StarMade Development Direction

[Sven_The_Slayer]

I guess it's finding the balance. For something like Minecraft it feels natural to be monitoring food levels, but with so much we'll be adding in, those smaller things could easily feel like a pain to have to deal with.

Yeah I would hate to have to stop and eat personally like in Minecraft but it wouldn't be as big of an problem if I had to store food in the cargo bay that gets consumed over time.

 

[Bench]

Yeah I would hate to have to stop and eat personally like in Minecraft but it wouldn't be as big of an problem if I had to store food in the cargo bay that gets consumed over time.

It'd more likely just keep stack of something on you rather than you magically accessing cargo

 

[Mr.Steam]

With the advent of replication and transporter technology eating is no longer necessary. As long as you have access to energy, "Food" can be replicated and beamed into your stomach automatically. In fact you don't need to use the bathroom anymore either. Human waste can just be beamed out of your colon and back into the food replicators.

 

[Bench]

beamed out of your colon

never thought i'd hear this line

 

[Mr.Steam]

never thought i'd hear this line

They may have overlooked that part on Star Trek!

 

[nightwalker_007]

Any chance we'll see shipyard computers decoupled from shipyards to allow designing of both Stations and Ships anywhere one of these computers is plopped? I'd also like to see being able to edit a ship design without having to fly into a hologram ship and enter a hologram core.

It would be awesome to have a NPC station that can act as a navigator. With that, a player could have their ship fly off to the far reaches of the galaxy while working on their new station or ship design (or other players that happen to be hitching a ride on your ship).

I've suggested a station design computer before, and needing a special station construction ship to build a station based on a station design before (http://starmadedock.net/threads/design-computer-for-both-starbases-and-ships.21000/). I think this is far better for role-playing and allows players to spend more time working on their station designed. Needing money to build a station that starts off as a single block in space seems a bit too artificial of a game mechanic.

We also desperately need improved faction permission controls, as well as individual ship ownership protection, to prevent theft by faction members.

 

[Lecic]

With the advent of replication and transporter technology eating is no longer necessary. As long as you have access to energy, "Food" can be replicated and beamed into your stomach automatically. In fact you don't need to use the bathroom anymore either. Human waste can just be beamed out of your colon and back into the food replicators.

That would seem to require you to install a teleporter and power generation inside your body, since Starmade transporters appear to only beam between other transporters or one way, from a transporter to an open space.

 

[Mr.Steam]

That would seem to require you to install a teleporter and power generation inside your body, since Starmade transporters appear to only beam between other transporters or one way, from a transporter to an open space

That brings up a great idea! How about some personal astronaut equipment that you carry that allows someone to lock onto you and beam you up. Like if you are on a hostile planet and need to get away from a dangerous situation in a hurry!

 

[Lecic]

That brings up a great idea! How about some personal astronaut equipment that you carry that allows someone to lock onto you and beam you up. Like if you are on a hostile planet and need to get away from a dangerous situation in a hurry!

What's the point of having a dangerous situation if you can escape it with the push of a button?

 

[Mr.Steam]

What's the point of having a dangerous situation if you can escape it with the push of a button?

Beats getting eaten by a hungry Xenomorph.

 

[TartarusMkII]

Heya Bench, thanks a ton for taking the time to write this for us. Here are my thoughts.

-Like the cargo boxes appearing in an area. That adds a ton of life to the game that many other games of this class do not have. Also, an unarmored space devoted to cargo is an important consideration for the mechanics of ship building, obviously.
-However, I still wonder if the game would be better served by a weight system similar to Space Engineers. That way the balance of stack size no longer matters- Infinite space in the UI no longer matters- just the weight of objects, and the collection of all things you, or a storage, is containing.

-Love the Quarter concept. I adore the fact that it effectively merges "roleplay builds" and "combat" builds of ships. This also makes players themselves key designers of the living universe. As long as servers can handle it, that is. The fact that managing the crew and caring for them becomes a major consideration of ship designs meant to make use of them. I imagine a smaller ship like a submarine, with maybe only a small alcove designated for a single guy to sit and rest for a bit. Though small, the mechanics check out. It also gives purpose to all "roleplay" rooms people could ever want to make.

-Like having NPCs sit in chairs independent of the computer.
-However, I feel that if players are allowed to mass all of their technicians in one Quarter, it may make future boarding mechanics a bit stale. I personally feel that it would be best to require the chair and computer to be in the same Quarter.

