Devblog 13th September 2017 (Power Stream!)

[MaartenAll]

8 pm UTC? That is 9 pm WET, right?

 

[MeRobo]

8 pm UTC? That is 9 pm WET, right?

WET = UTC, WEST (Western European Summer Time) = UTC+1

 

[StormWing0]

PST?

 

[kiddan]

PST?

1:00PM, that's four minutes. =P

 

[Cluwne]

LMGTFY
And then the mods have the audacity to nag people about calling this community a bunch of blithering idiots...

 

[MaartenAll]

When you really want to watch the stream but it's 10 PM and wifi is crap...

 

[wraitheart]

Going to keep it alongside the new system to start with.

poorly worded i ment are they keeping them in game as some people use some of them as decoration

 

[Cluwne]

I honestly wouldn't mind something done with them to keep them as some sort of an "alternative" power source for variety sake. Not like AUX mind you, but as a passive "normal" type.
I also have a nagging feeling that the auxiliary power could be deprecated as well with the new system in place.

 

[Valiant70]

Aux power was a bandaid on a rifle wound. The power update is (hopefully) the surgery it needed in the first place.

Let's just hope the whole thing doesn't die of a staph infection in the hospital. (Looking a Java-based graphics engine)

To be successful in the current space voxel game climate, Starmade will be forced to make itself unique and diverse to a degree I have not yet seen in any space voxel game. To do so is going to be a monumental undertaking for a single coder. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it's growing harder as time passses. The window for easy success as "space Minecraft" has passed. Schema chose the path of true excellence rather than a rapidly-produced game for a casual audience, and in doing so set himself up for possible failure. I guess it'll be worth it if it works out, but keeping other space voxel games from stealing Starmade's audience will not be easy.

 

[Cluwne]

We need to go deeper. AUX was a bandaid to replace another baindaid - docked reactors, which in turn were a mean to sidestep the imperfections of the current power system.
It's just such a shame to lose a whole system over reimplementation of another. I hope they'll reuse it for something or other.

And steal what exactly? There is quite frankly nothing to steal, short of the art assets. This game doesn't even have a soundtrack yet, for crying out loud.
Starmade was hardly breaking new grounds even in it's infancy.
Cannons, beams, missiles and some weird wonky gimmick weapon? Done in literally every sci-fi game that features weapons.
Voxel engine? Forget about it.
Space? You gotta be kidding me.
The awful Java? Nope.
Magical "mining beam"? Done one too many times already.

What sets it apart, at least for the time being, is the sheer scale of, well, everything. Including ships, community drama, people's ego and stupidity.
Ironically enough, the devs seem rather adamant on cutting down the universe down to a single galaxy.
Oh well, they're very busy people, we shouldn't expect them to overwork themselves with those silly unimportant things like making good game design decisions and actually doing something about the myriad of problems accumulated over the years.

 

[DevajC]

We need to go deeper. AUX was a bandaid to replace another baindaid - docked reactors, which in turn were a mean to sidestep the imperfections of the current power system.
It's just such a shame to lose a whole system over reimplementation of another. I hope they'll reuse it for something or other.

And steal what exactly? There is quite frankly nothing to steal, short of the art assets. This game doesn't even have a soundtrack yet, for crying out loud.
Starmade was hardly breaking new grounds even in it's infancy.
Cannons, beams, missiles and some weird wonky gimmick weapon? Done in literally every sci-fi game that features weapons.
Voxel engine? Forget about it.
Space? You gotta be kidding me.
The awful Java? Nope.
Magical "mining beam"? Done one too many times already.

What sets it apart, at least for the time being, is the sheer scale of, well, everything. Including ships, community drama, people's ego and stupidity.
Ironically enough, the devs seem rather adamant on cutting down the universe down to a single galaxy.
Oh well, they're very busy people, we shouldn't expect them to overwork themselves with those silly unimportant things like making good game design decisions and actually doing something about the myriad of problems accumulated over the years.

Haha yeah and when people complained about Schine in the End Game Documens number 2 they had the audacity to call them selves hardworkers and "people who always delivered on their promises" that was the biggest load of crap ive ever heard. They are the definition of "Shitty alpha game that never gets updated"

The new power update and weapon update dont actually add any more content. Just replace what we have.

What was that guy even talking about? Choosing the path of excellence? Lol! And calling other space games for "casuals" while there is literally nothing of depth in this game.

 

[Panpiper]

Once upon a time there was this great game called Starmade. I spent years learning it's intricacies. Then when finally I was approaching the point of sufficient mastery to at least dream of challenging the true elite, Starmade ended. They announced that instead of finishing Starmade, they were creating a new game with new mechanics, that curiously looked very much the same and had the same name.

