Hi, Awkanic here. My wife and I started playing a few months ago and we have noted down several items which we think could greatly improve the gameplay and user experience. We really enjoyed much of our time in starmade and we think this game has serious potential. Here are ten of our most notable challenges while playing.
The most prominent issue we noticed was rubber banding around planets. It seems as though whenever you hit the magic distance from a planet, and that planet starts to load, the starmade client seems to stop communicating with the server. We have tried this on multiple servers, including local servers, and the behaviour is consistent. The local server also indicates that rotations are not being applied.
As new players, our first stop was a planet which we called home. This meant that fighting pirates and even just returning home from mining was infuriating as once the communication with the server was disrupted, you would have to stop your ship and inch towards the planet at a snails pace to escape the rubber banding orbit of misery. This was exacerbated as the rubber banding would toss you backwards, unloading the part of the planet you just loaded, and creating a near infinite loop.
The second most memorable issue was that mining with a full cargo sends blocks to oblivion with no warning or indication. Both my wife and I, on separate occasions, created a ship from blueprints which, for some reason, no longer had cargo blocks in it. The result was that we mined for a few IRL hours only to find that the cargo from that time was not present. Needless to say, a simple warning stating “Cargo Breach” or something would be lightyears ahead of all that lost time. A notification or special sound when the final block of an entity is mined would also be more satisfying.
Third on our list is the computer direction issue. We get the reasons why the computer direction matters, but the struggle is real when you've created defense turrets which should finally defend you against pirates and none of the cannons are actually firing as you have your cannon computer sideways or backwards. We don't have a good solution here but it feels like the direction of the output block should indicate the direction of fire. The ability to rotate a computer in place without needing to reconnect all of its modules could help too
Fourth, building on moving objects is broken as placed blocks often miss their mark. We would often build big ships together and would have preferred the ability to edit this ship while the other person drives to the next mining spot. Perfect I’d love to be able to tell the AI to fly somewhere while I improved the ship.
Fifth...while building, the pink highlight is very useful until it's in the way. The ability to toggle it on and off would really help ship building with many systems interwoven.
Sixth… star damage shouldn't go from zero to catastrophic with no additional warnings in place. Ideally, shields would overload at a certain distance or some other indicator other than “warning” with a huge no-damage radius.
Seventh, whenever my wife is charging her jump drive or trying to dock with the docking rail, my machine renders her ships using the first item her ship has loaded. This means that while her machine is clearly docking, it looks to me like she's trying to harvest home base or my ship. Even more distribution is when the cannons are the first item on the ship. This makes playing together harder as I can't trust she's doing what it looks like she's doing.
Eighth… when trapped in space or jumping between ships and missing, it would be much nicer if you could target a ship with an AI and tell it to “come to me”. It's bizarre that one may command a robotic fleet but still be left abandoned in space.
Ninth… Adding the ability to lock cargo items to spots, or make it so they don't move when their quantity changes, would make those of us who like to keep organized inventories happy. The fact that one must keep multiple inventories for this purpose feels a bit silly.
Tenth… maneuvering in space and maneuvering as a person should automatically be set up with the same keybindings. If all of the same motions are available… why express those motions differently based on character state? It's much more user friendly to learn one set of controls.
Hopefully you've found this list constructive. Our hope is that some of these items would be addressed allowing more people to experience this awesomeness.
The most prominent issue we noticed was rubber banding around planets. It seems as though whenever you hit the magic distance from a planet, and that planet starts to load, the starmade client seems to stop communicating with the server. We have tried this on multiple servers, including local servers, and the behaviour is consistent. The local server also indicates that rotations are not being applied.
As new players, our first stop was a planet which we called home. This meant that fighting pirates and even just returning home from mining was infuriating as once the communication with the server was disrupted, you would have to stop your ship and inch towards the planet at a snails pace to escape the rubber banding orbit of misery. This was exacerbated as the rubber banding would toss you backwards, unloading the part of the planet you just loaded, and creating a near infinite loop.
The second most memorable issue was that mining with a full cargo sends blocks to oblivion with no warning or indication. Both my wife and I, on separate occasions, created a ship from blueprints which, for some reason, no longer had cargo blocks in it. The result was that we mined for a few IRL hours only to find that the cargo from that time was not present. Needless to say, a simple warning stating “Cargo Breach” or something would be lightyears ahead of all that lost time. A notification or special sound when the final block of an entity is mined would also be more satisfying.
Third on our list is the computer direction issue. We get the reasons why the computer direction matters, but the struggle is real when you've created defense turrets which should finally defend you against pirates and none of the cannons are actually firing as you have your cannon computer sideways or backwards. We don't have a good solution here but it feels like the direction of the output block should indicate the direction of fire. The ability to rotate a computer in place without needing to reconnect all of its modules could help too
Fourth, building on moving objects is broken as placed blocks often miss their mark. We would often build big ships together and would have preferred the ability to edit this ship while the other person drives to the next mining spot. Perfect I’d love to be able to tell the AI to fly somewhere while I improved the ship.
Fifth...while building, the pink highlight is very useful until it's in the way. The ability to toggle it on and off would really help ship building with many systems interwoven.
Sixth… star damage shouldn't go from zero to catastrophic with no additional warnings in place. Ideally, shields would overload at a certain distance or some other indicator other than “warning” with a huge no-damage radius.
Seventh, whenever my wife is charging her jump drive or trying to dock with the docking rail, my machine renders her ships using the first item her ship has loaded. This means that while her machine is clearly docking, it looks to me like she's trying to harvest home base or my ship. Even more distribution is when the cannons are the first item on the ship. This makes playing together harder as I can't trust she's doing what it looks like she's doing.
Eighth… when trapped in space or jumping between ships and missing, it would be much nicer if you could target a ship with an AI and tell it to “come to me”. It's bizarre that one may command a robotic fleet but still be left abandoned in space.
Ninth… Adding the ability to lock cargo items to spots, or make it so they don't move when their quantity changes, would make those of us who like to keep organized inventories happy. The fact that one must keep multiple inventories for this purpose feels a bit silly.
Tenth… maneuvering in space and maneuvering as a person should automatically be set up with the same keybindings. If all of the same motions are available… why express those motions differently based on character state? It's much more user friendly to learn one set of controls.
Hopefully you've found this list constructive. Our hope is that some of these items would be addressed allowing more people to experience this awesomeness.
