Stifled building in the shadow of an impending update

[terra mining corp.]

well alterintel,after watching your youtube vids(which are great btw), I think we are loseing a great deal of inspiration if you quit building.

 

[alterintel]

well alterintel,after watching your youtube vids(which are great btw), I think we are loseing a great deal of inspiration if you quit building.

When I say my building is on hold I don't mean I'm not playing anymore. Far from it in fact. It just means that I don't plan on working on any of my ships until I have better idea of how the future mechanics are going to work out. Don't worry I'm still doing my videos. I'm just doing them a bit slower now, And they will pretty much just focus on logic since that seams to be the mechanic which is least likely to change. The next video I'm planning on doing now is a "multiple output switch" I hope you will enjoy that one as well.

 

[Captain_Stripes]

I kinda skimmed thru this thread and just seeing a lot of similar responses dealing with "well its alpha, makes no sense to stop building, ect." I feel like I just want to add my own thoughts on the matter.

I understand what most people are saying and to a degree I agree. But this thread interested me because i've reached a similar conclusion to alterintel on the topic. I mostly lurk these forums, and with greater detail recently because of the idea of change, and to be frank with much time spent reading, not much has been learned other than "Impending Possible Change". I dont mean that in a bad light in schine, ive always been a supporter and I always find my way back to playing this game. I understand that the game is alpha and its a lone man show. But I must admit that im not too fond of the communities attacks (not so much attacks anymore, thank god the community as thinned out the hatred/immaturity to much more mild mannered types) against those who feel disconnected when major change is possible. Yes the game is in alpha, there is going to be changes, but that response is slowly losing the ground it once stood on. I started playing this game when it first came out and it has gone through so many changes since then, I am happy and proud of the game it is and is becoming. Im very excited but also equally drained. The way I build and manage my game time makes it so its takes me months at a time to complete a project of substantial stature. And honestly, ive never finished a large project in this game ever. Some people (and really seemingly a small percentage of the players) can crank out massive ships and stations and complete fleets in a week. That same process takes me months because of my real life hindrances, my ocd type behaviors when it comes to building and my need for perfection in every way. So when a new game changing feature is announced, I really dont want to waste time building something to quickly turn around to build it again. Or like usual when a change happens, completely scrap the project altogether. I dont have the time to completely enjoy what I have done. In this situation, reading that the change most likely wont happen until months from now, actually makes it worse for me. By the time I complete my work, it will be time to change it all over again, or there will be more to change than there would be if the change happened now. There is no reward for finishing a project, just more work to be done. Its hard to stay motivated and excited to currently play a game knowing that there is a possibility that the progress you made can be reversed in the near future. Im sure the end product will be amazing and rewarding, I still largely support the vision of this game but the current repetition has me very drained.

 

[Brokengauge]

I can understand feeling a bit frustrated when ppl say "it's alpha" and I totally get the fact that particular phrase (or any permutation thereof) does nothing helpful whatsoever for the folks who are feeling a bit bummed/burned.

But still.

It's an alpha. Going in, I expected that things would radically change periodically, that everything I had built would be total junk. Anyone who starts playing a game still in its "alpha" stage should only do so if they are prepared for their progress to become invalid.

That being said, I don't think the ppl who ARE upset or burned out or waiting are being unreasonable, either. I mean, whatever the reason, we all play for the same reason: to have fun. Yeah. we're "testers" but we are volunteering to help a game that we find fun. The prospect of having to refit, revamp, and redesign everything you've had to build so far has to look less appetizing than Rocky mountain oysters. When such a radical change is forewarned, it basically takes all the potential fun you COULD be having, wads it up, throws it out the window, then runs outside and sets it on fire. Then pees on the ashes a little bit.

It's not like stuff like this happens in real life.

Ok, it kind of does, but you don't get advanced warning about it IRL. To he honest, I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not...

Anyway, I'm not discouraged in the slightest. Building is always fun to me, when I get the chance. Scrapping projects halfway through really doesn't do anything to put a damper on the experience for me.

Just my further sleep deprived thoughts on it.

 

[Shaker]

DukeofRealms when are we getting a devblog? lift the communities spirits!!!

Last update was a fortnight ago

 

[Lecic]

sound track and SFX have all been scheduled before Crew.

Why on Earth is audio, which is, realistically, a non essential aesthetic/immersion system, planned for implementation before CREW, which will likely be (and if it isn't, that's frankly a major fuckup) a core gameplay mechanic?
[doublepost=1489819024,1489817955][/doublepost]

Ok, so this post was made on October 27th, 2015. Until a few days ago, I had never heard about Crews being our "focus". This is clearly a miscommunication, we certainly did not have Crew on our short term development plans. We likely spoke about it in one of our meetings, or multiple meetings, long distance discussion is quite common.

I've taken a look at the internal draft for this devblog, and I can see it was never passed through our typical PR filters. October - December of 2015 was quite a hectic time, many of us who generally edit and filter dev blogs and news posts would have been away (I was away during that time). So yes, that is a mistake from us there.