-Like Mutiny mechanics. I'm sure this will need balancing, but I am confident it would not be something difficult to tweak.
-However, I think that spawning on a ship should involve medical rooms/Quarters for the purpose of respawning. This also makes future boarding dynamic if Quarter systems could be captured for the purpose of respawning. It would add a lot of dynamics to designing a ship's interior with the knowledge that these spawn points could be captured or disabled. And I mean, hell, though I don't like teleporters, at least it would justify even NPCs suddenly reappearing in a med-bay.

-I am concerned about complex paths and patrols. I feel like if a player is good at the game enough to set up complex devices that the crew would need to navigate, they could also be bothered to set NPC pathing. But otherwise, I don't want players who are not yet fluent with logic to have to be concerned with it.

-I still do not like transporters. They make traveling too easy. I especially dislike the idea of being able to board enemy ships with it. If this was absolutely necessary, I think that we should come up with a reason to have some kind of device or node on the designated entrance/exits of a ship, or a docking/freight bay. Those nodes can then serve as logic for where NPCs and players 'board' the ship for what ever reason they want to do so.

And finally, I just want to share my personal opinion that I think that single player for Starmade is potentially much weaker than Multiplayer. I don't think it's a good idea to focus on one or the other, but rather continue making mechanics that apply to both, like NPC management. I would never say we should disenfranchise people who prefer to play Starmade offline, but I think that its strength is finding a home server, and joining its community, even if you then play it solo.

Feel free to quote and respond, I'd like to know what anyone thinks of my thoughts on this.

 

[Bench]

RE - inventory stacks
are they actually stacks of "You can only have X per stack of whatever" and then have as many stacks of that as you can fit, like in minecraft? or is it something else?

It'd be you can only have a certain stack size for a specific block type. In theory smaller items you could hold more of, while larger heavier blocks you can hold less of per stack, but this would be all balanced.

Indeed. Three cheers for an evident plan in general. Although I am hoping that the thrust updates that were talked about a while ago get put in somewhere in the middle of this.

Thrust updates are still being talked through to make sure we only have to do it once. Can't confirm when they'll be.

You had me at “Quarters”.

Bench - is any of this started?

Well the start of transporters are in the dev builds at the moment.

Bench, I have one last question. How far will the automation of factions systems go? You will be able to recruit NPCs, and systems will have security levels reminiscent of EvE online, but how will that security be enforced? Will it be possible to assign blueprints as "defense ships" and automatically spend faction points to have them warp in when an enemy enters your faction's highsec space, or will you have to actually have NPC-crewed ships standing ready at nearby bases for them to be sent against enemies? Or will you be required to send the ships yourself? Because with large enough empires, I'd imagine that, realistically, players (typically serving as government, albeit RPing as other things) would not have to micromanage every single thing - that is what admirals and captains and quartermasters and harbormasters and the like are for.

We'll make it as simple as possible. Most likely it'd be as easy as create ship, assign crew or switch on Bobby-AI, assign to territory to defend and it warps out, and then when it's needed it'd warp back in. That's probably the best approach performance-wise.

Man, this was a great read! I've only played the game for like a week, but have already started wondering about some of these things from reading posts on these forums. The NPC management and future passive resource harvesting is especially exciting.

I do have a question though: will the "startup costs" to getting to this NPC management be better explained or lowered in the future? I'm a new player, so I'm not too familiar with the requirements of different blocks for more advanced construction. Maybe I'm not playing the game smart enough, but I feel like there's a requirement to invest hours and days into really specific mining before you can produce blocks needed for something other than a mining vessel. I want more cannon barrels, but I don't have nearly enough hylat, so instead I can purchase them from a shop, but then I'd have to sell other capsules I've refined already, and I don't know if I'll need those later for something I don't even have an inkling of yet. It feels like a catch-22, but I know it's just newb-ness.

As ship management is separate to blocks, the ability to assign quarters etc would be available to any ship without prejudice. The only prerequisite is that you need to be part of a faction and have the ability to recruit NPCs. If you're not part of a faction you can't recruit NPCs because you have no faction to recruit them to. Through this we control the learning curve for new players a bit.

