New Game Mechanic: Spontaneous Ship Part Entities

[jayman38]

Based on the ideas of "ejecting" power cores and destroyed ships "breaking apart" to create debris fields, I think Starmade would benefit from a new game mechanic where parts of the ship are cut from the ship and pasted into an "asteroid"-style entity that can be thrown from the ship or drift away from it slowly until it slows to a stop.

This could be the kind of thing that makes "break-off" less laggy. In fact, this may already be a mechanic in the game, part of the existing "break-off" system.

I recommend that players be able to define "break-apart" items such as powercores, antennas, wings, etc. And also, that the new entities can be given a chance to explode after some time (which may be shortened, depending on damage). And finally, "break-off" items should be activatable (ejectable) via logic.

This could also introduce a new way to launch torpedoes, pods (escape, science, and otherwise), and drones. So therefore, it would need some balancing suggestions from the studio audience.

 

[nightrune]

Break off is technically already part of the game. The problem is its currently broken and crazy laggy. Turns out its a really hard computational problem to do fast, but I believe is planned for the game.

 

[Lone_Puppy]

Break off is technically already part of the game. The problem is its currently broken and crazy laggy. Turns out its a really hard computational problem to do fast, but I believe is planned for the game.

Yeah, and when I tested it, the ship poops out asteroid parts and then crashes the game.

 

[NeonSturm]

The 2 problems with break off –as I see it– are, that 1: you spawn many many entities which can collide 2: detecting broken off parts.

Spoiler: What I think about Problem #2

Reality solves the 2nd problem by individually handling each object – something that is beyond computing power, or not?

Perhaps you could compute physics on a GPU and graphical representation on another or in another time-frame, if you unify calculations enough but on the processor it's truly too much to handle.
We can abstract particle or wave-function reality for larger volumes with more complex properties.

The lack of detection of breaking off shows us the inaccuracy of our abstraction
caused by our lack of computing power OR choice of inefficient |pre·mature OR not optimzed| algorithms.
​

What could a mature integrity-check algorithm look like?

Slice your ship into sticks with a length (run length compression).
Merge touching sticks in 4 directions by selecting the lowest ID – or deleting the higher ID from a table.
Walk through surviving IDs - each one is a separate entity.

Subjectively/Translated-to-voxel-games "Reality checks" for axial weak points every time thrust is applied to axial sticks.
Centrifugal forces require radial sticks or 2 axial checks, but without weak points, these two checks bring the same result so you only need 1.

Will this algorithm be faster than generating light?
Perhaps, I don't know how Starmade works internally.​