Why exactly is power broken?

[Dvaren]

In bird culture, this is considered a 'dick' move.

Again, you misinterpret my intent. I never denied responding negatively to Raisinbat, and in fact, I was quite upfront about my actions. What I find confusing is your willingness to accept his poor behavior, while simultaneously expressing surprise and disdain for the inevitable negative backlash. In my experience, vulgar and denigrating attacks on others are not often met with pleasantry and understanding, but quite the opposite.

or being intentionally condescending.

My exhibition of condescending rebuttals were in response to his poor mannerisms and attacks on others, not his underlying ideas pertaining to Starmade, which we might actually hold common ground on. A fellow who tells you to go "F" your ideas is not opening the doors for sharing of ideas, regardless.

There was though some substance relevant to the topic in all of Raisinbat's terribly triggering posts.

Yes, there was, and nothing I wrote prevented others from sifting through his steaming pile of vitriol to find the golden nuggets.

You entered the topic and only made character criticisms without any input to the topic which is not acceptable IMO.

True. Perhaps I could have offered rebuttals more attuned to Starmade issues. At the time I found his tone and eagerness to stifle and/or ridicule the opinions of others more relevant than any personal views I had on the subject manner.

Probably the real reason your post was deleted if you yourself had no hand in doing so.

The reason I gave is the exact reason reported by the website itself under my "alerts" located at the top right corner of my screen under the small white flag icon. If you'd like to suggest I am lying, please spare us the "subtlety ."

Two wrongs don't make a right bruh. Sorry I can't be bothered to explain anymore of my previous explanation at this time.

Correct. One wrong also does not make a right. I expect you were just as incensed by my opponents vulgar behavior as my own snarky responses.

As this is continuing to be off-topic, perhaps it would be best to continue it here; Definition of HYPOCRISY

Would the condemning of a set of behaviors exhibited in response to that same set of behaviors fall under that definition?

 

[Master_Artificer]

 

[GRHayes]

I'd like the [probable minority] few players to post here that actually think power is broken, and explain exactly why.

I along with many other players reject all the premises for the proposed power overhaul as being wrong / invalid. I don't think there's anything at all broken with power as-is. If anything needs to be changed with power, it can be handled with a simple rebalance or tweaking of the stats of the reactor, capacitor, and auxillary without re-inventing the core game of StarMade.

I have made dozens, perhaps a hundred ships over the past 3 years, and fixed / tweaked even countless more of other people's designs. I have _NEVER_ had a problem with power but one time, on a station that is pretty much entirely scaffold + interior and needed massive numbers of rail mass enhancers for gigantic turrets... so... go figure. I never came whining to the forums to demand the devs change the entire game to make power easier for me. I simply solved the problem by experimenting with new building ideas and reactor layouts. Moreover, everyone I've ever gamed with in Starmade has never complained about power or had issues with it. We all wonder, "Who is it exactly that demands power be changed, and why?" because this has never been a significant issue for the past 3-4 years, until now all of a sudden.

With reasons different/unique from those in the power overhaul thread (which, again, we already quote bombed and all proved false), WHY exactly is power broken? What exactly have you personally been so absolutely unable to accomplish in-game that you think StarMade is broken unless we have a "power overhaul"?

Ok, I'm entering this conversation a little late so forgive me if I rehash or repeat what someone else says.

First, you are both right and wrong. The current power system is actually broken on several levels. Even if it was fixed the issue they are wanting to replace it for is primarily it has become nothing more than a block filler and limits the the way ships are built the types of ships that can be built and how much of the interior of a ship is usable. You are though right in the aspect that the current system could be fixed and all those issues remedied.

The real issue with the current power system beside the programming bugs that exist and other inherent issues has more to do with the fact they used it as a limiter. At some point they felt there needed to be a balance between big ships and small ships. Someone at some point watched to movies where a loan pilot blows up a cap ship. They seem to forgot the other cap ships and fighters tying up the defenses so that ship could get through to hit a vulnerable point. Then there is the attempt to limit giant ships. Because of the way the game is written you could crash someones server if you load a ship to large for it to handle. That is just one negative aspect. Its fixable.

Now lets look at the new system the reactors and heat system and tanks. The tanks are supposedly to get rid of heat. But we know real space crafts and naval vessels with reactors don't use a tank or heat-exchanger like this because it would be pointless to exchange heat with the interior of the ship. Space craft have insulation to reflect IR away from the ship as best it can. The ship it self is designed to transfer heat to the outside and give it off as radiation/IR. In short we know it isn't to mimic a real ship. So why the tank system at all. Well again this is to take up and use space and limit how large of a reactor someone puts in a ship. In real ships space and Naval power system generally take up less than 10% of a vessel. You do find things like racing boats and others that have more space used by the power system.

