Building a living universe

[Jeryia]

I've slowly been working on a server setup using StarD's plugins and StarMade's already existing features to build out a more living universe. The hope is to offer a more living breathing universe full of quests, shops, and storyline based around a few npc factions. More details on the plans are below.

I'm posting this as I have largely completed most of the ship designs, storyline, and scripting to make things work. The main things I have left Is to write quests and populate the universe. However, before I start on that, I'd like to see what ideas people have on what they want to see, as well as attempt to guage interest.

Objectives:
* Give players something to do in survival. Storyline, and additional challenges.
* Give players reasons to fight (pvp events that are worth risking your ship)
* Provide alternate ways to play with choices and consiquences to those choices.


Features:
* Quest hubs offering missions of various types. Varying from the simple 'go kill something' to storyline based quests.
* Various shops offering infanite goods of certain types. Such as ships, blocks, docked things (turrets, fighters)
* Multiple factions at conflict (currently three)
* Reputation based offerings. So if you have helped out a given faction by doing quests for them or perhaps something else they may offer you better or cheeper goods, and more rewarding/challenging quests.
* Reduce barrier to entry with starmade, by providing ne players with many ship upgrade options so they can slowly learn how ships are built or even ignore that aspect of the game should they choose to do so.

Details:
Playstyle:
This setup will offer a more focused play style than the traditional starmade experience. For example, the player starts out with a small ship with many quests available to them to help them acquire money to buy larger more effective vessels. I'm expecting players to start out using and buying ships from the vendors to start. Perhaps modifying them to their playstyle, then eventually building their own. Likely the player will eventually align themselves with one of the factions for several added benefits.

Factions:
Currently there are three factions planned. With backstory, and unique ships for each. Each of these factions have their advantages and disadvantages. Such as shields being lower cost for one, and armor being lower cost for another. Each faction will own a decent number of stations potentially offering quests and items to purchase to simulate the existence of a larger civilization. The factions will attack each other, and players will get the option to align yourself with one of the factions. This would put you at war with the other two, and you would then be fired upon by them should you encounter their ships. Alignment would also give you several benefits, such as the ability to get paid to assist the faction with their war effort (such as pvp events), as well as allowing access to their ships and some discounts on their wears.

Economy:
Stations offering goods would have infinite supplies to avoid 'running out' of needed materials. However, purchasing through the standard StarMade trade route would also be available being referred to as the 'Black Market'. The Black market would the the only way to sell goods, as I have not figured out a good way to offer the sales of ships and blocks that wouldn't be trivial for players to exploit.

Events:
I plan to add several events to this. Some will be player triggered others will be random.
example event:
One faction decides to launch an attack against another faction. It would make a call to anyone aligned with it to assist, and be paid to do so. Once the attack started the defending faction would try to hold off the attack and make a call to those aligned to it to help, paying any player who chose to do so. The players involved and aligned with the winning faction would be well rewarded, and those aligned to the losing faction and involved will get a smaller reward.

Issues:
Like most server setups, all of this will be done via chat commands for when a player wants to start a quest or buy an item. This works, but isn't as elegant as using a nice gui interface. Though the quests and events will play out without the need for entering any chat command (if you want to turn in the quest, all you need to do is complete it's objectives).

Future:
Once I think things are ready enough, I plan to setup a server hosting an incomplete, but playable version of the above to see how it's working, and to help locate any bugs.


Right now, most things about this are open to change. So I'd like to hear what people think before I start down paths that become harder to change. Does this interest people? Is there anything you guys want to see done a certain way or differently? Is anyone interested in assisting?

 

[JinM]

However, before I start on that, I'd like to see what ideas people have on what they want to see, as well as attempt to guage interest.

Objectives:
* Give players something to do in survival. Storyline, and additional challenges.

So I read your entire post.

First of I write about my first thought , because this feature would be really awesome and I want to say it really fast: I would immediatelly join a server, where I could set up quests or missions for other players. Prequisite is ofc, that I am not the builder or some mod of the server, I want to set up like one small quest thingy nothing big or have responsibility. Just the ability to do so. And this is a huge job to give to the player, so they can do something in survival. It boosts player interaction and "giving something back to the other players you play with".

