My Thoughts on the New SM

[Napther]

Actually, Island-ships arent really that much an issue since right now the reactor purple alien hentai tentacle disables or interrupts the power supply.

Try doing that at combat ranges

Let alone, trying to do that while the island ship 1-shots you anyway because it has maximum stabiliser distance that your RP ship cannot afford to have had

 

[The Judge]

Last 30 Days     75.1     -0.1     -0.08%     162
January 2018     75.1     +7.6     +11.22%     162
December 2017     67.5     +9.7     +16.79%     120
November 2017     57.8     -2.3     -3.89%     117
October 2017     60.2     +3.2     +5.62%     114
September 2017     57.0     -8.0     -12.32%     112

source
From average 116 up to 162 means a raise of 40 percent players compared to the last 4 months.

Will these players be permanent though? I believe the new increase in players has been caused purely by people interested to see the new power changes, however I don't think they will stay. Players who play multiplayer, who are the vast majority of the community to my knowledge, are unhappy with the new features, and probably won't stay.

 

[Lancake]

The next thing that needs to be fixed is the integrity mechanic. As it is now, it encourages players to build all systems in large cubes for maximum durability.

Could you provide a few example groups that you think should be stable yet aren't, and vice versa? I've been changing the config values to get a more forgiving scale, based on some of the feedback posted in a discord group. I've only received a few examples to work with and other players may have different expectations.

Some ways of building though, would never work.
For example a cube area that is filled with a "checkerboard" pattern. In theory that's 50% dense (and should still be OK) yet with the current system that is the most unstable configuration possible if the integrity value is shared with each other. This would only apply for systems without a controller like thrust, as any controller block has its own independent integrity value.

Edit: fixed markup

 

[JinM]

Thats the peak players, not average. Average players onyl went up by 7.6.

AAAAAaah. You are totally right. I forgot to take the real average numbers. Dunno. The last column looked to promissing. lol

 

[GDPR 302420]

Last 30 Days     75.1     -0.1     -0.08%     162
January 2018     75.1     +7.6     +11.22%     162
December 2017     67.5     +9.7     +16.79%     120
November 2017     57.8     -2.3     -3.89%     117
October 2017     60.2     +3.2     +5.62%     114
September 2017     57.0     -8.0     -12.32%     112

source
From average 116 up to 162 means a raise of 40 percent players compared to the last 4 months.

This gain has happened before, you get a small spike of players every now and then and that spike drops off after awhile, the overall trend in players is still a downward trend. This spike is unlikely to stay for long, as shown by other spikes.

Also, as someone pointed our earlier, these stats are misleading, the actual average player count has not changed very much at all.

Excuse me but, how in hell do you know that? Are you a game developer who has made games in Java before with the same complexity of Starmade? Are you intimately familiar with the game's code?

I don't need to be have a medical degree to know that getting bit by a brown snake is a terrible idea.

 

[JinM]

The average usercount this month compared to the arythmetic average of the last 4 months changed for a plus of 25% in the current month. From an average of 60.625 (Sept-Dec) to 75.1. That's noticable, but ofcourse less than my first interpretation of 40%.

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

Could you provide a few example groups that you think should be stable yet aren't, and vice versa? I've been changing the config values to get a more forgiving scale, based on some of the feedback posted in a discord group. I've only received a few examples to work with and other players may have different expectations.

Some ways of building though, would never work.
For example a cube area that is filled with a "checkerboard" pattern. In theory that's 50% dense (and should still be OK) yet with the current system that is the most unstable configuration possible if the integrity value is shared with each other. This would only apply for systems without a controller like thrust, as any controller block has its own independent integrity value.

Edit: fixed markup

For me the majority of my systems can be expected to be sandwiched between interior/interior or interior and exterior.

Something like this may work:

1. Touching Faces: -8
   
2. Touching Faces: -4
   
3. Touching Faces: -2
   
4. Touching Faces: +0
   
5. Touching Faces: +1
   
6. Touching Faces: +2

The other idea I had was to have other things such as hull and armor count to integrity. So if your systems are sandwiched between decks they are fine. Not sure how viable that idea is or its impact on calculations.

