A solution to catalog buying lag and infinite resources ruining the economy

XHawk87 · Jul 2, 2013

=The Problems with the Catalog=

Infinite Resources

As you can buy ships for credits cost alone, you can effectively transmute any type of resource into any other by selling resources to a shop, and then buying ships from a catalog for those credits. I won't deny the convenience of being able to do this, however it does mean that manufacturing is entirely pointless. You can design a "ship" with nothing but a core and a bunch of the desired resource in order to buy as many of those as you wish for your credits. It is never necessary to actually gather materials, build a factory, manufacture ship parts and then build a ship, and this is a real shame.

The ease and availability of credits contributes to this problem, however I would like to keep this purely about the catalog, as that is already being discussed elsewhere.

Lag while buying large ships

You can spawn in a new super-carrier capital ship in an instant, or rather a very long instant which stalls the server while its being spawned. This is not only bad for everyone else playing, but also makes it ridiculously easy to obtain a replacement capital ship if you have the credits. Personally, I would prefer to see capital ships take a bit of effort to create.

=My suggestions=

Make buying ships from a catalog require resources

The resources could come either from the player's inventory, or the shop they are being bought from (in which case it costs credits). The key part is that the resources MUST exist in order to be used for building a ship. This effectively prevents infinite resources, as manufacturing must have been done by someone in order to be used in a ship.

Make building a ship from a catalog take time

A gigantic ship appearing out of nowhere is a problem, a core appearing is not. So first a core appears, then block by block over time the ship is constructed. I would recommend a rate of about 5 blocks per second, that's a little faster than a player can build on average, but not ridiculously fast. It would therefore cause no more lag than a player building a ship by hand. It would also mean that the larger the ship, the longer it would take to build. An 18k block capital ship would take about an hour to build itself, whereas a 100 block fighter would take only 20 seconds.

Eliott · Jul 2, 2013

These are all very nice ideas for increasing the stability of the software and awesome ideas for balance for future versions!

BeefBacon · Jul 2, 2013

I\'ve seen it suggested elsewhere that ships of a certain size should require a shipyard structure of the appropriate size to be built. Shipyards should be expensive to build, and it should take time for the shipyard to construct the ship.

The credits thing will soon be fixed, I\'m sure. Don\'t think a great deal of gameplay balancing has gone into the game at this point (alpha is alpha) so balancing seems to be what the vast majority of these suggestion threads are about.

ultra695 · Jul 2, 2013

Building from resources rather than credits would be amazing.

MichaelSeph · Jul 2, 2013

The last idea, of

\"Make building a ship from a catalog take time\"

Is actually a terrible one, the unreality of a ship appearing out of nowhere can be solved by adding a \"warp\" effect for it as if arriving from the ship\'s central at the order, or making shops huge enough to look as if the ship jsut got out of it\'s garage, but blocks appearing one by one or in chunk brings incredible bugs (blocks will keep appearing even if somebody or something got in the way), performance killer (it\'s like playing an video instead of reading a bunch of text at once) and the program needed to do that is also quite hard to do, something that works for all ships.

Trinova · Jul 2, 2013

That\'s just not right. I don\'t know the exact format of ship files but it would be pretty easy to just iterate over all 3 coordinates and place a couple of blocks every building tick. Since the building process would only do a couple of steps every second it would safe very much performance. If this would happen with some kind of ray which moves from spot to spot it would even look nice like the ship realy gets build.

For the problem of blocking the building process you could avoid that just like collision is avoided right now. You get warped out if you enter the building zone. Or better you can\'t enter it in the first place.

XHawk87 · Jul 2, 2013

Thanks for the fast feedback.

@BeefBacon

ships of a certain size should require a shipyard structure of the appropriate size to be built

Shipyards for capital ships sounds like a cool idea. I am not sure how it\'d work though, would you mind linking me to the discussion thread?

Don\'t think a great deal of gameplay balancing has gone into the game at this point

Its easier to design a game with balance in mind than it is to go back and rewrite features because they ruin the balance. It should be considered an important aspect even in the early stages. Schema has done a good job, but game balance is a very tricky issue in complex games such as this.

