StarMade: Stuff

[schema]

Hello,

I'm sorry for not updaing in a while. I was mostly busy with working on concepts on how to realize the steam release, as well as releases on other publishers.



However I did some work mainly on one thing: rotating sectors. The way they are now really gives me a hard time solving the void->system transition as well as the other way around, since there is no logical solution for that being perfect.

So I came up with an alternative. The method is unfortunately not easy to explain: it will be basically a rigid grid rotating around the sun (kind of like locking the hinges on a ferris wheel). This is much more easy to handle logically and technically, but it will eliminate the day and night transition (because the angle to the sun is then fixed), which are basically the reason the revolving sectors existed in the first place. I will try to bring that back by moving the real rotation into single sectors (like planets, or sectors with a huge mass station). Those sectors will locally revolve around themselves: This means it's not fixed on which side of the sector you will enter if you fly to it, but once you are inside you will be part of the rotation. This approach is also a lot more "realistic", since an earth day isn't made of planets rotating around the sun (that would be a year), but the planets rotation about themselves.

Feel free to discuss the planned idea. I really need some input on this.



Oh, before I forget, as announced the game's cost will be 6$ on August 1st. The free version will be still available though.



Thanks for playing StarMade

cheers,

- schema

 

[Trafalgar]

So basically no matter where you are in the system it will seem like you\'re orbiting around the star at the same speed as anything else there, but everything will orbit at a speed relative to its distance, because the grid is fixed in place and merely spins in place, with everything inside it? It sounds like it would seem a lot more seamless inside systems, but when entering and exiting systems it will still seem weird if you see stuff orbiting, then fly through a border near a planet and suddenly are orbiting at the same speed as it. It\'s also weird that we could just fly straight towards a star and find ourselves orbiting it, but it does make things easier.

As for the planets, if they\'re still discs, I imagine you could get night and day by pointing the planet\'s x or z axis at the cross product of the normalized vector towards the sun and the normalized up vector (e.g. <0,1,0>), and rotating the planet around that axis over time. Hmm, you\'d have issues with things landing there / docking / etc not rotating with it unless (a) it had its own sector that rotated with it, which would be really weird with firing guns and missiles into a rotating zone, or (b) if the rotating zone wasn\'t a sector, but instead was a property of objects? Seems like a pretty hard problem unless they don\'t rotate at all.

You could just replace the suns with lighthouses (or lanterns) and night would be when the light is facing in the opposite direction. That would be a whole lot easier. :P

 

[CasusU]

$6!? That\'s bullshit. You should be charging $15-$20 for this at least.

 

[Bigdog]

Some people are just to cheap i agree though it should be around $15-$20 it is farly new game though, but its alpha so it should be cheaper. Though some people like to charge more for there alphas like Planetary Annihilation the game is not even worth that much from what it looks like in the vids.

 

[KantagaXD]

what do you get more if you buy the game?

 

[Dragon9000]

Sounds good

 

[Dragon9000]

Will people who have bought the game already get a steam key on steam release?

 

[Darius85]

You have game for 3$ (soon it will be 6$ i know) is it not enough?

I think in future price will be even higher so buying it now it is good move.

Also you support Shema in his work.

 

[M211]

Hallo,

I wanted to buy the game but, only Paypal doesnt´t work for me!!

Schema please add new payment thing like Überweisung (don´t know englis word, sorry)

Cheers

 

[stason78]

I think you are on the right track with these changes. I also need to share a moment I had yesterday on my home planet. There I was in the early morning (local planet time) building my awsome planetary station when suddenly the sky was lit with the most amazing colors. The dawn of a new day had come and it was a really cool feeling. Well done on that and I hope you can recreate that effect using the rotating planets.

 

[VariousArtist]

should be added as block... =)

 

[DivineEvil]

I really can\'t see it another way, but having Star Systems being completely separate instances, and some mechanic allowing travel between them, each System having less planets, less shops and less stations, but bigger sectors with much more sophisticaded features - flat planets warped to spheres, stations and shops being modularly generated from 25x25 elements, large asteroid clusters feasible for prolonged mining operations and some property-based nebulae or dust fields.

