Criss' Thread

[NeonSturm]

I know TG is more toward pacifism than toward war,

but it makes sense that traders have for example: 7 cargo bays and 1 shuttle bay instead of 8 cargo bays.

The shuttle can Act as:

1. Passenger pickup (while the trader continues the route)
   
2. Deliver small packages or devices containing information (while the trader continues the route)
3. Scout the trade route for treats
4. Escape Pod if the treat is too big
   
5. Diplomatic side-missions
   
6. …

I can certainly think of variations like:

1. Pirates captured the trader and put a fighter into it, using cargo bays for Loot.
2. Scavengers replace Cargo Bays with crew quarters or fighters to re-purpose the ship for another task.
3. Miners added mining beams to it.
4. …

I'd also like to see a spot meant for a turret or forward-facing things like mining arrays even if it isn't used.

If the same blueprint-designer made the trade ship after he made mining ship blueprint.

These are the things that make a design "authentic".​

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

I know TG is more toward pacifism than toward war,

but it makes sense that traders have for example: 7 cargo bays and 1 shuttle bay instead of 8 cargo bays.

The shuttle can Act as:

1. Passenger pickup (while the trader continues the route)
   
2. Deliver small packages or devices containing information (while the trader continues the route)
3. Scout the trade route for treats
4. Escape Pod if the treat is too big
   
5. Diplomatic side-missions
   
6. …

I can certainly think of variations like:

1. Pirates captured the trader and put a fighter into it, using cargo bays for Loot.
2. Scavengers replace Cargo Bays with crew quarters or fighters to re-purpose the ship for another task.
3. Miners added mining beams to it.
4. …

I'd also like to see a spot meant for a turret or forward-facing things like mining arrays even if it isn't used.

If the same blueprint-designer made the trade ship after he made mining ship blueprint.

These are the things that make a design "authentic".​

I'm fairly sure the trade guild shuttle won't fit.

 

[Criss]

If the same blueprint-designer made the trade ship after he made mining ship blueprint.

Well they wouldn't have in this case. Cargo vessels and civilian craft are designed by two different companies in the Trade Guild.

I'm not sure the small cargo ship really needs anything else. An escape pod could make sense but the ship is done for now. I don't have any plans for it.

 

[NeonSturm]

 

[Madman198237]

You use lifeboats because it's faster to reach a drowning person, faster to escape danger, less risky that endangering the entire crew and ship, easier to reach somebody in the water, etc. In real life, you use small boats for first contact because there's no risk of suddenly getting attacked by everybody on the other ship, in the event of a betrayal.

 

[Blodge]

I think the restriction here is not one of ship design but of AI limitations. The NPCs are currently not versatile enough to be performing passenger pick-up or convoy look-out roles. Hell, they only learned how to avoid collisions with static objects along trade routes a couple of weeks ago. Expecting them to run diplomatic missions might be a bit much at this point!

 

[NeonSturm]

I think the restriction here is not one of ship design but of AI limitations. The NPCs are currently not versatile enough to be performing passenger pick-up or convoy look-out roles. Hell, they only learned how to avoid collisions with static objects along trade routes a couple of weeks ago. Expecting them to run diplomatic missions might be a bit much at this point!

True, but if the display-block interface improved enough along with "display-block regex-AI" the might soon be able to.

If you don't beg shine to improve AI but instead suggest to implement the interface improvements for display-blocks to game-variables where they aren't sufficient to allow us to handle it with regex-logic-AI, we could reuse it in other regex parsers unlike shine's obfuscated code.

I will support such a suggestion when I see it and maybe it's time for some Community Content: proper regex function references (similarly to what PHP, Java and X2/"X3-Reunion"-Macros provide).
I will try some tasks for the AI-part once regex is done (researching on human language support for a few years now), but I am not used to work with regex jet.​

 

[Crimson-Artist]

i know it took a while but ive completed the Outcasts ships on the wiki. I've also updated the trading guild frigate

 

[Ithirahad]

Perhaps some more progress posts here are in order? Not everyone can/does watch the streams...

 

[Criss]

Perhaps some more progress posts here are in order? Not everyone can/does watch the streams...

You are correct. Ill get to one after today's stream to be sure. There was an absence of posts because our builds slowed down for some time.

 

[therimmer96]

You are correct. Ill get to one after today's stream to be sure. There was an absence of posts because our builds slowed down for some time.

So what you're saying is Schine doesn't keep its promises?

 

[Treefolk]

So what you're saying is Schine doesn't keep its promises?

To be fair, "after today's stream" encompasses a span of time that starts on thursday and terminates at the end of time and space as we know it (probably the heat death of the universe?). If Criss posts an update between those two points, he keeps his promise of an update after the Thursday stream.

 

[kiddan]

To be fair, "after today's stream" encompasses a span of time that starts on thursday and terminates at the end of time and space as we know it (probably the heat death of the universe?). If Criss posts an update between those two points, he keeps his promise of an update after the Thursday stream.

And that's only the definition for when he starts making the post!

 

[El_Poulpy]

 

[serge1944]

Hey,can someone tell me at what hour is twitch please?I've lost track of it.

 

[Saber]

Hey,can someone tell me at what hour is twitch please?I've lost track of it.

In about 5 minutes. (Sorry just saw this post)

 

[Amadeus]

That moment when the 3D art director replies before the social media director in his own thread... lol

 

[Nauvran]

That moment when the 3D art director replies before the social media director in his own thread... lol

Criss in a nutshell. Saber also replies more often to stream chat than Criss

 

[Criss]

Alright everyone, it's longtime overdue update time!