 

[Napther]

Integrity bludgeons with a giant metal 1-dimensional rod people who use certain systems decoratively.

All my ships refitted thus far begin with negative thrust integrity because I use them in lining my corridors for their grey line effect.

 

[Non]

All my ships refitted thus far begin with negative thrust integrity because I use them in lining my corridors for their grey line effect.

Well we all know Schine hates interiors.

 

[YamiHikari]

Something like this may work:

1. Touching Faces: -8
   
2. Touching Faces: -4
   
3. Touching Faces: -2
   
4. Touching Faces: +0
   
5. Touching Faces: +1
   
6. Touching Faces: +2

Ouch. Those are some heavy penalties. I think your suggestion for 4, 5, and 6 faces works, but -8 for 1 touching face (and I'm assuming -10 for 0) would kill the integrity pretty quickly. Of course, it may work really well. What we really need is extensive testing and tweaking. We'll never know what works until we try.
[doublepost=1517840724,1517840619][/doublepost]

Well we all know Schine hates interiors.

Actually, what it does is bring up the question of inclusion in builds. In fact, this raises the possibility of maybe being able to "deactivate" blocks so they can be used aesthetically without contributing to integrity (with the tradeoff of not being usable).

 

[Edymnion]

Could you provide a few example groups that you think should be stable yet aren't, and vice versa? I've been changing the config values to get a more forgiving scale, based on some of the feedback posted in a discord group. I've only received a few examples to work with and other players may have different expectations.

This is one I was working on prior to the update:

Its got a pretty big integrity penalty, while this one is a little smaller but same basic design and it's in the positive:

[doublepost=1517849159,1517847852][/doublepost]

Will these players be permanent though? I believe the new increase in players has been caused purely by people interested to see the new power changes, however I don't think they will stay.

Many of these are existing players who are interested in the game and are just checking back in as big updates happen to see what changed while they wait for a more polished game (aka Beta).

But honestly, the playerbase numbers right now don't matter. There is no advertising campaign, there is no push to attract players, etc, because there is no need for them right now. This is alpha, and while we the players that are here would LIKE to have a bigger community, that just makes things messier and harder for the devs to sift through. Basically right now we're in the stage of development that would normally be kept behind closed doors and limited to maybe 2 dozen testers.

Players who play multiplayer, who are the vast majority of the community to my knowledge, are unhappy with the new features, and probably won't stay.

Eh, may be a majority of the VOCAL community HERE. There are differences. Anyone that comes onto a message board like this is already a small minority. And I know more than one person who got tired of the toxicity we had here before and left because of it.

We the users don't have metrics on how many people are actually active and playing in single player or are playing in private servers or even public servers but not coming onto these boards.

And don't forget, in any situation, the people who are unhappy are generally the ones to speak up, while those who are happy just keep on doing their thing. Thats true in video games, in fast food, or shopping at Walmart. Happy people don't tend to come out in droves to say "I'm happy with it!", so the majority of any given vocal group is going to be negative reviews, no matter how small of an actual minority they are.

 

[Nosajimiki]

Could you provide a few example groups that you think should be stable yet aren't, and vice versa? I've been changing the config values to get a more forgiving scale, based on some of the feedback posted in a discord group. I've only received a few examples to work with and other players may have different expectations.

This issue is way worse than what ships do or don't meet integrity, but rather what happens when you lose it. Right now there is massive game crashing lagg that happens when even small ships start to burn (I've killed the game shooting up a 30k ship with square system blocks), or worse, the invincibility exploit where current integrity mechanics can be used to make a ship literally impossible to overheat by intentionally overloading the game engine. I'd VERY strongly suggest moving away from chain reaction explosions AND the future planned "acid" effects. The game engine can not handle them.

