Brainstorm This: Crew Chambers (no crew)

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    Maybe I missed something above, but I think the main obstacle would be scalability. How do you prevent abuse of scale, also, how does this effect fighter-sized ships, anything too small to have much more than a cockpit?
    Small ships / systems
    -Have a 0 volume chamber size.
    -Need only 1 workstation.
    -Don't need crewmember to work the workstation (when crew actually arrives).

    So for a ship you will have a couple tiers of chambers:

    Tier 1: Smallest ships, have only 1 workstation per system and no need for the chamber itself or crew beyond pilot. (Fighters, drones)

    Tier 2: Medium ships, need some volume for chamber and 1 workstation, but the volume is pretty small on most systems so there is no need for a crewmember. Probably only main systems will have crewmembers working them. Say in case of specialised ships with oversized systems of certain types. (Frigates, corvettes, freighters)

    Tier 3: Large ships, have a proper chamber size and 1-2 workstations with crewmembers working on them. (Cruisers)

    Tier 4: Very large ships, like battleships or titans will have multiple workstations and large volume for chambers, with 3-5 crewmembers per system and up to a dozen workstations.
     

    Valiant70

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    Small ships / systems
    -Have a 0 volume chamber size.
    -Need only 1 workstation.
    -Don't need crewmember to work the workstation (when crew actually arrives).

    So for a ship you will have a couple tiers of chambers:

    Tier 1: Smallest ships, have only 1 workstation per system and no need for the chamber itself or crew beyond pilot. (Fighters, drones)

    Tier 2: Medium ships, need some volume for chamber and 1 workstation, but the volume is pretty small on most systems so there is no need for a crewmember. Probably only main systems will have crewmembers working them. Say in case of specialised ships with oversized systems of certain types. (Frigates, corvettes, freighters)

    Tier 3: Large ships, have a proper chamber size and 1-2 workstations with crewmembers working on them. (Cruisers)

    Tier 4: Very large ships, like battleships or titans will have multiple workstations and large volume for chambers, with 3-5 crewmembers per system and up to a dozen workstations.
    Just to clarify, would these need to be distinct tiers? I don’t think that’s something Schema would want. It seems like everything is going in the direction of being continuously variable.
     

    Edymnion

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    I really do like the idea of replicating the shipyard arm mechanic for designating crew space, and tying that into the chamber system.

    Instead of basing the chamber ability on the size of the chamber, it could be based on the number of crew actively inside the chamber area.

    That would go a long way to promoting interiors, as well as giving those interiors legit function. Have the FTL chamber wrap around main engineering, the logistics chamber could wrap around science stations, etc. Instead of requiring set percentages of the reactor, each function could require X number of crew inside the chamber space.

    Then have a chamber that is crew storage (aka crew quarters) that determines your maximum number of crew.

    Could even use the current stabilizer/node mechanics to create paths from the crew quarters chamber to the duty station chambers for crew to move down so they wouldn't need individual pathing AI.

    I like it!
     

    Valiant70

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    Instead of basing the chamber ability on the size of the chamber, it could be based on the number of crew actively inside the chamber area.
    I have a mental image of a 2-meter high chamber with an NPC crammed into every tile.
     

    Edymnion

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    I have a mental image of a 2-meter high chamber with an NPC crammed into every tile.
    Heh, your manager prefers to refer to it as a "cube farm".

    Could simply have an exclusion zone around workstations to prevent them from being stacked up on top of each other though.
     
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    Just to clarify, would these need to be distinct tiers? I don’t think that’s something Schema would want. It seems like everything is going in the direction of being continuously variable.
    No, that's just description of how it will look.

    Volume of the chamber (minimum 0) should scale with the size of the system. Number of workstations (minimum 1) and crewmembers (minimum 0) needed scales with the volume of the chamber.

    So a small system would have only 1 workstation and maybe some space.
    Medium system would have 1-3 workstations, some space and 1-2 crewmembers.
    Large system would have even more workstations (maybe a lot more for titans), allocated space and crewmembers.
     
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    This implements the core functionalities and consequences of a crew system, and leaves room for adding crew with little modification to ships. To add crew:
    • Reduce the base bonus of crew chambers
    • Add a bonus for crew working at workstations within the rooms.
    • Add living space requirements. Reducing the required size of crew chambers would reduce the need for ship modifications.
    These are my thoughts almost exactly. Thank you for responding; it's good to see that I'm not seeing massive opportunity where none exists!

    • How do you (fairly) determine damage to the chamber?
    Good question, one I've also asked myself and there are probably a few viable answers to. You can't damage empty space, so my best idea so far is that damage to the chamber outline blocks would cause serious damage, substantially affecting function (like a main system got hit) and damage to any registered decorative components inside its bounds would result in much less substantial damage with maybe a chance of critical hit sort of deal of something.