For those that do not know, there are indeed reasons for my absence on this thread. StarMade is a great game, and I am happy to be a part of the team. However, as it stands, it is not a reliable source of income. Working from home has made me a bit too lax and I'm essentially playing a game when I work on StarMade. I just don't have the discipline to sit at the desk for 8 hours and work on a video game when I can play other fun games or surf the web.

I've since gotten a job elsewhere and it is taking up quite a bit of my time. As much as I love StarMade, it is still a job when I work on it, and it feels like a job. I suppose I got a bit burnt out. Coming home and hopping into a game, not to enjoy it, but to work on completing builds wasn't something I wanted to do with my free time. So in addition to me simply being around less, there is a lot less building going on behind the scenes.

That being said, I did want to go over something very new, something that perhaps many of you have not seen. I'd also like to walk through our design process as we make these builds.

So to start, we were given a task, right around the NPC faction update. With each faction we needed a trade station (homebase), a factory and a shop. You will likely have noticed there are a number of placeholders in the game right now, essentially a bunch of copy-pasted cube shapes with different colors. What Saber and I have been working on the past few months is getting the replacements for these stand-ins ready for the game. Today we will be looking at the design process for the Outcast Small Factory Station.

We obviously strive to make each faction unique. We have no Outcast Stations to base anything off of, but we do have a few ships. Taking a look at the two best examples of Outcast ship design, the Transit and the Ward, we can see a few prominent patterns. There are broad shapes, obtuse angles, and a sort of chunky, yet sensible appearance. The Trading Guild is much more classic sci-fi and the Scavengers are junky mad-maxers in space. I personally like to think the Outcasts take a lot of inspiration from Star Wars ships such as this.

To start, I make a model. This has sort of become the starting point for many of our builds going forward. The model is small and gives me a general idea of the proportions and shape of the structure. It's also easier and quicker to build a few models than to frame out a full station. During our process Saber and I concepted probably a dozen or so different station models to work from.

From here I begin the next step, scaling the model up. Each block on our models represents something around 13 cubic meters of space on the full build. The result is sometimes less than expected. Scaling the models up reduces the implied details that the model had and suddenly we may end up with something that looks much less interesting than what we had hoped for. Nonetheless, that is something we can resolve. By now the station is beginning to take shape.

We begin laying down the functionality as well as the details while we build the primary structure of the station. You'll see two Transits docked to the side. Our plan was to allow them to undock their cargo pods, send them through the station and redock on the other side. In the center of the structure is the factory floor. There is a main control room above in the front, a landing pad for smaller ships below and the living quarters were to be in the rear. At this point we discovered a problem, see if you can guess what it is.

We began thinking about living as an Outcast. We wanted the Outcasts to feel a bit loosely coordinated, since they are outcasts. We also wanted to give them an industrial lifestyle. They are in space mining, refining and building for their lives. They live to work. We decided that the Outcasts would waste no time or resources on lavish living spaces. Their homes are all pre-fabricated designs that are installed into their stations like removable cargo crates. Since the start of this build process we've also been working to catalog all of the repeating structures and templates that appear on all stations.

Mirroring that housing structure is another, each with docking clamps on the ends. The plan was to have the Ward or other large ships dock in between the houses, giving them a very nice view out the windows. We also continued to flesh out other areas of the station such as the Transit docking areas and the landing pads. Unfortunately it did not save the station from it's ultimate problem. This thing looks like space-Walmart. That was not sitting well with me. Saber may have been more accepting of it at the time, but we decided to think smaller and think better. In the end I think the result paid off.

So we redesigned the station. Essentially we started over with a miniature model. At the time, the huge convenience-store-of-a-station that we built was intended to be the "small" Outcast factory, yet it was already 300 meters wide. That's more in line with our plans for medium sized structures.

Our new design shared similar features, but condensed the structure significantly. The Transits can still dock, and the structures around them are similar to the designs on the original station. The pre-fab housing was tucked underneath the top "roof" structure of the station. We decided to give the station a bit of a tower as a main control area or primary office. We noticed at this point that we were already applying an aesthetic that exists in the real world - Art Deco. Specifically Art Deco architecture. If you don't know what that is, here is a perfect example of a building found in my home town.

The art deco detailing is minimal, but it's just enough flare to give this some new life an uplift the somewhat plain shapes and forms we had going on. From here we needed to do some balancing. The station was a bit top heavy. We wanted some pylon sort of structures on the original design and decided to extend the central tower downward.

We still had plenty of space inside the station. The problem with placing our housing units so early on is determining how they play into the internal layout of the station. We managed to make it work. Since this is a factory, we added factory looking machinery. For now this stuff is something we sort of make up on the fly. Parts move around, pistons pump and it overall looks neat. We even try color-coding it with lighting. In the future we will begin applying these designs to larger Outcast factories in order to maintain consistency.

You will also notice that the station is somewhat dimly lit. Lighting is important. Very important. Good lighting can make or break the atmosphere of a build. This is something I learned during my minecraft days.

At this point we are pretty much done! The Outcast Small Factory is complete. It does not have a proper name, but seeing as how this is the small factory I am thinking something along the lines of the "Forge Class Factory Station"

The top of the station also features landing decks for shuttles. The housing modules are layered atop one-another underneath the landing decks. Those decks lead to a cargo deck as well as an airlock for access to the central tower. Inside the tower sits a primary office and quarters for the station manager. Centered between the Transit docks is the common area / lounge where workers can eat and relax. Each dock gets a flight control room to monitor the movement of station goods onto ships.

With that I bring this post to a close. I hope you enjoyed some insight into our design process. I'll be discussing more details when I show off the next station, the Outcast small shop. We also have a few ship variants and stations for the Scavengers that we have yet to show off. Stay tuned for more, thanks for reading, and thanks for playing StarMade!

 

[HorribleHedgehog]

I love the pre-fab housing blocks.