Allow Bulk Blueprints/Spawning

[MacThule]

Larger ship mobs seem to be more functional recently, and now I'm wishing for a way to bulk fill & spawn identical ships in MP as a player. Admin mass spawn is fine for testing, but there should be a way for players themselves in MP to get their fighter and drone swarms into play without spending 3 hours to do it.

We could really use a way to buy a "50x BP" of fighters or turrets or whatever, fill them all collectively under one merged BP, and spawn them all in one click. Obviously there would have to be server config settings limiting bulk numbers and perhaps other factors like how many cores a bulk-BP entity can have, or its total mass or size.

 

[NTIMESc]

Well the mass spawn interface needs some major work as well. It's UI is painful.
As far as multiplayer mass spawing, I'm really hoping that shipyards and fleet tools get some significant upgrades to allow automated production and fleet assignment, with intelligent rally points, and settings for formations.

 

[fokko]

you can do this if you dock all to a stick, then with activation beam, activate a button which undocks all ships.

 

[MacThule]

you can do this if you dock all to a stick, then with activation beam, activate a button which undocks all ships.

Then destroy the stick, yeah.

It's extra steps for what I feel like should be a simple function. Almost anything can be player worked-around in this game, which is amazing. Fleets are a central feature though, as are turrets, and they both require large numbers of entities on a pretty regular basis. Just something I think would make the game better for more people.

 

[Edymnion]

Yeah, considering last I heard they're still trying to move away from blueprints and spawning things in directly in general, I doubt its gonna happen. They're still pushing for "build ships in shipyards" instead of "fill a blueprint and have it magically pop into existence" like the old blueprints system does. The old "pocket battleship" thing being an issue.

But yeah, best work around at the time being is to make a rack that all of your drones/turrets/etc are attached to, kind of like the sprue in a model kit, that you can build and maneuver close to your target so that you don't have to fly individual pieces in from across the sector.