Here are the answers to the Q&A thread from the 31st of March, this should be all of them. If not, shoot me a PM and we'll answer it for the next one. We will be coming out with a dev blog soon
Here's a question that has piqued my interest: How do you envision the endgame? When all was said and done and Starmade's, say, "finished" development, what would the result be? Where'd we be, at that point?
Are the old pirates (ships and stations) and the derelict/Trading Guild stations going to be phased out or will some/all of these be overhauled with new power, weapons (even rails!)???
What are your plans for NPC's (ships, factions, characters, creatures, plants, etc.)? Right now we have factions and shop owners, but both are very minimal in function. I'd like some insight into what you have planned for the universe and how you are going to bring it to life. Will this include active trade between factions and stations/shops? Will there be battles/wars? Ambushes? Active station and ship building? Infestations?
[doublepost=1522459417,1522459318][/doublepost]
Valiant, if you look at the end notes of the answers to the last Q&A, you will see that there is a question about chairs included in the "questions to be answered in the future" section.
Will weapon volleys be added? As in a way for weapon arrays to fire one right after another rather than all at once without the use of logic. ex. A Missile+Damage Beam system that has multiple arrays and will fire its missiles one after another at a locked on target rather than all at once.
Effects are going to be changed for the weapon update. Other effects will be done mostly via the reactor. Additional tools will be added individually. - schema
The universe update is appears to be a large collection of features, some large and some small, connected by a common theme. Do you plan to release it in one major patch, or over the course of several patches introducing different features?
It will likely be one big patch for release. However there will be dev versions along the way. To streamline and save time, those will be highly experimental to test and showcase features, while fixes and polishing will be at the end of the update. - schema
Is the flightmodell a subjet to change in the future? If yes what your plans?
Exsamples:
-Will the flightmodel be purely spacelike or a space/aireal(for small ships)/naval(for large ships) hybride? I think there good reasons why nearly no other Spaceship game I know use a pure spacelike flightmodel.
-Why can ships accelerrate in all directions with same speed? Spaceships that cirlestrafe around each other look really stupid.
Are there any instances of prominent bugs and problems that are either already fixed or intended to be fixed in the next update? Conversely, are there any that you can say will not be addressed yet?
Is it the plan to make credits or blocks the core currency of StarMade? For example, it used to be credits, now on most servers shield capacitors are good bartering material (since they are needed a lot and relatively hard to make).
Since one of the primary goals of the weapons update is to improve multi-block effect capabilities of single projectiles, and since it has already been stated that the architecture of the weapon will be the sole determinant of its abilities, do you plan to loosen up on the structural integrity on weaponry in order to allow architectural variety? The current settings are pretty restrictive in the mid-range (large enough to start suffering from low integrity but too small to properly squeeze in a decent sized brick of blocks)
Will there be a better aiming system for for example self operated cannons. It could me something like a hit marker which you have to aim at to hit the enemy ship
What configs and other tools will be added to future updates to enable better control of the serverside experience such as fleet limits, sector chmod controls expanded to systems etc. ?
With so many recent and planned updates eliminating systems that were previously expected to be made using logic systems, are there any practical applications of logic that Schine plans to specifically keep as logic based or open up in the future for advanced ship building such as weapon staging, turning chambers on/off , and giving weapons and chambers detectable logic states?
Pulse is leaving us, it could've been fun laying a wall of warheads and then scatter them around with a pulse blast.
Is there any chance for it to be staying in a different form, If not as a similar one to it's current form, maybe as a frontal wave and it ignores astronauts.
So can pulse be resurrected?
I heard that support weapons will lose the ability to have slave systems, while this does not bother me much for the improvements coming, I wonder when and if we will ever see healing cannons/missiles or salvage cannons/missiles and mixes for the other support tools?
There is a possibility for all of those, although not exactly planned. For the universe update there are more methods for salvage/mining planned. With the new repair beam there will also several new options for stations. - schema
Current planets are heavily unoptimised, ever since we started work on our new planets, little to no work has gone into current ones... We have a number of potential systems which could see planet size increase drastically, we're not at a stage to be able to tell if that will work just yet.
