Detachment

[PDI247]

Ahead of time, apologies if this has already been requested, or if it already exists and I just haven't gotten to that point yet... but, I'm in the process of building my first ship. My first ship is intended to be a rather large one; currently in the process of salvaging a bunch of asteroids and find new shops all over the place and buy them all out of their grey and black hull pieces. If there's a better way to obtain these two types of hulls, definitely let me know. I know shops are sort of a limited resource.

While in this process, though, I'm finding that I'm adding unnecessary weight while trying to outline the ship I'm attempting to build. Right now it's just a hollow tube with the necessary tools attached, but it won't be long before I start adding hallways going left and right and up and down and... well, you get the idea.

This brings up the concept that it might be nice to have a 'detach' block, or make default blocks into optional detach mechanisms. For example, obviously thrusters would go in the back of the ship 100% of the time, but I'm building this ship from the front. Therefore, it would be nice if I could, say, push the section with thrusters back further as is necessary, when I'm adding something new to the ship that would require the moving of the thrusters.

It would also be useful for switching out entire systems for ships; perhaps your ship doesn't need those hangars that your other ships lay in right now, or maybe you don't need that salvage structure while you're running off to your next combat area. Maybe that factory wing is too valuable to risk in the upcoming battle, or maybe the ship needs to be faster for it and those types of things are just slowing you down.

Sure, you could build several ships all designed for specific tasks, and have one 'general purpose' ship that does it all, but is considerably more expensive if it gets lost. You could also just collect all the blocks for an entire wing. Seems time-consuming, though.

I've divided my ship by large black rings. Each ring defining a 'section' that I'd like to disconnect from the rest and/or be able to move everything behind it. So... is this a potential future adjustment, or does it already exist, or...?

Thanks!

 

[dch13]

If you\'re every looking for a surplus of grey and black hulls, see if you can find an abandoned space station and salvage as much as you can. You should be able to easily find tens of thousands of black and grey hulls there.

That said, I\'m curious as to how you would suggest implementing the section detachment. As far as I\'ve been able to tell, blocks seem to be tied to their respective ship cores without any clear deliniation \'detachable\' blocks and \'non-detachable\' blocks. If you could figure out a method, I\'m sure it will enthuse those members who\'ve occasionally forgotten which direction was forward on their ship

In the meantime, perhaps you can try to finagle the docking mechanism to create sections on your ship? Chain docking is not currently available, so you probably won\'t be able to attach sections end-on-end, but perhaps you could create a multi-section ship with each module connected to a central, main, section?

 

[PDI247]

Good to know about the abandoned stations... will look around for those in a bit.

Almost assuredly, there\'s a complete list of blocks attached to the core. If the player was only allowed to define ONE block, or if the developers themselves defined one specific block, that could be used as a \'detach\' mechanism. Cycling through the ship\'s blocks, you could then figure out how a \'section\' is defined by the player (Or, again, Devs could require a specific set of shapes that the game understands) and essentially move every block inside and behind that section-cutter at once.

The least performance-intensive and yet least restricting choice would probably be to require the player to define their own shapes for what a section is, with a small maximum number of shapes. Perhaps the way to make these shapes would be to have a special block that shoots you into Build mode, but instead of building your ship, you build the shape with the desired detachment block. This of course would require a minimum number of blocks to create a divider.

There are MANY ways to transport the information from the new block to the ship, like maybe the shape-building block would have to be attached to the core of the ship before you do it, or have the shape-builder provide an item which can then be put into a shape-understanding block attached to the ship\'s core... this is off the top of my head, there are more elegant ways of handling it.

I realize the \'simplest\' way would be to require the shape-builder to be connected to a ship\'s core and it could work much like the weapons or salvage systems, where you select the block and then place blocks or press V on every block associated with it, but that leads to two potential problems... one, people making EVERYTHING detachable for some unknown reason. Two, it might be useful to people if the same shapes are reusable on multiple ships.

So, with the detachment blocks and shapes defined, there comes an interesting situation. You don\'t just want to MOVE the blocks... you also want to be able to add and remove them from the core. Removing them should be straight-forward enough, but adding them requires some logic... maybe all the blocks are then required to be connected to one another, but that could result in players doing really strange things, like connecting an asteroid to a ship. Could even happen by accident.

I don\'t really want to use \'add another block\' for every little component, but I don\'t want to throw out a way to handle it that Devs might have to enlist an entirely new structure to handle it, either. Getting away from blocks, there are hundreds of ways to handle all of this. I just have no idea how the game\'s structured, or how easy/difficult any of them would be to add in.

 

[dch13]

You know, that second method you mentioned sounds (perhaps deceptively?) as if it could be quite easy to implement, actually. There is already a method of selecting bricks to accompany a central control brick \"AM cannons tied to WComputer,\" so adapting that for a detachment block would work great!

However, since the new detachment would function independently as its own ship, might not a better method be to have it be that when a second ship core is placed -- while in build mode for the first ship -- you can utilize that block as the detachment core? That way, when the section detaches, it has the capability to bind to that ship core as it\'s own entity?

Granted, the only one able to answer that would be a developer, but I\'m curious as to what you think.

 

[PDI247]

Certainly it makes sense to be able to trade these modules from one ship to another if that need arises. Bearing in mind, of course, that we end up with the potential of connecting multiple ships into a larger structure at that point, which I\'m sure everyone would be thrilled about.

Again, I\'m just throwing out ideas without having a clue of how the game itself is structured. I only know how I would have created the game, but everyone has their own styles and ways to handle everything - especially implementing every aspect of a game.