A Solution To Flying Spaghetti Monsters

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    I do not care what a ship looks like. Everyone should just build whatever they like. Any rules or restrictions if at all needed should be placed by server admins not game mechanics. StarMade has no from or shape it is just blocks and space. The universe is made by players in whatever form they seem fit.
    Then you should also be okay with removing all weapons. Because without any rules to building ship systems fighting the ships would be more or less impossible without destroying most of the blocks on the ship. You'll need to hunt them down like you do now while salvaging asteroids, only it will dodge and fire back.

    I really want to see how much time will it take to kill dreadnought class ships in such a "system".

    No rules is good for a pure building game, but then you don't need weapons, or systems at all. Just make indestructible cores and allow them to move any number of blocks and you'll be golden.
     
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    1. would it be possible to fly around inside the spaced out ship with a small one permanently pulsing ship, doing damage?
    2. would it not just help to create a bigger blast radius on missles?
     
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    Then you should also be okay with removing all weapons. Because without any rules to building ship systems fighting the ships would be more or less impossible without destroying most of the blocks on the ship. You'll need to hunt them down like you do now while salvaging asteroids, only it will dodge and fire back.
    Past the basic game you can turn the game into anything you like.

    What I am kicking against here for over two years now. Is the ever more complex base game. The base game should be super simple. Since even in a super simple base game people will fly pretty much the same kind of ships you see today. Only the inside the bit that gets them to work will be far more easy to learn. That will get you players. Because right now there are way to few people on this game.

    After that you can add in another layer of more complex rules. That layer are the servers and the admins that run them. You do not add that stuff to the base game!

    Power 2.0 should be a mod at the most. Make power like shields. Each individual power reactor has a set power recharge and each power capacitor has a set power storage with a max power limit. It does not matter how you place them or where. That is something new players can understand with ease and every ship ever made currently on the dock will once again function. Realism is a second level addition and even then it is just made up rules! Everyone has another idea of what that should be so leave it out of the base game.

    The big mistake/view point currently by the people who build really integrate complex ships. Is that a simple base game would remove there way of doing things. They even say that they are okay with StarMade being a niece game. Then that shows just how self centered people are/have become. A simple base game will not remove complex builds. But it will level the playing field so that the gap between simple and complex is not as wide as it is today.

    Wake up! There is no game without players. And those players will not stay if there lovely build ships and stations become useless after every X updates. Because all of a sudden things that were done one way now have to be done another way.

    A simple base is also way way more easy to maintain and debug. Just look at the amount of recoding and debugging this power update throws up. For something that currently works to how silly is that. Like this game has no other really pressing problems. All it does is make even bigger ships possible. If and only if those ships are hollow. Because it is all about a CPU's block count.

    And these Spaghetti ships that for short even no one had heard about. Let alone seen one on any server. They are still ultra rare. I flat out ignore them. What are you going to do when I am in my Home Base.

    1. would it be possible to fly around inside the spaced out ship with a small one permanently pulsing ship, doing damage?
    2. would it not just help to create a bigger blast radius on missles?
    Well maybe add a weapon with a burn mechanic. The explosive effect lends it self perfect for that. When ever it hits a block the next block burns. Unless it has four other blocks next to it. A string ship would then burn like a torch just from a single shot. As the fire rages from block to block.

     
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    Past the basic game you can turn the game into anything you like.
    No you can't.

    There is only so much you can do when engine of the game just doesn't recognise certain functions. Cut out the dimensional calculations that Starmade has now and you probably won't be able to add them back through mods, at least not without unpleasant workarounds. Same goes for many other functions. Like say you could do only so much for Skyrim combat system, because the game just doesn't have the ways to recognise or track some actions and everything else relies on external programs that have problems with lagging behind. You'll get the same with Starmade, only multiplied many times due to it being a voxel game.

    For what you propose developers must make tirered levels of systems which would advance in complexity of building them and their power. This way functions would be preserved while also having easy ways of equipping a ship.