I'm so excited! I know I was hoping for some performance updates, but usually you want to do that later on after you build out your features so you know what you need to get done. Still so excited. Quarters are the most interesting version of this. Hopefullly it'll lead to docking and undocking drones/NPC ships as well. Maybes its an unfair question, but any chances of that Bench ? Maybe that will come around to fleet setups.

We're looking at how we can use this same system to enable better automated docking mechanics etc, but no promises on that.

This has been a long standing issue: Can we also see faction permissions expanded so that players can protect their ships from being entered. activated. raided, or otherwise used by any other player, faction or non-faction players? Can we see station permissions expanded to prevent faction members accessing rooms and storage/factories (eg, expand the permission block roles) to make people less squeamish about allowing new members to join a faction, or to make their faction open?

Can we expand this to include defined spaces for faction and non-faction members inside of a station so they have their own little protected space in which they can build and work without fear of having their stuff stolen?

How about we expand NPC roles to allow NPCs to randomly visit stations and roam around. For instance, if a station has a quarter area defined as a recreational area, NPCs might want to visit there when they aren't interacting with a store. This will encourage functional base designs, and make the block-stations less attractive. It'll also allow for another avenue for NPC recruitment besides buying them from a shopkeeper.

As part of the NPC / faction overhauls as part of this focus, we'll be looking at faction permissions to address everyone's current concerns and issues with the system.

NPC recruitment will be really simple. You'll encounter NPCs all over the place. If they're not part of a faction already, then you could recruit them. No needing to go to shop-keeps to recruit them. There will be perhaps representatives of particular groups of NPCs who have a higher starting experience level or perhaps better attributes in a particular area, but the cost to recruit them will be more.

Does fauna include hostile mobs? Like for example hostile units in astronaut mode attacking the base from time to time.

Fauna will include all kinds of creatures, hostile and friendly, in all manner of sizes and rarity.

So what does this mean for BOBBY?

You're not exactly going to be able to fit living quarters in something like a carrier based fighter, or drone/ what have you, so i'm assuming he'll still be used for things like that?

Bobby-AI is still viable for turrets, and for ships where you may not have enough space for fully established quarters. Bobby-AI is also good for ships like fighters where you might not have the man-power to have each one with their own pilot.

Crew is nice, but the idea of needing to micromanage them irks me. Happiness and moral? When did I start playing the Sims? If there is an "auto" mode for them, perfect.

This game has been going away from where I would like it to go, sadly. But that is the risk I took buying the game so early in development. Oh well, still $6 well spent, but it appears I've gotten all the enjoyment I can from Starmade.

We're expanding into new areas, but we don't want you stuck trying to micromanage. Once you've established quarters that take care of the stats of your crew, you could in theory not have to worry about them again and they'll just take care of themselves. Again you're not required to have crew for you to be a viable force in the galaxy, however if you do choose that lone wolf lifestyle don't be surprised if you're the one mining all the resources and everything in between.

Man, these are some kick-butt plans you got! You could totally have an entire working crew on a 1:1 scale USS Enterprise! And would this open the ability to run a bar on a space station that people come and pay to raise their crew's morale?

If a players' ship docks to your station and they let their crew roam around and come to your bar, then it makes sense that you'd earn credits from that.

Bench: Will it be possible to have players act as crew?

While players won't give the same bonuses that NPC crew give, players will still be viable in roles. Something like turret control for example, enabling another player to control a group of turrets rather than leaving them to Bobby-AI may give you a leg up on the competition. Similarly other stations will be just as beneficial having a player on as having an NPC through just having a human player who can respond to situations, communicate with you etc.

I'd like heavy automated farming machinery designed for stations/planets (but could be put on ships) to allow full automation on stationary objects and limited travel time on the majority of ships.

Speaking of station/planet equipment that's very heavy but still allowed on ships- Factories and Shipyards on ships, devs. Please.

If any station-specific block systems are made available on ships, it would only be on capital ships and there would be pros and cons to each being on them.

would it be possible to have different uses for food depending on who it goes to? like for instance food will only give bonuses to players but not necessary for survival but if given to crew members it keeps their morale up

that could be a possibility, where consumable items like food for a npc boosts energy levels, but for a player it provides a health buff or something. It all matters where we choose to go with it.

That brings up a great idea! How about some personal astronaut equipment that you carry that allows someone to lock onto you and beam you up. Like if you are on a hostile planet and need to get away from a dangerous situation in a hurry!

