Power System Overhaul Proposal

[petlahk]

If an array of data detailing the heat of a ship can be maintained where different critical elements affect said array; then you could say that heat above x level causes it to stop being functional; so players are forced to spread items apart; or to maximise the effectiveness of a single generator object implement heatpipe-like systems. But the key effect of such a system is to drop the density of system blocks; dropping the size needed, but more importantly limiting abuse of filling the ship with the new kind instead. Sure you could fill a ship with small reactors and maximise the density of power system blocks, but if you put them into a single reactor; you let them be more effcient; or rather you need less to achieve the same power output- BUT this reactor will still make a similar impact on the density of system blocks imposed by the heat it generates.

Ie, instead of replacing power cap/regen; you add on a heatmap that creates a density cap of sorts; and by simple rerarrangement, extra space can be found in the ship's interior

It seems that you figured out why the Devs decided that you'd need the square heat boundaries. That makes a lot of sense. Thank you for explaining it.

 

[Brokengauge]

Also, now the devs know to optimize this new power system to minimize the over powered advantage of chandeliers...

 

[SkyHawk024]

im game for this i think it would be a rather neat update!

 

[terra mining corp.]

I'm still trying to get my head to soak this all in,i think it would change how I build ships now where I have a hull design in mind and I build power and systems to use that space to build reactors of different specs for different classes of ship and template those?

 

[Jojomo]

I'm really glad you posted this. Now, don't take this the wrong way, I'm not attacking you per se, just your way of thinking that is shared by most of the Dock.

We need to get rid of this "you cannot have a pretty and effective PVP ship" meme. It's not true and it hasn't been true for years. There are innumerable examples of great looking PVP ships, both inside and out. Not making your meta minmaxed PVP ship look good is laziness, not a limitation placed on you by the game.

I don't think anyone's saying that you can't.
There's a broad spectrum between pure performance and pure aesthetics, and probably no-one ever seriously builds a ship that is right at the absolute either end of that spectrum.
If they did though, you can bet your life the pure performance ship would look terrible, and the pure aesthetics ship would perform terribly.

Because this heat system encourages the creation of chandelier shaped ships, which would be significantly more difficult to incorporate in a variety of aesthetic choices.

The part of that sentence that jumps out at me is "more difficult", as opposed to "impossible".

In any case, I think it's way too early for you (or anyone) to be making this call. Until we see the system fully defined, and the ways players min/max within it, we won't know what PvP ships will look like.

 

[Anubis Evo]

Wow! This is incredible and I have been waiting for some delicious changes to power for a long time! This isn't exactly what I had thought of but that's not a bad thing in the least, it's more of a refreshing and exciting new way of creating ships which creates incentive for one to create more than just a ship filled with chunks of systems.

I was having a hard time picturing how the whole heat system area would work but those info-graphics really helped me understand more of what some of those boundaries would be like. I love the idea of everything that was listed here, I would just like to see a more in-depth image going over how these reactors would be created. I understand the goal of them but can't quite grasp the full idea/intent of what you would ideally like one to look like. "Ideally" used loosely in the fact that one of the most beautiful things about this game is the ability for you to show 5 different people how to make something and you will get a 5 different outputs.

The only thing which I'd like to provide some of my own input towards would be the Chamber blocks. I saw that there were many ideas tossed around and it was made abundantly clear that nothing has been decided on yet, but I'd like to make not of one of them I did not agree with. It was mentioned that there would possibly be a requirement to have them for your reactors, but I feel that on smaller ships that would really cause a hindrance on some of the sleeker designs as I feel like that could get quite cumbersome size-wise.

I look forward to the changes that are to come out of this and any other threads similar to this one in the future!

 

[Lord Daro]

Oh come on! I just got around to finaly building a somewhat decently looking cloaked ship!
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Well whatever. This does sound like an interesting concept and I am allready curious how it'll work in praxis.