Acid sounds nice when considering what a single shot looks like, but once you start hitting a ship with a continuous stream of acid effects, you'll quickly overflow the game buffer, and this could be abused with obliterative armor designed to maximize the amount of useless stuff that you burn in the beginning of your buffer to make actual system damage fall off the back end of your buffer.

And for integrity, try using a mathematical penalty like bonus damage to a system HP pool, then deactivate the system when it runs out of HP, or make a system quickly lose performance as it falls into negative integrity. This way, you can disable a spaghetti systems using a single meta variable instead of complex systems that require referencing your entire block system. IE: no extra strain on the game itself. Like I repeated warned against before the new integrity mechanic was introduced, procedurally selecting and physically destroying blocks is not performant.

 

[Bladeriker]

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying I am upset for having to adjust to the changes. Overall I like them, and feel they add a new dimension to SM. With the latest update we have even more freedom to move and build as needed.

Now I am waiting for the weapons update, so for now I am adjusting my old ships to the new system.

 

[Edymnion]

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying I am upset for having to adjust to the changes. Overall I like them, and feel they add a new dimension to SM. With the latest update we have even more freedom to move and build as needed.

Now I am waiting for the weapons update, so for now I am adjusting my old ships to the new system.

Yup, I learned a long time ago, if I make something I REALLY like, I save a separate copy of the shell. Things change, and they're going to keep changing all the way up until we go to Beta, so its generally easier to redo systems from scratch than it is to re-juggle innards via retro-fitting.

 

[Valiant70]

Could you provide a few example groups that you think should be stable yet aren't, and vice versa? I've been changing the config values to get a more forgiving scale, based on some of the feedback posted in a discord group. I've only received a few examples to work with and other players may have different expectations.

One I know off the top of my head. Place four groups of thrusters, each sized 3x3x7. Last I checked, negative integrity.

Fundamentally, the trouble isn’t any specific shape though.

The real problem is that having excess integrity is an advantage. In other words, a ship with a creatively shaped system with +12 or so integrity has a disadvantage against a ship with a cube system that has +238 integrity or something. The cube can soak up more shots before it starts exploding, making it meta.

This really isn’t necessary for killing spaghetti. Integrity just needs to be a threshold. Build spaghetti, and it explodes. Build ANYTHING over 0 integrity and it should be as durable as a cube. If it’s not as durable as a cube, creative freedom suffers.

 

[Nosajimiki]

Could you provide a few example groups that you think should be stable yet aren't, and vice versa? I've been changing the config values to get a more forgiving scale, based on some of the feedback posted in a discord group. I've only received a few examples to work with and other players may have different expectations.

This issue is way worse than what ships do or don't meet integrity, but rather what happens when you lose it. Right now there is massive game crashing lagg that happens when even small ships start to burn (I've killed the game shooting up a 30k ship with square system blocks), or worse, the invincibility exploit where current integrity mechanics can be used to make a ship literally impossible to overheat by intentionally overloading the game engine. I'd VERY strongly suggest moving away from chain reaction explosions AND the future planned "acid" effects. The game engine can not handle them.

Acid sounds nice when considering what a single shot looks like, but once you start hitting a ship with a continuous stream of acid effects, you'll quickly overflow the game buffer, and this could be abused with obliterative armor designed to maximize the amount of useless stuff that you burn in the beginning of your buffer to make actual system damage fall off the back end of your buffer.

And for integrity, try using a mathematical penalty like bonus damage to a system HP pool, then deactivate the system when it runs out of HP, or make a system quickly lose performance as it falls into negative integrity. This way, you can disable a spaghetti systems using a single meta variable instead of complex systems that require referencing your entire block system. IE: no extra strain on the game itself. Like I repeated warned against before the new integrity mechanic was introduced, procedurally selecting and physically destroying blocks is not performant.

