Dev Blog : October 21st 2016

[smavs]

This is such an exciting update, I can't wait.

I've read the comments here and elsewhere and still have some questions I haven't seen asked or answered explicitly.

If they have been addressed before please direct me there and sorry for not looking hard enough.

My questions on the NPC factions as a server admin:

Will there be admin, in-game, or config file options to modify:

1. NPC Faction Territory
a. Assign specific locations and exact borders to NPC factions?
b. Settings to determine how (or if) NPC factions claim new territory or even specific conquer/defend priorities?

2. NPC Faction Relations
a. Diplomacy - Allied/Hostile/Neutral/Tribute - how detailed will these settings be?
a1. will there be settings to determine how NPC factions respond to other NPC factions actions? like an ally attacking a different ally?
a2. tribute or treaty options? i.e. deliver 50,000 fertikeen ingots every 100 ticks or lose faction standing until war is declared
b. Territory - Open/Closed/Select Borders
b1. same concepts as a1 above. i.e. what if a faction encounters an ally while invading the space of a faction allied with their ally. the settings to determine these circumstances would be really cool to have full control over.
c. Trading - Full/No/Select Trading
c1. The ability for an individual player to set up a trading post with specific items is already inherent in the shop module. Will there be options to set NPC factions to trade in specific things, and/or only with selected allies or other factions? Could these even be set as options regardless of diplomatic standings or even to specific locations for trading posts/stations/ships? I like the idea of being able to setup only the border stations of certain factions for inter-faction trading, as a way to isolate those faction's inner territory from other faction traffic.

Sorry again if all this has been covered.

 

[Bench]

I hear the concerns from some people and its stuff we've discussed as a development team as things to note prior to starting development of this project.

Here's some aspects worth noting are currently in our plans...

- NPC factions, like player controlled factions, will need to gather resources in order to expand. In the future as we add features or mechanics to factions, they will apply to both players and npc factions alike.
- faction calculations for unloaded factions will happen at intervals rather than constantly, this allows less of a performance hit and helps supports the scalability of the game.
- visiting space that NPC factions have calculated to have gathered resources from will result in less resources loading in when you visit.
- NPC faction ships and stations will load in when you go close to their star systems and sectors. At that point aspects that were calculated virtually now become physical, so salvagers, freighters etc that were part of the calculations, now become physical ships. the plan is that if you disrupt or destroy the npc ships then you cripple their resource gathering etc as you would expect with any other player faction.

There's a lot planned for NPC factions and our aim at this point is to really set a solid foundation for them to enable us to build upon.

 

[nightrune]

I hear the concerns from some people and its stuff we've discussed as a development team as things to note prior to starting development of this project.

Here's some aspects worth noting are currently in our plans...

- NPC factions, like player controlled factions, will need to gather resources in order to expand. In the future as we add features or mechanics to factions, they will apply to both players and npc factions alike.
- faction calculations for unloaded factions will happen at intervals rather than constantly, this allows less of a performance hit and helps supports the scalability of the game.
- visiting space that NPC factions have calculated to have gathered resources from will result in less resources loading in when you visit.
- NPC faction ships and stations will load in when you go close to their star systems and sectors. At that point aspects that were calculated virtually now become physical, so salvagers, freighters etc that were part of the calculations, now become physical ships. the plan is that if you disrupt or destroy the npc ships then you cripple their resource gathering etc as you would expect with any other player faction.

There's a lot planned for NPC factions and our aim at this point is to really set a solid foundation for them to enable us to build upon.

These same mechanics then would apply for player factions to mine and get materials as well correct?

 

[Bench]

These same mechanics then would apply for player factions to mine and get materials as well correct?

Both NPC and player factions would be able to use fleets to mine, expanding on the existing fleet mining ability

 

[Ithirahad]

Will our fleets be able to locate and go after enemies who are within scanner range of them? It is kind of hard to defend a system with fleets if the fleets can't detect enemies beyond their own loading range.

 

[Gmodism]

Awesome I can't wait for this, so nice with some life in the universe!

