Dev Blog : October 21st 2016

[nightrune]

Your mom is a technical limitation.

Informative, and Highly Productive. New levels of conversation has been reached, and the world is a better place.

 

[Malacodor]

Beams have a ton of bugs, some of which are on the list to be fixed and others not so much.

I could find only one open combat related bug report about damage beams. If bugs don't get reported, then it's no wonder they don't get fixed.

 

[Raisinbat]

Informative, and Highly Productive. New levels of conversation has been reached, and the world is a better place.

If you don't read the posts properly you're going to get made fun of. Weapon ranges being determined by sector size is not a limitation, it's just silly.

 

[nightrune]

If you don't read the posts properly you're going to get made fun of. Weapon ranges being determined by sector size is not a limitation, it's just silly.

No its a technical limitation, and its convenient. It directly affects how many entities you need to scan through to detect a hit.

 

[Raisinbat]

No its a technical limitation, and its convenient. It directly affects how many entities you need to scan through to detect a hit.

So with 12km sector sizes, we're better of with dynamic 24km range can/beam instead of 8km fixed ones?

 

[Malacodor]

If you don't read the posts properly you're going to get made fun of. Weapon ranges being determined by sector size is not a limitation, it's just silly.

It would also be silly, if weapons had ranges, that allowed them to shoot into unloaded sectors. So it's indeed a technical limitation. I suggest to keep x*sector size as upper limit for weapon ranges, but only in addition to numerical values, which are then <= x*sector size.

 

[nightrune]

It would also be silly, if weapons had ranges, that allowed them to shoot into unloaded sectors. So it's indeed a technical limitation. I suggest to keep x*sector size as upper limit for weapon ranges, but only in addition to numerical values, which are then <= x*sector size.

Now that's a productive discussion! We should start a thread.

 

[Malacodor]

Now that's a productive discussion! We should start a thread.

Okay, here it is.

 

[Ithirahad]

That's a technical limitation not likely to ever get changed.

Eh, loading ranges could be changed. It'd just mean a LOT of performance loss.

 

[Lone_Puppy]

I can't wait to have a universe populated with NPC factions doing their thing.

 

[StormWing0]

Eh, loading ranges could be changed. It'd just mean a LOT of performance loss.

That reminds me is the sector load range and the nav view range floating around in the server config somewhere? If not it should be so server owners can customize it to their liking.

 

[Shaker]

Build for what reason?
Explore for what reason?

This is my current situation in the game, ive tried to future proof while waiting for something to do, built variants of ships for scouting/mining/fleet combat. Now everytime i login, its like what can i do? Im not really a PvP player so all i can do is fly around and check on other players.

Im worried that the alpha/beta players will drop off before anything major gets developed, 2months ago craftau was on 15-20 players on the weekend, now we are on 2.

 

[kiddan]

Build for what reason?
Explore for what reason?

This is my current situation in the game, ive tried to future proof while waiting for something to do, built variants of ships for scouting/mining/fleet combat. Now everytime i login, its like what can i do? Im not really a PvP player so all i can do is fly around and check on other players.

Im worried that the alpha/beta players will drop off before anything major gets developed, 2months ago craftau was on 15-20 players on the weekend, now we are on 2.

Yea, dominating the world or just building something cool are both somewhat objectives we have right now; But they aren't good enough for players that want an immediate, unchanging, ultimate goal. There needs to be a new type of goal for the players that want something to work towards without coming-up with it themselves. A goal that's always there to work towards and can't be changed by the player when it gets tough to achieve.

 

[Erth Paradine]

I'm inclined to agree with Jasper1991...

The illusion of participation:
It feels there's a loose illusion of player participation towards development. Although as time goes on, player contributions in the development cycle seem much more coincidental. For the most abundant illustration of this; how often is a suggestions thread directly credited for contributing towards a new feature, or a bug/exploit summarily disclosed after being truly patched? Further, while the ~75% redacted document provides for a tantalizing read, and I think it's a really, really, neat and interesting list...I'm also hearing that Schine will implement the ideas "if we can". This suggests the list is a collection of pie-in-the-sky ideas written by a disjointed (but NOT necessarily dysfunctional) team. I've chatted (often only briefly) with enough Schine team members to realize how frelling intelligent they are...but a little voice still nags about the collective whole.


