Polishing patch after the HP update

[MeepMoop]

Schine has lived up to and very soon will deliver on a lot of the planned requested features for Starmade. I think that's great, though Starmade still doesn't feel like a complete or unified game yet, and I think that has something to do with the lack of polish. It's the things like bullet effects, lack of explosions, kinda buggy sound engine, and the likes. New players and old players may find the game to feel a lot more full and complete and the battles would be so much more fun and exhilarating with some classic sci-fi effects.

In order to give this suggestion some substance, here's a few basic changes, though it'd be better if some other people suggested some changes to aesthetics/visuals/audio.

1. Make cannon bullets look like tracer rounds. (Can of course be changed in the graphics settings if your computer is the Latvian dream) (Here's an example of the kind of bullets that might be nice)
   
2. Lasers increase more in size with more blocks.
3. Better thruster plumes. (Larger/Longer/Single and centered)
4. Make logic "pipes" optionally invisible.
5. Add better weapon hit effects. (Larger and more vibrant bullet hit effects, explosions, and etc)
6. Add weapon fire sounds. (Maybe local to the entity if you argue sound doesn't travel in space because it can travel from the attached barrel through the ship)
7. Make the "space wind" sound less intrusive and softer, like this:
   Spoiler: "Space wind" example.
8. Make personal computers/displays make sci-fi beeps. (Similar to stuff like this.
   Spoiler: Computer beeping example.

   )
9. A more integrated and intuitive third person mode. (I know it's unrealistic, but I think it would be really nice to see and control. If server owners want to, they would be able to turn off third person ability with an option.)

Anyway, the purpose of me asking this is because I want Starmade to feel more like Sci-fi. I want the battles to be flashier and all that stuff, and I think that Schine really has added quite a lot of great features, including the long requested rails, and will soon be adding the long requested HP. It would be a great idea to focus on general polishing and bug fixing after the HP update, and it would make Starmade overall a more engaging and entertaining game.

 

[Gamel]

for 2,3, there are mods to fix that, i am waiting schine to make those mod official and default

 

[Yrjosmiel]

#4 YES PLESS

 

[Byamarro]

for 2,3, there are mods to fix that, i am waiting schine to make those mod official and default

Definitelly that should be default.

 

[Visitor]

Slightly controversial but "bringing attention to opinions that are not so uncommon" post time:

To be honest, I care not much for graphical polish. In fact, I suspect that the game doesn't seem much like a completed product not because of lack of polish, but still noticeable a lack of content falling outside of construction. Even more, I know of some people who picked up the game because they don't care for audio-visuals as much as actual depth and ambition of the project. However, the whole gameplay currently revolves around building objects, with any and every way of using them being very simple and often of little point beyond some credits and immediate satisfaction (if such can be derived from it).

Yes, the sound engine should be finished one day and the sound effects already in the game - used. But I'd rather push all those flashes, shiny explosions and so on at the bottom of the list (unless they'd be very easily implementable) and concentrate on churning out core features and optimization as even with stuff like rails, bigger ships and planets there's still quite some lag on average-spec computer - which may be unavoidable but together with the rest of the game - should be polished as well as possible.

As some threads on this forum and quite a few discussions on game's Steam page, message boards and in other assorted online communities indicate, it's the gameplay itself that is often lacking. One creates great ships and stations but there's rarely anything out there requiring them. Even most of the current activities of mining and ship battle are just absolute basics of most modern freeplay space games.

I suspect that rather than with beeps and impact shocks - which would be nice to have eventually provided the performance would be good - the game would do better with current features refined - for me, in no specific order, it'd be content targeted at 'infantry'/shipless gameplay - from places made to be entered and explored as a person to equipment and activities requiring personal actions, cockpits and command bridges instead of cores people bother Schine about since years, some basic survival elements like limited oxygen, medicines (if only in form of magical health and antipoison pick-me-ups), life support with oxygen generation block and ducts connected to different areas of ship (maybe even depressurization upon hull breach and related effects), quests and overarching world's background, actual diversified, interactive NPC (potentially including more 'living' and customizable crewmembers) flora and fauna serving some purpose beyond eye-candy on the planets seldom anyone really visits for anything but some mass-scale resource harvesting and more established NPC organisations with their own areas of influence, relations and goals.

