Your point? What does this have to do with ship sizes or being able to build ships bigger than the (arbitary) game limit? If i would want a (semi) realistic game i'd play Kerbal Space program. The reason i play EGS is to build (in my opinion) cool spaceships (not doing much else since there isn't much i would be interested in, yet), but the problem is that the game is deliberately limited (ship sized, and view/weapon ranges) because obviously many ppls. computers can't handle several big ships at once (not even talking about them shooting at each other). This was the initial impulse that made me think of the idea to "merge" BPs. Because i didn't see any other option that wouldn't include extremely tweaking the games engine. If the game would allow merging (and demerging) BPs it would free up TONS of resources for other things, like a huge galaxy, other factions doing things while the player is away, Bases generating resources while player is away, crew management/crew walking inside the ship while operating, MUCH greater view/weapon range, x times bigger builds and lots of things like this. As i have said before, there could be spacedocks or even just a game option to set a active BP to de-merge status, where could build and modify ships just like now. And once you are finished, you hit the Merge button and the game combines all Building Blocks to one single structure. Weapons Damage would be shown by damage decals or by actually removing damaged areas, depending on weapon impact (similar like when you blow up some ground on a planet). The game could even add burning plasma fires and other typical sci fi -ish things that need to be taken care of by the player. I would bet it would look and feel much more realistic and better(more exciting than just removing some blocks (which looks pretty lame, anyways. imo). Of course i appreciate your opinion, but it didn't convince me. I will stay at my opinion that merging and de-merging would be much more beneficial to the game for the cost of a small price. The downside would be: Damage model less accurate. (Weapon impact could still remove areas at the impact spot and damage like plasma fire could be added on top) PvP players screaming because they can't smash other ppl. ships/bases as they used to. The advantages would be: Greater view range, 20 km at least, if not much more. Yes, this is important. At least if you want to build ships that are bigger than 100 meters (which is laughable tiny imo. Think BIG, not everyone is interested in building tiny ships only. ). Greater Weapons range. (doesn't need explaination imo.) Grid size limitation removal, or at least several Km big structures allowed. (This would allow huge structure an ships to be build increasing the overall scale and scope of the game!) More resources to handle NPC factions, especially if they are not at the same playfield as player. HUGE galaxy (does this really need a explaination? ) Bigger playfields, solar systems with several planets and stars, not just some near orbit locations. Space should feel HUGE, not claustrophobic. More of everything! Free up ressources to compute Player owned bases and facilities without player being present at same playfield. More ressources for bigger planets. Much more ressources for not (Yet) implemented features, like advanced weapon systems, shields, ship scanners/sensors, cloak, ECM/ECCM, Target lock, crew mechanism, and many, many more things like this. Tons of things i didn't even think of. As i said, block for block damage is a nice feature and i see why ppl like it, but to me it is not so important to have everything else stand back because of this single feature. Sure the devs may be able to tickle more performance out of the engine somewhen, but merging and demerging would free up TONS of resources in one fell swoop. EGS can be much more than a space shooter where you can destroy other ppls. ships like 100s other games nowadays. Let's face it, PvP players will be gone as soon as there's another hot space PvP game is out there. EGS has the potential to become much more than that. It could become one of the (if not THE) greatest space games EVER.
If only number of blocks were the factor, structure class sizes would be only based on that. However, number of triangles in each block, device count, light count, etc. all factor into the load on the game. I don't think merging the blocks together helps with those other factors.
