StarMade Dev Blog 17 November 2017

    TheOmega

    The reason Deb needs meds
    Joined
    Nov 20, 2013
    Messages
    218
    Reaction score
    37
    • Purchased!
    • Legacy Citizen 3
    First of all thanks for an amazing dev blog, really looking forward to some of the upcomming features.

    Also for the purposes of Lecic's frontal armor cube and Criss's solution I present the following image:

    With blue blocks being shield blocks, orange being armor and red circles being shield radiuses one can essentially create armor that is completely immune to pierce damage thus utterly negating the solution posed by Criss a few pages back.
    Yeah, but if you cover an entire large ship with them, the shields are going to be useless because they have no HP, etc. etc.
     

    AtraUnam

    Maiden of crashes
    Joined
    Oct 15, 2013
    Messages
    1,120
    Reaction score
    866
    • Railman Gold
    • Competition Winner - Small Fleets
    • Wired for Logic Gold
    Yeah, but if you cover an entire large ship with them, the shields are going to be useless because they have no HP, etc. etc.
    They don't need to be their purpose isn't to provide any actual defense, they soely exist to gimp pierce projectiles. Actual defense can be done by a main shield that does not cover the forward armor block, as specified by Lecic
     

    klawxx

    Product Manager - Roden Shipyards
    Joined
    Jan 5, 2016
    Messages
    337
    Reaction score
    595
    • Legacy Citizen 4
    • Community Content - Silver 1
    • Likeable
    I'm the average StarMade player, but i do have an IT background... I would like to say some things, I will be brief:

    1 - Build strong foundations and stop rebuilding. that's not constructive... no pun intended lol
    2 - Often the simplest solution is usually the best one, like the old shield system....
    3 - Stablish a strong and constant presence with you clients. so, make sure we are always in the same page by keeping in touch.

    Man I love this game and I tried to help out the most I could, like with translation (Translators badges, anyone ;)).
    I don't want this "project" to die out. This is much more than a game. I Always wanted to design starships when I was younger...:rolleyes:

    Yea, and for god sake, give those AI pilots some skills. the idiots keep hitting my ships like some drunk mofos :(.
     
    • Like
    Reactions: Thingie

    StormWing0

    Leads the Storm
    Joined
    Jun 26, 2015
    Messages
    2,129
    Reaction score
    319
    • Community Content - Bronze 1
    From the sounds of it shine hasn't played vs a moving target at average combat range yet when testing? o_O In any event why not make the Scanner help with targeting for cannons and beams? Or the Recon Chambers? maybe putting upgrades into those chambers on that path would make it so you could lead targets better or parts of targets? Say you're aiming for a particular turret or shield generator having some kind of directional lead indicator would help.
     

    Lecic

    Convicted Lancake Abuser
    Joined
    Apr 14, 2013
    Messages
    5,105
    Reaction score
    1,222
    • Thinking Positive Gold
    • Purchased!
    • Legacy Citizen 10
    From the sounds of it shine hasn't played vs a moving target at average combat range yet when testing? o_O In any event why not make the Scanner help with targeting for cannons and beams? Or the Recon Chambers? maybe putting upgrades into those chambers on that path would make it so you could lead targets better or parts of targets? Say you're aiming for a particular turret or shield generator having some kind of directional lead indicator would help.
    Directional lead is not useful for hitting anything specific on a ship when the entire ship you are targetting is a 5x5 dot of pixels.
     
    Joined
    Jan 4, 2015
    Messages
    629
    Reaction score
    243
    I am very good at being myself. Real world tech, we utilize single servers atm. this is almost the entry level for server based gaming. Distributed computing and clustering works for advancing past the limitations of our current processing level.
    i can see that you are. the utilize and distributed computing suggestion really top it off. a+ 9 ass
     
    Joined
    Aug 23, 2016
    Messages
    758
    Reaction score
    129
    This assumes you NEED to have a full covering hull. As discussed earlier, this is not necessarily the case. A rear-set shield generator allows you to have a large bubble and keep a large amount of hull on the front of your ship as well.

    At combat ranges, weapons are only going to be hitting the front face of your ship anyway. If you don't care about aesthetics, you could even do a partial dome over just the front quarter of your shield sphere, and have your turrets be orbital designs rather than docked to the actual hull.
    The principle applies regardless of whether you fully enclose the ship or not. Moving docked hull away from the ship means either reduced coverage or increased mass.

    Have you actually checked to see what sort of numbers you get?
    For example can a shield bubble from a shield of enough power fit inside your ship's length?
    And how many blocks to you need to cover the fwd quarter of the shield bubble?

    I assume you haven't, or you'd quote them.
    You're entire complaint is just speculation that hasn't been fully thought through, and is untested.
     

    Matt_Bradock

    The Shrink
    Joined
    Aug 4, 2013
    Messages
    798
    Reaction score
    464
    • Purchased!
    • Thinking Positive
    • Legacy Citizen 5
    Lancake thought of spaghettis to be problematic before they really became popular here, so we have several measures planned to make it less viable to build in a spaghetti style, even though we don't want to share the plans until the weapons update is fully announced.
    A effective way to counter spaghetti ships would be forcing the break-off mechanic, and a proximity detonator for missiles (so they don't actually have to impact, just come within, say, 5 blocks range of any block on a ship) with as little lag as possible. This way both spaghetti and chandelier ships would really fall behind solid, well armored ships, as they could still be damaged by missiles and could be very quickly cut up with cannons or beams once shields drop.
     

    Lecic

    Convicted Lancake Abuser
    Joined
    Apr 14, 2013
    Messages
    5,105
    Reaction score
    1,222
    • Thinking Positive Gold
    • Purchased!
    • Legacy Citizen 10
    For example can a shield bubble from a shield of enough power fit inside your ship's length?
    Unless things have changed, regen is the only thing that contributes to bubble size. I can have as many capacitors as I can fit inside a bubble as I want.