Sadly, all that investment in time in the old Starmade was now lost. Everything we had ever built, everything we had ever learned, was now useless. Even more sadly, it appears that even when the new power system is finally available, the wholesale reinvention is not finished. This will be followed by a weapons update, apparently only a "first stage" of a "universe overhaul".

I have absolutely zero interest in playing a game where anything I build is to be scrapped within a month or two, when everything changes yet again.

Does anyone have even a clue as to when the new Starmade game's mechanics will be in place without further babies and bathwater chuckings? Do I have to wait six months or two years before checking back again?

 

[Dr. Whammy]

Not gonna lie; it's been pretty painful watching what was once a terminally addictive game fall prey to stagnation.

At my old college, there was a saying; "Done is better than perfect". StarMade may still have a head start but repeatedly reinventing the game isn't going to win the race against all these other building games coming out. Then again, beating the competition may not be the team's focus. I recall reading that StarMade is basically a project of passion rather than profit; that Schema is basically building his dream game and letting all of us play it while in development as a sort of volunteer quality control team. I can respect this concept, as I have similar aspirations.

I'm hoping that he and the dev team have more up their sleeves than they're letting us know about. In the mean time, as players, a shift of focus may be in order for those of us who can stand to do so. Example; while waiting for the power update, I've been increasing my knowledge of rails, logic and general building techniques. Likewise, everyone here probably has something they are good at or would like to experienmt more with, that does not depend on these changing features. Even if you don't, you can still make a complete copy of your StarMade Installation folder and play the version of the game you like the most.

 

[kikaha]

poorly worded i ment are they keeping them in game as some people use some of them as decoration

During the stream about the power i asked that question multiple times.

"What wil happen to all those block not needed anymore once the new power system will be in place fully." Chambers and all.

I mean all those effect blocks, jump drive, inhibitor... Its IDs and Starmade is somehow limited as to the number of IDs for blocks. So are they going to scrap those blocks altogether or not ?

i wanted to know because i use quite a few of them as decorative blocks.

Sadly my questions were ignored. Maybe answering it would have revealed too much about that universe overhaul. Or maybe my english is not good enough to be understood.

 

[nightrune]

At my old college, there was a saying; "Done is better than perfect".

I can say here, this is one of the things I'm very cognizant of. It's also why dev builds won't be complete, but it does need to be good enough. We are constantly trying to balance good enough with pushing something out the door. Much of the internal discussion was around whether we should even go through with a power update. It ended up being a choice we needed to make. If this was a game developed behind closed doors and was consistently running into balancing issues and performance problems, the decision to change mechanics would have been made as well. Along with that, mechanic changes in a voxel world tend to be much harder if players have already built objects. The equivalent is like suddenly changing physics in the real world. This made it a hard decision but one we ultimately decided to do. Updating power is as much for new players, current players, as it is for schine. Power is/will play a much larger role in the universe update.

We hear the pain of broken builds, but the path to completion is rarely smooth.

 

[StormWing0]

Is that annoying bug that resets faction ranks on multiplayer servers with wrappers ever going to be fixed? Needless to say it gets extremely annoying.

 

[JinM]

I suggest you guys make a quick def update with some details you mentioned in the stream. I think many people don't recognise the the benefits of the new system jet, even though you guys are clearly on a good way:
- specialised ships possible with the new chamber system, but the basic ship is possible without chambers (jumping and shooting)
- brainstorming about obtainable items that can be placed in the ship to upgrade some chambers
- chamber mechanics in detail to the tiered levels, example with the cloaker vs the auto charge jumper
- brainstorming about the changed universe where much space will hold only sparse ressources and some places will have a higher density of a certain ressource
- the cross relation between the new ressource distribution and that you need to explore vast distances if you want to make all chambers

And mention that the power update will be coming in short term, the universe update will take some time as you first want to rebalance the weapon stats and maybe other things. Explain that the universe update allready gets mentioned, to give some insight in why you guys are exited for the power update.

 

[DukeofRealms]

Stream highlights (added to the first post) :


Working on text document now.

 

[Dr. Whammy]

Stream highlights (added to the first post) :


Working on text document now.

This is awesome. For me, this info was worth the wait. Thanks for sharing.

 

[Panpiper]

Yay! They have removed all skill from power systems! 'Exploitable' just happens to also mean 'skill'.

From now on, the amount of power you have is a direct, one for one correlation with the size of your ship. If you want more power, build a bigger ship. That's it. Simple enough for the bottom of the pyramid. The rest of us who actually want to test our engineering skill, can look for a new game.