    Eventually - not sure how viable it is - my hope would be to see the chamber lose 50% effectiveness immediately if the enclosed interior becomes exposed to outer space (a hull breach affect it).

    I see two problems here:
    • How do you keep the decorations inside from EITHER being dead weight OR being something that you stuff in as many of X block as possible?
    My thought was that decorations inside actually directly improve the function of the chamber up to a certain percentage (probably 30%-50% it's hard to say without testing). Lazy builders could literally slab in decorative blocks up to max efficiency % and let it look horrible, but others could make the interior look great while earning better effects. There might be better ways, but this seemed simplest to code (at least for first run) and allows for lazy building while still rewarding meticulous work.
    [doublepost=1514055754,1514055283][/doublepost]
    How do you prevent abuse of scale, also, how does this effect fighter-sized ships, anything too small to have much more than a cockpit?
    I appreciate the hole-poking! Thank you!

    You'll have to give an example of what you mean by abuse of scale - I'm thinking they would operate very much like current chambers in terms of scale. They would have scaled minimum and maximum effective sizes. There would have to be ceilings on their value, just like current chambers. I like the way the new chambers work, I just think they should stop competing with interior for mass and space in a ship and leaving no roles for interior space to even fill in the end.

    I would imagine that since a small craft would only need a few blocks anyway, they could be a brick of chamber blocks as currently. Some fighters are two-seaters, as well, which would become a thing if you had a largish fighter with a serious specialization.

    And I really like the idea Dire Venom had about allowing chambers to remain automated even at larger scales; then in theory you should still be able to use this system to make unmanned drones of large vessels with substantially-sized chambers.
    [doublepost=1514056207][/doublepost]
    Then have a chamber that is crew storage (aka crew quarters) that determines your maximum number of crew.

    Could even use the current stabilizer/node mechanics to create paths from the crew quarters chamber to the duty station chambers for crew to move down so they wouldn't need individual pathing AI.

    I like it!
    Exactly - glad you like it. I had some time away from the game then coming back reading some very good comments by Lecic about stabilizers gave me an epiphany. I think it solves a variety of long-standing problems right away, up-front, and opens strongly for the option of crew later.
     

    Lecic

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    I really do like the idea of replicating the shipyard arm mechanic for designating crew space, and tying that into the chamber system.

    Instead of basing the chamber ability on the size of the chamber, it could be based on the number of crew actively inside the chamber area.

    That would go a long way to promoting interiors, as well as giving those interiors legit function. Have the FTL chamber wrap around main engineering, the logistics chamber could wrap around science stations, etc. Instead of requiring set percentages of the reactor, each function could require X number of crew inside the chamber space.

    Then have a chamber that is crew storage (aka crew quarters) that determines your maximum number of crew.

    Could even use the current stabilizer/node mechanics to create paths from the crew quarters chamber to the duty station chambers for crew to move down so they wouldn't need individual pathing AI.

    I like it!
    I think it makes more sense to have chambers have their strength based on the size of the chamber itself, but you need a certain number of crew to keep a chamber running at maximum power. Otherwise it starts to lose effectiveness, and maybe even starts suffering random outages. That way, before we get crew and the chambers are just empty rooms with empty computers in them, the chambers still work fine, and all that needs to be done is uncommenting the line that says a chamber of X size needs Y crew, rather than recoding chambers to work completely differently.

    This is also better from an aesthetic standpoint. Multiple people have talked about wanting a limiter on how many crew stations can be in one space, but this is unnecessary. If a chamber that's, say, 5000 blocks, maxes out effectiveness at 5 crew stations, why does it matter if the builder wants to put all 5 in a line right next to eachother or if they want one in each corner and one in the center of the chamber room?
     
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    Crashmaster

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    Crew Minus Crew

    Was reminded of this old thread by the current one. It has some ideas that might be useful to further brainstorming. Surprised it wasn't in the similar threads suggestions.
     
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    Crew Minus Crew

    Was reminded of this old thread by the current one. It has some ideas that might be useful to further brainstorming. Surprised it wasn't in the similar threads suggestions.
    Thank you for pointing that out!
    I hope the devs have had a good read of it. It looks like it holds quite a lot of merit, acheive both the player and dev goals.
     
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    I think it makes more sense to have chambers have their strength based on the size of the chamber itself, but you need a certain number of crew to keep a chamber running at maximum power. Otherwise it starts to lose effectiveness, and maybe even starts suffering random outages.
    As far as we've all looked at this so far, I'm in agreement with the above. It's more nuanced and complex, but also intuitive. It allows systems to complement & complete each other. It's nice because none of this affects core ship functionality, it only affects optimization. A new player could still slap together a basic ship with simplistic chambers and have a fully functional ship with decent stats, but it wouldn't be able to stand toe-to-toe with a dedicated PvP ship that had a well-organized interior and robust crew. The level of complexity from a system like this would mean that to get anything above the grade of maybe a frigate or basic destroyer up to fully optimal statistics would probably require a team effort by multiple builders over a substantial period of time, which would raise the value of optimized capital ships to epic proportions (probably to the point of warranting self-destruct systems to avoid losing the strategic edge). At the same time, even a fairly new player would be able to engineer very well-optimized fighters, bombers, scouts, freighters & corvettes.