This is possible without granting higher admin rights to players, by setting up Homebases with a new faction each, that let players dock quest-able entities to it. Or you even can use advaned shops, that have the nice side effect, that a ship can detect via logic, if it is undocked (because it then suddenly has more than 0% power).

Why let players design quests? Because that is the only way to get enough content for a server. Even if you hire like 15 mods (and this would be a very high management workload!) you would be able to keep up with a comparable quest-maker system that lets players design quests.

I just showed my most advanced idea, ofcourse an easier system with commands that let each player request items via cargo delivery to this or that station port, would be a simpler job to set up.


Now lets dive into your server idea: Point one: you cant do this alone. Even running a server and setting it up for vanilla survival with some active mods is a big work. Including quests makes it nearly impossible to run it smoothly without some bigger help.

Point two: Getting people to help you out, need either simple server concepts so you have a concept on what you want to achive at the end (like: vanilla server with rules like Brierie has), OR you make a completly working concept that only includes ideas you actually know are doable with the current scripting possibilities. In booth cases you need more concrete stuff (not examples, concrete and nearly complete rules if vanilla or the word of you: yes this works with scripts and this and that feature will be there).

Lastly I want to say, that I think the economy and questing system you propose are a little bit to special. They are thought out, but not appealing to a greater audience. It would make it easier, if people would be able to pick quests without alligning themself to either faction side. The problem with faction sides is, that we allready have ridiculous small amount of players and dont have many friends who play this game. So we want to find friends in Starmade to play and build together. Allignment to 3 sides would split up this group even more. It would totally work out, if we had a huge server population - then it would be totally fine. But I think the numbers we have right now are not enough to make a 3 faction playstyle work.

Make the quest system without the faction allignment and it would totally work out mate imho.

 

[Batavium]

I'm posting this as I have largely completed most of the ship designs, storyline, and scripting to make things work. The main things I have left Is to write quests and populate the universe. However, before I start on that, I'd like to see what ideas people have on what they want to see, as well as attempt to guage interest.

Nice to see someone try something different. Will i play it? Probably not. But the concept might appeal to others. The current StarMade player base that play online is very small though.

I do have a few tips. Looking at your post you seem very knowledgeable about StarMade. So you may already know this.

If you want to change the default in game stations with designs of your own or from the Dock. Then you need to do this before you create the map. Once the map has been "seeded" with stations you can no longer alter them. Just replace the default Blueprints.

When you set the size of your sectors keep them small. You can not make sectors smaller after you create the map. You can make them bigger so start off small. Sector size has a big impact on how a server runs. Each player exists in a 3 by 3 by 3 sector bubble. That is 27 sectors total that all need to be loaded into memory and fed to each player from the servers storage. You may not see it in the beginning but after people played the server for a while and more and more stuff is added. Some sectors will get very heavy to process by the server. It will also create over time a very large map file.

Maybe this is of some use to you. Good luck with the server!

 

[Jeryia]

Thank you all for your replies.

First of I write about my first thought , because this feature would be really awesome and I want to say it really fast: I would immediatelly join a server, where I could set up quests or missions for other players. Prequisite is ofc, that I am not the builder or some mod of the server, I want to set up like one small quest thingy nothing big or have responsibility. Just the ability to do so. And this is a huge job to give to the player, so they can do something in survival. It boosts player interaction and "giving something back to the other players you play with".

This is possible without granting higher admin rights to players, by setting up Homebases with a new faction each, that let players dock quest-able entities to it. Or you even can use advaned shops, that have the nice side effect, that a ship can detect via logic, if it is undocked (because it then suddenly has more than 0% power).

Why let players design quests? Because that is the only way to get enough content for a server. Even if you hire like 15 mods (and this would be a very high management workload!) you would be able to keep up with a comparable quest-maker system that lets players design quests.

I just showed my most advanced idea, ofcourse an easier system with commands that let each player request items via cargo delivery to this or that station port, would be a simpler job to set up.