 

[kulbolen]

nothing wrong w power overhaul, as long as you dont make your overall ship dimension and shape dictate your powers effectiveness. game already does that to some extent with current mechanic, but its not too hard to mostly work around. if the heat mechanic incentivizes certain dimensions or build styles, itll be at best a sidegrade and probably downgrade to current system.

a change that removes some power abuse and adds a fun thoughtful element to building power is probably a good thing, but from description it sounds dangerously hard to balance for abuse potential, maybe moreso than current system.

the block weighting and space changes sound nice for building fancy interior stuff, but what about volume/dimension concern? interiors are already viable in pvp, but bloating the ships profile is the most dangerous part of adding large interiors, has nothing to do with block weight since you can dual purpose many blocks you would already be using. apparently well need less system blocks for our ship to perform at the same level as before with these changes, so that might help volume concern by letting you repurpose system space for interior space... but is there a mechanic in place keeping you from just using that interior space for ...more system space, and cutting down your profile more? or is limiting system block usage going to be a side effect of this new power system?

it seems like much of the concern about current game pvp viability comes from people who dont actually understand system optimization and dont spend much time at all in pvp environment, including game devs. this is understandable, as sms community is small, and its pvp community even smaller... it makes perfect sense that sm dev team would simplify some of the more complicated systems while simultaneously making them more engaging to place into a ship. interesting and odd engineering designs are why i still play sm... but it would probably benefit the overall playerbase and health of the game to make it easier to play and more accessible, at the cost of versatility in design. but its no secret that it hurts the experienced pvp playerbase and the oddball engineers, whether people admit it or not.

as far as dev criticism and pvp comments, it doesnt matter who you are. if you make a post that isnt well thought out and has a ton of inaccuracy from a position of authority, you open yourself to less than constructive criticism. then you have to spend time and effort covering it up, deleting posts, damage controlling; whatnot.

 

[nightrune]

I am loving this prospect, however I do see one potential exploit. In between the first two photos you talk about the ability to add interior inside the heat zone since quote "those only affect systems." Unless you have some way around it, wouldn't this mean you could place a reactor in the middle of the ship, fill the heat boundary around the reactor with the entire ship's interior/ fill something like 75% of the heat boundary with interior and circumvent the heat boundary's effects to your systems?

That seems to be why its designed that way. You could have one big core, but you can't concentrate it all in one place.

As for my thoughts on the subject.

Assuming we give people more scanning information in combat. This is a really cool way to show critical parts. I'd propose that the hotter parts pop like the current power aux. So while you could get more power/do more damage, you may be showing your enemy right where to hit you. A careful concentrated player could wait and slowly take out parts.

This actually goes back to my thought on the current power system and docking. I'm really interested in how this works with docked parts. It seems like a good candidate for a "Share Everything" removing the need for docked batteries and docked reactors completely.

Power supply beam lives in an odd space now. It likely needs redacted or turned into some weird flame beam (I'm giggling writing that).

I think Shield Supply could get really interesting though. You trade heat and shield regen for helping an ally. I'm not sure when I would do that, but its something to think about.

Rail Mass enhancers now live in a completely weird space as well. They are designed to make sure its exponentially harder to move large things and keep the amount of moving things down to a couple steps in the tree.

Heat + Sensors is a really fun thing to think about. If we kept/expanded on current mechanics basically you could find an entity based on three criteria, radar, visibility, and heat. This gives the stealth gameplay a ton of depth it didn't have before, but still easy to reason about.

Regarding reactor shapes, I am worried how you'll convey how/what to build to players since historically the game has had a hard time doing that. Ideally there would be multiple main core types like you said, and the ability to put I would prefer the trade offs be extremely clear based on how you build it. A really great way to help teach people is to just have a couple base reactor shapes as templates. In single player finding templates of reactors from NPC ships could be fun and simple. Since I'm assuming you'll usually destroy the reactors in combat.

OK, I'm pretty much on board with most of this. The details can be worked out but this a direction i think the game needs. A few things:

1. heat sink systems have to be a thing.
2. (I realise this will be unpopular) This game needs a consumable economy. You have at this time a golden opportunity to kill so many birds with one stone. REACTOR CORES MUST EVENTUALLY WEAR OUT. Half of the current players will curse you but future players will love you for it.