Overall, change likely to accomodate the realism of the system. I hope that the orbital spin will become horizontal plane instead of vertical, because it really inconvenient to percieve on a base of common knowledge. And rotation phases should be scaled properly relatively by default, in example so that planet sector revolves itself in 20 minutes and system reloves only in 720 minutes. But anyway, I like the change and wonder how it will end up.

 

[Charlie_]

And I love the eventual sector-orbit. It should indeed be very more easy on the logics.

Day-night is a temporary loss, and I don\'t think it will impact the gameplay too much. It was sure a nice mechanic, but through and through, a lot of the time you\'re actually in space more than on a planet. So if we get them back, good If we don\'t, weeeeell heh, we can just say the planets are tididally locked.

Keep up the good work! I\'m waiting for the price raise to buy it

 

[Ueichen]

So why don\'t you make planets into sectors? that would make it simpler, it would make them more massive, one \'\'planet sector\"could be basically like a minecraft world, so it would also fix the fact that you are now able to see the \"bottom\" of the planet. This sector could also include moons, and a low-earth orbit big enough for massive ships...



I thought that would make it simpler and cooler, what do you guys think?

 

[Moph]

Hmm, well, I just wrote out a long post in which I was wrangling with the idea of how it currently works, and I think it\'s a complete mess, but only because of how it\'s displayed to players. If I\'ve stumbled to understanding it correctly, the current sectors move?

I think the way to go would be to have each system, void and star, be a fixed 3D volume in a 3D grid. The star/sun should be fixed in the centre of the star system, and the system divided into a fixed grid, which would be called \'sectors\'. So at this point, both systems are effectively both the same as each other. (This is how I assumed it worked, and why it\'s been so confusing.)

Now, in addition with star systems, each planet would then have it\'s own \'sector\' which orbits around the star, which is how it does currently work, if I\'m right. This acts as a frame of reference for the planet. For the sake of clarity, I\'m going to refer to this as the \'planet\'s zone of influence\', or \'planetary zone\', not sector.

Currently, what the player sees in game is the \'planetary zone\' as the sector, which is what\'s leading to so much confusion I think, especially since Void system sectors are Star system sectors are not the same.

Instead, the sectors should be displayed as the actual divided up system grid sectors, and the planetary zone should be displayed differently, perhaps in the same way the notification for being within range of a shop is.

Having the Void system and Star system sectors being displayed in the exact same way makes people assume they act in the same way as well, and it\'s so extremely confusing.

Now, in using this system, where the star system is broken down into both sectors and planetary zones, a couple of problems can be solved. Players will be travelling with the planetary zone, so they will be able to see that they are travelling through the star system\'s sectors, and it will give a clear indication to them that they are in orbit around the star. It will also remove the problem of getting disorientated when crossing systems because their navigation tools will still be working from the star system\'s divided up grid sectors. Players will intuitively understand that if they\'ve been on a planet in orbit, they are not going to be in the same place they were when they landed on the planet.

I feel like this is the correct way for this problem to be approached, but it does leave one problem on the table. And that is, that you will not be able to create static entities in this system due to the potential of planets colliding with them. The solution is simple, every entity in this system, will need to be in orbit, and I believe this is already possible with the way it currently works.

There is also another point that I think is worth mentioning here.
Planets can orbit at different rates, and unfortunately, locking all the planetary zones together will mean the outer planets orbit faster, while the inner planets orbit slower, which is totally the opposite of what happens, not to mention that the system will be entirely unlinked to the mass of the planets. This is perhaps a minor consideration though as it\'s not likely to damage gameplay. This could be solved somewhat by dividing the solar system into circular bands which each have defined orbital speeds, but that would still ignore satellite mass.