So unless the reactor and tank systems combined take up less than 5% to 10% of the ship not much has changed or will.

Then I have questions like, "How much of the reactor and tanks need to be intact for it to keep working? Will there be a stupid explosive effect like with aux-power making it not worth the risk? Will the entire thing shut down if one pipe breaks?"
In short what will the reliability of the system be like vs the current system. The current system are at least fairly reliable.

The biggest aspect I see that hinders starmade is every time someone uses their brain to make use of a current system in the game and does something they didn't expect,plan for, consider it seems to get labeled a exploit.
Personally I always thought of sand boxes as a place you give people a set of tools to create with and it is up to that individual to think and solve problems and do what they can and come up with.

 

[JinM]

Personally I always thought of sand boxes as a place you give people a set of tools to create with and it is up to that individual to think and solve problems and do what they can and come up with.

The server community is not ready for this thought. They will allways opt for the bigger ships when it comes to the typcial "anarachy" pvp servers out there.

It's just like in Minecraft: People could make a great pvp game out of it, if they wouldn't push all limits to its max and have less then less fun but more grind. But just like in Minecraft, the guys allways opt for full diamond armor (or mass>100k sized bad looking ships on servers like Brierie), and then they complain about this or that game mechanic that's broken. You know the only pvp ships I see looking for pvp on Brierie are doom cubes. I am not even willing to fight those because first of all they are too ugly to even get shoot at, and secondly I am pretty sure the little kid behind the cube is going to hate me for it (I am not the guy who is proud or happy when he lets others feel bad - just saying ).

Why don't they use 50k size limits on ships for pvp on servers??? Why this ridiculous gigantism? (rethorical question) There are like 10% of the playerbase who even have the time and the ability to design a ship bigger than 50k mass! Thats my first point. If we had a size limit on pvp we actually would shoot each other with our own carefully designed ships and not this >100k low-"I slap many systems in my ship and its only effective because of its size and not because I know whats happening" tactic.

Get this straight: Just because 10% of the people understand how to design a 100k ship doesn't mean the other guys are able to do so as well. And why, WHY, should I play with this 90% of noobs and run around in their "ships" that took them 1 or 2 weeks to design but are only good because of its size instead of its carefull design. I despise a fight like that: Seeing: ok the enemy dude has a 100k ship; my ship is only 50k; his ship will win the fight not because he spend more time in designing its exterior or inner systems, but because he just slapped more and more onto it. We need that size limit - or we just fight each other in biger and bigger ships until the servers melt.

You know it would take me ages to build a 100k ship that I would be proud of. And also I am totally sure that we would never have a nice fight with those 500k sized things without lag or crashes:

Any person (with exepctions, but I mean the majority of the casual players here, so over 80% give or take!) who tells me, that he knows what he is doing when he designs any ship over 100k mass, should consider his sanity. Neither is there enough time to build so many systems into a ship, nor are there enough combatants to proof that this ship is good, and lastly: Do you know the blood and steel turnatement? There the most dedicated ships designers tried to combat each other in 10k mass sized ships. You know what happend? The server lagged really strong so it was barely playble. So if those ships, who are effciently and (supposedly) perfectly designed, allready lag the server if they are below 10k mass - why do you guys think that any bigger ship can be usefull for pvp if it is actually the fact, that the most efficiently designed competetive ships allready bug the server out at 10k?

The only pvp servers with size caps are small ones with not many visitors (Genxova and Sunworld imo). And even there is a ridiculous high cap of 500k mass. So yes: Imo we could have an incredible amount of fun in Starmade. But not with any ship bigger than 50k.

But the majority of the pvp players will never agree with me on that. They rather have no depth "fun" with 100k mass ships instead of having real tactical depth (and actually playable fights) with ships below 10k mass.


That doesn't mean I don't like big ships or blowing stuff up with big ship. I am just trying to say, that pvp would have more tactical depth in lower size limits. If a ship is big its ofcourse fun to destroy it - but then it's not about complexity but about size and action, but not about carefull design. Because carefully designed big ships take ages to build and there are not many builders out there (lets say not more than 50) that are able to.

 

[Az14el]

The reason why last years blood & steel pvp tourny crashed at the very end of the final fight was due to combination of a fully enclosed docked hull coming off of raisins ship and thousands upon thousands of swarmer missiles being in the air :p
And one pretty bad spike when Gandracs ships undocked some of its drones incorrectly and had to be despawned.