If we did have such a thing, it'd be a one-time use item, and it wouldn't be an instantaneous transport to prevent it being too OP. So you might use it to try and escape, but it might have a countdown until you're able to beam "while your transport locks on" but at the same time, all enemy players in the area also get a marker showing where you are.

Heya Bench, thanks a ton for taking the time to write this for us. Here are my thoughts.

-Like the cargo boxes appearing in an area. That adds a ton of life to the game that many other games of this class do not have. Also, an unarmored space devoted to cargo is an important consideration for the mechanics of ship building, obviously.

-However, I still wonder if the game would be better served by a weight system similar to Space Engineers. That way the balance of stack size no longer matters- Infinite space in the UI no longer matters- just the weight of objects, and the collection of all things you, or a storage, is containing.

Haven't played Space Engineers so I can't comment on their system, but I think we'd want to limit how much we rely on weight, as even at the moment balancing thrust mechanics is tough.

-Love the Quarter concept. I adore the fact that it effectively merges "roleplay builds" and "combat" builds of ships. This also makes players themselves key designers of the living universe. As long as servers can handle it, that is. The fact that managing the crew and caring for them becomes a major consideration of ship designs meant to make use of them. I imagine a smaller ship like a submarine, with maybe only a small alcove designated for a single guy to sit and rest for a bit. Though small, the mechanics check out. It also gives purpose to all "roleplay" rooms people could ever want to make.

-Like having NPCs sit in chairs independent of the computer.
-However, I feel that if players are allowed to mass all of their technicians in one Quarter, it may make future boarding mechanics a bit stale. I personally feel that it would be best to require the chair and computer to be in the same Quarter.

It'd only be between engineering and the bridge, your medics would still have to be in your medbay, etc. We'll have to see how it all plays out with boarding, it's completely new so we'd need to see how balanced it is and whether with the setup it uses, that it's actually fun.

-Like Mutiny mechanics. I'm sure this will need balancing, but I am confident it would not be something difficult to tweak.
-However, I think that spawning on a ship should involve medical rooms/Quarters for the purpose of respawning. This also makes future boarding dynamic if Quarter systems could be captured for the purpose of respawning. It would add a lot of dynamics to designing a ship's interior with the knowledge that these spawn points could be captured or disabled. And I mean, hell, though I don't like teleporters, at least it would justify even NPCs suddenly reappearing in a med-bay.

Spawning on ships once added will be based off the medical quarter. The element of capturing a quarter is not something we have considered yet; will have to give that some thought.

-I am concerned about complex paths and patrols. I feel like if a player is good at the game enough to set up complex devices that the crew would need to navigate, they could also be bothered to set NPC pathing. But otherwise, I don't want players who are not yet fluent with logic to have to be concerned with it.

Pathing will be automatically calculated. You can set up patrol routes if you wish or just assign security to wander around your ship, in which case they'd travel based off the auto-calculated pathing between quarters. It's only once you start building more complex logic / rail circuits and systems that you'd employ the ability to create your own interactions and pathing. And even then it wouldn't be the entire thing. You may have a door that requires a button, and with the pathing/interactions system you'd just set, okay if a npc approaches from this direction it needs to press this button, then move to here then push this button then mark the exit direction of that set. It doesn't matter where the NPC is heading to, it just knows when it gets into that range here's how i go through.

-I still do not like transporters. They make traveling too easy. I especially dislike the idea of being able to board enemy ships with it. If this was absolutely necessary, I think that we should come up with a reason to have some kind of device or node on the designated entrance/exits of a ship, or a docking/freight bay. Those nodes can then serve as logic for where NPCs and players 'board' the ship for what ever reason they want to do so.

And finally, I just want to share my personal opinion that I think that single player for Starmade is potentially much weaker than Multiplayer. I don't think it's a good idea to focus on one or the other, but rather continue making mechanics that apply to both, like NPC management. I would never say we should disenfranchise people who prefer to play Starmade offline, but I think that its strength is finding a home server, and joining its community, even if you then play it solo.

Feel free to quote and respond, I'd like to know what anyone thinks of my thoughts on this.

