Dev Blog : February 17th 2016

[nightrune]

Ships trying to keep a straight line formation around the center rotating flagship:
This is far from usable/finished but I thought it looked amazing :D

You should have a thread of just failed dev pictures that are hilarious. I would love this.

 

[Ithirahad]

That's hilarious... They look like cute little arrow bugs swirling around :P

...Actually, I suppose they ARE 'bugs' swirling around. Or at least bugged AIs...
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You should have a thread of just failed dev pictures that are hilarious. I would love this.

You should have seen the rail dev builds before Kupu's textures were put in. Schema had gone and drawn MS Paint arrows for rail direction on light textures :P

 

[AndyP]

Green lights with yellow arrow, why not? they did the job, and kupu hat time to produce those awesome rails while we were already testing if they do the functional job.

For the "OOS" (out of sector) simulation, I hope we can get some system going that is like X³,
the fight is done with some sort of realtime work, but ignores physics, collisions and basically reduces it to a 2d plane.
It allowed quite a lot of simulation in the background and you could always jump into the fight seamless, as only the "vertical position" had to be adjusted to make them go out of collision and then it could turn into a full physics enabled fight.)

Reading only meta-stuff could allow an efficient way to use actual reload, energy and shields without needing to go into too much details, and I feel like "aiming" (ship and turrets), "physics" and raytracing of shots is the highest part in the cpu-demand in battles. Flatting out stuff to some scoring like "distance based hit percentage chance" could do a good job for this.

However, yes it will be tough to create a system that does not allow exploits, however, if fights take their time, a "out-of-sector" optimized ship may totally fail for in-sector combat, and a player can turn the outcome quickly.

- Andy

 

[Ithirahad]

Green lights with yellow arrow, why not? they did the job, and kupu hat time to produce those awesome rails while we were already testing if they do the functional job.

It's not bad; just looked funny at the time. I understand why it was done, and it made sense.

 

[Rixxan]

You should have a thread of just failed dev pictures that are hilarious. I would love this.

I second this motion do we have a third?

 

[Ithirahad]

I second this motion do we have a third?

TBH I dunno if there are enough instances of this sort of thing to constitute a thread...

 

[AndyP]

They are not really failures,
if you imagine turning like 120° right while standing still and having such a wide formation,
will result in odd flight paths.
As the target position is crossing the adjacent ship paths, it tried to evade a collision (also new and needed work on the AI flight behaviour), it cannot do anything else than head for the target point, but also evade outward when about to hit it, this will for sure cascade a bit.
It does and will look a lot smoother when doing a slow turn while flying forward at low-medium speed. (Slow enough to let the inner-most ship not having to reverse flight, and the out-most ship can keep up without needing to shorten the path inward.)

[Edit]
Also:
Being a formation flight leader does take a bit practice, and turning around without moving forward is hard for any formation flight attempt, if you try to keep the circle they would be in a disadvantage if the flagship would go for full-speed-forward before finishing the curve.
[/Edit]

- Andy

 

[Ithirahad]

Yeah. It just starts to look funny when the collision avoidance functions start activating in cascade with small ships. You end up with a bunch of entities wiggling around like bugs to attempt to turn away from each other and repeatedly get out of collision range as they orbit the flagship to get back into position.

 

[nightrune]

They are not really failures,
if you imagine turning like 120° right while standing still and having such a wide formation,
will result in odd flight paths.
As the target position is crossing the adjacent ship paths, it tried to evade a collision (also new and needed work on the AI flight behaviour), it cannot do anything else than head for the target point, but also evade outward when about to hit it, this will for sure cascade a bit.
It does and will look a lot smoother when doing a slow turn while flying forward at low-medium speed. (Slow enough to let the inner-most ship not having to reverse flight, and the out-most ship can keep up without needing to shorten the path inward.)

- Andy

I suppose failures is the wrong word, but as another developer its great to see funny stuff. I just played with creating all the shapes of starmade in Unity and allowing them to rotate. Boy did I have issues with textures. Things like that would be awesome!

 

[MrFURB]

It's... It's hurricane BOBBY!

 

[Ithirahad]

I suppose failures is the wrong word, but as another developer its great to see funny stuff. I just played with creating all the shapes of starmade in Unity and allowing them to rotate. Boy did I have issues with textures. Things like that would be awesome!

Reminsd me of that one time I imported a massive model with ALL of the normals inside out. That was... really confusing for a sec.

