Strength in Numbers

[Mr. V]

Hello all! I have been playing Starmade and following the forums in general for a few months now, but this will be my first post.

... be gentle


My recommendation is not for any specific mechanic of the game. It is meant to point out that there are many things that we, as a diverse group of fans of this game, can help Schema and his wonderful team accomplish.

In general, I've seen a few suggestions wanting things that would probably be difficult, expensive, or tedious to accomplish with the current resources of Schema's indie game company. Schema's team has proven extremely talented, but there are only so many of them and much to do.

Two examples are:
1) Who doesn't want to see more AI factions with diverse ships that are unique and make sense for those factions? Pretty much everyone does as a number of threads have shown. The coding is one portion of that, but making groups of ships that make sense with each other but that are vastly different from other AI faction ships... who has the time to design them all? We all could certainly do a part.. probably even from our own existing catalogs.

2) I recently saw a post about adding music to the game. Some were quick to point out the cost of hiring a musician.... speaking as an amateur musician - I would love to have music I created in an awesome game like Starmade - and would want no more than to be credited for it and retain the rights to use what I had created elsewhere. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only musician who would have that sentiment.

These are just two areas - I'm sure there are many more things the user community would be willing and able to provide.


We just need a dev to give us some guidelines on what they want on pretty much anything and turn it into a friendly competition. Tell us what type of whatever you want, and make mention that you might tweak anything you select... then let us at it.

I believe Schema and his team have grown to understand that they have a large user community that wants to help this game continue to grow. Expand on the recent request for help naming minerals -- there's so much more we all can provide, amateur to professional talents from many different skill-sets and hobbies.

Thank you all: I eagerly await comments, suggestions on improvement, flaming death mail... whatever

Respectfully,
Mr. V

 

[MineCatFTW]

This. This all the way.

 

[Mr. V]

This. This all the way.

Thanks for the support MineCat

 

[Fwyrl]

I love this idea!

 

[Izikiel]

It has it's merits. The only downside that I can see is that the process will be a lot like the process for automation.

 

[Fwyrl]

All they have to do is put up a contest for say, "Who can make the best sound effects?" and then take the ones they like, announce the winners, and implement the sounds. The same could work for TP's, and they're already doing this for the official trailer.

 

[rece ktore leczo]

So far working on the sound effects would be a waste of time because of the update of weapons, effect blocks, etc.

The best way of adding sounds would be to make it moddable. Then Community could use whatever they want. If some audio mod would be pretty good, then it could be used as an official one.
I think it would be possible (to customize the audio) but i'm not sure.

The biggest problem is that sound effects should be procedurally generated/modified because of the various options for combining weapons with different ratios, etc.

 

[Fwyrl]

That's not the point though. My point is that they can outsource things like that, just by calling it a contest. It saves money, and time, and makes the users happy too Winning all around.

 

[rece ktore leczo]

Making it moddable also would save time and money Plus everyone could customize their game for personal preferences.

I'm just concerned with contest idea, that some entries would be near equally good, so deciding which one should be in game, would create a shit-storm on the forum "WHY NOT OTHER ONE??".
Giving Community tool to make their own sound effects/soundtracks would lead to bigger choice of sound-packs. This works for texture packs and astronaut skins

 

[Fwyrl]

That's a good idea, but one of the the stated goals of Starmade is to make the vanilla game so dynamic that you don't need mods.

Also, it's good to just have defaults for everything other then -blank-

 

[rece ktore leczo]

That's true The game should be enjoyable in vanilla state.

With the system to easily make and add audio packs, vanilla could have few these packs, dev-made and winner entries of the contests. Well, i don't know if it would be easy to make few different audio packs - explosion is explosion and laser sound is laser sound at last

It could be also done with texture packs. The best ones could be implemented in the official game.

 

[Fwyrl]

That's true The game should be enjoyable in vanilla state.

With the system to easily make and add audio packs, vanilla could have few these packs, dev-made and winner entries of the contests. Well, i don't know if it would be easy to make few different audio packs - explosion is explosion and laser sound is laser sound at last

It could be also done with texture packs. The best ones could be implemented in the official game.

In the dev-build update news, on the main page, they said that the sounds will be in the XML file, and, as such, will be easily modable (read: sound packs :D So for now, yes, not doable, but in the next update, very doable.)

 

[rece ktore leczo]

So now we only have to wait