PVP with derpy PVE flybys:
There is an incredibly strong emphasis upon PVP - as aside from ship building, there really isn't anything else: resource balancing is so off that gigantisim is dead-simple (and largely rewarded), and it's near-impossible to implement any form of consistent trade for materials or ships and their related designs (BTW: of all suggestion threads, that is the most commented upon; a worthy read). PVE is definitely more like PVLOL, and I don't understand how the latest NPC updates will be addressing AI's underlying defects. Are we just getting a wider variety of derpy ships and NPC factions? While I'm given the impression that StarMade is intended to tailor towards space trade, space combat, and space construction...SM's emphasis continues to tailor towards a One Player Takes All approach, as even teams (factions) are an often broken or otherwise unpredictable feature (see next point).

My largest design-related concern is the lack of any apparent "consumable" or "decay" mechanic...as I see SM edging towards the ages-old trap first seen with MUDs...for a solution, think of "procedural decay" as a complement to "procedural generation". Although that's another "new feature", and therefore a topic for another day.


Lack of stable core features:
This reality profoundly hurts gameplay, and the community as a whole...with needed attention flowing only in reactionary spurts.

A few pieces of low-hanging fruit are features like "fleets", or really anything to do with AI; I'm typing this while my player dizzily sits atop a derping trade guild ship, stuck on yet another sector border, earlier I watched as NPCs spent hours ramming an asteroid. More often than not, AI-controlled and fleeted ships behave like neurotic druken squirrels using half-broken jetpacks for travel. Competing against AI in combat feels more like my doom days of trying to frag a strafing sniper. Shipyards were a feature so broken from the onset that I regularly hear of players habitually avoiding them. Collision management combined with resource (asteroid) respawning is another PITA: a 15-line bash shell routine accomplishes what the game engine fails to do; keeping the server online and responsive when asteroids respawn. A similar lag-related issue appears during pirate spawns.

These are all basic experiences that a new player should be reasonably expected to encounter...yet do they even consistently function, and why can't these features be stabilized before lopping another batch of features into the mix?

Aside from the game's persistently derpy AI, or the half-baked introduction of "new features". Let's look at the community for a minute, and a particular style of gameplay: on more than one occasion, players have reported defects in the game engine (in this one: unreliable faction configs). After all, bug reporting is The Right Thing To Do. Although when such a bug goes unpatched, over timelines spanning YEARS, some of these same players have begun to behave as-if such broken features were an intentional game mechanic...and really, why not?

This gives rise to a manufactured conflict that I found myself caught in earlier this year (which continues to play-out today): a group exploits multiple recurring and/or long-lived game engine bugs, forcing an administrative response. This player-vs-admin exchange leads to expressions varying from victimization to self-entitlement, often accompanied with a chorus of "badmin" assertions. With a software development team that effectively refuses to remove such temptations (upwards of two years now...seriously?), and no means of third-party validation. How have things NOT been setup for such a conflict? In the end, a server/admin finds themselves ostracized by a talented, passionate and very vocal portion of SM's community, for doing nothing more than responding to developer-nurtured forums of abusive gameplay.

How about fixing the game's broken core, sharing those accomplishments, implementing an effective QA process to ensure bugs don't regularly re-emerge, and ultimately removing such easy, persistent, recurring temptations for players with less than ideal levels of self-restraint. Developers are then no longer rewarding or enabling bad behavior, and instead they're attributing credit for a positive contribution (e.g. bug reporting), and if/when events necessitate it; devs are enabling both players and admins a neutral means of legitimizing and validating related events (e.g. a changelog which simply says fixed X bug...and start listing them all, please).

Further, if there's going to be teams (e.g. factions), there needs to be accountability, audit logs, blueprint sale (duplication) logs, and just clear communications of what's happening. Players invest an incredible amount of time building their entities, why not a simple log showing who removed what, and when? Most of our bans have resulted from a combination of long-running and/or re-emerging exploits, and how players responded when caught. The remaining bans were largely due to vigilante style player reactions to what they (wrongly) assumed was administrative malice. How about a means for server operators to collaborate upon and manage their own risk tolerances for those types of players. While I understand that SM, especially in an alpha state, has its bugs, why not accommodate this reality by adding in-game transparency, now. Continuing to ignore an inherent player-vs-admin power imbalance does not mean that its compounding issues will go away, and needing to later shoehorn in such functionality just sounds like another reason to put it off. Without admin-free player level auditing/logging visibility, how can mysteries surrounding strongly-unfavorable circumstances lead to anything but accusations of administrative malice? How does the resulting persistent toxicity help anyone?

Developer inaction impairs Schine's ability to move forward in other ways as well: over a span of weeks AndyP and I invested many hours examining backup and live data, discussing server and in-game configurations and mechanics, and simply brainstorming over potential causes to the issues. Along the way I discovered how players exploited a bug enabling any faction member to remove a faction module (even if permissions and rank denied such rights). Guess what I learned after finding that one: it's a stupidly-simple reoccurring bug! Oh FFS, what a waste of everyone's time; when will a QA process be developed, to catch these before a public release?

