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Hi, For a large "multi-piece" ship (where the mother-ship is much smaller than all pieces combined), if the mother-ship is 100% thrusters and nothing else, you will not have enough thrust to do a 360 degree turn in less than 5 minutes. It may or may not be buggy; but you still have no sane...

Hi, Some random notes based on my (recent) research on large ship design... Note that none of this applies to small ships. The problem is thrust - specifically; getting enough power regen to sustain "barely acceptable" manoeuvrability. Because of the cripplingly retarded turn speed of "medium...

It would be possible to copy a huge area in advanced build mode, then delete that huge area (and smack a massive hole in the side of the ship), then fly the pieces into their places and dock them; then paste the huge area back how it was. You'd want to be careful though (wouldn't want the game...

Hi, I think I want better AI; so that a faction can take control multiple systems and setup automated defenses, automated miners, automated cargo haulers, etc. Otherwise it's virtually impossible to get enough players online to make controlling/using/defending multiple system viable. Then; I...

Hi, War should be considered a "meta-game". It should be a game of strategy. A game where factions try to take systems with key/scarce resources, and intercept enemy trading routes, and create blockades to starve their enemy; and try to prevent their enemy from doing these things; and make (and...

For performance; the JIT compiling does have some overhead, and Java's memory management isn't great (slower and more wasteful, but possibly more importantly there's unavoidable "lag spikes" caused by the garbage collector). In addition, Java currently doesn't support SIMD properly (which, for...

The good thing about software is that it's "soft" (easily changed). If there are more than 4 values for armour (which I doubt - I thought there was only 0%, 33%, 66% and 100%) then it's easy to change it so there's only 4. More than that wouldn't make a noticeable difference to game-play. It...

For performance (avoiding extra table lookups, etc. when calculating damage) you need bits for armour. To tell the difference between solid and non-solid (for the purpose of rendering) just use the "fully solid or not fully solid" bit. To tell the difference between solid and non-solid (for...

I didn't forget. Corners, wedges, etc, were classed as "not fully solid" and have 6 bits for orientation. You're right. Maybe that separate HP byte could be 6 bits for HP and 2 bits for armour. That'd be enough for HP values from 1 to 63, and 4 armour values (none, hull, standard hull...

If "3-bytes per entry" means you have to use twice as many instructions for array lookups, and makes CPU caches less efficient, and prevents the JVM from optimising for SIMD; are you entirely sure that you want code that's maybe 10 times slower just so you can get a few measly extra bits that...

I agree - if the user isn't very smart and/or isn't trying to hide the fact that they're using multiple accounts, then it'd be easy to detect.

D'oh. I messed up - was supposed to be a reply to http://starmadedock.net/threads/unify-block-shapes.4250/#post-65524 .

The first thing I'd look at is having 1 bit to determine if the block is "fully solid" (hull, weapon computer, etc) or not (glass, flowers, wedges, etc). This is important for faster rendering (hidden surface removal - if 2 adjacent blocks are both "fully solid" then both block's adjoining faces...

I would add that "destroyed" includes being destroyed by AI pirates under certain conditions - only if the sector happens to be loaded while you're offline (which is only possible for multi-player) and you were unlucky.

It's relatively simple to get multiple email addresses. I've probably got 4 of them for various reasons (the one I use, one from my ISP that I never use, one left over from Uni, and one I was using for testing something a few years ago). I'd also assume that a lot of people have one for...

If there's a rule against using multiple accounts, then that just means people using multiple accounts make sure nobody finds out, and doesn't prevent the use of multiple accounts. In a similar way, if there's a rule against "gaming" the reputation system, then that just means people doing that...

I thought so too, but wasn't sure. I checked the site's rules and can't find anything against it. Now I'm wondering how many people already have multiple accounts. Yes; but only in the short-term. The goal would be to reach "Community rater" status, where you'd get far more power to influence...

Obligatory yet unnecessary Wikipedia link for today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaming_the_system I've never liked rating systems, and prefer honesty rather than "ego stroking for points". If a system like this was put in place, I'd have little hesitation to: a) get another account just so I...

I'd also add that this same problem (textures with transparency not being shown when they're behind other textures with transparency) occurs in a lot of games. To fix it, I think you need to force the video card to render the furthermost texture first ("painter's algorithm"), which would be a...

With (e.g.) 8 asteroids spread evenly in a 5km sector, you'd have a 2*2*2 grid of asteroids, and the distance from the centre of one asteroid to the centre of its nearest neighbour would be 5km/2 or 2500m.