Dedicated Admin/Owner Menu, and game options including blueprint purchases

[KuramaFox]

This would be a menu visible and useable only by the server owner and people with admin permissions. It would have a selection of settings that adjust various aspects. It could be in the game, or in a server program. Such things would include:

Maximum value allowed for pirates. Simply limits pirates to using player-made blueprints at or below this level.

Allow Blueprint Importing. Sets whether players can import a blueprint from their local files.

Ship purchasing requires shop inventory. A toggle that determines whether a player can purchase a blueprinted ship or not based on the shop. If enabled, the shop must have the parts in stock necessary for a ship to be constructed.

If a "player item bank" gets added to shops or something, allowing players to store items there, then parts from here can be used, as can the player's inventory, free of charge. Players can select whether to prioritize owned parts or whether to buy them all.

Shops part ordering multiplier. Allows players to purchase items (or blueprint ships with items) a shop does not posess, if they pay X times as much for each part that must be "ordered." Must be >1, and can be disabled. If this is invoked, a player will be notified the shop lacks parts after trying to purchase, and will be shown the increased cost they must pay if they wish to buy the ship (allowing them to change their mind).

Maximum speed. Until such time that this is determined by some other factor (like a ship part). In which case it would be replaced by a scaling factor for how much that factor improves speeds.

Sector Limits. X,Y, and Z numbers which determine the limits of space. Set to 0 to set infinite (i.e. the current way the universe is unlimited), must be positive integers otherwise, and sets how many sectors away you can go from spawn. Using the minimum of 1 for all three values, you would have a universe that is only 3x3x3 sectors. If you enter the "end of the universe" you appear at the other end. Lets pretend that spawn is 0,0,0 instead of 2,2,2 for a moment, and the X limit is 10. When you enter sector 10, if you keep going to where sector 11 would be, you enter sector -10. Effectively meaning you have circumnavigated it.

Long story short, this allows players and server owners to customize their universe if they desire. Some may want a full-unlimited one. Others may want X and Y unlimited, but might prefer to limit it to only being 5 sectors "tall." Others may want a fully limited universe.









Other options and controls would be available as added. Could include things relating to piracy frequency, pirate "difficulty" (i.e. how many ships typically appear in one group of pirates), whether shops buy and sell at the same price, friendly-fire options, a button that deletes all current NPC faction ships from the game, etc.

In short, a dedicated interface to allow a player playing singleplayer, or an admin running a server, to easily adjust and customize some attributes of the game. At the same time, no one thing (such as a fix for blueprint purchasing abuse) is applied in a blanket manner that not everyone would enjoy. And furthermore, the options can be adjusted as need be, if the owner decides they wish to (maybe once people get up and running they may want to increase the pirate's spending cap).

 

[matheus.de.alcantara]

I like it.

 

[KuramaFox]

Including other suggestions for stuff that can be put in the menu.

Edit: well, after seeing another topic, I have another to add: Faction safety settings.

Allows one to toggle whether faction home bases are invulnerable or not. And possibly whether or not that applies to any docked vessels and turrets. After all, the hardcore PvPer will hate invulnerable strongholds because they want to have a proper means of defeating the enemy, but others will WANT their home base to be invulnerable so they can log off without worrying that their base will get blown to bits by a 500 block long super-destroyer during the times when no one is online to defend it. Hard-locking the option one way or the other will only alienate people from being able to do what they wish with the game.

 

[KuramaFox]

Speaking of bumps, I wonder if it would be possible to add an \"anchor\" function to allow players to stay stationary.



Edit: Oh, just thought of another good one. For the \"Allow blueprint importing\" selection, you could also set a maximum ship value. Thereby allowing players to import any ship they want up to that limit, but requiring them to build on-server anything larger.

This is useful because frankly, I don\'t like it when I can\'t bring my small-but-good-looking barely-a-million ship somewhere. Which is irksome, because many of the servers that actually have PvP tend to enforce this. Also, I rather like being able to spawn at will a cheap 70k fighter design I have. And if I could simply spawn smaller things from my own files, I\'d happily join some of these servers.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

Shops needing to stock all that hull is ridiculous. As is, spawning in blueprints is the only way I can actually get enough hardened hull besides strip-mining planets and asteroids for hours or using several dozen shops.

Paying extra would just make hardened hull ships even more ludicrously expensive for very little armor bonus.


Also, I\'ve found that just modifying the default pirate ship, I can make a pirate vessel the same size that\'s all-around better, yet costs less. Cost isn\'t a good measure of ship strength since it leads to optimized designs that end up being just flying shields with weapons in the front and thrusters and power strapped to the back. It also rules out turrets due to their cost. A limit on number of shield blocks/weapon blocks for pirate ships would be better.



Everything else looks like a good idea.

 

[KuramaFox]

Server owners who sympathize with you can simply set the special-order multiplier to 1, allowing you to get the parts at the same cost as usual.

Armor in general needs work anyway, and who knows, it may get messed with soon now that they dealt with shields (though I think they should raise the exponential slightly a bit up from 0.66 or whatever it currently is). Aside from durability hopefully getting modified at some point, they may with any luck boost the default levels of shop stocking of those parts.



Yeah, the default pirate ship is a mostly-appearance based vessel. It looks like a ship you can fly inside, and has parts thrown together ineffeciently. Your comment about being just flying shields and weapons with engines and power being best will be innaccurate if/when they buff armor. ESPECIALLY what with the changes they made to shields recently. Also, I don\'t have much experience with the power draining beam, but that thing will be rather troublesome to any such \"effecient armorless\" ship. Particularly as the only way to have suitable power generation is to actually make use of the dimension-based scaling mechanic power generators have.

Cost may not be the absolute best measure of a ship as you said, but the only alternative I can think of is block count, and that wouldn\'t be much better. The option would always be available to not limit the cost of ships as well, so you could just find servers that do so.