Basically, current planets are definitely unusable. A significant reason for this is when we switched our chunk size from 16x16x16 to 32x32x32 in v0.199.132, we didn't optimize planets for these chunk changes. The top priority for our new planet system is optimisation (and with that, size) - DukeofRealms
When will survival features be added and will there things such as oxygen systems that you can wire throughout your ship. Will there be creatures and will there be any that are like some sort of creatures that infects ships kinda like zerg?
The style of survival of starmade will likely not be that much on an astronaut level (like having to eat etc), but rather on a world building one (supply/control/growing of regions/empire) - schema
Below are all unanswered questions from previous sessions, which we'll draw from if extra time is available.
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?
Basically, current planets are definitely unusable. A significant reason for this is when we switched our chunk size from 16x16x16 to 32x32x32 in v0.199.132, we didn't optimize planets for these chunk changes. The top priority for our new planet system is optimisation (and with that, size) - DukeofRealms
Last years april fools gift was of the new planet system and does showcase some of its ability. While we've implemented many performance upgrades from the beginning of the project, the biggest one has yet to come.
For the devbuild, are there some bugfix with the displays ?: special signs are broken and we encounter massive fps drop when there is too much text ^-^" T2140 Display Module 50fps to 8fps
Did you miss the part where everyone called you out for that thing being an overly long way of saying "everyone gets to do whatever they want forever"? It's ridiculously naive and misrepresentative and doesn't give any indication what you're going to do when things are mutually exclusive. Eg an explorer would want fast travel times and low restrictions on where to go while that makes territory control impossible for an imperialist since they can't protect large areas from people popping in and out. Imperialist gameplay would function much better if it took real life days to travel from one faction's space to another, but that would kill the pacing of exploration, so what do you choose?
Here's a question for you, "how should ships be balanced?" This is a pretty god damn fundamental piece of information about your game that you don't seem to have any idea about.
In robocraft any two vehicles are kept fairly similar in power with weapons losing effectiveness the more of them you have and size restrictions in matches keeping everyone about equally durable, which it seems like 2.0 is trying to do, but that's an ARENA GAME. How does it make any sense that you can spend 40 hours mining to put together a cruiser that then gets owned by a tiny fighter that only took 10 minutes of work to get???
Ballanced around cost? Mass? DIMENSIONS??? Are we supposed to have different ship types that can cooperate in team fights, or is that cheating? Should completely basic n00b ships be 100% on par with meticulously planned out ships built by veterans? Any shipyard requirements? Special resources? Ammo for better DPS / fuel for better speed? Have you thought about this at all or do you just open up notepad and start peeing on random code when your forum pets start crying about made up issues like gigantism or empty space?
That's the real question being asked by @Raisinbat here. What reference values everything is going to be balanced around?
Here are some examples of these 'reference values':
What will be the main parameters of a ship/station to estimate their survivability and firepower? Mass/size/dimensions/power gen/system block count?
How long should 1v1, NvN, 2NvN, etc. battle last, if all involved ships are identical? Like, 1 minute, or, 1 hour or something else?
Which thickness of hull should be considered as 'light armor' and not 'heavy armor'?
How many star systems there needs to be under a single faction's control for it to be considered 'Empire of Benjamin' and not 'Ben's backyard'?
How many ships should there be in an average-sized fleet?
When a ship stops being considered as a fighter and becomes a battleship instead?
How much resources should a successful lone miner be able to gather in 1 hour?
etc
As you see, there are many values which can possibly be referenced to when there is a necessity to balance gameplay. The absence of any values of this kind, or balancing consisting only of patching exploits which the community speaks about here on forums, will most certainly lead to a questionable quality and enjoyability of the game at best.
Considering all of the above, my question is: are there such reference values which the dev team is aiming for, or keeping in mind at least?
That's the real question being asked by @Raisinbat here. What reference values everything is going to be balanced around?
Here are some examples of these 'reference values':
What will be the main parameters of a ship/station to estimate their survivability and firepower? Mass/size/dimensions/power gen/system block count?
