Oxygen, Atomospheres, NPC Crews and Repairing

[Artaxias]

Oxygen/Atmopsheres: Players need oxygen to survive. In order for this to be practical for this game however some though has to be given. For ships, an area must be sealed off from space and have an oxygen cube inside for a steady flow of oxygen to exist in the ship. For stations, simply seal off the hangar from the rest of the station and have doors or fields that players can travel through to get inside. Players, however, should still be able to survive for a significant time outside these oxygen areas due to their space suits. For the spawn perhaps we could have a large station with sufficient oxygen levels, and make this spawn station indestructible. Some planets will have sufficient oxygen and others will not. So some planets may need to have sealed structures built in order for players to live on it. When an oxygen area is sealed, the oxygen cube will turn green (default is red). The more oxygen cubes, the more area the oxygen supply covers. Any oxygen outside a sealed area will be lost.

Oxygen may be difficult to implement, but I much rather see this next suggestion implemented anyway.

NPC Crews/Reparing: Obviously it would be a pain for a player to maintain the oxygen area of his ship during battle. For this we could have NPC crews that replace blocks that are destroyed (slowly, and these NPC's can take damage and even die). You of course, must have the blueprints saved and set in some other block as this is what the crew will repair it to. In addition, instead of just poofing a ship from the catalog out of midair, NPC crews which you must hire will slowly build it. As for the repairing, they will simply slowly replace the blocks from inside the ship.

In addition, these crews would be able to man turrets and fly ships for you, essentially allowing players to own a small NPC faction. This would significantly improve singleplayer and mulitplayer alike. There would be a cap on how many NPC's you can own, and they could only be able to man ships up to a certain mass to prevent one player from manning multiple huge motherships.

The types of NPC's:

Technician: This NPC will move around inside the ship and make repairs by replacing destroyed blocks and repairing damaged ones. They will only repair blocks destroyed by weapons, not removed manually.

Marine: These troops possess blaster rifles and can board ships or defend ships from boarding, though they must be taken close enough manually or by an NPC pilot (make your own boarding vessel for them to fly).

**A side note from this, boarding is only plausible if the enemy ship is not moving and you want to keep the ship. Therefore, it would be necessary for people to be able to disable the enemy ship by destroying enough thrusters or power units leaving the ship dead in space (or the ship can move very slowly).

Pilot: These troops can man small ships and turrets.

If the player is killed, the NPC's will surrender will either disappear or join the victor. These NPC's can be hired from space stations or perhaps there own unique NPC space station (this unique space station would have a bar, hotel and basically a place where space mercenaries would hang around).

***Another note. Perhaps a block must be placed similar to the Bobby AI to control each NPC.

 

[RossTiger]

The idea of oxygen is a really interesting one, and your right, could be very difficult to implement, but worth it Sealed area of the ship required to sustain oxygen - I like, if you want to get complex you might also want to add oxygen scrubbers Safe indestructible space station at spawn - I like....not much to say I just think it\'s a good idea, but you\'d have to have pretty big hanger bays I think to cope with the influx of players on very large servers. Oxygen on planets, some have more oxygen than others - I like very much, basically the amount of oxygen could affect that rate at which your oxygen meter diminishes e.g. low oxygen planets your gauge goes down at half speed to when you in space. High oxygen planets your gauge doesn\'t go down at all and fills up if it\'s low......possible high risk of explosions in oxygen rich environments? Getting a bit ahead of myself here.



Crew I actually think would be more difficult to implement that Oxygen, although no less a good idea I play FTL at having crew members on your ship could be very useful, you could assign them to systems or just general repair. The difficulty I think would come in simulating these NPC\'s, a computer AI is one thing, a moving NPC is another, but hopefully they can solve it

I like the idea of boarding by the way, I can imagine teleporting onto an enemy ship while the sheilds are down (when your a member of a large crew of course, not the pilots) producing quite a lot of \"stuck in blocks\" bugs (maybe that could be a danger lol). But the idea of maybe taking their shields down and latching onto their hull, then breaking through with something akind to a blow torch which breaks the hull down slower than clicking (lol) is an exciting idea!