 

[terra mining corp.]

I hear the concerns from some people and its stuff we've discussed as a development team as things to note prior to starting development of this project.

Here's some aspects worth noting are currently in our plans...

- NPC factions, like player controlled factions, will need to gather resources in order to expand. In the future as we add features or mechanics to factions, they will apply to both players and npc factions alike.
- faction calculations for unloaded factions will happen at intervals rather than constantly, this allows less of a performance hit and helps supports the scalability of the game.
- visiting space that NPC factions have calculated to have gathered resources from will result in less resources loading in when you visit.
- NPC faction ships and stations will load in when you go close to their star systems and sectors. At that point aspects that were calculated virtually now become physical, so salvagers, freighters etc that were part of the calculations, now become physical ships. the plan is that if you disrupt or destroy the npc ships then you cripple their resource gathering etc as you would expect with any other player faction.

There's a lot planned for NPC factions and our aim at this point is to really set a solid foundation for them to enable us to build upon.

So going with the ability for npc's to mine out a sector,will they mine out your sector if faction is offline? or will faction defence fleets defend territories

 

[Drakkart]

I hear the concerns from some people and its stuff we've discussed as a development team as things to note prior to starting development of this project.

Here's some aspects worth noting are currently in our plans...

- NPC factions, like player controlled factions, will need to gather resources in order to expand. In the future as we add features or mechanics to factions, they will apply to both players and npc factions alike.
- faction calculations for unloaded factions will happen at intervals rather than constantly, this allows less of a performance hit and helps supports the scalability of the game.
- visiting space that NPC factions have calculated to have gathered resources from will result in less resources loading in when you visit.
- NPC faction ships and stations will load in when you go close to their star systems and sectors. At that point aspects that were calculated virtually now become physical, so salvagers, freighters etc that were part of the calculations, now become physical ships. the plan is that if you disrupt or destroy the npc ships then you cripple their resource gathering etc as you would expect with any other player faction.

There's a lot planned for NPC factions and our aim at this point is to really set a solid foundation for them to enable us to build upon.

Thank you for clarification so this means that if i am happen to be at the right place at the right time when such a claculation happens. i could witness said npc faction ships warp into my sector and start to establish them selfes?

 

[serge1944]

With npc coming,will the astronaut npc be ingame aswell?

 

[StormWing0]

With npc coming,will the astronaut npc be ingame aswell?

We already have them they just aren't in use for anything other than adv shops and the old crew attempt. Likely the new Astronaut NPCs would simply be more advanced versions of them.

 

[Tomssuli]

Thank you for clarification so this means that if i am happen to be at the right place at the right time when such a claculation happens. i could witness said npc faction ships warp into my sector and start to establish them selfes?

It would indeed be interesting to see NPC faction start building a station and eventually start producing ships! ...and if it's a hostile faction, then bring troops to stop the progress before it goes too far =)


[OFFTOPIC]
Cool fact that came to mind from this conversation: Back in 1984 when strategy games were nonexistent, Will Wright did this in the C64 game "Raid on Bungeling Bay", where a shipyard would construct an aircraft carrier and you could stop it in the building process if you were fast enough... otherwise you had to fight the carrier and the airplanes.
[/OFFTOPIC]

 

[Bench]

Will our fleets be able to locate and go after enemies who are within scanner range of them? It is kind of hard to defend a system with fleets if the fleets can't detect enemies beyond their own loading range.

That will be something we have to explore.

So going with the ability for npc's to mine out a sector,will they mine out your sector if faction is offline? or will faction defence fleets defend territories

Something we'll have to consider.

Thank you for clarification so this means that if i am happen to be at the right place at the right time when such a claculation happens. i could witness said npc faction ships warp into my sector and start to establish them selfes?

Possibly. More so, if you approach an area that they're already active their ships would load in. We're talking about approaching beyond your own loading range, but as you enter into that range they would load with the sector.

With npc coming,will the astronaut npc be ingame aswell?