 

[nightrune]

My largest design-related concern is the lack of any apparent "consumable" or "decay" mechanic...as I see SM edging towards the ages-old trap first seen with MUDs...for a solution, think of "procedural decay" as a complement to "procedural generation". Although that's another "new feature", and therefore a topic for another day.

This was a really good read.

 

[Clawhammer91]

I'm inclined to agree with Jasper1991...

The illusion of participation:
It feels there's a loose illusion of player participation towards development. Although as time goes on, player contributions in the development cycle seem much more coincidental. For the most abundant illustration of this; how often is a suggestions thread directly credited for contributing towards a new feature, or a bug/exploit summarily disclosed after being truly patched? Further, while the ~75% redacted document provides for a tantalizing read, and I think it's a really, really, neat and interesting list...I'm also hearing that Schine will implement the ideas "if we can". This suggests the list is a collection of pie-in-the-sky ideas written by a disjointed (but NOT necessarily dysfunctional) team. I've chatted (often only briefly) with enough Schine team members to realize how frelling intelligent they are...but a little voice still nags about the collective whole.


PVP with derpy PVE flybys:
There is an incredibly strong emphasis upon PVP - as aside from ship building, there really isn't anything else: resource balancing is so off that gigantisim is dead-simple (and largely rewarded), and it's near-impossible to implement any form of consistent trade for materials or ships and their related designs (BTW: of all suggestion threads, that is the most commented upon; a worthy read). PVE is definitely more like PVLOL, and I don't understand how the latest NPC updates will be addressing AI's underlying defects. Are we just getting a wider variety of derpy ships and NPC factions? While I'm given the impression that StarMade is intended to tailor towards space trade, space combat, and space construction...SM's emphasis continues to tailor towards a One Player Takes All approach, as even teams (factions) are an often broken or otherwise unpredictable feature (see next point).

My largest design-related concern is the lack of any apparent "consumable" or "decay" mechanic...as I see SM edging towards the ages-old trap first seen with MUDs...for a solution, think of "procedural decay" as a complement to "procedural generation". Although that's another "new feature", and therefore a topic for another day.


Lack of stable core features:
This reality profoundly hurts gameplay, and the community as a whole...with needed attention flowing only in reactionary spurts.

A few pieces of low-hanging fruit are features like "fleets", or really anything to do with AI; I'm typing this while my player dizzily sits atop a derping trade guild ship, stuck on yet another sector border, earlier I watched as NPCs spent hours ramming an asteroid. More often than not, AI-controlled and fleeted ships behave like neurotic druken squirrels using half-broken jetpacks for travel. Competing against AI in combat feels more like my doom days of trying to frag a strafing sniper. Shipyards were a feature so broken from the onset that I regularly hear of players habitually avoiding them. Collision management combined with resource (asteroid) respawning is another PITA: a 15-line bash shell routine accomplishes what the game engine fails to do; keeping the server online and responsive when asteroids respawn. A similar lag-related issue appears during pirate spawns.

These are all basic experiences that a new player should be reasonably expected to encounter...yet do they even consistently function, and why can't these features be stabilized before lopping another batch of features into the mix?

Aside from the game's persistently derpy AI, or the half-baked introduction of "new features". Let's look at the community for a minute, and a particular style of gameplay: on more than one occasion, players have reported defects in the game engine (in this one: unreliable faction configs). After all, bug reporting is The Right Thing To Do. Although when such a bug goes unpatched, over timelines spanning YEARS, some of these same players have begun to behave as-if such broken features were an intentional game mechanic...and really, why not?

This gives rise to a manufactured conflict that I found myself caught in earlier this year (which continues to play-out today): a group exploits multiple recurring and/or long-lived game engine bugs, forcing an administrative response. This player-vs-admin exchange leads to expressions varying from victimization to self-entitlement, often accompanied with a chorus of "badmin" assertions. With a software development team that effectively refuses to remove such temptations (upwards of two years now...seriously?), and no means of third-party validation. How have things NOT been setup for such a conflict? In the end, a server/admin finds themselves ostracized by a talented, passionate and very vocal portion of SM's community, for doing nothing more than responding to developer-nurtured forums of abusive gameplay.

