- Joined
- Apr 14, 2014
- Messages
- 7
- Reaction score
- 3
Greetings fellow space-cannon fodder! First let me say ignore the weird topic name, I couldn't come up with anything better. That aside, I have a few ideas that may or may not have already been suggested at some point, space and time. Considering my suggestion for linking Plex Storage to Salvage Computers eventually made it's way into the game, I figure I'll dump more of my creative juice into the pot and see what happens. I'll try to add new ideas to the list as I come up with'em, somethings bound to help the game along. Feel free to share your input, one of you might have a better vision for some of these than I do.
- Seperate pirate and trading guild ship settings.
As simple as it currently is, I find it slightly annoying and a bit dumb that the "EnemyUsable" setting (yes "useable" seems to be misspelled in-game") lets both the pirates and trading guild use any flagged ships. I feel it would be more enjoyable if we could flag seperate ships for either faction. Some people might want the guild to only fly freighters while the pirates use fighters for example.
- AI Factions and Standing
Recently I went back to playing Warframe and to my surprise they added a factions and standing system. So that got me thinking "Why doesn't Star Made have something like this?". I'm thinking a server side table, maybe in Excel or something, could be created and the admin would be able to fill in various fields such as name and member count. From within the game there could be additional settings to fine tune each faction, such as setting the relationship towards another faction, giving or taking away owned sectors for a faction and assigning stations or other structures. The current method of assigning ships to factions could be modified with a dropdown menu that would contain each faction's name. Selecting a faction would allow the admin to set various ship flags for that faction, such as "Useable", "Use Cannons", "Use Missiles", "Use Beams", etc.
- Faction Icons and Colors
Ever wanted to give your faction a sick icon but couldn't since your ship would become a flying version of said icon? I feel your pain, hence why I'm tossing in the idea of a display block. If you've ever played the Industrialcraft 2 mod for Minecraft, you've probably seen the display panels and extenders. We could have something similar where the display would have a gui with a grid. You'd be able to pick brushes, brush sizes, colors and maybe a few other tools. Similar to how most paint programs work, you'd then draw your faction logo and use the block to save it into a server side file. Every display placed by your faction would then display that logo and every extender touching the display or another connected extender would enlarge the logo as you expand the "screen".
- Deployable Armor
Yes you read correctly, I'm actually suggesting something similar to Ablative Armor from Star Trek Voyager.
While blast doors can work, they're still just doors and as such they function with other doors touching them. Meaning that if your friend opens a door in your ship during combat and the "armor" outside is touching them, you're kinda sunk. So I'm thinking a seperate block/interaction system that would function on it's own without conflicting with the door system. Maybe even the option to hotkey the armor or drop it on the hotbar for easy use. For balancing and realism reasons, shields and most weapons would be offline. I'm thinking something really closr to Ablative Armor, where the energy used on shields and beams weapons was diverted to support the armor's structure, leaving only missiles available as a weapon choice.
- Ship Owner/Officer Stations
While I'm on the idea of fancy star ships, what about something to flag you as the owner of your ship? A possible system that could flag you as the owner and let you set permissions on other blocks of your ship, maybe even a way to set ranks so you could have that star ship crew you always wanted with your friends. Lets say you only feel like being the captain today, but the current system makes you have to fly the ship, shoot the weapons, etc. If we had customizeable blocks, similar to the ship's core, that could be made to give access to certain ship functions, our buddy could fly the ship while we go repair that 10 foot hole in the back. Imagine opening a block gui and being able to name it and flag certain features of your ship that the block can access. Let's say you want a weapons console, name it and either check the boxes of which weapons that console can access or drag and drop the weapon computers into the hotbar while you're inside the block. Now since the current computers kinda screw you over on vision, let's go ahead and link a camera block to the weapons console. Now you've got your own Worf switching camera views and blowing ships apart all around you.
- Inertia
A long standing question I've had is "If I'm in space, why do I slow down as if theres gravity?". Having inertia would be pretty cool, we could pop thrusters down facing any direction which would allow our ship to push away from that direction. Mind you this would probably require a rewrite of the current system and bring about alot of new bugs, but it's still a fun idea worth mentioning.
- Tracking Devices
Ever have one of those fights where you're about to win but your target escapes and you can't find him no matter how hard you search? Wouldn't it be awesome to have some sort of projectile that sticks to the target for a few seconds, allowing you to follow a sort of vapor trail? I'm thinking something like a sticky probe that'll attach itself to the target ship for 10 seconds and emit a colored trail based on the color of light block you have linked to it. Right now this is mostly a pvp idea unless the current AI learns how to run away when 90% of their ship is missing.