Those ships including my own were all built with no particular server lag considerations other than "dont crash it before you get a kill", they were almost all very laggy for their size lol, this was mostly due to high amounts of large rail parts like docked hulls/big turrets/AMS spam, but also mass amounts of missiles at the time were pretty bad on performance.

But (correct me if im wrong) that's part of GRHayes point, in that those meta-conforming pvp ships were quite a bit laggier than most in their size range due to their high combat performance designs. Which may (or not) be part of schines supposed "hidden reasoning" behind a major power change. I'd also jump on the "why not just fix rail interactions instead?" bandwagon, but I don't have any good rail/entity specific answers there to 'suggest' in place of schines proposal. *shrugs* it'd sure be one way of doing it if "fix the rail lag creep" is their intention, im just not sure if i'd enjoy the engineering game quite so much anymore despite the overall serverside performance increase I would expect from it.

 

[Edymnion]

a fully enclosed docked hull coming off

I really, really wish all of the servers hosting these competitions would just flat out forbid the use of such things.

No docked hulls, no docked reactors (including the revamped "we swear its not a docked reactor, we just dock a huge reactor and then dock the turrets to it directly" docked reactors), etc.

Everyone knows these are game breaking design exploits (as in they literally break the game when they fail), so why these competitions even allow them in the first place is beyond me.

 

[GRHayes]

Well the issue with docked reactors and docked hulls are in general related. The method they chose to handle the dock system is the real culprit. I don't mean the way the docks works I mean the way objects are stored in relation to one another. If they used a link file rather than relying on the directory system they could have allowed multiple docked systems and had things load faster and allowed chaining to be longer.

There are actually better methods of handling voxels than the chunked system which has its limitations as well which are effected by hardware and such as how much ram you have vs the page file size and other stuff. When you get over a some size chunk system in this game will start recalculating the number of components simply by you moving your position or camera angle.

All that said its there game. If I don't like it I don't have to play it. Which is pretty much why I only drop in time to time now.

As for my feelings very large ships I have no issue with them. People are always going to have differences and advantages. Even if you gave everyone the exact same ship and no one could have anything different. Someone would be smarter a better tactician, someone is going to be faster, or can afford better hardware, more time, ... There is always going to be someone at some point who can do better than you or me at something.

I would hate to see how these people bitching about big ships deal with real life. Is this the only thing you do in your life with some sort of competitiveness to it? If so sad.

I went through the Naval Nuclear Power program trained as a reactor operator, worked for DOD/DLA 7 years on industrial controls robotics automation and programming, then Texas instruments in equipment engineering, I have 2 business one in game development and a hotel, I've worked on so much shit employers tend to look at me in disbelief till they see actual documentations and photos. Yea, serious imagine having to take a 3 inch binder to prove to people you actually did the shit you did.
Even with all that I make mistakes and there are people who often can do stuff better and faster than me in some areas. There aren't to many though that can cover all those areas though. If you wonder what my real hobby is beside programming its learning. I tend to rather learn how to do something than simply pay someone else to do it. I've develop furniture, tiled floors, built house, rebuilt cars rock climber, flow, sky divide.... 3 martial arts...
I learned a long time ago be the best I can be don't worry about being the best at anything. It is a fools game. Someone out there has a natural talent for pretty much anything in life you can think of and you will never be at their level.

Hearing this stuff gives me a headache it makes me think I listening to a bunch of liberals who all think everyone has to be a winner and since people aren't actually equal we have to make them equal.
Instead of trying to compete with others on that level compete with yourself. See what improvements you can make that you like over the last one you built.

Honestly, Devs if you are listening I blame you because you gave into this cultural BS and fostering it.

 

[JinM]

Yeah it's a sandbox game. It's not about the rules the devs make with rail mechanics, but how the people playing with a sandbox make their own rules like forbidding docked reactors, hulls or limitting ship sizes. Like you said - being creative in a sandbox and using its freedom.

 

[Edymnion]

Yeah it's a sandbox game. It's not about the rules the devs make with rail mechanics, but how the people playing with a sandbox make their own rules like forbidding docked reactors, hulls or limitting ship sizes. Like you said - being creative in a sandbox and using its freedom.

Being creative is one thing.

Doing something you specifically know beforehand will crash the entire server if it goes even the slightest bit wrong is another.

Servers banning "creativity" by saying you can't do things that destroy said server are as old as game servers themselves.