 

[kiraen]

How does the simulation take into account ship speed/maneuverability? Or armor thickness? If it ignores armor, then system doom cubes are in, if it needs to destroy all armor, then massive blocks of armor are in. How long do battles take? There's so many variables here.

The actual ship scoring that these calculations and simulations are based off of is located in:

(install directory)/data/script/statistics/ship-index-calculation.lua

Of course, looking now won't do you any good since they have stated that this has already been improved (all praise the cat, amen). But once the update is released it will be interesting to see what has been changed/added.

Two other things to keep in mind:

1. The calculations and variables in this file will likely change ~200 times before we hit v0.5 (we're at less then v0.2 right now)
2. This file is 100% moddable. If you don't like how it works feel free to change it yourself. Please, share if you come up with something better.

I am sure that some one (probably a lot of 'some ones') will use this data to exploit the system and make the perfect Unloaded Killing Machine. I say: Go for it. It is simply not possible for the devs to think of everything. This is the time to find those exploits and be giving feedback so as to reduce those exploits before the game is released. They will never be gone completely.

And finally: It's a game, people!
There is absolutely no chance that these simulations will be 100% realistic and accurate. Even if it was possible for the devs to code it that way the server would have to be on a billion dollar super-computer to process 1 second of battle every 15 days. I don't know about you, but I don't have one of those in my basement. At least not when I'm awake.


$0.02

 

[Ithirahad]

TBH, as people keep saying, if a faction is known to be fielding dedicated unload warships, people will simply fly over to their AI fleet battle sites and rip apart all the nooby cubes like butter...

 

[whooplaah]

​

Greetings once again Citizens! Here's an update for you that will hopefully answer some questions.

We have worked hard the past two weeks to bring fleets into StarMade. Unfortunately, all the fleet work we have started to implement is not ready for release yet. The backend is fully implemented, and it’s already usable, but we would feel uncomfortable releasing it in this state, especially since the testing team didn’t have much time to try it out.

You can expect a release soon…. Instead, we will talk a little bit about how fleets work, how they integrate, and what they will mean for gameplay.

Fleets

Basically, in its rawest form, fleets are a collection of ships. For StarMade, they are going to be much more than that. Fleets will become a whole new gameplay chapter which will make the universe come alive a lot more.

As said, a fleet in the game is a collection of ships. However, a fleet also has an owner and a flagship.
Only the owner has full control over the ships, but there will be different flags that you can set, so that other faction members can make use of a fleet if so desired.

We haven’t decided yet if fleet creation should be allowed anywhere, or whether it will be restricted in some way.

When you create a fleet, you can add ships in range to it. In order for a ship to be able to be added to a fleet you must have access to it and they it may not be in another fleet already.

When ships are added to a fleet they go into a list of ships in that fleet.The first ship in your list will always be designated the flagship. You can change the fleet order at any time, as that also influences other features we will talk about later on. All the backend systems are implemented and will be using SQL databases for fast lookup and updating in real time.

Now, one nice thing about fleets is that their ships don’t need to be loaded at all, or can only be partially loaded. Any entity that isn’t loaded will still be represented by a virtual object with the bare basics. This avoids a scalability problem since loading each sector that has a ship of a fleet in all the time would basically cripple performance.

This system opens up the door to a whole new gameplay element though. Fleets, although they are not even close to any player, or even when no player is on a server, are able to execute their mission.

Fleet Missions

Fleets can be used to perform a lot of active and inactive tasks: keep different Formations, different forms of attack, defend, come back, salvage, dock, trade, cargo, patrol, jump, and many more.

Some of these tasks can be executed in an unloaded state. That means you can send a fleet to attack someone, that someone could also send their fleet to defend a sector. While both fleets aren’t loaded, the fight would then be simulated according to (more balanced) ship scores.

You can also send fleets to bring cargo from point A to point B. These cargo lines can be raided in real time, since if you have your raiding fleet on the path of the cargo ships, they will load in and you can battle and defeat them, provided they didn’t send enough fighters to protect their cargo. This is just a basic form of conflict that will be integrated into our objectives/missions system later on.

These cargo lines as well as other fleets on the move will probably be made visible in the map with an updated scanning system.

Carriers

After basic fleet missions are implemented, there is also a fully functional and convenient carrier system planned, a carrier simply being a ship you use to deploy ships or fleets from. The main problem of carriers is getting ships out of and into the carrier. Plotting a path in space taking into account moving obstructions, custom sizes and shapes through block placements etc, is immensely complex. Add moving and possibly rotating carriers to that equation, and the problem becomes nearly impossible to solve.