    What are you going to do when I am in my Home Base.
    Park a couple of satellites that you can't reasonably beat around your base and around all the asteroid fields in your system? So that you can't go mining and will be locked on your base. If AI gets better also add patrol ships to hunt you down.

    ___________________________________________

    If there will be no rules to how systems are build, just block count, ships aimed at PvP either will be turned in complete clouds of single blocks or into mushed down systems where each 5x5x5 chunk has all the system of the ship in needed proportions. It won't make them look like proper ships in any way.

    If you want combat ships to look like proper ships you need systems to follow rules that make them look like systems. So that reactor core is a blob with say, reactor casing, for example, shields would have some kind of generators (which we kind of getting now), and armor actually mattering so that even light and mobile ships would want 1 layer of it to soak up stray hits.
     
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    Lecic

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    1. would it be possible to fly around inside the spaced out ship with a small one permanently pulsing ship, doing damage?
    Possible? Maybe. Would it work in a practical sense? Unlikely. Both the spaghetti ship and the pulse ship likely fly at maximum server speed, so the pulsar could never catch the spaghetti.

    2. would it not just help to create a bigger blast radius on missles?
    No, because missiles have trouble hitting the strands in the first place. You would need some sort of weapon that explodes when close to an enemy, like a flak cannon or proximity missile.
     

    Wolverines527

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    Honestly i just dont see the who issue here how is a flying spaghetti monster ship a problem if my guess is right its just a ship made out of reactor blocks correct? Sorry I'm not all that familiar with this concept so thats whyI'm asking
     

    FlyingDebris

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    because that spaghetti monster is a laggy mess that is nearly impossible to kill and can easily tank ships 10x its size with no effort. I can arrange a demonstration if you'd like, your 500k or whatever you have in that range versus my 50k spaghetti ship.
     
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    Didn't read the thread but couldn't you just calculate the max box dims and divide it by amount of blocks to create a formula to nerf SHP?
    That way a ship with huge outer dimensions with few blocks gets battered with the nerf stick?
    Then again we would contradict Schine wanting interiors in ships RIP
     
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    Only skimmed this thread, so correct me if I'm missing something here.

    This sounds more alike an administrative problem rather than a game engine issue, sure it's an exploit that annoying players are using to play like complete assholes, but if it happened on my server it would result in a perma-ban. Not saying it'll stop this crap from happening, some trolls expect to get banned, but it would help reduce it.

    One more thing, isn't there a setting for max ship size in the settings? From what I've read, these ships only work if they're at least in the kilometer range in size. Who realistically builds a 10km/3 ship and doesn't expect the server to slow to a crawl?
     
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    Only skimmed this thread, so correct me if I'm missing something here.

    This sounds more alike an administrative problem rather than a game engine issue, sure it's an exploit that annoying players are using to play like complete assholes, but if it happened on my server it would result in a perma-ban. Not saying it'll stop this crap from happening, some trolls expect to get banned, but it would help reduce it.

    One more thing, isn't there a setting for max ship size in the settings? From what I've read, these ships only work if they're at least in the kilometer range in size. Who realistically builds a 10km/3 ship and doesn't expect the server to slow to a crawl?
    Banning people for particular ship designs is a dangerous road made of large gray areas. It is best that the game mechanics naturally make it undesirable to make ship designs that are ugly, frustrating to deal with, and incredibly illogical.
     
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    Banning people for particular ship designs is a dangerous road made of large gray areas. It is best that the game mechanics naturally make it undesirable to make ship designs that are ugly, frustrating to deal with, and incredibly illogical.
    Granted, bans have more to do with the intent rather than the design itself. I agree with you on that one.

    Still, building a ship that's kilometers in dimensions not only poses a gameplay issue like it does with spaghetti ships, but I'd imagine it would lag out a server pretty bad. Maybe there needs to be a server setting that limits the cubic area a ship can occupy, say 500 blocks cubed? Or the new power system could implement a minimum distance your stabilizers need to be from your reactor in order to work, making a range they have to be within depending on reactor size. Too close OR to far and they don't work.
     

    Crashmaster

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    Only skimmed this thread, so correct me if I'm missing something here.
    You have missed that there is a range of effective masses/ sizes for spaggetti ships well under 10km^3.
     

