When you realize you just can't do it

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    You're probably going to think "but what the hell is he going to talk about?"

    Small story, then free commenting :3

    So... Here's one really great game, Freespace 2 (haven't played FS1 so, can't judge). This game has amazing story and gameplay, and even tho the game is getting old (it got out in 2000 or so if I remember well), it's still super badass :3

    Of course, one may only want to rebuild a Freespace ship in Starmade, as I did with 2 ships. And of course, there are just so many of them, it would take years to make every one of those. But what is the "real" achievement, the greatest and hardest of all is to manage to rebuild the capital ships, but not just any capitals', the biggest ones. There are two : the GTVA Collossus, and the SJ Sathanas.

    As I like to be the big bad mean guy, I picked the SJ Sathanas (SJ standing for Shivan Juggernaut). Small presentation required:

    Sathanas-Scale1.jpg
    I made a few annotations, to get a precise idea on where to start placing blocks.

    The SJ Sathanas is a 6km long ship, featuring 4 frontal giga beam lasers, jump-drive capability, and the ability to make stars explode, causing supernovas. And we can't even be sure how much else it can do.

    Back to Starmade, so the first thing I wanted to do is to create a frame, able to containe the Sathanas. That's a box of 2632 * 2905 * 5980 blocks. Right, that's 45.722.840.800 blocks. Supposing the Sathanas only fills 10% of that, that's still a ship of 4.57 billion blocks. It's easy to realize how monstruous this ship is, considering a pixel on the right part of the image is a 10x10x10 box.

    If you place 1 block a second, considering it's only 10% of the frame box (which is unlikely, probably more like 15%), it would take a single player 145 years to place all the blocks. Of course, you have sym. and can place 10x10x10 (or more depending on configuration, 20 in my case) blocks, multiplied by up to 8.

    And since I didn't the want the core to be on the center of the ship (blue cross), I made a structure to find the actuel center.

    starmade-screenshot-0002.png
    A red, black or gray bar is 40 blocks long (except the very last red one). Here we see the left part of the ship. In fact, even while being in the middle, we can't see both sides. The grey bars have numbers, to visualize how far we are from each end of the ship. Width is made of 5 numbers on each side, length goes from 1 to 10, reaching in the middle.

    starmade-screenshot-0005.png
    If you try to go to the far end (front or rear) of the ship, it'll simply disappear, because the core is in another sector. Even tho the ship has less than 10k blocks, it takes almost a minute to save as a blueprint. Not mentioning how colliding with an asteroid makes the server lag like crazy.

    So why the story? Just to ask you questions and have a "small" context :p

    What is the biggest ship you ever made/are building? If you finished it, how long did it take? If you had a project such as mine, what would you do? Would you search help, and get as many people as you can? Would you simply give up? Would you make a smaller version? Would you still try to build it nevertheless? Or else?

    Now it's up to you :3
     
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    • Hardware Store
    My spacetrain
    As you can see, it looks aweful considering the shapes one can do currently, so I decided to refit it:
    I didn't put much effort in the back of it, because then it'd likely had taken me a long time.
    Original construction time: 2.5 weekends
    Refit time: 2-3 hours (thank goodness)
     
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    MrFURB

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    Project [REDACTED].
    Talked about it a bit with a few other shipwrights, but this was when Starmade didn't have the oomph or technology it does now. After the increased sector sizes came in, I began working on a framework that I could then load piece-by-piece and have other people join in to help design and build it. Then scrapped it. It just wasn't working out with it's scale. Then worked on another. Then scrapped it. Then worked on another... And then realized that the time and effort I was putting into something that I couldn't make work with current building tools was absolutely staggering. I plan on returning to project [REDACTED] in the future.
     
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    • Legacy Citizen 2
    I had to take a long break from my Dragon Mothership, starting to start on it again but it takes me down from over 80 fps to barely 6 (even if I stand still and have a majority of the ship still unloaded), idk what to do because I want to finish but I also don't want to destroy the universe Im building it in
     
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    First you need to know how much free RAM you have (duh! But if there isn't enough, just put your pc/laptop into sleep mode and then turn it back on. That should unload moat programs). Then you need to put at least 1/3 of your available memory to pre world regeneration (bottom option). Then check if the option 'max size of chunks in queue' is the same value as your pre regeneration. If not, change it so they are both the same (if there is no matching setting, just decrease the pre regeneration setting). Next, put the other 2/3 of your available memory by the (I really am terrible with names) middle setting. Then make sure the total of the two matches the maximum memory (top setting).

    Next, make sure you allocated at least the same amount of memory to java as your maximum memory in starmade. A 64 bit OS and java helps a lot. If you have a 64 bit system, make sure you are not running both 32 and 64 java, but only the 64 bit version.
    You can check the amount of available memory in the task manager. The maximum memory allocated to starmade and java shouldn't be higher than the value of 'available memory' in the task manager.
    Make sure all the settings are set to minimum, disable 2d texture compression and start the game.

    This is where things get interesting. To load your ship completely, you mustn't be close to the ship. Instead you should go about 1,5 sectors away from your ship (1500 m for 1000 m sectors, same scale for bigger sectors), and then wait a while for your ship to load. If that doesn't work after a while, nothing will. And in that case this would have been useless. And it was a really long post, so I hope it wasn't.