How long should 1v1, NvN, 2NvN, etc. battle last, if all involved ships are identical? Like, 1 minute, or, 1 hour or something else?
Which thickness of hull should be considered as 'light armor' and not 'heavy armor'?
How many star systems there needs to be under a single faction's control for it to be considered 'Empire of Benjamin' and not 'Ben's backyard'?
How many ships should there be in an average-sized fleet?
When a ship stops being considered as a fighter and becomes a battleship instead?
How much resources should a successful lone miner be able to gather in 1 hour?
etc
As you see, there are many values which can possibly be referenced to when there is a necessity to balance gameplay. The absence of any values of this kind, or balancing consisting only of patching exploits which the community speaks about here on forums, will most certainly lead to a questionable quality and enjoyability of the game at best.
Considering all of the above, my question is: are there such reference values which the dev team is aiming for, or keeping in mind at least?
I suspect the answer to all but the last point about mining will be "It depends on the server" as many of them will scale relative to other players.
Ship survivability will depend on how many people want to kick your ass and what they have to do it with. Ship characteristics, as always, will depend on block count and dimensions.
The length of a battle will depend on the relative damage dealing/absorbing strengths of the ships, and the skill and determination of the Pilots. While a 1v1 fight which lasts an hour is probably not desirable, I don't see how you can prevent this in a game which encourages creative freedom of ship design.
We already have different grades of armout strength. Again, thickness is determiend by the Builder. If my ship has a 3m thick hull and everyone else's is 2m, I have "heavy armour".
If one Faction is dominating the server by having 2 Systems and everyone else is struggling to keep hold of 1, then that Faction has an Empire. The Ottoman Empire controlled significantly less land than the Mongul Empire, but I'd still call them both Empires.
Average fleet size would be the average for the server.
There are whole threads discussing the issue of what is a Fighter and what is not, and the answers are almost as various as the number of contributors. Some fleets may not even contain ships fitting either description.
I think what Raisinbat is actually talking about is will the game's overall design come to favour one style of play over another, and what checks will there be to prevent one faction from dominating a server over all others, and older players slaughtering newbies on-sight. Bascially, how are they going to keep the game fun and fair to all player types.
I suspect at this point Schema doesn't really know. He's just trying to build the best Universe simulator he can, and will probably try to crystalise some sort of game-play model out of it once the foundations are sound.
Did you miss the part where everyone called you out for that thing being an overly long way of saying "everyone gets to do whatever they want forever"? It's ridiculously naive and misrepresentative and doesn't give any indication what you're going to do when things are mutually exclusive. Eg an explorer would want fast travel times and low restrictions on where to go while that makes territory control impossible for an imperialist since they can't protect large areas from people popping in and out. Imperialist gameplay would function much better if it took real life days to travel from one faction's space to another, but that would kill the pacing of exploration, so what do you choose?
Here's a question for you, "how should ships be balanced?" This is a pretty god damn fundamental piece of information about your game that you don't seem to have any idea about.
In robocraft any two vehicles are kept fairly similar in power with weapons losing effectiveness the more of them you have and size restrictions in matches keeping everyone about equally durable, which it seems like 2.0 is trying to do, but that's an ARENA GAME. How does it make any sense that you can spend 40 hours mining to put together a cruiser that then gets owned by a tiny fighter that only took 10 minutes of work to get???
Ballanced around cost? Mass? DIMENSIONS??? Are we supposed to have different ship types that can cooperate in team fights, or is that cheating? Should completely basic n00b ships be 100% on par with meticulously planned out ships built by veterans? Any shipyard requirements? Special resources? Ammo for better DPS / fuel for better speed? Have you thought about this at all or do you just open up notepad and start peeing on random code when your forum pets start crying about made up issues like gigantism or empty space?
Imperialism style play actually benefits just as much from faster travel as exploration. Fast travel makes factions more likely to interact with each other, making them more likely to vie for strategically significant places.