Howdy JinM,
Thank you for the time you spend reading through and providing some good honest feedback.
I'm having some difficulty with determining the logistics of what's being proposed. Here's one way I could see implementing player quests, though I don't think it is exactly what you're thinking of:
Offering players the ability to use their home base as a quest hub. Questing players would dock to the home base, or get close to get the quests, then would be sent to do whatever. Players in the faction could choose from a list of quests if the reward is spontaneously generated, or would need to 'deposit' the reward before anyone could do the quest (to prevent exploiting it).

I didn't quite know what you where referring to when you mentioned 'questable entity'.'

Now lets dive into your server idea: Point one: you cant do this alone. Even running a server and setting it up for vanilla survival with some active mods is a big work. Including quests makes it nearly impossible to run it smoothly without some bigger help.

True, it can be a lot of work. In my experience running starmade servers, there are three main things that are the big time sinks:
1. Writing the scripting (biggest time sink, has taken me years of on and off time to build what I have now)
2. Server Maintenance. Stuff breaks... Biggest thing here is being available to fix them, which is a pain long term.
3. General admin work (dealing with player disputes, helping confused players, etc)

For proposals like this, the general plan is to slowly work up to a release worthy product, likely running some open tests, and call for volunteers. If there are no volunteers, then the project will not survive long term.

Point two: Getting people to help you out, need either simple server concepts so you have a concept on what you want to achive at the end (like: vanilla server with rules like Brierie has), OR you make a completly working concept that only includes ideas you actually know are doable with the current scripting possibilities. In booth cases you need more concrete stuff (not examples, concrete and nearly complete rules if vanilla or the word of you: yes this works with scripts and this and that feature will be there).

I agree, and am rapidly approaching the second bit. The quest hubs, shops, npc factions, and a few test quests are in place and implemented as proof of concept. The purpose of this topic is: "I know what interests me, and I like, but I know that often doesn't map to other's interests". I've left this intentionally vague to encourage others to be imaginative. Though perhaps I've left it a bit too vague :P. So I'm posting this as a what do you guys think such a thing should look like? Is there anything that you would hate about this concept? What kind of quests do you like? Are people tierd of the simple 'Go kill this guy, we don't like him' sort of quests? Are larger quests too painful ('Just give me the damn reward! I don't care about your sob story!').

Lastly I want to say, that I think the economy and questing system you propose are a little bit to special. They are thought out, but not appealing to a greater audience. It would make it easier, if people would be able to pick quests without alligning themself to either faction side. The problem with faction sides is, that we allready have ridiculous small amount of players and dont have many friends who play this game. So we want to find friends in Starmade to play and build together. Allignment to 3 sides would split up this group even more. It would totally work out, if we had a huge server population - then it would be totally fine. But I think the numbers we have right now are not enough to make a 3 faction playstyle work.

Perhaps you're right. I could make one of the factions non align able to avoid fragmentation. I think the overall alignment would work though. Servers such as Light vs Dark offer alignment and I believe that has worked out well for them. There will definitely be a large number of quests available to players who have no alignment. Though, I'd like to stick with the alignments to see how it goes. Note that I plan to have players all start out as neutral to all but one of the factions, and all players start in the same place inside one of the faction's areas.

The alignment is mostly to divy people up for pvp events. Without it, I think it would be harder to have them in anything but an arena style.

Nice to see someone try something different. Will i play it? Probably not. But the concept might appeal to others. The current StarMade player base that play online is very small though.

I do have a few tips. Looking at your post you seem very knowledgeable about StarMade. So you may already know this.

If you want to change the default in game stations with designs of your own or from the Dock. Then you need to do this before you create the map. Once the map has been "seeded" with stations you can no longer alter them. Just replace the default Blueprints.

When you set the size of your sectors keep them small. You can not make sectors smaller after you create the map. You can make them bigger so start off small. Sector size has a big impact on how a server runs. Each player exists in a 3 by 3 by 3 sector bubble. That is 27 sectors total that all need to be loaded into memory and fed to each player from the servers storage. You may not see it in the beginning but after people played the server for a while and more and more stuff is added. Some sectors will get very heavy to process by the server. It will also create over time a very large map file.

Maybe this is of some use to you. Good luck with the server!

Howdy Betavium,
Thanks for being honest. I appreciate the server setup advice.

Don't worry about posting things that I may already know, as it's better to say it and have me know, then to not say it and have to charge forward messing something up. I was actually unaware that was the case for the default in game stations. Though in all honestly I am considering removing them in their entirety, leaving only what my scripts place.