    Lecic

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    Granted, bans have more to do with the intent rather than the design itself. I agree with you on that one.

    Still, building a ship that's kilometers in dimensions not only poses a gameplay issue like it does with spaghetti ships, but I'd imagine it would lag out a server pretty bad. Maybe there needs to be a server setting that limits the cubic area a ship can occupy, say 500 blocks cubed?
    At 500 blocks cubed, a total volume of 125,000,000 blocks, I could build a 1% density spaghetti ship that would still have 1,250,000 blocks.

    Your plan not only does not work, it also hurts players who are building normal ships. Many ships extend past 500 meters without being large in mass. The prime example I can think of is the NFD Armstrong, which was a +1km long carrier/mobile base ship that only weighed 50k mass.

    Trying to solve this through admin intervention is not the way to go. Balance the game properly.

    Or the new power system could implement a minimum distance your stabilizers need to be from your reactor in order to work, making a range they have to be within depending on reactor size. Too close OR to far and they don't work.
    Sure, but you and I may have different ideas of what would constitute "too far."

    Only skimmed this thread, so correct me if I'm missing something here.
    Just judging by this you didn't actually read my post, or you would know that implementing a much closer stabilizer distance was a core part of the suggestion.
     
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    [Simply having a rule that all blocks must touch at least one other block would also achieve something similar in regard of Spaghetti maybe]
    I've been thinking about something like that;

    The game recognizes block groups now. Let's use them to simulate the ship breaking apart, w/o actually doing anything even remotely as resource hungry!

    Any group or groups that are not touching the largest group or groups of blocks should start suffering random block death, like sun damage.

    Example:

    1. All but the single largest free- floating stripe would die on a spagetthi ship.

    2. A normal ship that suffered damage in such a way that a part of it is no longer connected to the rest, would lose that part. ( wing blown off / cannon barrel cut off / ship cut in half etc... )

    Reaction:

    -Spagetthi pilot has to interconnect his lines to survive, preferably on multiple points, or else a single lost block would still lead to losing major sections.
    - Spagetthi ship now gained mass and surface, easier to hit, while still being fragile. Less tempting to build.

    Overall:

    No replacement for OP idea, probably not a full cure on it's own either, but it could be a part of the solution, and an improvement on combat in general.
     
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    nightrune

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    also, "spaghetti ships" arent any harder on a server from a technical standpoint than any other comparably complex ship.
    I tend not to comment on most things, but this isn't true either. No not harder on the server, but harder on clients. Ships like the fair and balanced have more exposed sides of blocks. Making it graphically more intensive. There are many reasons to force ship sizes down and more dense.
     

    Zyrr

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    Not exclusive to spaced out ships. Traditional ships I have stress my client out from exposed block faces more than the spaced out ships I have.

    Now, if you were to say that the much greater amount of chunks that need to be loaded stress out player clients more than contemporary ships of the same approximate mass, you'd be correct. The enormous chunk difference is something more or less exclusive to spaced out ships.
     

    Matt_Bradock

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    I tend not to comment on most things, but this isn't true either. No not harder on the server, but harder on clients. Ships like the fair and balanced have more exposed sides of blocks. Making it graphically more intensive. There are many reasons to force ship sizes down and more dense.
    I can actually confirm that, I have encountered that issue at the first time I encountered Veilith's massive spaghetti bowl, and my FPS dropped under 5 when I looked at it. basicly, on a spaghettiboat, almost every single block is rendered on at least 4 sides, while on a conventional design, more than half of the ship's blocks aren't rendered at all until damaged. Not everyone has a HP Z8, Zyrr
     
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    I tend not to comment on most things, but this isn't true either. No not harder on the server, but harder on clients. Ships like the fair and balanced have more exposed sides of blocks. Making it graphically more intensive. There are many reasons to force ship sizes down and more dense.
    Yup, this ship Amarr Khanid Damnation when it was hollow gave me ~40ish fps when looking from isometric viewpoint. I filled it in and it gave 100-110 fps when viewed the same way.