not moving also reduces lag a lot. This is especially useful for drone carriers.
The current integrity system is the biggest limiter though. I've seen chain reactions on ships as small as 250k blocks crash the game, but hopefully this will be fixed.
connecting a rail speed controller to it. then connect a deactivated activation module to the rail speed controller. it sets the rail speed to zero, avoiding collision calculations.
connecting a rail speed controller to it. then connect a deactivated activation module to the rail speed controller. it sets the rail speed to zero, avoiding collision calculations.
A single small turret (such as AMS) causes less lag than a single larger turret of similar design; however, multiple smaller turrets cause significantly more lag than a single big one of similar total firepower.
Also of note is that AMS turrets are not always good at picking separate targets from one-another, so spamming a bunch of them causes them to lose a lot of their effectiveness per additional turret past about 3-4 per angle of attack. Even large capital ships rarely benefit from more than 12-16 total AMS turrets.
A single small turret (such as AMS) causes less lag than a single larger turret of similar design; however, multiple smaller turrets cause significantly more lag than a single big one of similar total firepower.
Also of note is that AMS turrets are not always good at picking separate targets from one-another, so spamming a bunch of them causes them to lose a lot of their effectiveness per additional turret past about 3-4 per angle of attack. Even large capital ships rarely benefit from more than 12-16 total AMS turrets.
Could you solve that with fixed turrets :? Or essentially Docked Armour facings with embedded AMS:? Narrow field of fire, but it Will only beable to shoot in one direction (and only take 1 extra entity per).
You don't need to use docked entities at all to make Curtain AMS guns. People who do that generally use an innership remote to turn a clock on/off that fires an array of hull mounted guns. That said, I find Waffle AMS to be more practical. This is where you make a weapon group of typically 50-300 small cannons on your ship that you manually fire using right mouse button. Having to manually fire can distract a bit from the fight, but if you use turrets as your main weapon system, you will have the time to do this. Curtain AMS are much worse against VLS missiles and opponents who straif.
Both the Ddraig and the Seraphim (which I believe you have used) have waffle AMS. With a bit of practice, these will typically take care of 80-90% of missiles regardless of how many missiles your enemy is using. In either case, your AMS turrets should just be a backup system to protect your flanks and clean up the strays that get past your waffle or curtain.
Every 2 weeks, so the next one will be in approximately 2 days Mostly finished answering the questions, but we're also working on a short dev blog to give a bit of an update on progress.
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- DukeofRealms