@MichaelSeph

the unreality of a ship appearing out of nowhere

My issue wasn\'t with unreality of the ship appearing, its with the speed at which something new can be created. I don\'t think a new capital ship should be something that just comes into being without any effort by anyone.

blocks will keep appearing even if somebody or something got in the way

While you raise a good point about things getting in the way of ship construction, this is something that can be considered while writing it. Construction can be halted while something is obstructing the build site, and no other blocks can be filled in.

and the program needed to do that is also quite hard to do

As a games developer of considerable experience myself, I can assure you that a professional developer like Schema would be able to write something like this without the great difficulty you are suggesting.

performance killer (it\'s like playing an video instead of reading a bunch of text at once)

The real performance killer at the moment is the ship materialising fully-formed at the moment of its creation, having to enter this into the world and inform all nearby clients instantly. The block by block approach would generate no more lag than a new player spawning a core, getting into build mode and start placing blocks onto it.

Edit: Trinova Posted while I was writing

If this would happen with some kind of ray which moves from spot to spot it would even look nice like the ship realy gets build.

This is a really cool idea, and it\'d fit well with the Shipyards idea. You could feed the blueprint into the shipyard and it starts painting the ship for you within the framework using tractor beams.

D-Car · Jul 3, 2013

Of all this, I\'m a huge fan of the ship-purchasing taking time. Even if it\'s as much as ten blocks per server tick, it\'d kill the problem of people intentionally crashing servers by spawning ships. Additionally, the player should be limited to one ship being constructed at a time, but should be permitted to queue up multiple ships in a build queue (and also to rearrange the pending ships in his queue).

Forcing players to have all the blocks to build their ships would only exacerbate the problem of shops constantly being out of everything. The solution to this is to force shops to restock according to some kind of system or timer thing somehow. That way, only the commonly-trafficked sectors\' shops would always be out of things and you could have a reasonable expectation that flying ten sectors away would net you a shop with (at least some of) the parts you need.

RossTiger · Jul 3, 2013

These are some great ideas, I especially like the idea of having shipyards for larger ships, maybe with drones on rails or floating round shooting beams to create the blocks. You could also add in the option to push a ship out of production early, for instance if the shipyard was under attack, it sounds complicated but if the primary systems were built first then the hull round it, this could work. Small ships I think are fine being produced by shops, although some sort of small garage would be nice.

Will add my support to ships needing resources instead of credits, this forces you to put effort into collecting or producing the required materials, instead of grabbing a few cactuses from the nearest desert planet. I can\'t imagine it would be difficult to calculate since the ship files must record what blocks are used for each ship.

kregeth · Jul 3, 2013

another thing that would be great to add to this is instead of accessing your blueprint at a spacestation you would need a dedicated shipyard (similar to a docking module) that you would have to extend to accomedate the size of the blueprint you want built, would would also have to supply the shipyard beforehand with the materials needed for the job, seeing how a single ship could be made of more blocktypes you can hold i\'d also reccomend having the shipyard module double as a container(like the plexstorage but more slots) and to balance the ability to make ships automatically the shipyard module should be a manufactured item that does not show up in the shop table or the loot table of pirates

TL;DR: the blueprint catalogue is OP, nerf and concider remaking the mechanics

Zxaber · Jul 3, 2013

One way to get around people flying into the build area might be for the shop to add a shield to the build area in the form of a bounding box. In this way, people wouldn\'t be able to accidentally mess up production if not paying attention. On the other side, if an enemy faction ship came by, they might be able to halt production by destroying the box, and then salvaging some of the ship for themselves. What happens at that point is up for discussion. Perhaps the owner can either choose to resume production and re-buy the parts destroyed, or else scrap the project and get the money/parts back.

On another note, building the ship should cost some in labor. Perhaps a percentage of what all the parts would cost? Or maybe a flat fee per block? Should the process be interfered with mid-production, I\'d say this labor fee shouldn\'t be refundable. If production is started up again, whatever amount hadn\'t been used yet could go towards the new fee, but if the owner decided to cut his losses and scrap the project, the labor fee would be forfeit.

Being able to take items from the owner\'s ship\'s chest would also be nice. I\'ve heard suggestions about limiting the stack size of each inventory slot (Like Minecraft\'s 64-item limit).

ne3zy · Jul 4, 2013

if you change the blueprints like that you must be able to build the ship where you want to

Greiger · Jul 4, 2013

I love the idea, but I hate the idea of the needing the materiels on hand. Sure throw in what you got, to save some cash, and resources will be taken from the shop. But what is so fun about flying from shop to shop buying Power tanks?

I figure if you don\'t have the materiel, and the shop dosn\'t either, just double the cost of that part when calculating the cost of the blueprint, and if doing the block by block thing during building make it take twice as long to place the block. This is a trading guild, not individual shopkeepers, they have networks for getting this stuff.

There we go, having as much as you can onhand is encouraged, but you don\'t have to spend two days scouring the universe for a few of some stupid rare part everybody needs and bought out of every shop in 100 sectors. No need to kill the catalog\'s convienience.

