Spherical Turrets - How Laggy are They?

[Malacodor]

I'd like to use one or more turrets like this one, but I fear they'd cause performance and lag problems due to collision calculations. Then again that's a problem with turrets in general, at least in greater numbers. So my question is: are spherical turrets in a hemispherical recess much worse than regular turrets or not? It would be great if some people with multiplayer experience could give me tips before I invest a lot of time in building potentially useless turrets.

 

[EricBlank]

Spherical turrets don't seem to be significantly worse than any other design, no. Keep enough room in the socket between the walls and the turret itself, like a difference of 2m radius, and the only collision will be the barrel with the sides, or if you choose an internal mechanism to restrict its rotation.

 

[Lukwan]

It would be great if some people with multiplayer experience could give me tips before I invest a lot of time in building potentially useless turrets.

Tested and true. Eye-Ball turret

Spoiler: The eye of Justice is upon you

I can't speak about combat effectiveness but it did win one tournament with evenly matched ships. (50K blocks/one turret only/no swarm-missiles.)

Lag was never a problem (and there were plenty of things that would lag that server). I realize that this turret is not exactly what you were asking about. It does not have extra moving parts that could add to lag but it did operate two supply beams that were operated by an oscillator cct and triggered via wireless (now obsolete).

I state that this turret is zero-collision and that is a slight fib. All turrets that do not float their barrels have two points of collision in the barrel; the lower limit and the upper limit. This turret has those but no other points of contact. In fact I use the lower limit to prevent the turret from even attempting to fire below it's clear arc of fire. This prevented it from wasting power shooting it's own base or the host ship. When the base rotates it can spin 360 degrees with full freedom. All of this has worked flawlessly for me.

Something to consider. The way this turret sticks out of the host ship gives it a tremendous field of fire. You will get better than 180 degrees of kill-zone while being more exposed to enemy fire. This turret was intended as a damage soak so that worked for this purpose.

I hope that is helpful.

 

[Dr. Whammy]

This is my free floating 360 degree coverage planetary defense turret

I used to have a problem where upon loading my sector, these things would come apart from their spherical carrier bases and start wiggling out of control...

The end result? LAAAAAAAAAAG!!!


They were near a planetary base but still...

 

[AtraUnam]

Sphere turrets are no worse for lag than regular turrets and are by far the most volume efficinent design making them more competative.

 

[Edymnion]

I use spherical turrets all the time.

The main defensive turret on top of my homebase is an eyeball turret, actually.

 

[Malacodor]

Thank you for your answers so far.

I use spherical turrets all the time.

The main defensive turret on top of my homebase is an eyeball turret, actually.
View attachment 32839

I guess a turret in a socket causes way more collision checks than a free floating one.

 

[EricBlank]

It might, yeah. Try to make sure the socket is two sizes too large for the turret and that'll be mostly mitigated

 

[AtraUnam]

It might, yeah. Try to make sure the socket is two sizes too large for the turret and that'll be mostly mitigated

That is... not how early collision checks work...

 

[Malacodor]

That is... not how early collision checks work...

Could you please explain?

 

[AtraUnam]

Could you please explain?

the game will start doing this checks as soon as the box dims of the two objects intercept. a sphere turret 1m from its socket does the exact same checks as a regular turret on a flat surface. The only way you could avoid such checks would be to have turret on the very edge of the ship with no parts of the ship extending beyond that turret.

 

[Lukwan]

the game will start doing this checks as soon as the box dims of the two objects intercept.

I can confirm this. The base of my eyeball turret sits inside a recessed cylinder of the host-ship. I made efforts to avoid lag by maintaining a buffer space between the wedges of the base and of the 'socket'. Even though the slabbed or wedged blocks had a gap when rotating it seemed to give me grief if the dimensional blocks intersected. I aimed for a visual gap of about 1 and a half-two blocks and found that sufficient to avoid lag.

 

[Malacodor]

Even though the slabbed or wedged blocks had a gap when rotating it seemed to give me grief if the dimensional blocks intersected.

So to be on the safe side I need to replace all shaped blocks with cubes and make sure that there are still no collisions?

 

[Lukwan]

So to be on the safe side I need to replace all shaped blocks with cubes and make sure that there are still no collisions?

That would be a good way to troubleshoot the build.

 

[NuclearFun]

So to be on the safe side I need to replace all shaped blocks with cubes and make sure that there are still no collisions?

i did some testing myself recently and came to the same conclusion.

 

[Malacodor]

That would be a good way to troubleshoot the build.

i did some testing myself recently and came to the same conclusion.

Thank you for the clarification/confirmation. I found that I can make the gap a bit smaller by replacing certain cubes with heptas (effectively cutting off corners), which looks better, but with several large turrets that would probably cause collision hell.

 

[nightrune]

Thank you for the clarification/confirmation. I found that I can make the gap a bit smaller by replacing certain cubes with heptas (effectively cutting off corners), which looks better, but with several large turrets that would probably cause collision hell.

As far as I understand you are gonna incur the same amount of checking regardless.

 

[Madman198237]

I use spherical turrets all the time.

The main defensive turret on top of my homebase is an eyeball turret, actually.
View attachment 32839

Heeeeyyyy Sauron!


Where's the rest of Barad-dur?

 

[Edymnion]

Heeeeyyyy Sauron!


Where's the rest of Barad-dur?

Heh, my favorite reaction so far is still "Wait, that thing is a TURRET?!?"

 

[EricBlank]

That is... not how early collision checks work...

Yeah, I was thinking of actual collisions, not collision checks.