 

[Artaxias]

Thanks for commenting. Your ideas are great additions that I didn\'t think of. I like the idea of how the oxygen level would vary, not just oxygen or no oxygen. Maybe not explosions, but wildfires every now and then in high oxygen regions.

In addition, it would be nice if weather was added such as rain, snow, thunder and wind. It would be interesting too if the occasional asteroid hit a planet.

Furthermore, your blowtorch idea sounds interesting. Perhaps you can send a boarding ship that can shoot a beam that draws the boarding ship towards the other ship. From there you can use a special handheld weapon to slowly destroy blocks (a block every 2-3 seconds or so). I thought about having a tractor beam that pulls the enemy ship towards you, but that just seems a little OP to me. That being said, it should not ruled out. Perhaps this beam can only be successful if the enemy shields are down and they don\'t have enough thrust to break the power of the beam. Could be a good idea.

One more thing, perhaps there should be a jetpack equipment a player can wield which doubles there speed or so. This pack would have to be loaded with fuel and would run out of fuel fairly quick.

 

[TheSavage0ne]

Having npc crews would be a new level of npc, amazing idea, hopefully its added.

 

[HomoNova]

A ElectroMagnetic Pulse could be employed to disable a ship in preperation for boarding. It would be a better system than the power drain beam, for which I have found no use. It could also be used to temporarily lower enemy shields to increase damage. So that it isn\'t too easy, the size of grouping increases power could keep it so that a small ship can\'t take out shields of a far larger ship

 

[Damiann47]

I do think that Oxygen is already a given, and as savage0ne as said it is an expected feature... I think. Anyway as for NPC crews I could care any less about them, I rather use other players.

 

[Artaxias]

Some good ideas put forth here by other people. EMP is a sound idea and perhaps this EMP will be more effective when the enemy shields are down/low. Thank you to everyone for commenting.

Also, I am pleased to hear oxygen will be added, I hope schema keeps my ideas as well as others in mind while implementing this.

@Damiann47

I understand you may prefer other players, however some people do not have a committed group of people large enough to man their ships. In addition, this would help advance the singleplayer option as well.

 

[Guarana_SUI]

Great ideas!

For the Oxygen thing you should check out my thread about gravity and the specific diffrence between the inside(ship,Station) and the outside (Space).
http://star-made.org/content/gravity-system-overhaul-also-oxygen

As for the NPC\'s i really like the Idea of having a Crew to add some life to your ship because at the moment its very lonley. also i could totally see a alarm system goes on when the ship gets atacked and all the crew members goes nuts, panicin and running around. xD

 

[Artaxias]

I checked out your thread and like your ideas.

As for your comment on the crew panicking that got me thinking. It would be cool to have an alarm system when being fired at (which can be disabled per user preference) and in addition to that an AI that says things like \"Shields at 83%\" and \"Hull damaged received\". It puts more life into the game when there\'s dialogue and interaction with other people and AI\'s.

 

[Damiann47]

Yeah its mostly coming from my experiance with AI is that they\'re not too great, I just find that they hinder me rather then assist me. Plus I\'m wondering about how they path around the ship, there are a few compex interiors or ones with no interiors.

 

[blokPhoenix]

most of the ships ive seen/use are just massive solid chunks of blocks with a tiny open area for your core, not much walking space, so it\'d be very hard neigh impossible to get npc\'s to function well on ships like these(which are the meta). perhaps instead of the 3 npc types we get a new AI block, the repairer, and expand the existing BOBBY to include defense/offense. defense mode will detach automatically when the ship is hit by an enemy(if the AI is on a ship) and will shoot at the enemy untill recalled, out of range(would be nice to add an auto-dock) or the target is destroyed. offense mode will do the same except must be manually detached and will chase further?

for the marines, maybe instead they get deployed out of the ship and begin firing or maybe trying to sabotage the enemy ship with grenades or C4? once again i see major problems with people getting \'beamed\' onboard, who\'s to say where an actual room is and where a 2x1 gap in their sheild dispersers are?

point is, i can see alot of problems with the whole boarding and having npcs moving on your ship during combat.