My opinion is ships themselves should be the consumables.

In the current system, you can make any ship into an ultra effective meta boat as long as it is even remotely wedge shaped. So you can still easily make a good looking ship that is also min-maxed.

The wedge shaped part is actually the problem. A long with the power and cap balancing that adds nothing to the game. This change has a chance to give players more choice. If you want to build a specific shape you then need to choose how you build your reactor to it. If you are building a pvp build you could start with the reactor, but actually you can choose a shape and fit reactor and weapons to it. The idea being you are no longer required to build a wedge shaped ship. That seems boring to me.

 

[Tomatart_B]

Honestly, if you really think about it this probably wont happen for quite a long time, because preparations will need to be made to prevent setbacks. IE: the npc factions; all the npc ships will need to be refitted too, along with all future npc ships they have planned, otherwise the npc factions will be non-functional after this update until they re-do the systems in those ships.

This concept of new power systems is great, and needs to be done sooner rather than later so future features are tailored to fit with it, but in the same way, it also seems like it will set back alot of other features from being implemented. Like improving the AI and fleets, which may have to be changed to fit these new ship styles.

Also, I know this is just a proposal, but is there a ballpark time frame for this, because i don't want to build more ships now if i'll just have to re-do them in a few months.

 

[Cowskier]

Really pumped for this update. Always wanted a combination between Space Engineer's interior space and Starmade's level of detail (And FPS)

 

[Madman198237]

This is a really neat mechanic, but, as mentioned, it's going to break a lot of ships. Overall, I like the idea, but I want to make sure that it's not like all-encompassingly terrible.

Heat needs to be regarded in a separate way as well, in my opinion:
Heat is the byproduct of pushing a reactor past its limits. You don't generate any "heat" if your built-in cooling systems can take the heat (I'm a terrible pun person, I know). But you start generating heat (Yes, this sounds a bit like IC2 from MC. I didn't even realize it til after I started writing) when your cooling systems can't keep up. So, yes, you have a set amount of power available to you "free", but when you start lobbing artillery rounds while your buddy is firing off the humongous autocannon as fast as he can, you're going to overrun your reactor's capabilities.....and stuff will go wrong from there.

Let's say at 10% heat it gets dangerous for NPCs (Or YOU) to be within the reactor's immediate area (Based on the bounding box proposed in the OP as the "heat area" or whatever)....because nobody likes a melted face. Or a melted ANY body part, for that matter.

Then at 25% heat "soft" blocks within the area start melting. Whenever we get means to resist solar heat, blocks that count as resistant would not take damage, but other blocks would start losing HP (And exploding, if anything functions like that after the update)

Say at 50% heat you start getting leakages in connected chambers. AKA, chambers connected to the reactor start dealing damage like the main reactor did at 25%.

At 75%, connected cooling devices start to lose HP.

If you're crazy, damaged, or dumb enough to push your ship into 90% heat, then you are taking extreme block damage from inside, and some small explosions can start going off.

If you reach 100% heat, well, say hello, reactor failure. I see two options here: We go for realism. Your ship becomes an irradiated wreck slowly burning itself away as the reactor continues to burn in a wildfire of nuclear/antimatter power that can't be stopped unless you get the reactor out of the ship. Option Two: the Every Space Movie/TV Show/Game Ever Option. Screw realism! EVERYTHING EXPLODES. Good for keeping server databases clean!

Also, crew members DO NOT like watching their friends get burned to a crisp. So, maybe make sure the reactor techs are properly dressed and have a safe area, behind some closed doors and possibly engine-grade heat shields.

Obviously, all values and effects are just suggestions (Could that be why this is a discussion thread?!?!?!! ).