 

[JinM]

Servers banning "creativity" by saying you can't do things that destroy said server are as old as game servers themselves.

Exactly. But why servers are still without size limits is outside my comprehension.

 

[kulbolen]

Any person (with exepctions, but I mean the majority of the casual players here, so over 80% give or take!) who tells me, that he knows what he is doing when he designs any ship over 100k mass, should consider his sanity.

the majority of casual players have no idea how to build any effective ship; size isnt relevant. with a few easy to manage exceptions, build concepts dont change all that much as you scale up. if you can build a *good* 12k ship, you can build a good 100k ship. unless youre wreally into highly stylized designs, they dont even take much longer.

So if those ships, who are effciently and (supposedly) perfectly designed, allready lag the server if they are below 10k mass - why do you guys think that any bigger ship can be usefull for pvp if it is actually the fact, that the most efficiently designed competetive ships allready bug the server out at 10k?

bns ships are 12k, and the tournament supposedly had rules about crashing the server = a loss, but they dont seem to have been well enforced. id go as far as to say some of the contestants knew their ships would cause lag, and considered it either an acceptable downside, or even a potential benefit based on their ship build. you can build a powerful ship without some features that cause mass lag.

theyre hardly perfectly designed; they all have distinct flaws and most bns constestant can comment here about how their ship wasnt finished or ready and they had to rush to get stuff in.

Exactly. But why servers are still without size limits is outside my comprehension.

a few reasons. many admins dont understand that the games "default" settings are not appropriate for mp play. this lack of understanding of the games massive limitations leads them to argue against restricting creative freedom, or encouraging large stuff as it fits the theme of epic battles on a grand scale etc. some just want more players on their server, and playerbase likes to scale inversely to rules.

i like the idea of a mass cap just because it helps the game run better and promotes better engineering, but i think there should be softer methods of encouraging this naturally in game.

ps, self powered turrets and docked hulls are not exploits, theyre well within the games normal mechanics... the latter is just a laggy mess when undocked and needs to either be optimized or removed for the games health.

 

[Batavium]

Exactly. But why servers are still without size limits is outside my comprehension.

1. You need to know it is possible to add a build limit.
2. You need some understanding in how StarMade works in handling of the universe. In order to "see" the need for it.
3. Expectations need to be based on reality "server CPU/RAM"
4. Player count matters. CPU/RAM : player count = limit A server may run fine for a long time with low player count.
5. It is possible to build a really massive ship without issues so long as it does not move or shoot. "server dies when it finally does"
6. People that claim Planets are not broken will also not see the build limit need.
7. Add random toughed as they are as numerous and diverse as the people playing StarMade

A default Build Limit would be nice. The Opt Out option. Force people to make a settings change to get No Limit rather then to let them add it in.

A Build Limit forces people to make better designs rather then bigger. You also know the max your enemy will bring to the table. It creates a much more fair play environment by taking out the size option.

Back on topic:

Power is not broken! It got murdered! Bring this back! Everything got BIG after this horrible power update back in 2015!

Orbital Cannon Uriel Most amazing and impressive build ever created in StarMade.

 

[Lecic]

I really, really wish all of the servers hosting these competitions would just flat out forbid the use of such things.

No docked hulls, no docked reactors (including the revamped "we swear its not a docked reactor, we just dock a huge reactor and then dock the turrets to it directly" docked reactors), etc.

Everyone knows these are game breaking design exploits (as in they literally break the game when they fail), so why these competitions even allow them in the first place is beyond me.

You know the point of Blood & Steel was to have people push the extreme limits of the meta, right?

 

[JinM]

I think that many many pvp- server admins in Starmade understand very well how the game mechanics work. I think it is not a lack of understanding.

I would also jump on the "not enough players" idea...but still I cant imagine that every admin rather plays with this mass>100k chunk stuff instead of having like 20% of nubs less. =)

 

[Edymnion]

You know the point of Blood & Steel was to have people push the extreme limits of the meta, right?

Yes, but what they do filters down to everybody else.

Its great as a "Here's how to break the game so the devs can fix it" kind of thing. As an "epitome of cutting edge pvp" it just makes a precedence that this kind of thing is normal and acceptable from what I've seen. And things like fully docked hulls really do need to be considered unacceptable for normal "not trying to break the game" play.

 

[Lecic]

Yes, but what they do filters down to everybody else.

Its great as a "Here's how to break the game so the devs can fix it" kind of thing. As an "epitome of cutting edge pvp" it just makes a precedence that this kind of thing is normal and acceptable from what I've seen. And things like fully docked hulls really do need to be considered unacceptable for normal "not trying to break the game" play.