One last problem to overcome is how to get into the system if you\'re outside! How do you jump onto a spinning roundabout/carousel? Usually, only if it\'s slow enough. This basically means that the fastest moving planets would need to be slow enough to chase down, and unless using different speed bands, that\'s going to be the outermost planet, meaning the inner planets will take ages to orbit.. which isn\'t a problem since orbit time determine\'s a planet\'s year, not it\'s day/night cycle; which in turn should really be solved by rotating the planetary zone (preferably about a random axis!).



TL;DR?
The only real problem with the current system is how it\'s displayed to players.


Also, while you\'re looking into issues of \'frame of reference\', how about setting one up for a player and his ship? When you exit a moving ship, the astronaut should be flying alongside it at an equal speed; he shouldn\'t just suddenly stop.
Both the astronaut and ship are in the same frame of reference.
I\'ve seen someone mention this as the reason why ship\'s decelerate for no reason; to allow you to catch it up if you accidentally exit it. I must admit, I can\'t think of any other reason why ships act like this.

 

[manguy331]

if you have the game will u still have pay

 

[asmanwoks]

Now i understand! man, this planned change sounds really cool!

 

[Matthmatt]

Planets are already resource-intensive enough, so unless a supercomputer comes with each purchase of the game, a SECTOR sized planet (which is incredibly massive) will destroy peoples computers. Also, the focus of the game is on space and ships, so that\'s probably where the most effort will go. I would also like to point out that, if the planets remain the same shape, you would still be able to see the bottom of a planet, no matter how massive it is, unless the planet is of infinite size, because there has to be a way to go around it. Schema has mentioned the possibility of making the planets \"oreo\" shaped though.

 

[Zovc]

like manguy said, when the free version is taken away will i have to pay to play the current free version? oh yea and 1 more thing about the buying thing to other people. I think the game is so cheap because theres a free version and its so new. Would you want to pay $15-$20 for something that doesnt have a very sure future? I think the game will last long but there can be anything that comes in on top and then the game loses people and sales. I dont like paying for my games so i get the free thing and try to make the most of it. Right now i think you can make a global multiplayer server for buyers to play with anyone anytime that has otherwise bought StarMade. Something else would make buyers single player better. I\'m guessing theres something going to happen to the single player seeing the box that currently has only Sandbox. Maybe put a new thing there, like a reverse game. Where you are the pirates and you fly around and fight random ships from the multiplayer servers (or single player) that are saved as a blueprint. So say i built a mothership on single player and saved it in the catalog. On Pirate Mode it can take random ships and use them as the pirates enemies, and your the pirates. But there\'s a twist! You shoot down a friendly pirate ship, (talking in the gamemode) and you lose alliance and theres the random ships coming after you and the entire pirate force (they don\'t go flying at you but they become your enemies). Now imagine that your best friend built a medium sized ship thats super powerful and saved the blueprint. Now you go on this gamemode on single player. Theres a prompt on first time/reset. You choose what multiplayer servers or single player, you want blueprints to be taken off of. You can uncheck all but one. You would incorperate into multiplayer where the owner sets it the first time, then after each restart an admin has to be first on the server to reset it. The server onwer should also be able to change it anytime with:

/spawnlist

In chat:

Spawning any blueprints from:

Single-player \"True\"

Localhost:4242 \"False\"

/spawntoggle (name)

/spawntoggle Single-player

*server message* Cannot deactivate

/spawntoggle Localhost:4242

*server message* Localhost:4242 \"True\"





I think this could keep the supportive free players while making buyers have a bigger benifit,

 

[GaeasSon]

I hesitate to comment because I imagine this must be where you started so there must be good reasons for not doing it this way...

But why not let your sectors be nice clean staticly cubic sectors, and then plot the position of your planets within those sectors as the traverse around the star? It would make parking relative to a planet difficult, I see. What if a planet generated with \"Lagrange poiints\" or \"parking orbitals\". Invisible, collisionless blocks around and above the disk of the planet that any sized ship could dock to... Or make it so that objects within 1 diamter tend to match vector with the planet. For day/night, planets could revolve.... or never mind the orbiting planets... just leave them fixed, and revolve them. You don\'t need to worry about tracking their revolutions unless someone is within range of them anyway.