Power capacity doesn't need to be kept---weapons will use "power" (Which we do not actually need to see in any concrete sense. Abstract "power generated" out of the game and replace it, in build mode, with an indicator of "Heat [Percent Increase Per Second]") as it "charges" between shots. If you can't keep up, stop shooting the cannons til the missile's regenerated. Also, adds a lot of dynamics to combat this way. Adds choices. If you push your ship hard enough, maybe you get the lead to beat them...but if you can't keep it up long enough, stuff starts to melt...and you die.

As for shields using the same mechanic, I don't object to diversifying shields, perhaps even keeping some similar mechanics...but no blank repeats, please. If we're introducing variety, let's not immediately make anything else the same. A similar system, with a main shield system with component parts that improve either regen or capacity would be a neat thing to do, but not as a clone of the proposed power system.

 

[Vvolodymyr]

Hi. Decided to add my 5cents. Absolutely agree with every problem identified by the team - spot on, guys and gals!
Would like to add my feeling and wishes:

1.) Currently the solution to efficiency has been, as you identified, balance (power, shields, maneuverability, weapons etc) - sacrificing something for something else. That is normal and natural - such choice should exist.
The "problem" was soft caps & efficiency drop off with size - forcing, ironically, larger ships become even larger and also more powerful.
It makes sense to stem this "Size Race" in a new way. Also after 2mil power regen - yes, there is no point in designing the power regen anymore - result- just chucking the ship full of power blocks in no particular shape - which is no fun.

I see some people want more ease and convenience to build larger and larger and larger and more and more and more powerful ships - but stepping back it's easy to see that such "Size Race" becomes ridiculous with time - and ultimately - Introducing a choice/trade-off is more natural and fun . Currently the only thing stopping gigantic ships from becoming "Flying Doom" is reduced speed/maneuverability. I hope this stays - as it is natural but it's not enough.

So: I hope you succeed translating the complexity of power systems design to any size ships - but please take care not to make it too easy for larger ships - so that we don't face the "Size Race" like we do as a consequence of our previous attempt (the soft cap).

2.) Me personally, and many other players, will Always try to pack our ships full - we will always think "so we get more bang from our weapons. Cool. What if I pack even more weapons anyways " . It's obvious you're trying to incentivize us to design interiors - which is Awesome! - but please keep in mind - we will still push things to the max and still try to pack as much bang as possible

3.) I may be weird - but I actually really really enjoyed designing convoluted power regeneration lines - maximizing efficiency and figuring out how and where to leave space for other things. How to add additional power regen groups in limited space in most efficient manner, taking up as little space as possible. Those simple rules for power reactors - provided hours of fun and complex designs. I hope something like this stays - in some form - basically purely for the fun of it. I know it might sound weird - but for me - designing those power reactors in predetermined space was as much fun as designing beautiful hulls. Basically there is an aesthetic value in it for me.

I know most of what I mentioned was already identified by the team. I just wanted to highlight the 3 top important to me things. Good luck!

 

[mrnotsoevil]

Just some more ideas

Heat
Maybe separate the proposed heat into two types of influences:

• Rename the "heat influence" to "radiation". Radiation interferes with the electronics of other systems
• Heat is generated by the reactors and must be dealt with.

Depending on the reactor type it radiates different amounts of ionizing radiation. Expensive and heavy shielding can block parts of it. The player is supposed to somehow get rid of the heat. For example you could build heat pipes to radiator beams outside of your ship or you could build a cooler that runs on cold cells. The first solution would be more simple and cheap, but would need to expose sensitive radiators to the outside. Also it would get problems if you are too close to a heat source (radiator not as efficient). The other one needs constant "fuel" - let's hope it never runs out. On the other hand this would make the power system not as sensitive to the environment or weapon fire.

Also: For radiation you could add a hand-held machine to measure it (just a gimmick)

Reactor types
Each reactor type could have it's own way how it's supposed to be built:

• A compact reactor chamber
• A reactor that should be built as a long rod (like Star Trek's warp core)
• A reactor that must be built as ring (Like the Tokamak nuclear fusion power plant type)
• More?

