Planned Sector Boundary Spawn Protection

[Edymnion]

One thing I've had an issue with before but never thought to mention:

We need protections in place to prevent a station from spawning so that parts of it cross sector boundaries.

I've designed large stations in the past in single player creative where I could crank the advanced build area up very high without bothering anyone (for making large shipyards), and then had a hell of a time trying to spawn it into an online server because it almost seems to randomly pick a place to spawn at, and when you're looking at a kilometer long shipyard in a 2km long sector, its not hard at all for it to overlap a sector boundary and start glitching out.

Some sort of protection to either not let it spawn in the first place (saving you cash and the effort of taking it apart again), or to make sure it slides the station around until it fits in the sector before deciding "this is where it will spawn" would be of immense help.

 

[splatthecat]

I would like something like this or for the first station block to spawn at exactly the centre of the sector regardless of where the astronaut is positioned when the station is spawned in. I have built stations that cross sectors and had awful times when I dock to it and the ship is suddenly shifted 2.5km away.

I tend to use the sector distances to position myself as close as I can to the middle of the sector though sometimes forget about above and below!

 

[Edymnion]

I'd love to be able to tell it to put the first station block in the dead center of a sector as well.

Again, I've built those large shipyards in the past where I thought I was good only to find out the last hundred meters or so spilled over a boarder and I had to move the entire thing and try again.

 

[Lone_Puppy]

I would like this also! I also want the ability to see the coordinates inside a sector the same way we can see sector coords inside systems.

 

[Phocian]

Great idea, as an admin I often get the issues from players that don't have stations in the middle of a sector. So I have to manually center them.

This gets worse when players then build defensive weapons platforms etc.

Our solution was a lazy one..... We increased the sector size to reduce the incidences.

 

[Crimson-Artist]

great idea. I've always been wondered where my station will be placed when i spawn it in. Perhaps if after hitting the spawn/ok button we are then given a ghostly block or image of the blueprint (if things get too graphically intensive then maybe only show the bounding box) which is tied to our cross hair. we can then place it anywhere we look. we can even orient it similar to how we do with astronaut mode advanced build mode.

 

[NeonSturm]

Why not go further hand have sectors be positioned between 4 objects?

Swapping tetras means translating the movement vector toward and from the border triangle.
Flying in a direction means that you have an origin, a destination and a distance which changes as the tetra warps and derive your speed in the non-warped tetra from these 2 coordinates and the variable distance while you derive your position from your position in the non-warped tetra and the warping-properties of it.

Seeing the position "as a fraction of distances between 4 reference-points" in 3-dimensional space lets you see position as 50% or 500/1000 along x/y/z where x/y/z is

1. A→B = fractional position along a line
   
2. (A→B)→C = fractional position along a line with a translation toward C
   
3. ((A→B)→C)→D = fractional position along a line with a translation toward C translated toward D.

I hear the scream for rounding errors, but movement is nothing but an incrementing position in the forth dimension which uses a second-based-scale instead of meter-based-scale.
If you change movement, the change can be applied as a gradual change between one and another movement vector.
Rounding errors are eliminated by aiming for a goal and a "more flexible use of the scale of progress toward that goal" or irrelevant because user-issued orders have a much greater rounding error of 300ms reaction time.

But collision checks have to be done with the result, which may also align to even numbers toward another position (docked = dock + 1n) when performed.

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

Having stations spawning in and not going over the sector boundary sounds like a great idea, short of fixing any bugs that cause issues anyway. Of course this wouldn't really work for hand built stations but it would be great if when your spawning one in that it either warns you or simply won't spawn it in over a boundary.

In the mean time if you need to find the center of a sector you can use the distance to the neighboring sectors and make sure they are all about the same distance from you, or use F11 to enter free cam mode which will put your camera in the center of the sector and you have to compare that location to your entity. Of course spawning the station in will have it offset. You could probably go to the center of the sector, hit C, fly backwards until just before you cross into the next sector and spawn it in. The game should always spawn an entity "galactic north" of you but I have not tested this with stations.

As for automatically placing the first block of a station as in the center has a few issues. This is ignoring the fact that in some cases you can have multiple stations in a sector, I don't know how common this is but we have it set on my server where we have warp-gate hubs. Also not every stations first block will be the actual center of the station so at the most it should be an option when starting a new station. This does give me an interesting idea though, how about the ability to "move"/re-center a station based on it's center of mass to the center of a sector assuming it's the only station in the sector.

 

[Lone_Puppy]

Perhaps the game itself could just check the blueprint dimensions and insures that if the object is overlapping a sector border, to then automatically realign the edge of the spawned structure say 50-100 metres back from the border.
[doublepost=1473800494,1473800412][/doublepost]Naturally this would not stop the player building out across the boarder. So, some kind of coords ref in the hud would be better for users planning and building extensions.

 

[Crimson-Artist]

You've submitted it, we discussed it. And in short...

Some kind of warning message will appear when you try to place a station near the sector boundary. Check out all the details in the phabricator ticket! http://phab.starma.de/T1919

 

[Edymnion]