Merge stations and shops

[WaffulMann]

Currently stations are useless and shops don't look like shops. I wouldn't want to buy stuff from a floating metal rod that summons ships when fired upon.
I suggest Schema merge stations and shops. The new stations can have NPCs walking around in them and patrol ships flying around. They can also be huge, the size of current planets. That way people and servers can have more of a starting hub.
As for the station itself maybe we can get the community to do a contest or a server project.
Thoughts?

 

[DarthHonky]

This is a good idea, the only part of it that I'd disagree with would be making the shop/station planet-sized. An object that big, with players running around and who knows how many ships docked would probably be a major lagfactory.

 

[CyberTao]

I assume Custom shops might be possible with the LUA scripting? Or you might be able to upright replace them like you can defualt Stations :u

As an added note, you can put Shops on player stations o -o

Patrolling ships might be added with the AI overhaul we will get eventually :u

Welcome to Starmade o/ The great waiting game owo

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

I suspect that the current abandoned space stations will soon serve a purpose (likely candidate:storage depot for trading guild. They definitely aren't built for combat), otherwise they would've been merged already. Additionally, the shops are still invulnerable and that's important. Abandoned stations becoming invulnerable would make the best preexisting base structure unusable and making shops vulnerable would cause severe problems with players being unable to buy things.
Some shops already are the newer model with one NPC. Likely that will just get expanded.

I'd love design contests for shops. The thing that really irks me about structures designed by a game's developers is they usually lack symmetry and have problems with interior design. The rings on shops, as well as pretty much everything in abandoned space stations (The hangar parts are especially bad, but even the elevator's tube is off), are asymmetric; shops have no interior design and abandoned stations have those upper-level hallways that don't connect right to the power containers.

 

[Ithirahad]

I suspect that the current abandoned space stations will soon serve a purpose (likely candidate:storage depot for trading guild. They definitely aren't built for combat), otherwise they would've been merged already. Additionally, the shops are still invulnerable and that's important. Abandoned stations becoming invulnerable would make the best preexisting base structure unusable and making shops vulnerable would cause severe problems with players being unable to buy things.
Some shops already are the newer model with one NPC. Likely that will just get expanded.

I'd love design contests for shops. The thing that really irks me about structures designed by a game's developers is they usually lack symmetry and have problems with interior design. The rings on shops, as well as pretty much everything in abandoned space stations (The hangar parts are especially bad, but even the elevator's tube is off), are asymmetric; shops have no interior design and abandoned stations have those upper-level hallways that don't connect right to the power containers.

Not to mention the fact that pirate station rings are asymmetrical... learned this the hard way when I tried to build inside them with symmetry. I ended up just cutting off the bottom ring of the station and rebuilding half of the top ring. It sucked, but now I have a cool space station on the Test Server. :3

 

[NeonSturm]

Sometimes It would be great to have repeated XY or ZY or XZ parts for a lower resource-drain on your computer.