Recognized by Council Heatseekers and block heat.

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    I'd like to out forth the suggestion that like Armor and HP scores, blocks be given a heat score with blocks that would logically generate more heat than others having a higher score, e.g thrusters, power etc.

    Then have the heatseekers select targets based on that so they effectively go for the hottest parts of the ship. Which is obviously what heat seekers should do.

    Think this would help lag issues as well as heatseekers seem to prioritise docked enities like turrets meaning you can often one hit undock every entity on a ship once it's sheilds are low enough and we all know how well that goes once you have a bunch of entities clipping into the ship they were docked to in one hit.
    They seem to be targeting rail dockers or something before all else.

    I'd also suggest buffing heatseeker damage while nerfing the amount of missiles that can be fired at once from a single group, or give them a much larger cool down to prevent them being a no skill spam weapon.

    Sure they look cool but until some better optimisation comes to this game they are a major frame rate killer for everyone. Even when there isn't a tonne of them on screen.
    Other option would be to make it so turning off trails actually turns off just trails, while leaving the missile glow, as currently turning off missile trails removes all visual signs of the missiles themselves.
    Maybe replace the current missile effect altogether and replace it with a StarTrek style photon torpedo sparkle or something?
    Just get the missile frame rate death fixed some how please.

    I just feel something needs to be done about missiles causing massive fps drops and the major lag they cause from undocking so many things at once.

    I could see making heatseekers actually seek heat having massive positives for the game performance wise.
    Less pirate spam as less chance of seekers going after a thrusterless station, which currently is the main cause of people being swamped by AI and the resulting server lag it causes.
    As stated earlier, less chance of a billion entities becoming undocked at once.
    Sun damage seems to use heatseeker code, again blasting docked entities off in one go, these changes would simulate hot systems over heating from the suns added heat.
     
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    I wouldn't mind a system where heatseekers attempted to hit "Hotter" parts of ships. I would suggest they simply target certain systems more often. So make it random, with some blocks weighted to be targets more then others. That way we don't have to increase the amount of data each block requires.

    Because to add a heat value to each block, would mean making each block take up more space. It might sound like a super tiny amount. But when you consider that you then have to multiply that by EVERY block that exists on any/all loaded entities, things start to scale out of control. Its a lot of extra data that needs to be sent/received by the server/client, Then processed.

    As an example, lets say we add 1 byte to each block. That seems pretty small right? Well, when you have a ship made of 1mil blocks, that is an extra 125,000 kilobytes, or 125 Megabytes for such a ship. This is before any compression is done. I am sure the actual addition to blocks would be in the bits instead of bytes, but this is just to show how quickly this scales up.

    AND this happens weather or not the blocks are all on one ship, or spread over many.

    TL;DR:
    I like the idea of heat seeking missiles hitting things on the ship that would logical be "Hot". But think the method to get said behavior would need to be changed.
     
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    Hey however it needs to be done, just the way it works currently is terrible.
     
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    I think that this would work really well with my proposed scanner system, which relies on electromagnetic emissions for detection. Gauging the EM emissions from blocks would be a very useful multipurpose way to have missiles track targets. Heatseekers could follow the largest concentration of EM, which would usually be thrusters. Weapons would be a close second, I'd guess. Followed by power systems.
     
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    lets say we add 1 byte to each block. That seems pretty small right? Well, when you have a ship made of 1mil blocks, that is an extra 125,000 kilobytes, or 125 Megabytes for such a ship. This is before any compression is done.
    I don't think I can follow the maths behind this... one million blocks times one additional byte each looks conspicuously like one million bytes to me. Before compression.

    Also I don't think some form of emission would require a whole byte, two or maybe three bits might hold enough information about none, some, some more, and lots... plus it wouldn't necessarily have to be updated every frame, only if blocks are added or lost.

    In fact, it wouldn't even have to be a value-per-block, but could simply be an attribute of the block type, like its mass, or texture - once the systems are placed, calculate the totals of always-on systems like power generators, variable systems like thrusters, and on-demand systems like individual weapons, and cache those values in just a few variables per ship/entity.
     
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    I was just using a byte as an example. I am sure it would only take one or two bits. But the point was that adding data to blocks could balloon and reduce preference. I get that adding a bit or two might not be too terrible, I just wanted to illustrate that there are likely better ways of implementation.

    *could have swore I added this next part to my other post but guess I forgot to actually type it out...

    I think something of a priority list of things like Thrust, Weapon blocks, shields ect. could be used. Then when the missile fires, instead of going "Where is the center of mass" it would "Simi Randomly" chose from the list. I say Simi because the highest priority in that list would have a greater chance of being chosen. the missile could even just default to "Center of Mass" on rare occasions. In an instance where the block it chose was not present on said ship might be a good case for choosing center of mass.