- Tractor Beam/Towing Cable
I'm well aware of the push/pull effects but those can be a bit troublesome to work with. For this idea, I'm thinking of a beam or cable you can active/deactivate only on ships that are either overheating or have a core thats damaged below 50%. There could be a server side setting to control the max number of "cables" a ship would be able to deploy at once and each "linked" ship you're towing would add it's mass to your own. Might wanna bring extra thrusters to this party.
- Ship Meister's Blueprint Block
Been talking with a friend about how annoying it is to build an awesome ship, take it into battle, get blocks blown off then have to remember what the shape was so you can repair it. Our solution for this? The Ship Meister's Blueprint Block. When placed and activated through it's interface, this block will create a laser grid defining the shape of your ship (Think of how the wireframes show up when connecting blocks to each other, that sorta thing). The interface can contain Power, Set and Reset buttons, allowing the player to activate/deactivate the building guide, set a new guide or remove the exsisting guide. The block should also be able to link with a light block to allow custom coloring of the wireframe, this would make it easier on those who can't see certain colors very well or are color blind. So long as the block isn't destroyed or reset, it will "remember" the location of every block on your current ship. (Though due to performance concerns I'm not suggesting the use of ghost textures for each block type, that might get a bit messy)
- Repair Bot 9000
This block is exactly like it sounds, a block that will automatically repair the structure it's attached to. The idea here is to link this block with a Ship Meister's Blueprint and a storage block. When a block on the structure is destroyed (not removed by a player), the Repair Bot will be like "Uh-oh you're kinda fallin apart here buddy, don't worry I got this!" and will begin checking the connected storage for a similar block type. By similar I mean if the destroyed block type is a piece of standard armor, it will check the storage for a piece of standard armor of any color, respecting the shape (block, wedge, tetra, corner, etc) and use that replacement to fill the damaged section. The blueprint block is there as a sort of guideline for the Repair Bot to follow, can't have it randomly placing blocks on the enemy as you shoot them down.
- Hotbarable Logic Activator (Didn't have an actual name)
Just as it sounds, a logic activator you can assign to the hotbar for easy access. This stems from the fact that I enjoy "armoring" my ships with a shell of blast doors that I can activate/deactivate at will. The problem with this is, I have to access the submenu for door control and open all my doors to drop the armor. For setups like this, using a logic block would allow the player to activate only the blocks assigned and being in the hotbar means no more entering build mode to use the block. I can see this block working well for activating/deactivating various subsystems, or different alerts on the ship. (Red alert anyone?)
- Seperate pirate and trading guild ship settings.
As simple as it currently is, I find it slightly annoying and a bit dumb that the "EnemyUsable" setting (yes "useable" seems to be misspelled in-game") lets both the pirates and trading guild use any flagged ships. I feel it would be more enjoyable if we could flag seperate ships for either faction. Some people might want the guild to only fly freighters while the pirates use fighters for example.
- AI Factions and Standing
Recently I went back to playing Warframe and to my surprise they added a factions and standing system. So that got me thinking "Why doesn't Star Made have something like this?". I'm thinking a server side table, maybe in Excel or something, could be created and the admin would be able to fill in various fields such as name and member count. From within the game there could be additional settings to fine tune each faction, such as setting the relationship towards another faction, giving or taking away owned sectors for a faction and assigning stations or other structures. The current method of assigning ships to factions could be modified with a dropdown menu that would contain each faction's name. Selecting a faction would allow the admin to set various ship flags for that faction, such as "Useable", "Use Cannons", "Use Missiles", "Use Beams", etc.
- Faction Icons and Colors
Ever wanted to give your faction a sick icon but couldn't since your ship would become a flying version of said icon? I feel your pain, hence why I'm tossing in the idea of a display block. If you've ever played the Industrialcraft 2 mod for Minecraft, you've probably seen the display panels and extenders. We could have something similar where the display would have a gui with a grid. You'd be able to pick brushes, brush sizes, colors and maybe a few other tools. Similar to how most paint programs work, you'd then draw your faction logo and use the block to save it into a server side file. Every display placed by your faction would then display that logo and every extender touching the display or another connected extender would enlarge the logo as you expand the "screen".
- Deployable Armor
Yes you read correctly, I'm actually suggesting something similar to Ablative Armor from Star Trek Voyager.