 

[Ghent96]

I wouldn't worry about 3 main factions. You can even use the NPC factions and use admin commands to join players into them after they earn reputation or prove themselves.

Yes, you read that right we've don't the experiment several times on mushroom fleet and currently have a player who is "running" the NPC -1 pirate faction. There's some quirks but it works.

 

[StarWars1981]

If this is still going, I would suggest altering your default faction status to make all factions auto-hostile to all other factions, to create auto-wars.

Just cause action is good and otherwise they'll peacefully coexist til you shoot some of their material, if you're part of the other faction. xD.

 

[PyroMancer2k17]

Features:
* Various shops offering infanite goods of certain types. Such as ships, blocks, docked things (turrets, fighters)

Economy:
Stations offering goods would have infinite supplies to avoid 'running out' of needed materials. However, purchasing through the standard StarMade trade route would also be available being referred to as the 'Black Market'. The Black market would the the only way to sell goods, as I have not figured out a good way to offer the sales of ships and blocks that wouldn't be trivial for players to exploit.

If I am understanding it correctly your not gonna have stations buy stuff? The problem with this is that it is the only real way to make cash. And for people to use the trade market to trade amongst each other they need money which they will have trouble getting since they can't sell at stations.

I understand the intent but honestly stations already have a TON of stuff and making the have infinite for purchase doesn't really help things. In fact once you get past the starting hurdle, and even then not so much, the stations become little more than a source for earning massive amounts of cash.

So far all the servers I've jumped on to mess around I was able to get a rather large mining ship put together in a few hours and then had tons of extra resources. For experienced players it seems like a minor issue to get hundreds of thousands, if not millions of each resource within a week. At that point money itself becomes pretty pointless in the game and this is the source of the "trivial for players to exploit" problem you mention as people have millions of resources so they don't need much cash to buy anything.

The problem is tied into the foundation of the game's economy itself though which is the root of the issue. The problem is no particular order are as follows.

1) Resources are way to easy to get - This is great if you wanna build some massive 100K+ ships but it also makes trading with the ports trivial. You build a mining ship which you use to mine and build it bigger so you mine even more. Before long this continuous growth as ships that clear whole planets in about 1 minute. I don't really have a good solution for this other than what I'll mention later.

2) Resource distribution is fairly even - This means you don't have to travel far from your home base to find all the resources you need. But if resource could be distributed so that they were very rare, or non-existent, in some regions of space while being extremely common in others you would give people a reason to travel, trade, and fight. Most things need 2 types of resources so if you put each of those on opposite sides of the galaxy then people would have to travel and trade to get what they need. You would also need to limit or do away with much of the Stations as they would negate this by having plenty of resources available for trade. This way even if they mine a lot really fast they will have to travel travel to get around or trade their large stock with someone who also has large stock of what they are short on.

3) There is no advancement in the game - I know quite a few people will react with "WHAT!? Yes there is!" to that comment but I'm not talking about getting bigger ships with more guns. The crafting is very basic and while there are 3 different crafting blocks you can build them pretty much right after you start. And all the really do is make different types of stuff. In other survival crafting games you often have a progression with different types of materials building better gear and items which you needed to build more advance stuff.

For example in other survival games, usually with mods, you could have a setup where you need to build some machines to process resources faster. That would in turn also let you process new materials which you then built more complicated machines and so on. Until in some cases you would need these elaborate setups with lots of wiring for power and piping for resources to make systems that generated large amounts of power, produced/refined tons of resources all of which you needed to make high end gear. It's one of the things that kept me hooked to them for so long.

I know some people really like tweeking the heck out of the exact block to mass ratio on systems as well as the primary to secondary block ratio on their guns to get the best performance per mass out of their ship. Which is fine but those figures are not readily obvious to most players who just slap together a ship and call it a day.

Then there are those who mostly play creative mode as they want to use the engine to build really sweet decoration builds. Ships that look awesome and function but in a real fight against tweeked combat ship get blown to dust so they don't hang in survival much.

