Astronaut suit = Ship

[pietrko]

Many people (me included) ask for better astronaut game play - more meta items, this that etc.
And you more or less agree that it should come after ship gameplay is viable, possibly as a part of exploration update.

What if instead of satisfying those demands you go into different direction.
You want to make game about ships.
But what is really the difference between astronaut and ship...?
stay with me:

Astronauts have very simple animations and consists of 7 parts.
2 legs,
2 arms
torso
head
tool
this is sufficient.

Why not make astronaut suits build-able same way ships are?
Every equipment, stat or function that astronaut have would be a result of player designing an astronaut suit & tool.

Build system would be the same as for ships, but it would require of you to do 5 separete entities enclosed within some space.

Each entity would have natural block restrictions (some blocks would be disallowed)
but otherwise this would be normal ship construction.
You would have 5 (leg, torso, head, arm, tool)

• A leg entity 3x3x7 (serves as template for both left and right leg), blocks allowed:
  • hull,
  • thrusters
  • docking
  • repulsors
  • ship core to serve as anchor point
• A torso entity 4x4x5 space (torso template), parent entity for all
  • hull
  • power rector, stabilizer
  • shield
  • chambers
  • ship core to serve as anchor point
• Arm entity 3x3x6 ...
  • hmm maybe it should be merged with tool entity?
  • ship core to serve as anchor point
• A head entity 3x3x3
  • logic block, activation, wireless block for ship communication!!!, sensors
  • hull
  • ship core to serve as anchor point
• Tool entity- (entity held by arm entity) allowed blocks
  • weapons and modules and weapon computers
  • hull
  • ship core to serve as anchor point

Now to form astronaut suit:
The parameters for every subentity are calculated and saved.
1. Power gens
2. Shields
3. Thrust
4. Damage, attack type cooldown,
5. Maybe even wireless logic system!
6. Total hull HP and armor
Of course you could just sum all the armour and all the shields and all the thurst and screw the placement.

Modules are set-up to hotkeys as with ships.


Now entity model is saved from those subentities.
You scale down the model let's say 4 times.
You merge the model and apply basic astronaut skeleton with jumping walking and shooting animation to every sub-entity.


Basically astronaut is a player-constructed ship that without all the block physics, instead it has pre-selected amount of "docked" entities which are animated like limbs of human model (basing on the same skeleton with same number of bones)
This way whatever you do with ships would be more or less possible with astronaut

Consider the possibilities guys.

 

[Captain Fortius]

Player built, functional hardsuits are a long time dream of mine. You've got my like.

 

[Nosajimiki]

Frankly... this seems like an overly complicated approach to such a small facet of the game. I think something more like the old X-Com games where you can mix and match armor pieces and a variety of astro weapons/tools would be fun though, especially if you had to find them at different shops, but going as granular as this seems a bit much.

 

[pietrko]

Frankly... this seems like an overly complicated approach to such a small facet of the game. I think something more like the old X-Com games where you can mix and match armor pieces and a variety of astro weapons/tools would be fun though, especially if you had to find them at different shops, but going as granular as this seems a bit much.

Small facet of game for you.
In regard to overly complicated well, you would have to ask schema.
From graphic engine perspective its rather simple, since every modern engine supports multimesh entites and skeletal animations.

I would like to know dev's opinion how hard it is codewise.
its certainly the most generic way you can do with astrounaut customization.

 

[OfficialCoding]

That would be very complicated. Jusst stick with ships.

 

[Skwidz]

Ehh... custom suits are cool but that's pretty much what skins are for. What the astronaut is pretty much lacking now is proper eva gear unless the astronaut has tiny thrusters hidden inside the boots. Perhaps a customizable jetpack and suit colors (and of course suit/jetpack models, perhaps mods or an editor thing to personalize those?) would be good enough. I've noticed some talk about more astronaut tools and perhaps armor between one of the devs and someone else so this could be possible.

 

[Nosajimiki]

Small facet of game for you.
In regard to overly complicated well, you would have to ask schema.
From graphic engine perspective its rather simple, since every modern engine supports multimesh entites and skeletal animations.

I would like to know dev's opinion how hard it is codewise.
its certainly the most generic way you can do with astronaut customization.

I did not mean in regards to the game engine and development so much as gameplay. What makes voxel-level complexity meaningful on a spaceship/building/tank/etc is that you can lay it out in any way, shape, or form you choose to get to the exact thing you desire. It takes extra time, but it feels worth it because of the amount of experimentation and creative freedom there is to be had. An astronaut as you mentioned would be bound to fixed sizes and shapes, and the results of your work would just be aggregated down to basic stats anyway, so the process of laying blocks becomes a fruitless burden.

Perhaps a more meaningful approach to the same idea would be more like the reactor system. Here you would have a design interface that you can open with a specialized astro-gear factory which would grant a maximum number of tech-points you could distribute to your suit design to give your astro bonuses and abilities: (HP, Speed, Carry weight, and various tools, weapons, and other abilities). You could then apply a custom skin or pick from a list of skins in a drop-down menu. Then it saves as a blueprint with block costs based on the features you selected. This way you can make custom gear, but without feeling like you're just coloring inside the lines.