If your cruiser gets owned by a fighter, chances are you made a really bad cruiser, or they made a really good fighter. That is a valid outcome as long as it accurately reflects skills that a player had to invest a lot of time and careful planning to learn and implement. Spaghetti is easy, and it can single-handedly determine the outcome of a fight so it is bad for game play, but things like hyper-arrays, staged weapon systems, and damage mitigating system layouts are actually good for game play because no single one of them can make a ship unstoppable, but aggregated, they reflect a reward to the player who innovates and spends time building something other than a doom cube.
I believe he's already declared that multi-ship engagements of specialized ships are actually a goal of the endgame.
That's the real question being asked by @Raisinbat here. What reference values everything is going to be balanced around?
Here are some examples of these 'reference values':
What will be the main parameters of a ship/station to estimate their survivability and firepower? Mass/size/dimensions/power gen/system block count?
How long should 1v1, NvN, 2NvN, etc. battle last, if all involved ships are identical? Like, 1 minute, or, 1 hour or something else?
Which thickness of hull should be considered as 'light armor' and not 'heavy armor'[?/QUOTE]
These are mostly Player driven questions. Schine can try to balance how strong offense/defense is, but he if players all decide that putting 80% of our power into weapons is the norm, that's not on them. The GOAL here simply needs to be that a min-maxed tank is not indestructible and that a min-maxed glass-cannon can not insta-kill ships that should be tanky. Everything in between is all culture, and faction dogma. In power 1.0, I've seen same-mass battles last anywhere from 50 seconds to 70 minutes. So with players able to influence so much variance, this question seems a but misdirected.
How many star systems there needs to be under a single faction's control for it to be considered 'Empire of Benjamin' and not 'Ben's backyard'?
How many ships should there be in an average-sized fleet?
When a ship stops being considered as a fighter and becomes a battleship instead?
How much resources should a successful lone miner be able to gather in 1 hour?
etc[?/QUOTE]
These are even more culturally based. Right now, a faction with 5 players could easily be called an empire, but in 2015, there were factions with 20-30 active members.
Fleet sizes and ship classifications constantly shift as the game becomes more or less laggy since what the game engine supports and what server admins allow pretty much define this.
Resources are also defined by lag since there is a technical limit to how fast the game can process block removal.
I think what Raisinbat is actually talking about is will the game's overall design come to favour one style of play over another, and what checks will there be to prevent one faction from dominating a server over all others, and older players slaughtering newbies on-sight. Bascially, how are they going to keep the game fun and fair to all player types.
No akimzav has it right. My beef is that every single ballance update schine has released has made PVP worse for EVERYONE, because they have no plan for how ships should interact with each other and what strengths/weaknesses certain builds should have, and just react to anything the forums chosen ones complain about, regardless of merit.
Imperialism style play actually benefits just as much from faster travel as exploration. Fast travel makes factions more likely to interact with each other, making them more likely to vie for strategically significant places.
I think you mixed up imperialist and fighter; imperialists aim to control territory, not to simply fight. If it is impossible to control territory, and with current mobility it is, only homebases are defendable and that's because they're invincible, anyone can romp through your territory and blow up all your stuff while you're asleep and there's nothing you can do about it.
Just imagine any RTS if all the units could teleport; you'd constantly be trying to chase down attackers that can hop out whenever they like; chokepoints dont matter and defender strength is diminished the more territory they need to defend since attackers can hit anywhere so defender must spread their forces out to the point where they are outnumbered no matter where they're attacked.
Look at planetside; noone in that game gives a toot about territory control, people just run around in huge zergs farming points, noone bothers defending anything because territory control doesn't matter; you go bed, wake up and everything is completely random again. If all you want to do is fight, sure that works, but there's no faction warfare this way.
Consider the alternative; If a long range jump took 16 hours to execute and defenders had a tool to extend that up to an extra 6 hours, determined by defender, it would function as a form of negotiation between factions on when the fight would take place. Then you'd have time to organize your forces and come up with a plan for the battle and people know when to be online. Sure its not fun to wait 16 hours, but that can easily be solved with teleporters, if a fleet could be ordered to move somewhere, you can just let the AI fly there then switch to piloting those ships when they arrive.
EDIT:
Also the more mobile fleets are the less important it is to control territory in close proximity to your home, since you can easily hope a few galaxies away. Unoccupied territory will always be easier to take than occupied territory, so factions have no reason to fight.