 

[Fuguzawaz]

Why do you say that the NPCs having a tough time getting around is a bad thing? Seems to me that it would encourage people to build ACTUAL hallways, like you would have in a real ship. Also, since the NPCs would not be as good as a real crew, it would encourage you to get players for your crew, but NPCs are there if you can\'t find any volunteers. If your ship is a 2x1 hallway that only leads straight to the core, then you don\'t deserve to have a crew. It seems to me that this point that was brought up is a pro instead of a con. This would make people build more realistic cruisers.

I also like the blow torch idea, this game needs items that the players can use while not piloting their ships, like torches and laser pistols. I imagine that a tractor beam would work exactly like every other system in this game, and it would be how many tractor beam blocks VS how many thrusters they have, and hey, why not, in a 1v1 ratio. Once the enemy ship is close enough the two become docked, and the NPCs all flood out of the doors that you will have to place on your ship, and begin welding through the hull. If an NPC \"sees\" a friendly crew already welding (NPC or otherwise) it would simply file in line behind him instead of starting a new welding spot. Another idea would be that the pilot of your ship would have to blast a hole in the enemy ship in order to board, or the NPCs could just use the enemies door that they will have had to install (but it takes time for the door to open, because the NPCs have to hack it, the bigger the door, the longer it takes, and the more NPCs around the door, the shorter it takes) The only thing that I can\'t quite work out is how to keep the NPCs from falling out of your ship when they float into space if you have a gravity module on. I GUESS the NPCs would be unaffected by the GU (gravity unit) however if they could find a fix for this that would be cool, like maybe if the NPCs are headed to board, they have to unattatch from the gravity unit first.

As for the block to be placed for each NPC on your ship, that sounds quite fair. It would be their \"bed\". Not only that, but with the home block, the NPCs could be set to different \"modes\", such as repair mode and assault (board) mode. I imagine that you would switch between these modes similar to how you switch between ship and turret mode with the BOBBY AI module, and the activate button would instead be a sleep button, so you don\'t have to have all of your crew running around at once.

Another possibility would be that the NPCs would work like the weapons would, it would need the main block (maybe called kitchen) that you would have to link the secondary blocks too, and then the secondary block (maybe called the bed) where the NPCs spawn from, and you can switch the NPCs into different modes (like the aforementioned repair and boarding modes) similar to the way you switch the percentages on your antimatter guns, this way you can put your NPCs to sleep via a click of the mouse from the ship core, and you can have multipule groups of NPCs with different main computers, so that at the right time you can activate and put to sleep the appropriate NPCs.

Also, I am pretty sure that NPC crew is in the planned features, right? Perhaps I am thinking of a different game...

 

[Artaxias]

This is the list I refer to for planned features:

http://star-made.org/wiki/planned-features

In addition to other exciting features \"Crews AI\" is on there. I checked this list before i made this thread but couldn\'t say for sure whether or not \"Crews AI\" was there. Even if that feature was already there, the discussion on this thread has brought out some good ideas which can be used if/when this feature is implemented.

I like what you had to say and have some comments for that, but as I\'m on a phone right now ill save that for when im on my computer. Thanks for the input everyone!

**EDIT

Okay, got on my computer and now I can type more. First thing to note is that AI crews and NPC crews are different in the fact that AI stands for Artificial Intelligence and NPC stands for Non-Playable character. How big the difference is depends on schema, because really, an NPC could be an AI as long as the AI resembles a character.

Now, onto the NPC crew. I think that before you can hire use these NPC crews or buy an NPC crew block from a shop (if my mercenary station idea isn\'t used) you must first buy and place a communications system block on your ship. You could place an NPC block without this communications system, but it would render useless. In order for the block to work effectively it must be connected to the communications system.

Rough Idea for NPC block and communications system:

Communications System Commands:

• Box that can be active or inactive \"Remain in Ship\" (when active all NPC\'s will enter there block and remain until the command is made inactive
• \"Alarm System Active\" box when active an alarm goes off when the ship is shot at and deactives if 30 seconds go by without being shot (this feature is for those who like it, and would serve no tactical purpose besides notifying you you\'re under attack)

There could be other cool features for this block but I can\'t think of any at the moment. Also, it would be useful if there was a counter on the GUI somewhere that how many crew members are inside the ship and how many are out so people can take off assured there crew is not getting left behind.