How about fixing the game's broken core, sharing those accomplishments, implementing an effective QA process to ensure bugs don't regularly re-emerge, and ultimately removing such easy, persistent, recurring temptations for players with less than ideal levels of self-restraint. Developers are then no longer rewarding or enabling bad behavior, and instead they're attributing credit for a positive contribution (e.g. bug reporting), and if/when events necessitate it; devs are enabling both players and admins a neutral means of legitimizing and validating related events (e.g. a changelog which simply says fixed X bug...and start listing them all, please).

Further, if there's going to be teams (e.g. factions), there needs to be accountability, audit logs, blueprint sale (duplication) logs, and just clear communications of what's happening. Players invest an incredible amount of time building their entities, why not a simple log showing who removed what, and when? Most of our bans have resulted from a combination of long-running and/or re-emerging exploits, and how players responded when caught. The remaining bans were largely due to vigilante style player reactions to what they (wrongly) assumed was administrative malice. How about a means for server operators to collaborate upon and manage their own risk tolerances for those types of players. While I understand that SM, especially in an alpha state, has its bugs, why not accommodate this reality by adding in-game transparency, now. Continuing to ignore an inherent player-vs-admin power imbalance does not mean that its compounding issues will go away, and needing to later shoehorn in such functionality just sounds like another reason to put it off. Without admin-free player level auditing/logging visibility, how can mysteries surrounding strongly-unfavorable circumstances lead to anything but accusations of administrative malice? How does the resulting persistent toxicity help anyone?

Developer inaction impairs Schine's ability to move forward in other ways as well: over a span of weeks AndyP and I invested many hours examining backup and live data, discussing server and in-game configurations and mechanics, and simply brainstorming over potential causes to the issues. Along the way I discovered how players exploited a bug enabling any faction member to remove a faction module (even if permissions and rank denied such rights). Guess what I learned after finding that one: it's a stupidly-simple reoccurring bug! Oh FFS, what a waste of everyone's time; when will a QA process be developed, to catch these before a public release?

It's the problem of all early access games. They have lack of experience, understanding of the mechanics, and perhaps have lack of funds to develop something new, thus, they decided to invest the time into the development of the existing framework to follow the steps of Space Engineers. To make "WOW effect" instead of making something truly important. It's "now with planets" fault that will never attract enough customers to the game. Much better to make the game playable and they will be able to stop the development and game will be ok, perhaps they are running out of funds and should finish it ASAP, thus, they will implement 1-2 features and release the unplayable game just like any other developer in the early access. Thus, I think any early access game is wasting of money and time. It is good framework for further developers who can modify the idea and develop something similar. But I am sure that they will make it professional, what we see here is total negligence to work with community and to face their potential customers' requirements.

 

[Lancake]

Correct. Beams have a ton of bugs, some of which are on the list to be fixed and others not so much.

Beams do not calculate more than their first instance of block damage per tick against armor. This means that, although shield and AHP damage is applied normally, a beam output cannot damage more than one armor block per tick. Any damage that could have been applied to blocks behind it are wasted. Any beam dealing more than 200 damage per tick is affected.
While you can still make a relatively decent armor piercing beam by stacking outputs, it becomes prohibitively expensive energy-wise to use and unless you're staying out of effective cannon range, doesn't match up to cannons at all.
Still better than cannons at system block removal but you would have to find a way of first slipping past a thick layer of armor.



Huh. I was under the impression that SHP had nothing to do with the damage of the projectile and everything to do with the number and SHP value of blocks destroyed. If I'm wrong I have a rather embarrassing gap in my knowledge.

Yeah, that's reported on the bug tracker. And you're correct about the SHP thing. Blocks removal will deduct its SHP value from its SHP pool. I assume he's talking about block destruction in this case. Where beam damage propagation doesn't work properly (which is true when armor is involved).

 

[Jojomo]

This was a really good read.

I enjoyed that link too, and read it all, but when I got to the end of the article I was surprised (that I was at the end): the author had spent a lot of effort analysing the negative traits of online gaming....but still hadn't offered a single specific solution.

So it wasn't the constructive criticism I thought it was, it was just plain criticism.

 

[alterintel]

I enjoyed that link too, and read it all, but when I got to the end of the article I was surprised (that I was at the end): the author had spent a lot of effort analysing the negative traits of online gaming....but still hadn't offered a single specific solution.

So it wasn't the constructive criticism I thought it was, it was just plain criticism.

There was a small bit of constructive criticism at the end. IE Early adopters and regular patrons should get free DLC vs making the game artificially un-fun for new comers, and Dynamically changing maps and spawn points was his solution for map memorization.

 

[Valck]

Dynamically changing maps and spawn points was his solution for map memorization.

Which is basically the most simple form of procedurally generated content... back to square one :)