    And how many blocks to you need to cover the fwd quarter of the shield bubble?
    Going off previous experience with docked forcefields, not very many.

    Have you actually checked to see what sort of numbers you get?
    Irrelevant when all of the numbers change every couple days. The specific numbers don't actually matter right now anyway- the only scenario in which unshielded hull isn't viable is one in which the shield bubbles are so large that they, as a feature, are completely worthless to implement anyway, as any ship will be fully covered by anything remotely approaching reasonable shield recharge rates anyway.
     
    Joined
    Dec 9, 2015
    Messages
    150
    Reaction score
    78
    Irrelevant when all of the numbers change every couple days. The specific numbers don't actually matter right now anyway- the only scenario in which unshielded hull isn't viable is one in which the shield bubbles are so large that they, as a feature, are completely worthless to implement anyway, as any ship will be fully covered by anything remotely approaching reasonable shield recharge rates anyway.
    what is a reasonable recharge rate for say a 10,000,000 Cap Shield?
     
    Joined
    Oct 22, 2014
    Messages
    338
    Reaction score
    148
    • Legacy Citizen 3
    I just read every post on this thread. What I got from all this was... a headache, lol.

    I just hope it all gets worked out. I'd like to think I may have just learned a bunch of how PvP works with all this, enough to be able to build a passable PVP ship. I'll admit to not liking several of the PVPers, but the information contained is valid. Definitely consult these people schema , the game will be better off for it in the long run. I love the crazy things that can be built with logic and rails, it's one of the biggest draws of this game for me. Carry on good sirs.
     
    Joined
    Dec 9, 2015
    Messages
    150
    Reaction score
    78
    so we would talk about a Shield recharger with a dimension of: 57*57*56 wich will yield a recharge of 1,000,692. this one would give a shield radius of 589.4m.... so possible shielded ship lenght of 1,178m ... fitting for a reactor+stabs needed to power the thing...
     

    Matt_Bradock

    The Shrink
    Joined
    Aug 4, 2013
    Messages
    798
    Reaction score
    464
    • Purchased!
    • Thinking Positive
    • Legacy Citizen 5
    Just to clarify things here... how would the shielding radius and shield center position even be calculated and how would number of modules/placement affect it?
     
    Joined
    Dec 9, 2015
    Messages
    150
    Reaction score
    78
    Just to clarify things here... how would the shielding radius and shield center position even be calculated and how would number of modules/placement affect it?
    i can say from testing that the radius is scaled to the number of recharg blocks. (recharge blocks need to touch each other to be counted as one generator)
    the center of the Shield radius looks do be the "mass" center of all placed rechargers (not 100% sure about that tho)
    all capacity blocks placed inside the radius connect to the recharger and count towards the shield capacity regardles of touching each other
     
    Joined
    Aug 10, 2013
    Messages
    290
    Reaction score
    366
    ~ Turret aim mode: manually aim turrets from your mothership
    That's super neat and fun to use!

    It is however the exact opposite of what'd be practical: Select-Target auto-aiming weapons on the mothership w/o having to resort to docked entities - Like seen in Star Trek Online. ( Manual aim vs small moving targets, from a moving source = Eternal dance with no hits scored. )
     
    Joined
    Aug 23, 2016
    Messages
    758
    Reaction score
    129
    Unless things have changed, regen is the only thing that contributes to bubble size. I can have as many capacitors as I can fit inside a bubble as I want.

    Going off previous experience with docked forcefields, not very many.

    Irrelevant when all of the numbers change every couple days. The specific numbers don't actually matter right now anyway- the only scenario in which unshielded hull isn't viable is one in which the shield bubbles are so large that they, as a feature, are completely worthless to implement anyway, as any ship will be fully covered by anything remotely approaching reasonable shield recharge rates anyway.
    This is very simple: you're wrong to worry about docked hull with shields 2.0 as they are (even if we first accept that docked hull is bad in the first place).

    Creating a docked hull, even just "fwd quarter" docked hull, will be so impractical that it will happen rarely, if at all, because shield range bubbles are so large for any shield with decent regen.

    For example, here's a Despoiler in 200.172. (Anyone can verify this by doing it themselves) Fwd end to the left.
    You can't see it through all the shield bubbles but I've drawn in red an approximate bounding profile box.

    Despite the fact that that shields in this ship are split into a bazillion smaller groups, shield range is so large that docked hull would be impractical.
    If the shields were a single group, to duplicate their recharge ability in shields 1.0, the range bubble would be so large as to make docked hull virtually unthinkable.



    starmade-screenshot-0058.png


    I'll say it again: with current shields 2.0 docked hull is possible, but so impractical that we aren't likely to see it.
     
    Joined
    Aug 23, 2016
    Messages
    758
    Reaction score
    129
    You are displaying the second option I listed, which is that the bubbles are so big that the entire feature is pointless.
    Great. So unless shield 2.0 variables change significantly perhaps we can stop listening to speculative complaints about docked hull that aren't based on reality.
     

    Lecic

    Convicted Lancake Abuser
    Joined
    Apr 14, 2013
    Messages
    5,105
    Reaction score
    1,222
    • Thinking Positive Gold
    • Purchased!
    • Legacy Citizen 10
    Great. So unless shield 2.0 variables change significantly perhaps we can stop listening to speculative complaints about docked hull that aren't based on reality.
    Or perhaps we should be asking ourselves if the entire feature should be scrapped, since it seems to be completely worthless, either allowing for broken unshielded hull or by being indistinguishable from the current one, and being nothing but a waste of developer time?
     
    • Like
    Reactions: Chckn Wildstyle