Of course, i'm just noting that a shift towards micromanaging livestock or fishing mini games (or similar) is not a good starting point to build meaningful game play within Starmade.
I would disagree, actually.
A "planet environment" object is something I could write in a few days, and Schema is several dozen leagues ahead of what I'm capable of. I don't think these things need large, complex mechanics to be meaningful. Temperature, pressure, and oxygen/co2 can be three 32-bit floats updated once in a while based on how many plants, animals, and running machines there are on the planet. Calculations for certain things like plant growth or animal characteristics/breeding/whatever (I have no idea how your fauna system will work) can query them. If it takes more than a (relatively) small amount of work, it's overdone for a SPACE game.
None of them let you take your crops to market on other planets with voxel space ships AFAIK, or make the space part a primary focus of the game.
YUCK! That's not what I was suggesting at all! Just put some simple mechanics in as a side dish to the main course. If it's more complicated than Minecraft's farming and such, it may be overdone. It is a SPACE game after all! There are those of us who would just like to be able to do these things in some capacity. Minigames are something that could possibly be included when everything else is done simply because they'd be fun. If they're left out, just give us a good API and leave minigames to the modders. That's great too.
Those are simple to talk about, but amazingly complicated to work on a grand scale correctly. Any mechanic like this also needs to mean something in the overall game. Otherwise we have just another mechanic tacked onto the star-made experience.
A lot of the framework will already be in place from the crew and NPC systems. A complete lack of towns would be... odd. It's a matter of putting something there so it doesn't feel like a missing piece in the experience, but not overcomplicating it and spending too much time.
Quite frankly, gravity needs to be trashed and redone before release. It's just less pressing than adding the rest of the game.
Whether planets will ever be able to achieve what you want doesn't mean they can't add to the game in a meaningful way. I'm confident we can have planet based mechanics add another layer to StarMade gameplay, instanced planets, do not add another layer. Adding instanced planets would be like putting a layer next to the existing layer and tying it together with a string. It's two different environments or two different games existing in the same program, that's not something we want to ever get into. If it requires a loading screen to do, it's a no.
Sure, we want people to explore. What we don't want is for exploration to take away from other game mechanics or to be implemented in a way that's disjointed. I can think of many exploration venues, scripted events playing through the universe, quest and missions using human created objects and lore, NPC interactions. We could create exploration in a game without planets. Planets add another layer to that.
We plan to achieve all of this. We are aiming to create the largest planets we can, the focus being on performance.
Current planets are heavily unoptimised, ever since we started work on our new planets, little to no work has gone into current ones. Achieving better performance than the current ones isn't a challenge at all. We have a number of potential systems which could see planet size increase drastically, we're not at a stage to be able to tell if that will work just yet.
I wouldn't want to see these kinds of mechanics until the base game is 'done'. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't be considered... unless Schine has another game planned? :D
I obviously don't have access to the game's code, but aren't sectors effectively instances without loading screens? In old versions of the game, crossing a sector border could take you somewhere on the other side of the star system (because of the sector rotation system for planets), and jumps and teleports can load-out and load-in tons of stuff on the fly around your character. Judging from the capabilities of that tech as it is, with a robust LoD system or even adequate static cover, you could make a transition to an effectively instanced planet without the loading screens.
) but I doubt sectors are instances like you're thinking. More likely, they're physics partitions to simplify calculations. Without them, you'd have to compare every ship to every other object in the game which would be very inefficient. Instead, each sector could be a linked list of entities, now the game loop only has to compare your ship to entities which are known via the list to be nearby. That way the game isn't doing collision checks between your ship and a planet situated in another galaxy.
That's similar to what could be done for planets, although there would be a lot of different specifics and different problems.I'm talking out my butt, I'm sure, (one of my specialties
Which could be as simple as "Each crew member eats one unit of food per day." Have a storage block of some kind designated for food storage, and every X units of time every crew member goes and takes one block out of it. If they don't get one, they "leave" instead of starve to death.
Too many blocks to load. Plain and simple. The game was never designed from the ground up to incorporate such a feature (where-as skywanderers is).