Non-power-usage of reactors

For everybody who didn't read my first post: Use resources stored in the reactors (e.g. plasma, nuclear rods, ...) or waste products for other systems. (Some) Weapons/jump drives/... need fuel but you could also divert waste/reactor resources to fuel those systems. Depending on how much resources are spent into the system they could be made more efficient/... than fueled by regular fuel.

 

[AkiraZXE]

I think this is a very good direction for Starmade to go. My only real concern is that this complicates matters with the ship core even further.

One thing that myself and a few friends have consistently run into is that free-form design is very tedious at a certain scale if your intent is to keep your ship core in a safe location. That said, it's not the absolute worst thing in the world because of the relative simplicity of the system mechanics.

If designing a proper reactor is going to be required for a medium-sized ship, that's just one more thing you have to keep track of relative to the ship core. If at all possible, I would hope that a revamp on this scale would also include a way to move the ship core around, simply out of necessity with how designing ships will change for those of us not designing the SDSD Freudian Nightmare.

 

[Madman198237]

Woah why did Sigmund Freud just get into this conversation? And can we get him back out again, please?

 

[Endal]

Wow, just wow. This is the damned biggest explosion of a thread I have seen in ages. But lets get to the point here.

Now, the one thing I am most concerned about is

• Systems (weapons, thrust, power, etc) will take a considerably smaller amount of space on your ship. This could be ranging from 5% (large ships) to 50% (small ships) of your total block count. The way we will achieve this is described in the section below.

, this point hasn't really been tacked directly, but it really, really, should be.

Well, when one says only 5% is necessary to operate the ship, it doesn't strictly mean you can only place 5%, as such this implies that the current system filling for big ships would be factors of magnitude more effective compared to now, considering that most ships have at the very least 30-50% systems, even with interior. Power is the smallest percentage of all so "it'll only apply for power" won't work.

The only thing I can think of right now that will reverse this potentially game-breaking change would be to implement exponentially savage requirements, power most notably, for said systems to run. This will make building bigger more and more difficult to the point of which a bigger ship is just more interior than the previous.

However, this does not apply to weapons. Therefore simply moving up a little bit up the slippery slope would gain quite a proportionately larger linear advantage in firepower due to it's current behaviour, making larger ships more favourable than... oh dear.
Weapons would need a rework with a factor larger than 1 too, which would roughly balance this out, but the numbers will determine the more practical ship size so this has to be considered extremely carefully for I fear that it'll slap a large portion of SM's community in the face.

Oh, I totally forgot, an NPC Crew update would definitely support this overhaul if the NPC Crew become a limiting factor in systems, forcing the point of building bigger ships becoming building more interior. Of course this would cause some outcry among those who don't like/can't into interior, to which point I need feedback on for I am one who can't into interior myself.

Constructive criticism welcome. In-case anyone forgets, stay objective.

 

[Crusade]

I feel a necessary addition to this would be linking / assigning reactors to specific systems.
if you do not link, the reactor will attempt to power everything, however if a weapon array has it's own reactor - it shouldn't draw from the shipwide reactor.

 

[Stimey]

Like the current system this has its benefits and draw backs. Just a few ideas to help get the juices flowing.

What if the power systems were assignable similar to other systems with the C and V so you could use system specific reactors so say even if your thrust power is lost your weapons system power and shield power would still be functional until you re-routed power from other systems back to the thrust or repaired the reactor. you would need to be able to do multiple links to the same reactor core which would allow the sharing of power and the ability to re-route power. this would also give the ability to do one large reactor to run the entire ship but smaller backup reactors or extra reactors for quicker re-gen on heavy draw systems such as weapons.

What about creating heat shielding to minimize the heat boundary between systems? could be expensive shielding or add extra mass to the ship as a trade off for being able to place another system closer to the reactor on one side or the other.

What about having a heat/power control computer or interface to be able to balance your systems or optimize them once they are installed by giving you the readings or graphs on possible draw by linked system compared to possible power/heat output.

If you are going to use coolant and plumbing to keep the cores from overheating why not add an inline pump block for reaching longer distances without the reduced function thus making it easier to space out the reactors while still having them connected such as thrust-er/reactor pods connected to the external part of your ship similar to the engine pods on the Star trek Enterprise.