I mean, that's what I at least would see as basics of finished product of the class the game aspires to be. Right now we have building stuff - a ship maker rather than freeplay space opera game. Sure, people try to build on it, with factions or some RP but too often it's somewhat forced, a way of using what one can to make things entertaining, because few such things (again, when it comes to not-building-stuff) are entertaining by default.

 

[MeepMoop]

Slightly controversial but "bringing attention to opinions that are not so uncommon" post time:

To be honest, I care not much for graphical polish. In fact, I suspect that the game doesn't seem much like a completed product not because of lack of polish, but still noticeable a lack of content falling outside of construction. Even more, I know of some people who picked up the game because they don't care for audio-visuals as much as actual depth and ambition of the project. However, the whole gameplay currently revolves around building objects, with any and every way of using them being very simple and often of little point beyond some credits and immediate satisfaction (if such can be derived from it).

Yes, the sound engine should be finished one day and the sound effects already in the game - used. But I'd rather push all those flashes, shiny explosions and so on at the bottom of the list (unless they'd be very easily implementable) and concentrate on churning out core features and optimization as even with stuff like rails, bigger ships and planets there's still quite some lag on average-spec computer - which may be unavoidable but together with the rest of the game - should be polished as well as possible.

As some threads on this forum and quite a few discussions on game's Steam page, message boards and in other assorted online communities indicate, it's the gameplay itself that is often lacking. One creates great ships and stations but there's rarely anything out there requiring them. Even most of the current activities of mining and ship battle are just absolute basics of most modern freeplay space games.

I suspect that rather than with beeps and impact shocks - which would be nice to have eventually provided the performance would be good - the game would do better with current features refined - for me, in no specific order, it'd be content targeted at 'infantry'/shipless gameplay - from places made to be entered and explored as a person to equipment and activities requiring personal actions, cockpits and command bridges instead of cores people bother Schine about since years, some basic survival elements like limited oxygen, medicines (if only in form of magical health and antipoison pick-me-ups), life support with oxygen generation block and ducts connected to different areas of ship (maybe even depressurization upon hull breach and related effects), quests and overarching world's background, actual diversified, interactive NPC (potentially including more 'living' and customizable crewmembers) flora and fauna serving some purpose beyond eye-candy on the planets seldom anyone really visits for anything but some mass-scale resource harvesting and more established NPC organisations with their own areas of influence, relations and goals.

I mean, that's what I at least would see as basics of finished product of the class the game aspires to be. Right now we have building stuff - a ship maker rather than freeplay space opera game. Sure, people try to build on it, with factions or some RP but too often it's somewhat forced, a way of using what one can to make things entertaining, because few such things (again, when it comes to not-building-stuff) are entertaining by default.

I agree with your sentiments, and I do agree that graphics don't always make the game; I still play some quite dated games. Though a slight deviation occurs in our priorities(not that I think graphics are more important, just that that are not as unimportant)- a common gameplay or aesthetics decision. Neither side is wrong in any case, just some matters of opinion, with the finished product always being the same, just in a different order.

From my point of view, I believe a game can be so much more fun if it visually and audibly immerses you. However, as you said, such a thing isn't important if the gameplay isn't even near finished. But it still would help, in any case, to have a game without buggy audio/visuals- or at the very least mediocre ones.

So I guess the main question is this; Should Schine stifle gameplay improvements just to enhance aesthetic pleasure? Should Schine neglect immersion even longer for more gameplay? It's not such a simple question, and there are proponents for both sides, so we'll have to wait and see what Schine does.

 

[Valiant70]

Graphics and sound are best polished in the Beta stage of development, when most of the features are already in and ready to be prettied up. Pretty stuff is a must, but it would increase overall development time to work on it much now.

 

[Kaamio]

Some would be nice, focusing on awareness increasing stuff like hit effects, lock on warnings, shield capacity warnings and stuff like that. I think those could be relevant as gameplay features...

Most of it seems like it could be developed parallel to features, but I don't really know. Some coding of course for the sound engine. Dunno if Schine has any "loose" people to do sound and graphics design though.