I mean at the very least have the shops pull these resources from all nearby shops until it has all it needs. I\'m pretty sure they navy dosn\'t just go to all the local hardware stores and buy out the entire store because they are making a destroyer. The companies supplying them deliver the parts to the navy, not the other way around.

Planr · Jul 4, 2013

Infinite Resources

As you can buy ships for credits cost alone, you can effectively transmute any type of resource into any other by selling resources to a shop, and then buying ships from a catalog for those credits. I won\'t deny the convenience of being able to do this, however it does mean that manufacturing is entirely pointless. You can design a \"ship\" with nothing but a core and a bunch of the desired resource in order to buy as many of those as you wish for your credits. It is never necessary to actually gather materials, build a factory, manufacture ship parts and then build a ship, and this is a real shame.

The ease and availability of credits contributes to this problem, however I would like to keep this purely about the catalog, as that is already being discussed elsewhere.

Have you actually even tested this scenario to prove it? You cannot get more money from the blueprints you buy except by using exploits (eg. ships with turrets can be bought for only the price of the ship itself, turrets excluded)

Lag while buying large ships

You can spawn in a new super-carrier capital ship in an instant, or rather a very long instant which stalls the server while its being spawned. This is not only bad for everyone else playing, but also makes it ridiculously easy to obtain a replacement capital ship if you have the credits. Personally, I would prefer to see capital ships take a bit of effort to create.

Capital ships take a lot of effort to create. But to actually buy? Absolutely not, and that\'s the way it should stay. There are alot of servers out there that can support heavier loads such as buying large ships. It\'s not a problem with the game, it\'s a problem relative to server strength.

Make buying ships from a catalog require resources

The resources could come either from the player\'s inventory, or the shop they are being bought from (in which case it costs credits). The key part is that the resources MUST exist in order to be used for building a ship. This effectively prevents infinite resources, as manufacturing must have been done by someone in order to be used in a ship.

The number of slots in your inventory are limited, and shops are definitely not going to compensate for what you\'re missing. Most capital ships are built out of a greater variety of blocks than what your inventory can accomodate for; Therefore it would be impossible to buy most capital ships in the first place. Credits are the best way to go, by far.

Make building a ship from a catalog take time

A gigantic ship appearing out of nowhere is a problem, a core appearing is not.

Not quite. It depends on how good your computer and the server can handle it.

So first a core appears, then block by block over time the ship is constructed. I would recommend a rate of about 5 blocks per second, that\'s a little faster than a player can build on average, but not ridiculously fast. It would therefore cause no more lag than a player building a ship by hand. It would also mean that the larger the ship, the longer it would take to build. An 18k block capital ship would take about an hour to build itself, whereas a 100 block fighter would take only 20 seconds.

This method, no matter how it would be implemented, would cause immense lag, as MichaelSeph said. It\'s a very poor method in general for buying things from the catalog, and I would rather just give up and use admin commands to spawn my stuff than to wait a whole entire hour to get my ship to \"build itself\". That would be ridiculous.

Damiann47 · Jul 4, 2013

The idea of buying takes time is not bad at all, that would probably help to discourage large scale buying. As for the resource requirement, that is a bad idea resources are very limited as it is. In my opinion I don\'t even want these NPC shops to be as central to the economy as they are now, I would rather have players manufactuing the parts then they sell then. If there was a better and much more stable way to get resources then I wouldn\'t have many problems with the requirment.

a_500lb_midgit · Jul 4, 2013

The NPC shops are very central to the economy but they dont have to all NPC shops I like the idea of shops that are like the NPC shops as in you use it like an NPC shop but are player ran the player stocks the items and also sets a price kind of like on alot of minecraft servers they have player shops at spawn

DrWatson · Jul 4, 2013

I like the shipyard idea . maybe attaching some building drones on rails . The rails would be X,Y,Z . the bigger the ship you want to build/spawn the longer the rails . e.g Ship is 150 blocks long ,50 blocks high , 30 blocks wide . so the rails with the builder drones attached should be 160blocks long , 55 blocks high and 35 blocks wide .

Trollerbobman · Jul 4, 2013

i dont think anyone gets that the ship costs the same as the things used in making it.