    For allocating memory to java: http://empireminecraft.com/threads/guide-how-to-allocate-more-memory-for-java-windows-mac.20011/

    Edit: I almost forgot! You should deffinitely put max segments drawn to 20 000. You should also increase your sector size to 10 000. You also should disiable universe simulation and set universe time to -1 (no more rotating systems). Try to keep everything in the same sector, and destroy any nearby entities (planets, asteroids, ships in a 3x3x3 area with your building sector as the center of that cube of sectors.
     
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    Largest I've started to build: 2.5km
    The framework took about 3 hours total to put together.
    Stopped work on it due to depreciation of a mod.
     
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    • Legacy Citizen 2
    First you need to know how much free RAM you have (duh! But if there isn't enough, just put your pc/laptop into sleep mode and then turn it back on. That should unload moat programs). Then you need to put at least 1/3 of your available memory to pre world regeneration (bottom option). Then check if the option 'max size of chunks in queue' is the same value as your pre regeneration. If not, change it so they are both the same (if there is no matching setting, just decrease the pre regeneration setting). Next, put the other 2/3 of your available memory by the (I really am terrible with names) middle setting. Then make sure the total of the two matches the maximum memory (top setting).

    Next, make sure you allocated at least the same amount of memory to java as your maximum memory in starmade. A 64 bit OS and java helps a lot. If you have a 64 bit system, make sure you are not running both 32 and 64 java, but only the 64 bit version.
    You can check the amount of available memory in the task manager. The maximum memory allocated to starmade and java shouldn't be higher than the value of 'available memory' in the task manager.
    Make sure all the settings are set to minimum, disable 2d texture compression and start the game.

    This is where things get interesting. To load your ship completely, you mustn't be close to the ship. Instead you should go about 1,5 sectors away from your ship (1500 m for 1000 m sectors, same scale for bigger sectors), and then wait a while for your ship to load. If that doesn't work after a while, nothing will. And in that case this would have been useless. And it was a really long post, so I hope it wasn't.

    For allocating memory to java: http://empireminecraft.com/threads/guide-how-to-allocate-more-memory-for-java-windows-mac.20011/

    Edit: I almost forgot! You should deffinitely put max segments drawn to 20 000. You should also increase your sector size to 10 000. You also should disiable universe simulation and set universe time to -1 (no more rotating systems). Try to keep everything in the same sector, and destroy any nearby entities (planets, asteroids, ships in a 3x3x3 area with your building sector as the center of that cube of sectors.
    I've been through most of these already, there was a stickied thread somewhere where I pretty much was running the game as if on a toaster even though I have 16GB of ram, a fairly new CPU, GeForce 660, etc. what I'm trying to say is that I've got a high end computer but I've managed to overload the game with this ship, also it's contained to the ship.

    One idea I've had is to save the blueprint and just restart the universe, removing a lot of the clutter, seeing if that helps.
     

    NeonSturm

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    I tried a 300 or 350 m War-Hammer (city) ship Battlebarge_Port-Wander_starport.jpg

    But I got stuck with the 30° rotated parts. Never going to build anything with other than 45° or 90° until I find a good solution for these parts.

    The second thing I had an issue with was scale. You have to build 1 block for every light and thus the front where the Christian cross is has to be 5x6y array of 3x4y blocks each and divided by 1 block lines => about 25x35y with all the details + 15 blocks for the "entrance".
    From this I got about 300 to 350 m size. But sometimes it doesn't match. If you don' start building from centre you mess everything up.

    The third issue was that it was already too big for SM-edit and I used double-walls + hardened hulls all over, but now wanted normal hull. That and a missing tower (roll-back during server-restart) demotivated me even more.

    I've build front to right and left about 60° beyond the outer ring of it in about 1/2 week, but underestimated how hard it is to build 20-30% parts.
    That killed my motivation.
     
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    But I got stuck with the 30° rotated parts. Never going to build anything with other than 45° or 90° until I find a good solution for these parts.
    Well, I got the same problem with a fighter-scaled ship... much more doable technically, but those angles looks ugly... 3 completely different versions, but none looked really nice.

    30° wedges maybe? =)

    @FunnyBunny14 : didn't know all of those, let's try and get a few extra FPS, thanks :3

    @FlyingDebris : Just checked this project. Well, they mentionned a 2-3 sectors long spaceship. Back in the early stages of SM, I wonder if they're still working on it... And wonder what's the exact length. Mine is clearly bigger than a sector, but I increased the size of said sectors (going to increase it a bit more).

    Well, I believe I saw a few 3km long spaceship. But doubling a ship's size means you're actually multiplying the number of blocks by 8. I'll need a supercomputer for that one :3

    Hope the computers keep increasing their performance every year, with a bit of time, we should have some powerful enough for really huge ships =) AND apparently Schema's already working on Oculus Rift support, which means those will look super nice as well :D
     

    NeonSturm

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    I think @Inspired2150 said he has built a 6km long ship.

    But I think it is really tall and thin compared to the length (else it would be even more awesome).