One other issue with chain reactions it that it takes a VERY long time for 5x5 block explosions to destroy a spaghetti ship. Even if you could get the performance issues handled and the exploits removed, spaghetti ships would still make very viable doomsday ships. A 30k Speg similar to the "Fair and Balanced" could be sent into a battlefield and still destroy a much larger titan or fleet of ships before enough explosions happen to cripple it. Then the player just needs to log out and let the sector refresh to stop the burning, then recycle whatever is left (or not since it was only a 30k ship anyway).

 

[NTIMESc]

Integrity bludgeons with a giant metal 1-dimensional rod people who use certain systems decoratively.

Without a way to discriminate between decorative and functional I would prefer a penalty for overuse of systems decoratively. Why should a ship function properly with thrusters lining the hallways? Personally, I'd like to see that sort of set up fry the crew alive moments before the ship self destructs. I would also like to see a better decorative system, perhaps with a generic decorative block that you can change the texture on.

I'd VERY strongly suggest moving away from chain reaction explosions AND the future planned "acid" effects. The game engine can not handle them.

I thought the point of this idea was to improve performance. The game engine doesn't seem to handle the current way of doing things either.

Acid sounds nice when considering what a single shot looks like, but once you start hitting a ship with a continuous stream of acid effects, you'll quickly overflow the game buffer, and this could be abused with obliterative armor designed to maximize the amount of useless stuff that you burn in the beginning of your buffer to make actual system damage fall off the back end of your buffer.

How does the current system work when the server is saturated with requests to apply damage?

One other issue with chain reactions it that it takes a VERY long time for 5x5 block explosions to destroy a spaghetti ship.

Is the 5x5 explosion model hard-coded so it can't be adapted to ridiculously fragile ships? Would it be possible to scale the damage inversely to the integrity?

 

[Nosajimiki]

I thought the point of this idea was to improve performance. The game engine doesn't seem to handle the current way of doing things either.

Performance was a stated goal of power 2.0, but integrity is very performance heavy. Destroying a 30k ship now causes at least as much lag as a comparable 500k ship with docked armor did in power 1.0.

How does the current system work when the server is saturated with requests to apply damage?

It drops damage. So if you hit something with too many weapons at once, some of them will "phase through" meaning it's damage just gets ignored. With Acid, you'd queue up a massive list of damage strikes which take much longer to individually process because you have to do all these extra checks for adjacent blocks. While things process; so, you'd overflow the buffer very quickly maximizing how fast you can die. Think about mining asteroids, how if you try to to mine over N-blocks a second, the game lags out and your mining starts to slow down. That is what Acid will do, meaning all you need to do to protect your ship is set up a lot of obliterates, and let the natural limits of the game engine protect you.

Is the 5x5 explosion model hard-coded so it can't be adapted to ridiculously fragile ships? Would it be possible to scale the damage inversely to the integrity?

Here is the thing, true spaghetti ships are VERY low density. Even if they are being plagued by 50x50 block explosions, that is is only 50 blocks per blast. On a ship that might be 500,000+ blocks total, it still won't make a big difference compared to the amount of time it takes a spaghetti to kill people

 

[alterintel]

I've also been waiting for this update to come out before I start refitting my ships for power 2.0. But now that I know weapons will be redone, I'm waiting again.

When I design the systems of a ship first I start off with how powerful the weapons, shields need to be. Then I calculate the power required and make the Reactor. Next I start balancing the power/mass/effects until have my ship min/maxed.

So now I'm waiting on the weapons update to see how much power they will use.

 

[Nauvran]

I've also been waiting for this update to come out before I start refitting my ships for power 2.0. But now that I know weapons will be redone, I'm waiting again.

When I design the systems of a ship first I start off with how powerful the weapons, shields need to be. Then I calculate the power required and make the Reactor. Next I start balancing the power/mass/effects until have my ship min/maxed.

So now I'm waiting on the weapons update to see how much power they will use.

Use the time to learn how reactors and chambers work, figure out how to best place the things down to get the optimal stuff out of them. otherwises you're going to be dead of boredom before weapons 3 comes out in 6-8 months.