How would the heat boundary be visible while building a ship? Only visible in build mode similar to launch rails?

If i am going to have to build my ships around my power source instead of the other way around then I think there needs to be different shapes of heat boundaries as per the way i combine the cores so i can tailor it more to my ships overall planned shape. IE... if i am going to build a cylindrical ship then i would place the cores in a + shape and longer rather than bigger around so the heat boundary would also be cylindrical. or if i want to build a wide but not very tall ship i could orient them in a single high wide linear layout.

All in all it needs to be done but if it is not going to be too complex then there needs to be straight forward values for both reactor core output per block and power draw per block of each system type so i don't have to spend days figuring out how many cores i need in each reactor to power a specific weapons or thruster system. 10 connected reactor cores optimal output = 10000 energy/heat units and a missile system with X number of missile tubes require Y amount of energy units and if i add an effect then the power requirement goes up by 50% of the original weapons system. If i need algebraic formulas to figure out the needs of my systems then everyone goes back to the old standard (build a big ass reactor, more than you will need and don't worry about figuring out anything which is what most people do now rather than try to balance size and output to need and space available

Thanks for all you do and keep up the great work!.

 

[Vvolodymyr]

Like the current system this has its benefits and draw backs. Just a few ideas to help get the juices flowing.

What if the power systems were assignable similar to other systems with the C and V so you could use system specific reactors so say even if your thrust power is lost your weapons system power and shield power would still be functional until you re-routed power from other systems back to the thrust or repaired the reactor. you would need to be able to do multiple links to the same reactor core which would allow the sharing of power and the ability to re-route power. this would also give the ability to do one large reactor to run the entire ship but smaller backup reactors or extra reactors for quicker re-gen on heavy draw systems such as weapons.

What about creating heat shielding to minimize the heat boundary between systems? could be expensive shielding or add extra mass to the ship as a trade off for being able to place another system closer to the reactor on one side or the other.

What about having a heat/power control computer or interface to be able to balance your systems or optimize them once they are installed by giving you the readings or graphs on possible draw by linked system compared to possible power/heat output.

If you are going to use coolant and plumbing to keep the cores from overheating why not add an inline pump block for reaching longer distances without the reduced function thus making it easier to space out the reactors while still having them connected such as thrust-er/reactor pods connected to the external part of your ship similar to the engine pods on the Star trek Enterprise.

How would the heat boundary be visible while building a ship? Only visible in build mode similar to launch rails?

If i am going to have to build my ships around my power source instead of the other way around then I think there needs to be different shapes of heat boundaries as per the way i combine the cores so i can tailor it more to my ships overall planned shape. IE... if i am going to build a cylindrical ship then i would place the cores in a + shape and longer rather than bigger around so the heat boundary would also be cylindrical. or if i want to build a wide but not very tall ship i could orient them in a single high wide linear layout.

All in all it needs to be done but if it is not going to be too complex then there needs to be straight forward values for both reactor core output per block and power draw per block of each system type so i don't have to spend days figuring out how many cores i need in each reactor to power a specific weapons or thruster system. 10 connected reactor cores optimal output = 10000 energy/heat units and a missile system with X number of missile tubes require Y amount of energy units and if i add an effect then the power requirement goes up by 50% of the original weapons system. If i need algebraic formulas to figure out the needs of my systems then everyone goes back to the old standard (build a big ass reactor, more than you will need and don't worry about figuring out anything which is what most people do now rather than try to balance size and output to need and space available

Thanks for all you do and keep up the great work!.

^^ Those are awesome ideas, I'm liking a lot. The C/V power assignment will bring the entire TV SciFi goto solution of "let me just reroute the power to..." :D

After thinking about the OP suggestion more - I'd say my biggest concern will be how it will affect ship shapes - variety and flexibility is definitely needed there. I happen to build inside out, but there are many creative hull freestylers out there .(seems like a lot of headache for the dev team - but great opportunity to make things more Awesome)