I've read through the post, I have no issue with anything in that post, other than the statements that Crew is what we were working on, and that we had planned it. Planning for Crew would be a misleading statement, we likely had a discussion of what we wanted to achieve with the system, no solid documentation. I've done a quick edit of the post to remove misleading information (I might have missed some).

We are currently writing a document of what we want StarMade to be, which won't have any statements on when we plan to work on each part. This document should be more useful.

To be completely honest, I'm not sure I believe you that crew was not what was being worked on when this was being written, considering how Tunk says he found new things about crew right around the same time- a year and a half ago, give or take a few months, right at the start of this thread.

 

[kulbolen]

Why on Earth is audio, which is, realistically, a non essential aesthetic/immersion system, planned for implementation before CREW, which will likely be (and if it isn't, that's frankly a major fuckup) a core gameplay mechanic?

i can only make a guess based on what makes sense to me. i assume they have someone working on audio who cant help with other development like programming, and it can just be inserted as its finished.

 

[alterintel]

It also makes sense to me that had an idea for crew that didn't pan out. Now he's probably got a more complicated solution that needs allot more pieces to work.

 

[DukeofRealms]

Why on Earth is audio, which is, realistically, a non essential aesthetic/immersion system, planned for implementation before CREW, which will likely be (and if it isn't, that's frankly a major fuckup) a core gameplay mechanic?

i can only make a guess based on what makes sense to me. i assume they have someone working on audio who cant help with other development like programming, and it can just be inserted as its finished.

This is correct. Audio is two projects, composing the soundtrack/SFX and developing the audio engine. Danki is currently working on creating the soundtrack (and may start working on SFX shortly). Developing the audio engine requires development time; however, it's an independent project that can be assigned to any new developers we bring in who are interested. Both sections of this work are independent tasks, whereas Crew is deeply integrated into all systems of StarMade.

When we bring in new developers, typically they are first assigned to read over the code, then assigned bugfixing to familiarise with our development tools as well as working directly with the source. The final step is assigning them to an independent development task, something which will not require a lot of involvement from other developers/team members. For example, asteroid generation was an independent project Auburn worked on. Sound engine work is an excellent candidate for independent development work. One of the many major reasons why is the fact that we will certainly work on it at some point and it's separate enough that it won't interfere with main development goals.

Crew is a long-term feature goal, it's in the main development cycle (which is gameplay). The main development cycle is mostly worked on by schema ; newer team members work on independent projects to gain familiarity with how we work and with the source. Once they are more familiar, joining in on main development cycle work begins. Crew has not passed the planning phase, it's dependent on many other systems and will be shaped by their outcomes. As planning has not finished, it has no place on short-term development goals. The Audio Engine has been planned for some time now; it's ready for work. We expect to have a new developer on board this year, so it's very likely this task will be assigned as their independent development task. With Crew, we are not sure when it will be ready for development. This is why audio is planned to be implemented before Crew, simply because it's separate work and we expect it to be picked up before we finish planning for Crew. This might end up not being the case, but this is where it stands currently.

To be completely honest, I'm not sure I believe you that crew was not what was being worked on when this was being written, considering how Tunk says he found new things about crew right around the same time- a year and a half ago, give or take a few months, right at the start of this thread.

Crew has never been "worked" on, at any point. Not this year, not last year, and certainly not in 2015. What likely happened in 2015, was a meeting on what we wanted to see for Crew. This ended up in a dev blog, was not filtered by development and lead to this misunderstanding. I have read development records, timelines and plans, Crew is not on development plans and never was. I certainly would remember, schema would remember, neither of us have any recollection this was the case or any evidence to indicate this I've spoken to Bench who believes that it was supposed to be written as what we are currently discussing. It wasn't worded that way; we didn't go through the normal filters, I'm sorry for the misunderstanding. The way we release information has drastically changed since 2015, hopefully, we don't run into a similar issue in the future.

 

[Tunk]

I'll just leave this here,
LIVING,GUARD,SHOP,CANTINE,HYGENE,TECHNICAL,MEDICAL,CARGO,CASINO,RELAX,PARTY,TRAINING,BRIDGE,PLANNING,CONFERENCE,LAB,PRISON_CELL

And probably the most hilarious thing, probably more than a few server admins have noticed:
(it does enumerate stuff, too lazy to follow what exactly)

 

[Ithirahad]

Yeah, there is some stuff in the files for crew already, and has been for a very long time, so it does not seem that

Crew has never been "worked" on, at any point. Not this year, not last year, and certainly not in 2015.

 

[schema]

These are just a few mostly empty data classes I did for fun. It took about 20 minutes to write. That's also why I told Duke that Quarters have not been worked on. There has never been any serious work towards it.

 

[Master_Artificer]

why not do some quick and easy crew. rooms that supply crew points based on size and rooms that consume crew points based on size and slaved to individual systems. So you have your interior, the crew rooms, consuming your block count. But, when slaved, their effect is to increase the block count of the system they are slaved to.

Its abstract and allows for lots of creative freedoms. NPCs can be added later. Your crew supply rooms could be decorated to a mess hall, barracks, officers quarters, medical, it doesn't matter. Your crew consuming rooms could be your bridge, your engineering, weapon control systems like that one scene on the deathstar in starwars, etc.

