Whats with ship cores?

[Lenier]

What if your spaceship could run as long as the lines between the console, fuel, and thrusters were intact?

What if your spaceship was recognized as an entity as a whole with one indicator and no turret indicators?

What if you could damage your opponent so much in one area that the ship would literally break into pieces?

What if turrets were not their own ships?

What if your ship needed to be built to hold together, not simply to hold shields?

What if you could build a spaceship on your spaceship and then fly away in it?

What if build mode was turned into blueprint mode and only built in a shipyard?

What if you had to put the most armor around more than one block?

What if power cells could overheat instead of ship-cores?


What even is a "ship core" anyway!


I know this is impossible, but I still think it would be neat if ship-entities were not based on their "cores" but on their essential elements and on whether pieces were "connected" to other pieces or not. There would be a block for docking and a block for being docked instead of zone based docking. Same for rotational docks like turrets. If your ship gets blown to pieces it will literally fly to pieces. There goes my aft section... Ship geometry would now be based on redundancy and connectivity. No more hollow cubes! You could have a command deck and a secondary command deck. If you lose one you move to the other. You would have many sections of the ship to defend: command deck, engines, power, weapons. Space battle could be based on destroying or demobilizing or even depressurizing the ship instead of simply getting directly to the core.

Anyway, its probably impossible! Or is it schema?

 

[Gerion]

It is not impossible, just hard to have a concept that works, is balanced and somehow also doesnt take a year+ to implement (not counting bugfixes). I would actually be happy if the ship marker wasnt on the core, but on the middle of the ship. You already have the metrics for width/height/lenght, just half them all and put the marker there.
As for system destruction: A certain percentage of a connected bunch of blocks is destroyed = it goes offline? Would work perfectly for weapons, might work for thrusters (if they ever get the rule that no block except for another thruster can be behind them), dont know about shields/power.

 

[Ithirahad]

While this goes a bit too far IMO (ships needing to be built to hold together would also rule out cool floaty bits), I agree with most of these ideas.

 

[NeonSturm]

What if your spaceship could run as long as the lines between the console, fuel, and thrusters were intact?

The lines? StarMade does not have 1^3 m thick cable-blocks and everything else might be CPU-intensive, but I like the concept.

What if your spaceship was recognized as an entity as a whole with one indicator and no turret indicators?

What if ships sensors are so dumb that they do not recognize moving or turret-shaped parts (in future)?

What if you could damage your opponent so much in one area that the ship would literally break into pieces?

As @Ithirahad said.
If ships break apart (cool) we would have even more Borg-Cubes of Doom (not so cool)

It could be nice if your ship is big enough to be a nice target, but has enough holes to make most shots miss. Imagine a 500m large spider-web-sphere. (If deflectors (= projectile-path changers) increase the chance a projectile hits one of these holes, it could make ship design very interesting)

What if turrets were not their own ships?

What if your ship needed to be built to hold together, not simply to hold shields?

What would you think about this if you have to build modular ships with 2 equal 300m long turrets?

What if you could build a spaceship on your spaceship and then fly away in it?

You already can.

What if build mode was turned into blueprint mode and only built in a shipyard?

Best part of this suggestion!

What if you had to put the most armor around more than one block?

Thick hull? I suggested somewhere that you should require 5 armour per 1 thruster or 5 armour per 1 power.

Then increase thrust, shield and damage or reduce hp and increase thrust - adjust everything that has to do with total-block count. Multiply/Divide by 6 (=5+1)
That would be good for RP ships, less for Doom-Borg Cubes of Death.

What if power cells could overheat instead of ship-cores?

As a whole? I imagine individual overheating being very expensive in either CPU time or RAM (we have 24 bits (0|1) per block

What even is a "ship core" anyway!

The centre of Mass as long as it is not calculated.

Something that prevents dumb 1amc, 1 computer, 1 reactor, 2 thruster, 1 power tank spam (core are expensive compared to other blocks)

 

[Lenier]

Hey thanks for comments.

NeonSturm, I agree with most of what you said.
Also I agree that it would take too long to implement, but I still think pieces of it are cool.

About turrets especially: I wish you could make smaller turrets that were attached to the main ship. Maybe they would still be recognized, but they would not be detachable unless broken and they would be controlled by on-ship computers instead of on-turret computers. It would make it possible to have your friends independently and safely fire from turret consoles in the bridge!

Also, while I think that ships with floaty bits look cool, as long as starmade allows for this type of unrealistic creativity, the game will not be able to build mechanics that help prevent cube-ship uncreativity. I honestly prefer cool looking realism to cool looking unrealism. Maybe its just my thing!

I also like the idea of fuel lines and turning the current connection thingers into real things so that it is more realistic in all respects and so that ship design becomes more difficult. Enough said, this is simply another preference.

Thanks again

 

[NeonSturm]

Also, while I think that ships with floaty bits look cool, as long as starmade allows for this type of unrealistic creativity, the game will not be able to build mechanics that help prevent cube-ship uncreativity.