Transporters will be balanced, and dependent on the shield level of the enemy ship as well as the fact that the enemy ship will need to have quarters for it even to be viable. If they have quarters they have crew, and so it's not just one person defending against an onslaught. It just makes having to think about internal security just as important as external weapons and armor. Also let's not forget the drawback of what happens to your shields as well. Balancing the times it takes for locking on etc will also play a big part. But I'm still convinced the system has merit.

 

[galoska]

Making an already incredible game even better. This is my favourite game of all time, no joke. Keep it up guys/gals!

 

[Amadeus]

I love this plan! just a quick question: will we be able to play as different races, not just human/terrans? Perhaps with certain races getting certain benefits?

 

[TartarusMkII]

Haven't played Space Engineers so I can't comment on their system, but I think we'd want to limit how much we rely on weight, as even at the moment balancing thrust mechanics is tough.

I was actually wrong to assume that it was common knowledge then. I'll make a suggestion thread with an outline on how this system can work for Starmade.

NPC recruitment will be really simple. You'll encounter NPCs all over the place. If they're not part of a faction already, then you could recruit them. No needing to go to shop-keeps to recruit them. There will be perhaps representatives of particular groups of NPCs who have a higher starting experience level or perhaps better attributes in a particular area, but the cost to recruit them will be more.

I love the idea of being able to go to an NPC bar or station and mingle and pick up NPCs to hire. The problem I see with this though, is that if the environment is not compelling enough, it could end up just being a bizarre room of a bunch of NPCs standing around. To start, it might be best to just contract people out of a terminal, or something.

As ship management is separate to blocks, the ability to assign quarters etc would be available to any ship without prejudice. The only prerequisite is that you need to be part of a faction and have the ability to recruit NPCs. If you're not part of a faction you can't recruit NPCs because you have no faction to recruit them to. Through this we control the learning curve for new players a bit.

The way you describe this makes me wonder- I feel like all players, then, should have their own personal faction. Then, rather than joining a faction, your own personal faction, or holdings, is then aligned with the faction you join. It would be different than an alliance of factions because you are fitting your personal holdings into the faction's hierarchy. This way, it would be easy to define what other members and their NPC crew can and cannot do with one person's personal assets that are a part of the conglomeration.

If a players' ship docks to your station and they let their crew roam around and come to your bar, then it makes sense that you'd earn credits from that.

This concept is simply amazing to me. That's all I can !@#$ing say.

 

[nightrune]

That brings up a great idea! How about some personal astronaut equipment that you carry that allows someone to lock onto you and beam you up. Like if you are on a hostile planet and need to get away from a dangerous situation in a hurry!

This should still be affected by the shields of the object you are on.

 

[Bench]

I love this plan! just a quick question: will we be able to play as different races, not just human/terrans? Perhaps with certain races getting certain benefits?

Not ruling it out.

The way you describe this makes me wonder- I feel like all players, then, should have their own personal faction. Then, rather than joining a faction, your own personal faction, or holdings, is then aligned with the faction you join. It would be different than an alliance of factions because you are fitting your personal holdings into the faction's hierarchy. This way, it would be easy to define what other members and their NPC crew can and cannot do with one person's personal assets that are a part of the conglomeration.

Through faction permission overhauls etc we'll make it natural for players to join factions but also recruit npcs to the faction to then join them as crew on their ships.

 

[TartarusMkII]

Through faction permission overhauls etc we'll make it natural for players to join factions but also recruit npcs to the faction to then join them as crew on their ships.

Something about the idea sits weirdly with me. If I hired NPCs, I'd want them to be clearly aligned to me first, before my faction- even if that would apparently mean nothing to the system, it could mean something significant to how the player interprets their ownership, or lack of ownership over what other faction members mean to their NPCs.

 

[Bench]

Something about the idea sits weirdly with me. If I hired NPCs, I'd want them to be clearly aligned to me first, before my faction- even if that would apparently mean nothing to the system, it could mean something significant to how the player interprets their ownership, or lack of ownership over what other faction members mean to their NPCs.

Interesting point.

 

[TartarusMkII]

Interesting point.

Err, to elaborate, let's say that because my NPCs are registered to the faction I am in, any other faction member can edit what the people I paid for are doing. While I don't really like that, let's just say that is the future case.

For a newer player, they might not expect other people to be able to edit their NPCs because they paid for them, and won't expect it if it happens. Only until they ask around and find out someone else had affected a change would their "wtf" moment be resolved.