    To follow up on a few grey areas that seem to be raising questions, I'm going to talk a little more about my thinking on this after looking at the excellent ideas and that other thread from earlier.

    My initial concept of this was definitely as Lecic describes; that the chamber strength derives primarily from the bounded size, almost exactly as they currently function except becoming hollow. Much of the chamber would become invulnerable empty space in essence, but damaging the bounding arm/frame would probably do crippling amounts of damage to the chamber, rather than just a percentage damage equal to what those blocks represent of the empty space that defines the chamber.

    So most of the chamber's function would be wrapped up in the amount of space bounded. From there, I imagined that its effect would be boosted further by decor (e.g. perhaps a 100% value increase to the chamber for optimal decor numbers). After that, if crew is implemented - in any form; NPCs, sprites, or even GUI-only - essentially half or more of the additive value of decor would become related to crew.

    EXAMPLE: The light reconnaissance frigate 'Razvedchik' has strong stealth, detection and speed capabilities. It's natural FTL jump charge speed is 120 seconds (e.g.). The designer runs a hall from engineering and frames a new FTL chamber nearby. It reduces the charge speed by 25% to 90 seconds. Another designer then installs interior hull, workstations, decorative walls and panels, flashy lights, etc, doubling the chamber's value to 50% and reducing the charge time to 60 seconds.

    While scouting an enemy mining operation, The Razvedchik is detected and takes heavy fire from drone escorts while attempting to jump clear. One shot passes through the FTL chamber, damaging some computers and hull, but not touching any of the actual FTL chamber bounding blocks. Charge speed increases 3% (based directly on the damage % to the chamber decor only). Just before getting away, a rocket breaches the outer armor plates and vaporizes 10 blocks of the actual FTL chamber bounding arm blocks as well as more decor. The decor damage reduces chamber function another 7%, but since the bounding arm only consists of 40 blocks to begin with, the chamber loses 25% of its base function as well as perhaps a temporary (60 or 120 second) complete outage while systems are stabilized, setting the jump drive recharge back to 2 minutes for now, then around 80 seconds once the FTL chamber is stabilized.

    Something along those lines anyway.

    Obviously, there are many ways such a system could work, and probably better ways than what I'm thinking of right now. In fact, I'd prefer to see some kind of hull-integrity modifier, but to look at that for an initial systems seems excessive. I'm looking mostly at what an initial trial implementation could look like. I like all the good long-term ideas coming out though!
     
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    Could this be done in a way that is friendly to the game engine?

    I think a crew chamber could output the resulting bonus from its size and contents to the parent ship one time and this variable could used by the ship to handle the effects. It wouldn't be a docked entity, which keeps it very simple. It wouldn't become an issue at all until a chamber or its contents took damage.

    How would it read damage?

    Is there room on the blocks themselves for them to take on a tag? That could be used to trigger a damaged chamber to recalculate its value for a ship without much work. I greatly fear the data size of our blocks won't permit this though...

    I don't think shipyards can currently read, say, a cannon round passing through them.

    If not by directly tagging member blocks, how else could a regional entity like an interior space register damage specifically to its member blocks in a way that isn't burdensome to the engine? Is it possible?
     

    Lecic

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    Could this be done in a way that is friendly to the game engine?

    I think a crew chamber could output the resulting bonus from its size and contents to the parent ship one time and this variable could used by the ship to handle the effects. It wouldn't be a docked entity, which keeps it very simple. It wouldn't become an issue at all until a chamber or its contents took damage.

    How would it read damage?

    Is there room on the blocks themselves for them to take on a tag? That could be used to trigger a damaged chamber to recalculate its value for a ship without much work. I greatly fear the data size of our blocks won't permit this though...

    I don't think shipyards can currently read, say, a cannon round passing through them.

    If not by directly tagging member blocks, how else could a regional entity like an interior space register damage specifically to its member blocks in a way that isn't burdensome to the engine? Is it possible?
    What about the new Reactor-Stabilizer line mechanic? The game clearly has a way of having a non-block entity that changes dimensions to match the blocks on ships that can be hit with projectiles. So make an invisible version of this to detect when projectiles or hitscan weapons are passing through a chamber room.
     