The devs won't fix things if it's just seen as a fringe problem. If everyone is using docked hulls, stacked turret reactors, and meta guns, schine is more likely to see it as a problem and work on solutions.

 

[GRHayes]

Being creative is one thing.

Doing something you specifically know beforehand will crash the entire server if it goes even the slightest bit wrong is another.

Servers banning "creativity" by saying you can't do things that destroy said server are as old as game servers themselves.

The reason docked reactors and docked hull sections and so on crash the server is because the programming design choice the devs made.
If for example they didn't use directories as a means of determining order they could easily had more than one connection point between objects.
Secondly, if they had chose to use a group method rather than chunk system it could still be updated but treated as a group thus one object making collision test easier and so on and not putting the load on the server.
If they hadn't turned Power into a space filler to start with trying to prevent giant ships docked reactors and so on wouldn't have been needed thus none of this would have happened.

So to be truthful the entire reason any of this stuff is a problem is the devs trying to prevent something to start with. Then they came up with so called solutions to try and make up for the issues that caused which has lead to a giant circle of stuff in which they now believe it can't be fixed and are looking to create a new power system. Which the heat system looks as another means of being a space filler or limiter because they don't want people getting overly powerful or something. Because the one thing I can tell you for sure is that heat system isn't based on reality.

 

[DrTarDIS]

Yes, but what they do filters down to everybody else.

Its great as a "Here's how to break the game so the devs can fix it" kind of thing. As an "epitome of cutting edge pvp" it just makes a precedence that this kind of thing is normal and acceptable from what I've seen. And things like fully docked hulls really do need to be considered unacceptable for normal "not trying to break the game" play.

LOL. "trying to break it" IS THE GAME. Gaining an advantage and snowballing it is the entire basis for every game I can think of. Don't cry because Competitive nature goes hand in hand with emergent gameplay. You either keep up with the emergent style, or you play in the little leagues.
EG from reality: Baseball vs slo-pitch. Keep up, or start your own gimped league.

 

[splatthecat]

OK, I am an RP/PvE player but I have been dabbling with PvP ships off the dock so that I can learn how to build a better combat vessel. 95% of my builds are salvagers, shuttles or scouts and I have always failed at building a decent combat ship. My efforts struggle against vanilla Isanths I am that bad!

Yes, stringing power generation through the body of the ship doesn't make a lot of sense. In reality you don't have power generation in the wingtips BUT you could have electrical wiring or components that are vulnerable to damage. Looking at it as a power "system" rather than a power "generator" makes more sense.

Looking at some of the PvP ships on the dock and there are quite a number that have an interior! Admittedly there are no plants or subtle texture changes or mood lighting but you don't just float through a bunch of systems to get to the core. Externally, many are quite aesthetically pleasing and not just a block of advanced armour floating through space.

Power does need fixing, but not by some over worked bunch of integrated systems just make what we have work better. If players want to make a generator cube inside their ship they should be allowed to, if they want to run lines through the ship they should be allowed to. For example, i have a ship that I have used for ages. About a year ago the power came from an 11x11x11 power cube that used to be all the rage then. This also dictated the shape. Recently I have been making some modifications to it and reworking the power, shields and thrusters in lines through the ship and have achieved exactly the same power, thrust and shield levels and given myself more space for more RP interior.

All this uncertainty has killed this game. Servers I played on a few months ago that had 20+ players on have a handful and on a couple I am lucky to see one other person. Established YouTubers who produced StarMade content are drifting off to other games and little is coming from the development team.

If something is broken, fix it. Don't try and change it for something else. Have tiered power generation if you must but the more advanced is heavier, has less hp/armour and prone to exploding or something. There has to be a balance caveat somewhere.

Whatever you decide to do, do it now or make another announcement to say you will just fix up what we have and not try and over complicate it. Yes we have to sometimes build bigger than we would like or ditch some power for a RP bathroom but this is the game we play. RP'ers and PvP'ers alike. Each to their own but we could all learn from each other, including the developers and players.

 

[Edymnion]

LOL. "trying to break it" IS THE GAME. Gaining an advantage and snowballing it is the entire basis for every game I can think of. Don't cry because Competitive nature goes hand in hand with emergent gameplay. You either keep up with the emergent style, or you play in the little leagues.
EG from reality: Baseball vs slo-pitch. Keep up, or start your own gimped league.

Good luck trying to ride that train.