However there is a solution we came up with that is a lot more simple and streamlined: Let the player plot the path into their ship themselves. We even have the tool for that already: Rails. There will be a zero mass zero structure hit point invisible railblock that players can use to guide their ships in and out of their carriers. They will be restricted specifically for that use in some way so people won’t replace all their rails with these new blocks. At the end of those rails will be a “pick-up area” where ships coming back have to fly into to connect to the invisible rail that will guide them into the ship, where ‘real’ rails can do the rest. You can even use your carrier to pick up ships without any AI if you fly your pickup zone onto another ship that you have access to.

Gameplay

We hope that this will make the game a lot more exciting as we will be using the same system for AI from this point out. Not only will different NPC factions try to grow their empire. They will use their fleets to protect and attack, or maybe even offer them to do the dirty work for you. Scalability wise it is possible to have as many and as big NPC factions as we want, because they are going to be procedurally generated, that means, their bases and ships don’t exist in the database until the time someone loads them in by visiting them. Through NPC factions we will try to build a more survival style mode without relying on a lot of time-tedious gameplay elements like having to manage food etc (that doesn’t mean food won’t also come to the game. But we will make sure that it’s not tedious). NPC factions will grow around you, and interact with you, so you will have to grow your own empire, or be crushed. You will need allies for yourself to combat your enemies, or you will have to flee to a less rich but safe part of the galaxy or universe, because some factions will prefer the rich spots and some will even try to eliminate you if you’re in the way.

While this is just one of the elements of what we have in store for objectives/missions/quests etc, we hope you like those changes as it will be another major pillar of gameplay.

- The Schine Team

I think these are great ideas, Bench, and thank you and the whole Schine team for putting this together.

I'm really looking forward to the fleet control mechanics. I think one of the key facets that this thread is grumbling about can be boiled down to how the fleet mechanics introduce a new play style. Now StarMade will let players turn their faction into an empire, with all the Real Time Strategy Gameplay that such a creature would need. I see faction leaders now taking up more of a command-strategy-planning role rather than just a dave-with-biggest-ship role. It brings a lot more value to scouting and spying on enemy factions.

There are a couple of things I'm curious about...

1. Will NPC miners deplete resources and destroy asteroids, or do they passively generate resources? This is mostly in relation to unloaded and simulated sector activity.

2. Are fleet formations going to be a factor in the simulated battles? Because holy crap that'd be cool. It isn't just ship size and weapons, but also spear vs. pincer vs. wall vs. wedge vs. cluster vs. spread etc. AMC and beams are less effective against wall and cluster formations, but missiles and pulse have advantage against them. Bonuses to defense or speed or... I'll stop there. But oh my gosh...

3. Will fleet ships in simulated battles fight until destroyed, or do they flee when the fleet is low on HP?

4. Will crew size, skill, assignment, and level be factored in? Cause I'd like to see small fleets of veteran NPCs take out large fleets of noob NPCs. It'd also be interesting to see NPC personalities and morale affect outcomes - the admiral that is ruthless and pursues fleeing enemies falls victim to the admiral that pulls a false retreat...

5. Will environment affect battles? For instance, a battle in a sector with lots of asteroids gives advantage to small ships that can hide vs. large ships that can't dodge. Also consider proximity to pirates, suns, worm holes, and other non-implemented stellar features.

 

[Pacific_Jim]

TBH, as people keep saying, if a faction is known to be fielding dedicated unload warships, people will simply fly over to their AI fleet battle sites and rip apart all the nooby cubes like butter...

This definitely needs emphasising. You can never really guarantee you'll only be using the fleet unloaded, it would be silly to skimp on a ship actually being usable.

 

[Drakkart]

That's the way, ah-ha ah-ah i like it !

It sounds good to me so ...

 

[StormWing0]

lol looks like fleet flocking needs to be worked on. XD

 

[nightrune]

lol looks like fleet flocking needs to be worked on. XD

Still looks like awesome progress though! So excited!

 

[StormWing0]

hmm I wonder how small an AI Fleet Miner I can make and still have it able to hold 1 or 2 crew in as confined a space as possible? I figure if it is small enough we could spam a huge swarm of them and have mini jump drives on them so they can quickly get back to base.

 

[Ithirahad]

lol looks like fleet flocking needs to be worked on. XD

Yup. Heavier/larger ships also currently accelerate veeeryyyyy slooooowlyyyy... due to some AI thing