A praise with suggestions

[darkhog]

I love Starmade. I really do. Even though I've only played for a few hours or so. It's very smooth, both for Alpha and for this level of complexity. Shipt controls (and controls in general) are superb and it's really good to play it. Perhaps that's because of multithreaded nature of SM from the start instead of patching it up, like it was case with minecraft.

Now on the bad things, with a way of improvement.

• Max speed of ship is really slow. 50km/h? For starship? REALLY? And it doesn't increase no matter how much boosters I put in, always maxes out on 49.9-50 km/h. There shouldn't be upper limit other than amount of boosters on the ships or speed of light, maybe (then again, it's a game and realism isn't as important there). Max speed should be speed that one booster gives * amount of boosters.
• Please add spherical planets. Of course completed with spherical gravity - there are numerous games that does such thing - Masterspace, several realistic flight sims, heck even Psychonauts (both titlescreen brain and Sascha's mind - didn't get anymore far than blueprint tank, know how to beat it, but execution fails, so I dunno if it does any more of it).
• Block updates takes waay too long. Sometimes after placing/removing block it takes up to 10 seconds for block to actually look like it was removed (collision box is updated instantly though). This affects plexdoors as well. Please focus on that one. Cause of this may be either being close to several big block bodies (shops, planets, big asteroids) or playing game for too long (which may suggest memory leak). Please focus on this, okay?
• One savestate? Seriously? I know universe is infinite, but sometimes I just want to start from scratch in new one without removing old universe (especially after mining out whole system).

Over all, great game. I hope that with right direction (which it have) it'll be true sandbox gem. I'll go play it right now.

Good luck making it!

 

[TheBawkHawk]

Hey darkhog, glad you\'re enjoying the game, and for your suggestions, I\'m sorry to say some of them just aren\'t possible.

1: The reason the 50 km/h speed limit is in place, is because collisions take time to process. So if you were going fast enough, you could clip through entire planets, or worse, get stuck halfway through. Also, if you were going too fast, you would be hitting invisible objects due to them not being rendered fast enough.

2: Spherical planets have been suggested multiple times before, and each time, no matter what we do, it just isn\'t plausible. Some problems that have to be solved for this to work are 1: How would the gravity work? 2: What happens if you get to the centre? Plus many other things.

3: That may be your computer, or it may not. I can\'t be sure.

4: When resetting your universe, you have an option to back it up first. This lets you have multiple universes that, with a bit of work, you can switch between.

Hope I helped you with your question.

 

[iTy]

Firstly the max speed is set to 50km/h however you can change it (look up a tutorial on the web! (don\'t go past 150km/h ish or things can\'t load as quick as you move!) ).

Secondly round planets don\'t work so well with the gravity at the moment (Schema is working on 2 sided planets! (personly I like flat planets!) ).

Thirdly I think it\'s just that your computers a bit slow.

And lastly I agree however I would proberly still use the same universe because... I did have a good reason but I just forgot

 

[darkhog]

@TheBawkHawk

1. Understandable. But there sould be some sort of hyperdrive that wouldn\'t take collisions into account. As with hyperdrive if you stop at wrong time you\'d materialize inside ship/planet/asteroid/sun, but then it would be your own fault and you could get out by engaging hyperdrive again. It should take lot of power to use though.

2. Gravity would pull player towards center of planet. And for what happen when you go in the center, I suggest this VSauce/minutephysics collab episode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN-FfJKgis8 - relevant part starts on about 1:00.

3. My computer specs are: Intel Core2Quad Q9450 2.66GHz, nVidia GeForce 9600GT and 4GB of ram. Plus every other thing like movement, shooting, etc. are smooth. Only block updates suffer and only mesh rendering part of them - collision boxes are updated instantly as I said.

4. I know that, but I want some more convenient way, like saves in Minecraft.

 

[TheBawkHawk]

1: Your hyperdrive idea sounds alright, but due to it being faster, and with almost no risks, people would use that and only that for transportation. What I propose for this kind of thing, is some sort of hyperdrive gate. They would launch you using your hyperdrive idea between two fixed points. In flight, your manuevering and thrusting controls would be locked, and would be restored once you exited. Players could create their own gates, and link them to another one of their, or their factions gates. Each gate can only be linked to one other gate, to avoid over-complification. There are many different ideas for this kind of thing, I suggest you read them, maybe contribute to them.

2: There are still some questions to be answered, and some of them are answered in other posts regarding circular planets.

3: You have me beat there, I don\'t know what it could be then.

4: I really want that too.

 

[squib]

Agree the game is great, amazing for an alpha build.

The simplest thing would be to change the unit of measure.
Why choose kilometers per hour when it could be written sectors per hour or just add a x 10 or 100.
Or make one up.
Or when you get the star streaming effect switch the speed measure to warp 1, even though the actual movement speed doesn\'t change.
I think less people would care if it sounded fast.