Trollerbobman · Jul 4, 2013

epicbastion · Jul 4, 2013

Infinite Resources

As you can buy ships for credits cost alone, you can effectively transmute any type of resource into any other by selling resources to a shop, and then buying ships from a catalog for those credits. I won\'t deny the convenience of being able to do this, however it does mean that manufacturing is entirely pointless. You can design a \"ship\" with nothing but a core and a bunch of the desired resource in order to buy as many of those as you wish for your credits. It is never necessary to actually gather materials, build a factory, manufacture ship parts and then build a ship, and this is a real shame.

The ease and availability of credits contributes to this problem, however I would like to keep this purely about the catalog, as that is already being discussed elsewhere.

Have you actually even tested this scenario to prove it? You cannot get more money from the blueprints you buy except by using exploits (eg. ships with turrets can be bought for only the price of the ship itself, turrets excluded)

Lag while buying large ships

You can spawn in a new super-carrier capital ship in an instant, or rather a very long instant which stalls the server while its being spawned. This is not only bad for everyone else playing, but also makes it ridiculously easy to obtain a replacement capital ship if you have the credits. Personally, I would prefer to see capital ships take a bit of effort to create.

Capital ships take a lot of effort to create. But to actually buy? Absolutely not, and that\'s the way it should stay. There are alot of servers out there that can support heavier loads such as buying large ships. It\'s not a problem with the game, it\'s a problem relative to server strength.

Make buying ships from a catalog require resources

The resources could come either from the player\'s inventory, or the shop they are being bought from (in which case it costs credits). The key part is that the resources MUST exist in order to be used for building a ship. This effectively prevents infinite resources, as manufacturing must have been done by someone in order to be used in a ship.

The number of slots in your inventory are limited, and shops are definitely not going to compensate for what you\'re missing. Most capital ships are built out of a greater variety of blocks than what your inventory can accomodate for; Therefore it would be impossible to buy most capital ships in the first place. Credits are the best way to go, by far.

Make building a ship from a catalog take time

A gigantic ship appearing out of nowhere is a problem, a core appearing is not.

Not quite. It depends on how good your computer and the server can handle it.

So first a core appears, then block by block over time the ship is constructed. I would recommend a rate of about 5 blocks per second, that\'s a little faster than a player can build on average, but not ridiculously fast. It would therefore cause no more lag than a player building a ship by hand. It would also mean that the larger the ship, the longer it would take to build. An 18k block capital ship would take about an hour to build itself, whereas a 100 block fighter would take only 20 seconds.

This method, no matter how it would be implemented, would cause immense lag, as MichaelSeph said. It\'s a very poor method in general for buying things from the catalog, and I would rather just give up and use admin commands to spawn my stuff than to wait a whole entire hour to get my ship to \"build itself\". That would be ridiculous.

1. If the shops are out of power storage tanks as they usually are, I buy up 300 of them then I save the blueprint, I can not buy these from the shops but i buy the ship i just saved from a blueprint, I now have 600 (300 per ship) so I have doubled the amount of tanks by buying the ship. I sold 10k grey hulls to pay for it so I have effectively used a readily available resource to \"create in game\" a rather rare resource. I did not have to use an exploit I just used credits.

2. If I can download from a website, then upload to the server and purchase a capital ship from the catalog, I used the 50k grey hull I harvested to sell for credits to instantly transform the credits into a shiny new huge capital ship with which I can go kill people and generally wreak havoc on a server. If that is what the server owner wants great, that is not what I want on my server. I want people to have to go and buy/find, harvest and manufacture the stuff they need to actually spend the hours to build an effective capital ship. This should be a choice made by the server owners not just a standard way it happens everywhere, players like to play in different ways, if you want the quick and epic spawn battles that take place with the 12 year old crowd go for it. I on the other hand want my players to have to work for every little part and pc they create.

3. Oh you mean I have to plan out and place storage for my shipyard to be able to build a ship, with all the items neccesary for the design, that is so hard and requires so much thought. You are right, most players will not be able to handle the concept of actually planning and forthought.

4. Server specs are not really that varied, the current state of star-made from a coding standpoint has much more to do with how a server handles things than whether I have a i3-1230v3 or an x3440 processor. I agree the 1230 would handle the computations faster but look at all the servers with high end specs, that have 80-90% uptime, that is not because the server can\'t handle it, its because the software is in alpha and is relatively unstable, don\'t get me wrong I have a 95% uptime rate with my x3440 but that is only because I restart the server every 3 to 4 hours.

5. Slow build in java has been around for a while, it can cause localized lag based on what visual effects you choose to use. To say it would cause lag across a server, I have no imperical evidence that it would, I guess if there were 100 ships all being slow built across a server it would load the server cpu up. I would like to think though that the slow build process could be put onto at least one other separate thread so it would not affect game play.