NPC Block, I was thinking the pilot, technician and marine block could all be unique.

Pilot Block

• Active/Inactive Box
• Turret/Ship/Boarding Pilot command (Boarding pilot means it would wait until the boarding vessel is filled with marines, perhaps a seat block can be placed an connected to the marine block so each marine has an assigned ship to go to)

Marine Block (Marines are defending by default but will attack when ordered too)

• Active/Inactive (can\'t think of another box feel free to suggest)

Technician/Engineer

• Active/Inactive
• Combat/Repair (I was thinking that only engineers could use the special blow torch to cut through ships hulls, they too should then also be able to be connected to a seat block in a boarding vessel)

These are all rough ideas. I am open to others input and am brainstorming my own ideas on how to make this better.

One more thing, perhaps there could be a couple keys on the keyboard assigned to the communications system. Like a key that tells your NPC\'s to board, to return to ship (i think this would be better than having to check a box in the comms system block) and pilots to attack/ceasefire (perhaps pilots should be able to be assigned to ship/turret cores, this would be incredibly useful if a pilot NPC was added).

 

[upsidedownfox]

how about if there were 2 types of crew: actual living creatures and drones. humans are better at doing certain tasks, but drones can go outside the ship, making them good for repair and going in dangerous areas. This would have to be coupled to oxygen, so drones would not need oxygen to survive.

Of course, there would need to be a way to prevent one ship from sending over tons of drones to an enemy ship and wrecking it without firing a shot.

 

[TheSavage0ne]

That sounds like an AMAZING idea!

 

[Artaxias]

Drones is an interesting concept. Maybe it should be possible to create drones by placing a ship core and then adding another Drone Computer block to that ship. These drones would be just like other ships except with a specific purpose. For example someone can outfit powerbeams or whatever they\'re called (I forget) and assign them to repair a certain ship.

 

[Winterhome]

Drones:
Target Friendly option with subgroupings.
Target Object (non-controlled ships, asteroids, planets, etc.) option with subgroupings.
Target Hostile

Subgroupings: Target Damaged (checks for damaged blocks, then shoots at them), Target Power Module, Ram

Rework the AI to not so much shoot AM cannons as shoot whatever the heck they have mounted. IE: Point and click type aiming as in many other games.


Could also be an interesting way of adding automatic mines. Hostile ship comes into your territory, they run head first into a minefield, and decide to turn away only to discover that there are three 20m^3 spikey mines floating their way.

 

[Miow22]

I really think that oxygen would be so cool!

 

[Ithirahad]

What if drones could be built like ships, but with microblocks (And a 1-block space limit; it would be like a standard docking cube but reduced down to tiny scale.), and then generated in a Drone Bay of some kind. Then you could have a ship that deploys a minefield (Drone Disintegrator power would stack, up to a full disintegrator cube being equivalent to one disintegrator block floating in space), or releases a swarm of swarmer drones, or has a few point-defense miniturrets that shoot down missiles or boarders (It should be possible to dock drones in some kind of special Drone Turret Module and use them as mini-turrets as well), and so on and so forth... Drones would have to be incredibly expensive to balance this out, though, or require something that not everyone can get without giving something else up. (My research tree would make that work, but most people disapproved of it for whatever reason.)

 

[NeonSturm]

Oxygen is easy to implement! Just like Fluids!

HP = pressure, weight.

gasses both take the average pressure if they have a difference of at least 2.

Water always keeps the lower one at a pressure of 1..10 more than their own, if it has not full pressure.

It tries to make an average between two horizontal neighbours

If a block\'s hp get changed, save the adjacent for re-calculation (add to a fifo buffer, toggle 1 bit on them to avoid adding them twice)

maximum recursion per second = 2 blocks.

maximum blocks per second from fifo buffer to calculate: 100..1000



The problem is to make it look realistic and to get the gravity orientation on new-version ships.