We'll see. There's a larger project planned for later on that focuses on astronauts and NPC gameplay in that regard.

 

[Ithirahad]

Thank you for clarification so this means that if i am happen to be at the right place at the right time when such a claculation happens. i could witness said npc faction ships warp into my sector and start to establish them selfes?

You have to remember that, at the moment, there is no immersive way of constructing a station from a blueprint... Do you really want to be able to sit in a sector and watch a freighter fly in and then a station poof out of nowhere?

I'm sure that, when a better system is added, realtime NPC station deployment can become a thing.

 

[Drakkart]

more like build block represents meta item design of station please add material andthen have the animation like in the shipyard with partially build stuff.

 

[Lukwan]

Why change power, why add auxilliary power, why change the thrust mechanic? Schine have tried to address these problems, they just fail spectacularly,which is why i'm really fucking worried.

"Fear is the mind killer..."

Why all the negativity RB? Have you read the development blogs where the the logic of these choices are explained? Are you an experienced game-developer or a project manager? Are you a Java programmer?

The order that things get worked on have a lot to do the critical path, relating to dependencies. Schine has been incredibly forthcoming about their planned chain of updates. Comparing SM to NMS is just...silly. NMS was hyped up well beyond reason and it's Dev-team we intentionally tight-lipped & misleading regarding what the game was going be (RE multiplayer.) So you are comparing a 'rush-to-cash-in' knock-off game at $66 to an early release Alpha game that is $15 to own or free to demo. Most pertinent is the fact that NMS is not truly MP. You are not going to be interacting directly with other humans in a MP sandbox as you do in SM. Balance issues are a much bigger deal with SM.

Apples and kumquats baby.

 

[Raisinbat]

Why all the negativity RB?

Because i fucking love this game to pieces, and i don't like watching it floundering like this with no clear goal for how the game is supposed to work. All these high level ideas run completely counter to the game's actual strengths; what good are the best shipdesign tools of any voxel game ever if the game is going to be nothing but out-of-sector combat based on arbitrary values where you can't see or interact with your ships in any meaningful way?

I've also seen enough idiotic white knights defending games when they're struggling and they've never made anything better. Even FFXIV had morons defending it when it first launched, and that game went from 600.000 players to <1000 in it's first month. Complaining about problems is the only way to get them fixed so we can have a better game, braindead praise and positivity may be more comfortable but it doesn't help.

I've also played starbound, tried no mans sky to see how bad it was and mystcraft mod for minecraft that also fawn over their infinite procedural worlds. They aren't worth shit. It sounds cool, especially in marketing and hype shit, but they don't help the games they're in at all; you just end up with world fatigue where nowhere in the world matters; if you can go anywhere you want whenever you want there's no value in the places you've been, because there are millions just like them out there. It completely changes how you perceive the world and exploration: you stop having a home that you're building on, and just stroll along to the next frontier burning everything in your path because none of it matters. It's not fun to explore because the new places you run into stop relating to the places you've been; you aren't expanding your territory or discovering anything new, even if it's something you've never ever seen before, it's comprised of the same things, you're looking for the same things and the novelty is lost in a couple of hours.

Have you read the development blogs where the the logic of these choices are explained? Are you an experienced game-developer or a project manager? Are you a Java programmer?

No, no and nope. For the first two you don't need to be a chef to tell when the kitchen is on fire, for the third i tried looking but did not find If you have it i would really appreciate a link, but whatever they claim to be working towards their past displays of incompetence worry me.

The order that things get worked on have a lot to do the critical path, relating to dependencies. Schine has been incredibly forthcoming about their planned chain of updates. Comparing SM to NMS is just...silly. NMS was hyped up well beyond reason and it's Dev-team we intentionally tight-lipped & misleading regarding what the game was going be (RE multiplayer.) So you are comparing a 'rush-to-cash-in' knock-off game at $66 to an early release Alpha game that is $15 to own or free to demo. Most pertinent is the fact that NMS is not truly MP. You are not going to be interacting directly with other humans in a MP sandbox as you do in SM. Balance issues are a much bigger deal with SM.

