Possible fix for abuse of catalog on servers.

[Eclantro]

Possible fix for abuse of catalog on servers.

In nearly every server i've joined, the catalog has been disabled to prevent abuse. I feel that this is a bad thing because people put a ton of work into their ships just to be unable to share their work across servers. I propose that when a ship is uploaded only a blueprint item be purchaseable. Afterwards that bluprint must be put into a foundry block with all/some of the modules required for the ship. The foundry would need to be hooked to a frame large enough to encompass the ship (similar to how the docking works, but with a physical frame). The ship would then be constructed over time by the foundry with the blocks in the foundry.

This would allow large servers to enable the catalog without it being abused, and the requirement of a foundry would bring a new element of gameplay as well as another reason to make a perminant home. The speed of the blocks being placed would be up to the devs, but perhaps it could take an upwards of a week (realtime) to make a 100,000 mass ship.

 

[Doctor Ragnarok]

This I like. I think that shipyards were floating around the planned features list, so maybe this could be a part of that.

 

[Terramort]

I actually came here to suggest this very thing today. I very much agree. It\'s totally stupid that you have to travel store to store to save up those necessary parts - unless you have some, then the store can magically warp in ever increasing numbers of said parts so long as you have money.

Blueprints should have an arbitrary price on them, set by the Blueprint creator/importor, and the real price comes from collecting the imortant ingrediants you need to add to your Foundry block.

For this to really work though, Factories/Economy has to be changed. It\'s just... to hard to get large amounts of supplies without just making a parts ship, buying, scavanging, repeat. Factories need to work like FACTORIES (mine mineral, refine mineral, make alloy, combine with other parts, go through finishing process, ???, PROFIT!) instead of alchemical cubes (add soil and... what? Where did that shield dispenser come from!?)

 

[Eclantro]

I totally agree that the current factory system is a bit messed up right now. I know someone on the server i play on has a 2 rock for X lvl 5 ore because i have no idea how upgraded it is. I liked the old system because it kinda made sence. Leave the decoration things for decoration and the parts for modules. I also had an idea for a kind of black market that you could order parts in mass for huge quantites of credits but you had to retrieve from a ship somewhere else that could be raided by another player first, but that was going to be another topic for when getting parts in mass would be difficult.

 

[Terramort]

That\'s brilliant. If you had a black market that you could order any number of items for an increased cost, that\'s be great! Perhaps limit to x purchases from them a day, based a server config. Perhaps generally have pirated items at normally 4-5x regular shops prices, but occasionally as low as 2x shop price. Maybe have the pirate shop actually BE a pirate shop - and in order to buy from said pirate shop (without pirates attacking you) have to have a certian ratio of Merchant kills to Pirate kills.

This would finally give reason to ally with a pirate faction, and protect their base, instead of just wiping them for the cash. Maybe the more you trade with the pirates, the more, larger ships/turrets they\'ll be able to afford, as well?

 

[KuramaFox]

Basically, have some more options available to the server owner.

Option set one (toggle): Blueprints. Allow or don\'t allow. If you allow, the following options can be modified:

Option set two (toggle): Upload. Allow or don\'t allow. That is, separate whether you are allowed to upload to the server from whether you can use blueprints. If not allowed, you can only use blueprints that were created on that server, preventing people from bringing in giant death ships via catalogue unless they built one there.

Option set three (toggle): Purchase method. Options are Allow purchase of all parts, allow purchase of hull and decoration/light parts, and allow purchase of no parts. In other words, you can only buy ships that you have the parts for in your inventory at that time if the last option is the selected one. For the second option, the game will allow you to \"purchase\" hull and decorative/lighting parts, but you must supply all the system parts from your inventory yourself. The first option of course is what we have by default currently. I put a third option there because some more colorful ships out there are likely made of more parts types then you have room for in your inventory (there are a LOT of different hull items after all). An alternative would be to allow substitution of one hull color for others, but that might be messy unless they changed to a minecraft style of block ids where a secondary number is in the ID to differentiate between different colored blocks of the same type (i.e. all wool blocks I think had the same ID, they just had a different secondary value for that ID).

Option set 4: Purchase multiplier (enter value). If purchase is allowed, sets the amount by which block costs are multiplied for purchasing ships. You could set it to 100 for instance, such that a ship\'s parts when purchased via blueprint cost 100 times the default price, to discourage overuse of the catalogue.

Option set 5: Blueprint size allowed (enter block number/file size/something like that). Sets the maximum size of blueprints that are allowed to be used on that server. So that servers that want more liberal options for blueprint usage can reduce oversized ship spamming in a different way.





By mixing and matching a few simple options like this, you would allow a substantial level of customization by servers for setting things up how they want.







Edit: While we are talking about blueprints though: By default, upon one being uploaded or created on a server, the options should default to either no sharing, or faction sharing only. Some servers end up with cluttered lists so big they crash the game. Why? Because almost no one ever bothers to turn off the sharing options for their blueprints. Not even the people who get angry when their design is \"stolen!\" They just leave it in the catalog for everyone to see because they either don\'t know it defaults to allowing everyone to use blueprints or because they are just lazy/forgetful.

 

[Archer6621]

+1 once again, loving this.

If all this becomes part of StarMade one day, we will enable blueprints again, simply because they actually become part of the game, rather than \"-poof- huge ass ship for credits that you can find plenty of\".

 

[Eclantro]

I understand what you say about there already being control factors in the game, but none that i can see would prevent the instantaneous spamming of ships from the people with resources. The point of this would be to make a fair and unregulated fix to the catalogs and to make it more of a process and game element and less of a djinn hiding in the game code. People could even trade the blueprints of their ships to others. Also, YuYu Hakusho ftw.

 

[mumurees]

I am loving this idea. I think it would be cool if you could attach these shipyard-foundry things to ships, so i could have my carrier that mines its own minerals to create its own fighters and turrets. just a thought, love the idea even if it cant be mobile.

 

[Eclantro]

bump

 

[Zovc]

i have to say no, because i say this, say i make a big battleship, and there lots of blocks in it, why would i want to get 5k hulls (no biggie) like 20k shields 1-5k amc and countless other things, JUST to spawn my battleship? No this is a rediculus idea for that 1 reason. But i think a way to make this work is to incorperate into credits credits, not credits blocks, so say i have a ship with 100k worth of power tanks, the recipe buying would cost 50k (half) and then you place the recipe into a special tab like the catalog tab, where you put all your recipes there, now it costs the full 100k to buy the actual ship/tank thingy. So that will also disable the, buy, sell at shop, buy, sell at shop, money gain, while still making credits much more important

 

[Eclantro]

The entire point of this would to remove the credit to matter conversion. When collecting parts from shops you purchase them. When making parts you craft them from other things. But shop stock has a limiting factor in the amount available. Collecting the resources for making a big ship is ridiculous? What about spawing parts instantly for money that would run like water, if water wasnt rarer, and also no base settings limiting factor besides the ship spam prevention system. Money talks, but resources are what are necessary out in the black.

 

[Eclantro]

i wont let this thread die.

 

[Jcewazhere]

Watching a ship get built block by block by something akin to a modern day 3d printer on a massive scale would be very cool. And if the process could be automated you could make standardized fighters or other ships for your faction.Especially if the blueprints could be traded/gifted as ingame items. Only the original creator of the blueprint would have unlimited copies to hand out or sell.(

 

[Trollerbobman]

there is like 10 threads about foundry blocks/shipyards already...