If your cruiser gets owned by a fighter, chances are you made a really bad cruiser, or they made a really good fighter. That is a valid outcome as long as it accurately reflects skills that a player had to invest a lot of time and careful planning to learn and implement.
Sure, for now, but with local shields and combat regen disabled schine are apparently trying to bridge that gap, which is what my post is about. Why are they making these terrible ballance changes all the time.
No akimzav I think you mixed up imperialist and fighter; imperialists aim to control territory, not to simply fight. If it is impossible to control territory, and with current mobility it is, only homebases are defendable and that's because they're invincible, anyone can romp through your territory and blow up all your stuff while you're asleep and there's nothing you can do about it.
Just imagine any RTS if all the units could teleport; you'd constantly be trying to chase down attackers that can hop out whenever they like; chokepoints dont matter and defender strength is diminished the more territory they need to defend since attackers can hit anywhere so defender must spread their forces out to the point where they are outnumbered no matter where they're attacked.
Look at planetside; noone in that game gives a toot about territory control, people just run around in huge zergs farming points, noone bothers defending anything because territory control doesn't matter; you go bed, wake up and everything is completely random again. If all you want to do is fight, sure that works, but there's no faction warfare this way.
Consider the alternative; If a long range jump took 16 hours to execute and defenders had a tool to extend that up to an extra 6 hours, determined by defender, it would function as a form of negotiation between factions on when the fight would take place. Then you'd have time to organize your forces and come up with a plan for the battle and people know when to be online. Sure its not fun to wait 16 hours, but that can easily be solved with teleporters, if a fleet could be ordered to move somewhere, you can just let the AI fly there then switch to piloting those ships when they arrive.
EDIT:
Also the more mobile fleets are the less important it is to control territory in close proximity to your home, since you can easily hope a few galaxies away. Unoccupied territory will always be easier to take than occupied territory, so factions have no reason to fight.
Sure, for now, but with local shields and combat regen disabled schine are apparently trying to bridge that gap, which is what my post is about. Why are they making these terrible ballance changes all the time.
I disagree. Imperialism with super limited mobility suffers just as much as everyone else. You are picturing "Imperialism" like those old facebook games where you send armies of auto-calc prefab units to do your fighting hours after you log out, but that is not how StarMade works. StarMade is a factions game. An Empire, is made up of players who are your generals. For a major conflict to happen means you need players from both sides converging in one place and that only happens if travel time is reasonable. I understand your concern about holding territory, but that is an issue with how territory is claimed, not with travel time.
Fast travel time means a battlefield can be reinforced by both sides before the fight it over. It also means you can fly around fast enough to establish the trade networks, jump gate connections, etc in a worthwhile time frame that form the basis of your empire's automation
Fast travel also makes interacting in inter-faction politics to be more meaningful because it means that you are more likely to come under attack by joint forces, and be able to call on the aid of allied factions that are online when you come under siege.
Sorry, I have to ask ... some plan to implement / improve functionalities for logical stuff? Something like:
- Control the commands of the fleet using logic? ( launch / recall desired ships like drones for example under certain conditions)
- Allow turn on / off warpgates using logic?
- Allow activating teleporters using logic?
- Allow control Shipyards using logic?
- Add new functions to the logical blocks present? ( like condition menus, new logic blocks ... NAND and XOR gates are something necessary )
- Optimize display blocks (more types of fonts and sizes for example)
- Display blocks in different sizes and shapes?
- More commands for the display bloks?
- Solve many bugs and problems present in the logic stuff?
I know this kind of stuff is in a "final goal" ... but a long time ago, there is no change or improvement in this aspect, and I would like to know if any of these questions will be implemented in future updates ... I do not mean "... we have it in mind for the future ...", I mean something more "This and this other will be implemented in the next updates" ... please, be transparent, thanks
This site uses cookies to help personalise content, tailor your experience and to keep you logged in if you register.
By continuing to use this site, you are consenting to our use of cookies.
T2140 Display Module 50fps to 8fps