I'm comparing them purely in gameplay terms, you're right that schine aren't shady, which is why i bought the game in the first place, but devs aside NMS has a huge procedurally generated world, which is what schine are trying to add, and it fucking sucks. Everything in that game is too high level and focused entirely on their concepts over implementation. In order for the large scale faction management to work the current game i fear will need to be pruned. How will logic or rail work OOS? My guess is it wont, how is a fleet of carriers going to dock fighter fleets? How will clocks and factories work while offloaded? Sure, as long as the factories are linked directly on the same entity there's no problem there, but how is docking and unloading going to work?

Docked reactors was a very simple issue to fix; simply remove docked entities when they're undocked by damage, and schine instead decided to cut content from the game. If such a small hurdle is solved in such a hamfisted fashion, it won't be the last mechanic to get the axe. This high level focus is going to come at a lot of gameplay concessions, i fear to the point where ship design will be purely aeesthetic; there's simply no point in weapon and defense layouts if they don't matter in OOS combat.

Game will end up with no depth in favor of a large simulated and procedurally generated universe, which isn't fun for more than a few hours. That is the comparison to NMS.

 

[Lancake]

Because i fucking love this game to pieces, and i don't like watching it floundering like this with no clear goal for how the game is supposed to work. All these high level ideas run completely counter to the game's actual strengths; what good are the best shipdesign tools of any voxel game ever if the game is going to be nothing but out-of-sector combat based on arbitrary values where you can't see or interact with your ships in any meaningful way?

...

Glad to know there's someone who shares the same view of procedural worlds as I do. I've always considered a game focused on procedural worlds to be a weakness. Nothing feels unique or worth exploring if it's an infinite and random world.
Same goes for its procedural quests, they are meaningless and their only good purpose is to shove you into a direction where there are more interesting things to find (sorta like how skyrim and fallout 4 do it).

Starmade has always been a procedural universe, and probably one of the more boring ones out there in that aspect. Generation is abundant and generic, you only need to explore 1 system and you've seen what the game has to offer in terms of variety and content. As for resources, a single system should give you enough to build whatever you want unless it's really lacking a specific asteroid resource.

The core of the game however, which is building ships/structures (and flying/fighting with them) is still what we focus on. What this update and the following ones do is actually step away from the boring generation and introduce more dynamic into a static, yet procedural world.
What's the point of building and flying ships if there's no objective beyond that?

In this update, NPC factions will be more unique and dynamic at the same time, yet this is only an addition to our core gameplay.
Your concerns of OoS or Out of Sector combat are valid but the interesting thing is that this is discouraged out of itself.
Assuming you're going to fight them, you're not going to send of your precious ships on their own and assume they'll do just fine. Out of sector combat is extremely hard to do accurate and a simplified version of that can only be afforded to be used between 2 NPC factions themselves.
Numbers are easily exploited in a block based system without making an actual combat worthy ship, reason why we should prioritize avoiding Out of Sector combat for players where possible. The fact still is that loaded combat does exist, meaning that if you fight a fleet that's optimized for unloaded combat, you'll wreck it with well made ships.

We can use that to our advantage since that's a risk:
- Unloaded combat, using optimized "number" ships that aren't being controlled by a player. These ships once actual loaded are doomed to die.
- Loaded combat using optimized combat ships that are being controlled by 1 or more players.

Think of a game series like total war. They have auto resolve for combat, but those are never accurate. You'll always do the battles that matter yourself, unless you're cheating and are pumping out a full army every turn.

If resources aren't that fast to gather, building and maintaining big throw away fleets that you can afford to lose isn't going to be a daily thing.
Even if it is, we could always force sectors to load if this sort of combat occurs but that might give a lot of performance problems.

The negatives of using optimized umber ships outweigh the positives you get from it and if they don't in reality, we can adjust values to make it so.