While blast doors can work, they're still just doors and as such they function with other doors touching them. Meaning that if your friend opens a door in your ship during combat and the "armor" outside is touching them, you're kinda sunk. So I'm thinking a seperate block/interaction system that would function on it's own without conflicting with the door system. Maybe even the option to hotkey the armor or drop it on the hotbar for easy use. For balancing and realism reasons, shields and most weapons would be offline. I'm thinking something really closr to Ablative Armor, where the energy used on shields and beams weapons was diverted to support the armor's structure, leaving only missiles available as a weapon choice.
- Ship Owner/Officer Stations
While I'm on the idea of fancy star ships, what about something to flag you as the owner of your ship? A possible system that could flag you as the owner and let you set permissions on other blocks of your ship, maybe even a way to set ranks so you could have that star ship crew you always wanted with your friends. Lets say you only feel like being the captain today, but the current system makes you have to fly the ship, shoot the weapons, etc. If we had customizeable blocks, similar to the ship's core, that could be made to give access to certain ship functions, our buddy could fly the ship while we go repair that 10 foot hole in the back. Imagine opening a block gui and being able to name it and flag certain features of your ship that the block can access. Let's say you want a weapons console, name it and either check the boxes of which weapons that console can access or drag and drop the weapon computers into the hotbar while you're inside the block. Now since the current computers kinda screw you over on vision, let's go ahead and link a camera block to the weapons console. Now you've got your own Worf switching camera views and blowing ships apart all around you.
- Inertia
A long standing question I've had is "If I'm in space, why do I slow down as if theres gravity?". Having inertia would be pretty cool, we could pop thrusters down facing any direction which would allow our ship to push away from that direction. Mind you this would probably require a rewrite of the current system and bring about alot of new bugs, but it's still a fun idea worth mentioning.
- Tracking Devices
Ever have one of those fights where you're about to win but your target escapes and you can't find him no matter how hard you search? Wouldn't it be awesome to have some sort of projectile that sticks to the target for a few seconds, allowing you to follow a sort of vapor trail? I'm thinking something like a sticky probe that'll attach itself to the target ship for 10 seconds and emit a colored trail based on the color of light block you have linked to it. Right now this is mostly a pvp idea unless the current AI learns how to run away when 90% of their ship is missing.
- Tractor Beam/Towing Cable
I'm well aware of the push/pull effects but those can be a bit troublesome to work with. For this idea, I'm thinking of a beam or cable you can active/deactivate only on ships that are either overheating or have a core thats damaged below 50%. There could be a server side setting to control the max number of "cables" a ship would be able to deploy at once and each "linked" ship you're towing would add it's mass to your own. Might wanna bring extra thrusters to this party.
- Ship Meister's Blueprint Block
Been talking with a friend about how annoying it is to build an awesome ship, take it into battle, get blocks blown off then have to remember what the shape was so you can repair it. Our solution for this? The Ship Meister's Blueprint Block. When placed and activated through it's interface, this block will create a laser grid defining the shape of your ship (Think of how the wireframes show up when connecting blocks to each other, that sorta thing). The interface can contain Power, Set and Reset buttons, allowing the player to activate/deactivate the building guide, set a new guide or remove the exsisting guide. The block should also be able to link with a light block to allow custom coloring of the wireframe, this would make it easier on those who can't see certain colors very well or are color blind. So long as the block isn't destroyed or reset, it will "remember" the location of every block on your current ship. (Though due to performance concerns I'm not suggesting the use of ghost textures for each block type, that might get a bit messy)
- Repair Bot 9000
This block is exactly like it sounds, a block that will automatically repair the structure it's attached to. The idea here is to link this block with a Ship Meister's Blueprint and a storage block. When a block on the structure is destroyed (not removed by a player), the Repair Bot will be like "Uh-oh you're kinda fallin apart here buddy, don't worry I got this!" and will begin checking the connected storage for a similar block type. By similar I mean if the destroyed block type is a piece of standard armor, it will check the storage for a piece of standard armor of any color, respecting the shape (block, wedge, tetra, corner, etc) and use that replacement to fill the damaged section. The blueprint block is there as a sort of guideline for the Repair Bot to follow, can't have it randomly placing blocks on the enemy as you shoot them down.
- Hotbarable Logic Activator (Didn't have an actual name)
Just as it sounds, a logic activator you can assign to the hotbar for easy access. This stems from the fact that I enjoy "armoring" my ships with a shell of blast doors that I can activate/deactivate at will. The problem with this is, I have to access the submenu for door control and open all my doors to drop the armor. For setups like this, using a logic block would allow the player to activate only the blocks assigned and being in the hotbar means no more entering build mode to use the block. I can see this block working well for activating/deactivating various subsystems, or different alerts on the ship. (Red alert anyone?)
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