Starmade interest through the years

[Jojomo]

I posted here a couple of weeks ago citing my top three reasons that combined meant I stopped actively playing.
One of them was the slow pace of building inside SM - I just don't have time for that.

So I decided to do something about it: I wrote a program that converts MagicaVoxel .vox files to SM .smtpl files, so you can model/design in MagicaVoxel instead of SM itself - a huge speed increase. (Possibly some of you may remember me starting to do the same thing with MCEdit a year ago and giving up due to lack of free time)

Anyway Vox2Smtpl is finished and functional, there's a thread in the Mods section: Vox2Smtpl: convert MagicaVoxel .vox to .smtpl
I hope you enjoy it.

 

[Winterhome]

Just gonna throw my two bits in here, since I'm technically "around" but no longer play the game.

Starmade has far more variability and theoretical content than games like, say, the Borderlands series. Borderlands 2, however, has players who've been in the game and actively and continually playing it ever since its release and have been jumping on top of every DLC that comes out. What's the difference, aside from the genre? Borderlands has a finite number of weapons despite weapons being the main draw and only a small handful of them are considered "viable" in any way whatsoever, and it also has a finite, set-in-stone world which isn't really good for exploration outside of finding amusing NPCs - both things are what I would consider 'negatives'.

What do AAA titles with more "limited" gameplay have over Starmade? Simple. Interesting singleplayer content. Missions. Wide variation in the environment with things to do and to distract the player with while traveling. And, of course, a skill ceiling based on personal skill rather than basing success on ship size.

I feel that Starmade would massively benefit from implementing an out-of-the-box mission generator and switching focus over to include proper astronaut gameplay and actual reasons to visit planets. Players might stop dropping like flies if the game stops being so building and PVP-centric (in a way that discourages newbies from engaging in PVP at that).

edit:: Also, we need more multithreading. Way more.

 

[Panpiper]

Schine didn't screw anyone out of anything.

I would suggest they screwed themselves out of ever being able to realistically finish the game, by basically tossing out the one thing they actually had working, their build system, and pretty much starting over from square one.

Can we at least agree that despite the game being able to deal with titans, having them in combat is a massive and unpractical pain in the ass?
Especially with those hundreds of PD's reacting to missile fire.

This is true. However if someone 'does' build a titan with which to bully other players, the only realistic counter to it is to have a titan of your own. Building a fleet of drone ships, while a more mass efficient, practical way to counter such a titan is even worse. (I know, I've made the mistake of doing that. I had to have the admin delete the drone fleet's entire sector just to get the server working again.) As long as titans are buildable, someone will build one. As long as someone could possibly build one, everyone has to be able to counter one. The quick and dirty solution is a hard cap of something like 100K mass. Not the ideal way perhaps, but effective.

psssstttt dood, Freaks R Us is populated 5-15 players.

Interesting. That was my server back when I played regularly. Any idea why it is still populated when others are not?

 

[JumpSuit]

Interesting. That was my server back when I played regularly. Any idea why it is still populated when others are not?

Well, it has its own Discord community... but it also has its own StarMade 'in-game' so to speak, self-running economy. Good Admins and very well stable. (Coming from my experience)

 

[jorgekorke]

As long as someone could possibly build one, everyone has to be able to counter one. The quick and dirty solution is a hard cap of something like 100K mass. Not the ideal way perhaps, but effective.

We had a unintentional hard cap in the past, with the credit holding limit. The blueprint update ruined that, and while everyone was cheering it up imagining it would kill gigantism, it only made things really worse. And I was there, warning in the thread. One month after this, we get Joel screwing up everyone's lives with a 2~3 mil mass doombrick.