It needs to make ships with empty space equally efficient to cubes (rotation, ...).
And it needs to balance the larger surface area (hull being more supported by number of hulls (HP per ship) and less per-block damage)

Dimensions need to alter how rotation speeds are distributed, but not how fast rotation is (that is something that should depend on mass).
rotation penalty based on (mass * (dimension)/(dimension + d2+d3) ) or something similar.

 

[Lenier]

What I am looking for is not a mechanic that balances the game for cool and uncool ships, I am looking for a mechanic that forces players to use the systems in a reasonable way, ruling out silly ship designs, but also perhaps unrealistically cool ones.

Do I understand correctly?
Anyway! Other people feel free to comment!

 

[FunnyBunny14]

Shipyards are confirmed, it will just take some time before they are implemented. As for building your shils to stay together, a hp system has also been confirmed.

 

[GonTar]

Interesting suggestions Mr, could be more informative if u ask me, but there's good ideas (and weird ones too)

Lenier said: ↑
What if power cells could overheat instead of ship-cores?

I said something similar to this on my suggestion, but instead of over heating, i was charmed by the idea of making the Glow-y blocks like Power Storage/Generators/Thrusters/etc blow up with some GFX Sprites n sound FX like the one of the desintegrator block.
Thus Making SpaceShips Destruction more Enjoyable and Satisfactory.

G.Mechanic Example:
-Make an algorithm that randomly activates explosions when hit on volatile blocks that are usually protected under the hull (like power rectors, etc) rewarding hull breach with an possible BooM with deep space explosion effects that brings a neat battle feeling while attacking an enemy ship and also while being attacked.

-Same as above but instead of using the Algorithm while in-combat it has a chance of being activated when CoreOver-Heating a ship, it should generate some random small explosions on the ship after OverHeating its core making the defeated ship expell debris all across the battle field, sounds cool right? imagine that "Crush a Pumpkin" feeling while defeating ur foes and tell me u don't wan't to see some of ur targets explode like damn canisters when defeated...

This being said, implementing this algorithm to the game should improve and make battles between ships and stations:

Spoiler: That actually look like this...

Spoiler: To look more like THIS

-

-

 

[NeonSturm]

Projectiles don't have to be explosives for that. Just imagine it as high-energetic glowing dust around the impact point.

Efficient stuff don't have to be damaging-explosive (but it can be). Any-way it should spread this dust too cause it is so awesome (even if there is no real damage behind the effect, cause it is below other block's resistance level)

 

[GonTar]

Projectiles don't have to be explosives for that. Just imagine it as high-energetic glowing dust around the impact point.

Efficient stuff don't have to be damaging-explosive (but it can be). Any-way it should spread this dust too cause it is so awesome (even if there is no real damage behind the effect, cause it is below other block's resistance level)

I understand what u say, and i agree that particles could do a great job into combat to make stuff look a lot prettier and more immersive but im affraid you miss-understanded my comment.

-I don't encourage explosive projectiles, in fact, it's the opposite Sir, my suggestion was adding an algorithm that makes some specific blocks have a small chance of being volatile on damage (imagine they do a small chain reaction or just a small "poof" Fx with particles n sound), so there's a variavle in each battle that makes it more exiting,

Edit: To be more accurate, lets say, from a developer mind, i would say this is what im trying to say:
As short as possible, its a collition check for certain block (4 example: "block affected = Power Reactor" as a condition) wich has a small % of probabilities to do:

(example)
-1 (5%) chance to: Explode with shiny n glowy cute colours.
(could add some extra variables like Exp. radius depends on ship size etc, or no damage at all like u said, just a variation to complement the Debris feature wich is still pretty cool in deed)
or
-2 (95%) chance to: Get normally destroyed expelling debris.
(95 to prevent a rainbow of particles killing our Pc's every time we hit enemy hardware)

idk if that helps understanding my thoughts, i hope it does

 

[Asmael]

-1 (5%) chance to: Explode with shiny n glowy cute colours.
(could add some extra variables like Exp. radius depends on ship size etc, or no damage at all like u said, just a variation to complement the Debris feature wich is still pretty cool in deed)
or
-2 (95%) chance to: Get normally destroyed expelling debris.
(95 to prevent a rainbow of particles killing our Pc's every time we hit enemy hardware)

idk if that helps understanding my thoughts, i hope it does

Random explosions when overheating a core ? (to be replaced with the HP system)

TOTALLY WANT !

As for the explosion when hitting volatile blocks... OK, but make it a client-side configuration to allow people to disable it and prevent some computers from exploding (huhu) whenever someone spam-destroy a ship's power generators :] Or other blocks. Now, as said by NeonSturm, we have 2048 bits, and we can't really store more data in those blocks, like a isVolatile boolean. Reason being if we increase the number of bits, it'll decrease the performance of comps.

So... If that's implemented, it's probably going to be all blocks.

PS : @GonTar From what movie these images come from ? Damn, I've seen that ship somewhere, but...

 

[RoyalWolfe]

PS : @GonTar From what movie these images come from ? Damn, I've seen that ship somewhere, but...

really? the station from STAR TREK deep space nine ring a bell? duh

 

[Ithirahad]

Yeah, it was from Star Trek: Deep Space 9. It was the Dominion/Cardassian fleet attacking the eponymous station, Deep Space 9.