---

Universe generation will have to change too in order to create a more engaging world, especially focused around MP. It's safe to assume that not many empires or players would go beyond the starting galaxy or its neighbours so this procedural world is in fact "limited", not by hard limits but by boredom. No sane player would fly this far out to make an empire especially when he's alone against a ton of NPC enemies and where no player is around him to keep things interesting.

As for the core few galaxies being used, by adjusting generation values and creating different unique systems, we can create Points of Interests. These are of course randomly placed within your galaxies but they'll attract both NPC and player factions that want to grow. If every system has a daily quota of asteroid output, you'll want to control and protect your best ones.
This is the larger scale objective, control more resources to make more to take even more. In a player only world, it will result in an imbalance if left unchecked. It would only take a few days before 2 major factions manifest and wage war with each other (because that's what we love ^^). In less than a week, 1 major faction might survive and you get a stale world till that big faction splits up themself because of internal disputes.
Either way, this isn't the best course of action especially for new players that would need to either join a big faction or stay small and unnoticed.

And at that point, the NPC factions come in, it's sorta their only use. To make sure the bigger factions don't grow out of control and to give protection to anyone who needs it. A bigger faction would take the easier path and try to avoid conflict with bigger NPC factions. If they go to war with all of them in that galaxy, they'll be overwhelmed. As for new players, they could align themselves to NPC factions and start growing their little empire within their systems till they get big enough to distance themselves. Big factions could of course align to NPC factions too, but with the right balance values, we can make it so that big enough factions don't get enough benefits from it compared to the risk of entering a war with rival NPC factions. Same goes for smaller factions so they wouldn't end up indestructible within the protection of NPC factions.

We could also increase the amount of danger or areas you should avoid, that creates boundaries into a world that is seemingly unlimited but that makes you think twice before flying blindly into 1 direction. If a particular nasty NPC faction controls a galaxy arm and getting close to them will get anything but a major fleet shot up bad, then you're not going to go there (or you go there just to die). Perhaps getting good relations with those guys will give you an area to stay as a relative new player since most players couldn't get close to you without being targeted by them.

Factions could each have their preferences, some prefer to loot, fight and expand aggressively without caring too defend it too much => Strong but disorganized faction, getting protection from these could scare of a lot of people but you might up one day without protection due to them constantly moving their systems around.
Some prefer to build and slowly build up a tight net of well protected systems. These don't offer much in reach and what's left for players to gather in each of the NPC controlled systems isn't much. But you do get good protection at the downside of growing slower.

Everything I mentioned above isn't fixed, some of it might not ever make it in the game and some will just have to be slightly altered but it should hopefully give you a good idea of where we're going.

 

[Jasper1991]

I am really starting to loose faith the the dev team, I do not want to loose faith in them but I am.

Here is why

• No indication of what the final product of this game is going to be, we have been hinted and updates have pushed us in the direction of several mechanics from lots of different styles of games, we have survival aspects, RTS aspects, PVP aspects, sandbox aspects and lots more, but its really confusing because I do not know what the game is going to be when its "finished" (the final product), and I am starting to think the devs do not know what they want the final product to be.
• Lack of development in the core mechanics of the game, all the devs are basically doing is adding lots of new "features" but what about the core mechanics of the game? The very heart of the game that these new "features" should be branching off receives very little attention if any at all, this also ties in with what Rasinbat is saying and what I am saying about what the final product is, the core mechanics of this game are very bare and minimal with a bunch of extras, the best comparison I can make is releasing free DLC to an undeveloped and unfinished game.
  
• The game in its current form is a game where the only fun to be found is in PVP, and PVP itself is very broken (unless maybe your on a reverse FP server, but that still has flaws) I say this all the time, everything you do in this game leads to PVP, the only purpose ships have in this game is to mine and shoot, you mine so you can get a better ship that mines or shoots better than your current one and then you shoot others with that ship, that is basically the only thing to do, while I will acknowledge the existence of roleplay communities such as Sol Remeberence, their communities are small and that ruins the whole point of roleplay, player interaction. I want to see so that ships have more purpose than mine and shoot, the exploration, PVE and mining mechanics from EVE I personally think would work pretty good in this game with some adjusting and tweaking, but thats my opinion and I hope the developers have their own plans for expanding the role of ships into more than mining and shooting.