    StormWing0

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    hmm maybe make it so damage is done to a chamber if a shot goes through the bounding box of the chamber/crew room? This way you wouldn't have to hit the blocks defining it just the overall bounding box. :)
     
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    What about the new Reactor-Stabilizer line mechanic? The game clearly has a way of having a non-block entity that changes dimensions to match the blocks on ships that can be hit with projectiles. So make an invisible version of this to detect when projectiles or hitscan weapons are passing through a chamber room.
    This is a mechanic worth considering. My question is "what is being damaged?" If a beam punches through a large logistics compartment and passes through mostly empty space only destroying 5-10 blocks total, how much damage does it do and why? Is the stabilizer beam going to read the empty air it passes through as additional damage? That might result in some weirdness.

    There must be a way to do it though. And really, non-block entities will probably be the best long-term solution if we eventually want to see crew compartments registering issues like decompression.

    Maybe Schine could fine a way to have the beam-entity read blocks within its radius that are destroyed (for now), rather than weapons themselves passing through it.
     

    Crashmaster

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    What do you think about initially simulating a stationary crew member with a pair of new/temporary blocks to fill out the empty space a bit?
     

    Lecic

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    This is a mechanic worth considering. My question is "what is being damaged?" If a beam punches through a large logistics compartment and passes through mostly empty space only destroying 5-10 blocks total, how much damage does it do and why? Is the stabilizer beam going to read the empty air it passes through as additional damage? That might result in some weirdness.

    There must be a way to do it though. And really, non-block entities will probably be the best long-term solution if we eventually want to see crew compartments registering issues like decompression.

    Maybe Schine could fine a way to have the beam-entity read blocks within its radius that are destroyed (for now), rather than weapons themselves passing through it.
    If the actual chamber blocks only make up the wireframe of the room, the point of the "pass through check" would be to give outages to the system when it's hit, even through no blocks actually essential to its operation were destroyed. Think of it like the projectile distracting the crew operating it or something like electrical interference.
     
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    This. This is what the building meta should be. There have been so many flamewars and failed balancing changes to try and address the fact that interior spaces, cool as they are, are not at all useful. However, many of the proposed solutions, and a recently implemented solution (looking at you, stabilizers) don't actually give a reason to build interiors. Instead they attempt to make room for interiors by discouraging the close clustering of systems, which, ironically, has only encouraged the opposite extreme, where it is most effective to have ships that are as long, thin, and wiry as possible (which is worse, because they look even uglier than doomcubes and are harder to even hit). If you had an actual REASON to build interiors, like this one, then people would build interiors.
    [doublepost=1515372201,1515371860][/doublepost]
    I have a mental image of a 2-meter high chamber with an NPC crammed into every tile.
    Maybe the more floor space is unoccupied by crew, the better each crew member functions? that would be a pretty realistic way of preventing the overcrowding of rooms. Realistically, the more crowded a room full of people is, the less easy it will be for those people to do anything. Then you would have people building bigger chambers, or more chambers, to accommodate additional crew.

    There could also be an exponentially decreasing bonus for greater vertical height in the chamber, so a 3-block high chamber provides a considerably greater per-crew bonus than a 2-block high chamber, a 4-block high chamber is better than a 3-block high chamber, but not by as much, a 5-block high chamber is somewhat better than a 4-block high chamber, etc. That way people would have a reason to build less-cramped rooms with higher ceilings, but beyond a certain ceiling height it stops making much of a difference.
     
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    Sachys

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    There could also be an exponentially decreasing bonus for greater vertical height in the chamber, so a 3-block high chamber provides a considerably greater per-crew bonus than a 2-block high chamber, a 4-block high chamber is better than a 3-block high chamber, but not by as much, a 5-block high chamber is somewhat better than a 4-block high chamber, etc. That way people would have a reason to build less-cramped rooms with higher ceilings, but beyond a certain ceiling height it stops making much of a difference.
    Room volume would be a better measure (with a minimum size per crew of say 3x3x3 for arguements sake), otherwise you'd be looking at forced design again (just like under 2.0).

    Edit: actually, if we were given chairs (as we weere promised i think), then it could work nicely - the chair becomes the centre of the crew space. On a smaller ship you could cram them in to get whatever bonus (though run the risk of them being wiped out easily / not being singularly as efficient), larger ships could have plenty of them but afford greater space per crew.
    Anyone?
     
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    Another thing: it's confirmed that once crew is added, there'll be a morale mechanic where you have to keep crew happy, or else they'll mutiny. One way of implementing that feature before crew NPCs themselves are added would be chambers specifically to provide for the needs of the crew, like cafeterias, theaters, arcades, bars, stuff like that. New decorative items could be added to define and enhance these rooms.

    As morale would steadily go down over the course of a voyage without something to alleviate it, these chambers wouldn't be needed as much on ships that return to base more often, but if you want your ship to be on duty for extended periods of time, you'll need this stuff.