    EDIT:
    Hum. After Re-reading your post Valck, I think I like your method better. It could also allow for which entity the missiles go after as well, instead of just where they hit on a ship.
     

    Keptick

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    I entirely agree with heatseekers needing to target the main ship first, and not all the docked entities. It would make sense for the largest heat signafure to attract the missiles, and not some random doors inside the ship. It's also probably possible to have them target individual systems as well (like thrusters) since turrets can do that already. Lancake I'd like to get your opinion on this.
     
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    Turrets target some system blocks first? I wasn't aware of this. Good to know
     
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    wait.... if "Of course target-seeking missiles will now also do the same" is correct. Doesn't that mean that this suggestion is already implemented in some fashion?

    As turrets (And target-seeking missiles) will target system blocks and not the center of mass? Or am I just crazy?
     
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    i think by target seeking missles, he means by damage beam and damage pulse +missle slaves
    not missle missle
     
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    yeah that is lockons. Heatseekers just seem to target docked entities before all else as they seem to have always done, while lockons seem to hit random parts of the ship once you've locked them with the plan being that in future you will be able to manually target systems with them, currently they choose their own systems to go after.

    But yeah Heatseekers definitely seem to have a one track mind with what they like to go for and they're long overdue changing I feel.
     
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    How about heatseeker lock-on range being determined by the target's Hull vs Systems ratio? A ship with more systems would be more visible to heat-seeking missiles.

    Lock-On missiles could be a function of surface area, block count, or mass.
     

    sayerulz

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    How long till someone puts a ball of lava on a stick going 1000 blocks out from their ship?
     
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    Lava's decorative. No heat sig. Also, that only works for a ship so small that it's total output is less than that of one lava block.
     
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    yeah that is lockons. Heatseekers just seem to target docked entities before all else as they seem to have always done, while lockons seem to hit random parts of the ship once you've locked them with the plan being that in future you will be able to manually target systems with them, currently they choose their own systems to go after.

    But yeah Heatseekers definitely seem to have a one track mind with what they like to go for and they're long overdue changing I feel.
    erm lock on will just go for the ship and depending o nhow close you are, it will do one of 2 things: very distant sniping:
    go straight for the ship and hit it wherever it happens to be closest
    close range:
    it will typically either loop around if coming from the top or bottom or side of the ship, and then will hit what ever side is closest
     
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    Agree, heatseekers need a balance, and hopefully this could be the change to stop the spammers
     
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    erm lock on will just go for the ship and depending o nhow close you are, it will do one of 2 things: very distant sniping:
    go straight for the ship and hit it wherever it happens to be closest
    close range:
    it will typically either loop around if coming from the top or bottom or side of the ship, and then will hit what ever side is closest

    I'll have to take another look maybe it has changed again, quite a while back when they overhauled how things work, like removing shipcore being taken out being the cause of the ship dying and restructuring blueprints etc, the missilelock system changed where once you have locked the ship, the missiles themselves would pick a random system and targey it, meaning for exanple if you fired off 6 lockons at once they would spreadout over the ship. (this was from a direct firing position to target, no over shoots that make the missiles loop back.)
    At the time I and some friends tested them and they were indeed spreading out across the target and not hitting the same spot.

    Again though as I said I will have to have another look and see if this was reverted. Since then my missile use has been a bit more long range and it can be hard to tell at extremely long ranges exavtly where the missiles are colliding.

    But yeah this is from a year ago:

    AI targeting improvements
    AI no longer targets the center of mass of an object. It will now specifically target blocks of ship systems. Of course target-seeking missiles will now also do the same.
    StarMade News - StarMade v0.19318 New Explosions, Tools, and Bug Fixes
     
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    I'll have to take another look maybe it has changed again, quite a while back when they overhauled how things work, like removing shipcore being taken out being the cause of the ship dying and restructuring blueprints etc, the missilelock system changed where once you have locked the ship, the missiles themselves would pick a random system and targey it, meaning for exanple if you fired off 6 lockons at once they would spreadout over the ship. (this was from a direct firing position to target, no over shoots that make the missiles loop back.)
    At the time I and some friends tested them and they were indeed spreading out across the target and not hitting the same spot.

    Again though as I said I will have to have another look and see if this was reverted. Since then my missile use has been a bit more long range and it can be hard to tell at extremely long ranges exavtly where the missiles are colliding.

    But yeah this is from a year ago:



    StarMade News - StarMade v0.19318 New Explosions, Tools, and Bug Fixes
    so from what i have seen is that when your swarms happen to not hit the closest entity on the first pass they will typically loop until they hit it, but if they reach their range, then they just go, but they loop usually