Now if I have no reason to be concerned about any of the points mentioned then please tell me why, because I for one and not satisfied with what this game offers in its current form, keep in mind this game was made available 4 or 5 years ago.

 

[Criss]

I am really starting to loose faith the the dev team, I do not want to loose faith in them but I am.

Here is why

• No indication of what the final product of this game is going to be, we have been hinted and updates have pushed us in the direction of several mechanics from lots of different styles of games, we have survival aspects, RTS aspects, PVP aspects, sandbox aspects and lots more, but its really confusing because I do not know what the game is going to be when its "finished" (the final product), and I am starting to think the devs do not know what they want the final product to be.
• Lack of development in the core mechanics of the game, all the devs are basically doing is adding lots of new "features" but what about the core mechanics of the game? The very heart of the game that these new "features" should be branching off receives very little attention if any at all, this also ties in with what Rasinbat is saying and what I am saying about what the final product is, the core mechanics of this game are very bare and minimal with a bunch of extras, the best comparison I can make is releasing free DLC to an undeveloped and unfinished game.
  
• The game in its current form is a game where the only fun to be found is in PVP, and PVP itself is very broken (unless maybe your on a reverse FP server, but that still has flaws) I say this all the time, everything you do in this game leads to PVP, the only purpose ships have in this game is to mine and shoot, you mine so you can get a better ship that mines or shoots better than your current one and then you shoot others with that ship, that is basically the only thing to do, while I will acknowledge the existence of roleplay communities such as Sol Remeberence, their communities are small and that ruins the whole point of roleplay, player interaction. I want to see so that ships have more purpose than mine and shoot, the exploration, PVE and mining mechanics from EVE I personally think would work pretty good in this game with some adjusting and tweaking, but thats my opinion and I hope the developers have their own plans for expanding the role of ships into more than mining and shooting.

Now if I have no reason to be concerned about any of the points mentioned then please tell me why, because I for one and not satisfied with what this game offers in its current form, keep in mind this game was made available 4 or 5 years ago.

Well I think everyone will agree the biggest cause for this is the time it's taken to get here. Were we more immediately successful, I imagine the pace would be quickened early on. Instead we have seen steady growth with occasional spikes (afaik). If we received the attention space engineers got a few years ago, well we certainly would be seeing more players, servers and work being done.

It's probably not the most comforting thing, but I am going to link this. I understand that 75% of this is censored at the moment. However, behind the scenes, that entire form is filled out. We have every feature we want for StarMade on that list. Now that's a lot of stuff, and it will take lots of work and discussion to get there. We aren't going to promise something big only to find out later that it won't work. That is why it's censored until we know we can achieve it. We also shouldn't be spending time fleshing it out entirely just yet, since we need to focus on the upcoming updates.

As for this update, I would argue that this update is a core mechanic of the game. This is the foundation for the PvE end of the gameplay, which is non-existent right now. If you have specific questions I am sure we could answer them. It's frustrating seeing some players loose faith. I don't know how much we can say but we should be able to clear a few things up.

 

[Jasper1991]

It's probably not the most comforting thing, but I am going to link this. I understand that 75% of this is censored at the moment. However, behind the scenes, that entire form is filled out. We have every feature we want for StarMade on that list. Now that's a lot of stuff, and it will take lots of work and discussion to get there. We aren't going to promise something big only to find out later that it won't work. That is why it's censored until we know we can achieve it. We also shouldn't be spending time fleshing it out entirely just yet, since we need to focus on the upcoming updates.

You may not personally agree with me, but I would prefer just having all the things you plan for this game on that page rather than censor 75% of it because you are worried you cannot pull it off, maybe put everything that you cannot promise in a separate category or maybe a separate thread, kinda like how the "recognised" tag in the suggestions thread, it would be nice to have but you are not sure if its going to be in the final product.