So your pretty much able to build whatever from the start with resources being the only real limited factor which is quickly fixed and then you don't have any treats. Resource become so plentiful in your storage that the loss of one ship is often just a drop in the bucket. Even the massive mining ship mines so fast that within a single night you can mine more than enough to replace it. And since there is no real progression starting over is super easy if your base is blown up and you loss most of your resources.

Overall though I don't really know what can and can't be done with modding the game but I think the best bet on making any sort of supply in demand with the current system is changing the resource spawn distribution so that curtain types of resources are more common in curtain areas of the galaxy. I don't recall seeing this on any servers I've been on but if they did I might not have noticed because they probably also had shops with plenty of supplies so I just bought what I needed which is what I do when I don't feel like mining and have a ton of resources amassed but short one 1 resource.

 

[Jeryia]

Howdy Guys,
sorry I didn't see your replies until now.

If this is still going, I would suggest altering your default faction status to make all factions auto-hostile to all other factions, to create auto-wars.

Just cause action is good and otherwise they'll peacefully coexist til you shoot some of their material, if you're part of the other faction. xD.

Still in progress, work has been hitting me harder than normal so I have not had as much time to mess with this as I would have liked(Heck I got called in in the middle of writing this reply!).

Right now I'm using a combination of setup scripts and custom faction configurations to set this up. Basically the custom configs are setup so that if I manually change relations between it and another faction, it will stick, for the most part(if you are set neutral or ally and piss them off enough, they may downgrade their status with you). The setup scripts set the factions to war, and setup all of the station locations (the npc faction has little outposts, and stuff that they place themselves, but the 'main' pieces are suppose to be what the scripts place).

I'm avoiding setting the NPC factions to auto-war with other factions to prevent a player from starting a faction, and then being subjected to a massive assault from all factions (NPC factions seem to center their conflict around players current locations).

There is an issue with the current choice though. If a player pisses off a faction enough to go to war with them, they are effectively banned from that factions' space without being attacked(Though it does gain them some favor with the other factions that are an enemy of the pissed off one, so they do have places to go where they can be protected).

If I am understanding it correctly your not gonna have stations buy stuff? The problem with this is that it is the only real way to make cash. And for people to use the trade market to trade amongst each other they need money which they will have trouble getting since they can't sell at stations.

Not precisely, You can sell stuff to the faction home bases, and most quests offer credit rewards. I'm not certain about whether to add the randomly spawned stations in, which the trading guild ones would offer the ability to buy and sell from them like normal. Based on that what do you think?

1) Resources are way to easy to get - This is great if you wanna build some massive 100K+ ships but it also makes trading with the ports trivial. You build a mining ship which you use to mine and build it bigger so you mine even more. Before long this continuous growth as ships that clear whole planets in about 1 minute. I don't really have a good solution for this other than what I'll mention later.

2) Resource distribution is fairly even - This means you don't have to travel far from your home base to find all the resources you need. But if resource could be distributed so that they were very rare, or non-existent, in some regions of space while being extremely common in others you would give people a reason to travel, trade, and fight. Most things need 2 types of resources so if you put each of those on opposite sides of the galaxy then people would have to travel and trade to get what they need. You would also need to limit or do away with much of the Stations as they would negate this by having plenty of resources available for trade. This way even if they mine a lot really fast they will have to travel travel to get around or trade their large stock with someone who also has large stock of what they are short on.

I agree, personally I think part of the problem is severs are setting up mining bonuses that are too high. This makes resource acquisition much easier. It also looks like Schema plans to implement your idea (based on the recent dev blog post). Though your post was clearly before that. I think I'll leave this one to schema

3) There is no advancement in the game - I know quite a few people will react with "WHAT!? Yes there is!" to that comment but I'm not talking about getting bigger ships with more guns. The crafting is very basic and while there are 3 different crafting blocks you can build them pretty much right after you start. And all the really do is make different types of stuff. In other survival crafting games you often have a progression with different types of materials building better gear and items which you needed to build more advance stuff.

I consider this the main thing I'm trying to accomplish. Offering the player(s) more advancement through challenging objectives. My general vision is to have a progression of quests/missions that get increasingly harder, adding in a storyline for better immersion. Though it doesn't make the game offer any sort of material based reward beyond better rewards or harder quests/missions.