The only complicated bit I can see is programming the drawing of a bounding box around the room you want starmade to recognize.
[doublepost=1489853859,1489853230][/doublepost]Ayy lmao just thought of it.

Reuse the very old turret dock system, the way it made bounding boxes.

Edit: made a more detailed post about it in the bottom of page one on the suggestion "crew minus crew" thread.

 

[JinM]

If coding were that easy... :D

 

[Master_Artificer]

If coding were that easy... :D

Basically abstract the crew until its a system that behaves like starmades other systems. Just playing on its strong suites and not throwing everything out that we have so far to make it work. Because we all know schema can code systems in, hes done it before, but I dunno if we will get crew any time soon if he needs to try and write pathfinding for crew.

 

[kulbolen]

Crew has never been "worked" on, at any point.

These are just a few mostly empty data classes I did for fun. It took about 20 minutes to write. That's also why I told Duke that Quarters have not been worked on. There has never been any serious work towards it.

i write a lot of hostile argumentative shit on here, but im pretty happy with these answers tbh... its not in the game so.

ill just take this moment to plug one more time that i think working on game stability and playability/qol stuff is like 10000x more important than anything else you could be doing atm; the recent update notes have me hopeful.

 

[Ghent96]

Hey Guys,

As the title suggests, I'm not currently building. Most of my building is on hold because I'm waiting for the outcome of 2 major overhauls that are coming out.

The Power Overhaul

...
If there's going to be another "Big" update or "Overhaul", I'm not sure if I want to know. The anticipation is literally killing my creativity.

Well imo the severe backlash against the power update by the community should have told Schine not to press forward with that. If you're worried, then add your voice and tell them to leave well enough alone with power, except for maybe some rebalancing.

For crew: this is not going to affect your ship designs afaik.

 

[Ithirahad]

Well imo the severe backlash against the power update by the community should have told Schine not to press forward with that. If you're worried, then add your voice and tell them to leave well enough alone with power, except for maybe some rebalancing.

For crew: this is not going to affect your ship designs afaik.

You aren't putting things in perspective.

First of all, there's something you have to remember about this community, and this game. In its current state, there isn't much to do on survival servers at the moment. There are no quests, minimal RP features, and PvE is unrefined and usually doesn't provide an adequate experience for players. Hell, even PvP in its current state is unrefined and only of interest to a small population out of StarMade's total potential player base.

As a result, most people leave fairly quickly. There are really three types of people who remain in the game, and continue to participate in the community, after playing for a little while.

1. Creative builders who don't particularly concern themselves with survival or RP gameplay and mostly use the game as a creative outlet. These people aren't particularly concerned with the merit of the new system from a design perspective, as long as it works and hopefully looks pretty.
2. A small subset of competitive players who actually enjoy the current systems. You'd be surprised how many people got frustrated with some aspect of the systems and left as a result. (Or so I suspect, anyway.) These people are, naturally, going to be opposed to any change that removes the aspects of the game that they enjoy about it (an opinion not necessarily shared by the majority of potential players...)
3. People like me, who are building all kinds of assets with the hope that the game will become what we want. We may or may not care quite as much, generally so long as whatever system is implemented works well, is enjoyable, and preferably doesn't make our designs less viable than they are currently. Or, we might be vocally opposed, or whatever.

This sort of limited playerbase will severely skew feedback.

Second of all, a lot of people aren't too happy about having to overhaul their systems again for something that has nothing to do with their personal desires for the game, whether or not it would improve things in general. This has less of an effect, but it skews things as well. :P

 

[wizardoftrash]

I'm absolutely stoked about the potential power overhaul, and it is because it will force me back to the drawing board.

Each time a build fails or I lose a ship, it is a chance to make improvements and adjustments. I experienced this with the major mass/thrust overhaul that Space Engineers introduced a while back: every part of my fleet became power starved or too heavy to accelerate with cargo.

Instead of modifying the existing designs to make them work, I broke up the ships to preserve the general look of the outer-hull and completely re-built the fleet starting with the guts (then re-layering and patching the outer hull). It was a very satisfying experience.

With this theoretical power overhaul, there will probably need to be a drafting step for really big builds (awww yiss, graph paper), but I doubt any overhaul that completely invalidates hull shapes would get implemented. As long as a build can be gutted or husked, it could be re-fitted, but I suspect there will be a Starmade Renaissance when the power overhaul hits, with people making all-new things!

 

[Ghent96]

so... the paraphrase of Shine (Duke and Schema) here seems to be: "Come on guys, let's paint the ship all super shiny and put on decals and have it make COOL SOUNDS, just don't worry about the fact that nothing is done on the inside, and please don't call us out on the few half-hearted attempts we made at trying to build the inside of the ship. PS... we're going to totally change the ship anyways in a few months, LOL"

....

-_-

ffs
Words cannot even express, right now, the comedy from the devs in this thread, and the way this community is being disrespected lately.
PS - the ship is sinking. Doesn't matter if it sounds pretty, right now.
Your priorites are FUBAR