Okay, I was *just* thinking about this today. Haven't been over here recently, so I didn't know there was an actual post about it! I agree full heartedly about merging blocks into one, with a pool HP. Firstly, it would definitely improve combat performance. Second, it could genuinely stop this "several layers of whitespaced armor" BS that is needed on PvP servers and give the edge to actual flight skill and ship types. Even ships made of regular steel would actually be usable, and OMG GLASS would be okay to have again. It might even make Gatling guns useful again! Not pulse though. Pulse just sucks (Increase the firing rate to half of what Gatling guns are and I think they'd be viable again.). I'd even go so far to say do this for all vessels *and* bases. I don't think you'd even necessarily need to keep it as one merged version forever either. What about linking it to the core? Once a ship has a core in it, it merges. Remove the core, and you could easily move blocks or add devices as necessary? When the ship goes to 0hp, explode the core and any other component that is explosive (IE: Fuel tanks, generator, 02 tanks etc). Of course, a ship without a core is dead in the water, and all blocks that were connected are permanently "disabled" until a new core is put in and the entire ship is repaired. Devices I do agree with the second part of the OP's post...To a small degree. Why not have devices actually deduct HP? Those are sensitive systems, and the more sensitive systems your ship has, the easier it is to destroy the vessel? Take a generator for an SV. -100 hp to the total hp of the craft. Since many of the ones I see have something like... 4 generators. This would make sense that your ships HP would drop quite a bit. Now to add to a post I saw a bit earlier. Devices can have their own HP pool, called systems. If EMP/Ion weaponry is introduced, these can deal direct damage to the systems HP pool. At every fraction of HP loss, a device is lost. IE: Lose 1/16th of your systems, a thruster goes out. Another 1/16th, a weapon goes out. Etc. You can go even further by dividing specific systems into three categories. Thrusters/Propulsion systems, Weapon Systems, and Life Support systems (And since I took the survey and saw radar/FoW on the list "Sensors"). Each having their own HP pool. And can/could be disabled. Either through some random damage (You're ship is at half health, so now each of your systems is going to lose a little bit of HP every time your ship takes damage), or direct targeting (Turrets, fixed weapon targeting if you have a targeting computer). Balancing (Size Class) Now, one of the things I have noticed on PvP has been size classes. This...Really needs to be reworked. Considering you can have way over 1K blocks in an SV and still somehow be class 1 is silly. Perhaps (since it'll be easier on the computer if you merge vessels), reform size classes based on the amount of blocks used in its creation, Not counting devices of course. Size class 1 1-200 blocks (SV, CV, HV)- Small fighter/ Small Corvette/Small Transport Size Class 2 201-400 blocks - Heavy fighter/Full Corvette/Medium Transport Size Class 3 401-600 blocks- Small Transport/Small Frigate/Heavy Transport, Light tank Size Class 4 601-800- Medium Transport/Frigate/Heavy tank Size class 5 800+(Maybe cap it at 5K blocks for servers) - Large transport/Capital/Mobile Base *This is just a rough example. You can probably lessen or increase as needed for balance. Balancing (The @!#$ing Whitespace issue and a possible exploit to the merge ship idea) Yeah, I'm going here. This is downright dumb, and needs to stop. Merging a ship, without allowing damage to *enter* and kill the player or instantly destroy devices because of weapon skip would be an absolute dream. Imagine anyone being able to actively join in PvP without having to "git gud" at layering thousands of blocks of armor? It would change PvPvE for the better in my opinion. But the thing is, as a collective pool of hp it'd be simple enough just to add some additional blocks to get more HP. Aside from adjusting size classes to block amounts, what else can be done to prevent this? Only calculate the HP of blocks outside the ship. Any additional blocks inside the ship are not calculated (except for mass when it comes to your plans on weight and propulsion). This would give players a reason to invest in regular steel for decks or inner walls (Won't count as harshly as Hardened steel or combat steel). Anyways, that's my two cents. I hope this helps.
No offense, but for that issue, id' like to read a dev statement about this. But i can't imagine that merging and de merging would have only little or no impact on performance, especially when buiding ships bigger then 500 m. As for devices and interior lights, the game doesn't need to render them anyways at a certain distance, to make the ship/base still be reckognizeable (>5km for example). No one cares if some refrigerators are perfectly rendered inside the emeny ship, you can't see it anyways.
Some of the advantages are hypothetical at best - really doesn't matter whether the blocks are merged for preformance issues -- what I'm more concerned about is the fact that merging blocks under any conditions other than an editor will create spikes of lag for everyone involved - that would turn me off. Don't know about the rest of you - but i /love/ doing real time co-op builds in multiplayer. [Statement Retracted because it sounded rude]I can see atleast 500m my BA On the top of a mountain on a planet - and that doesn't even account for rendering in space Also for the record your position is hard to read: In the above post you seem highly in favor of Merging - in one of the ones after it - you seem rather admitting of the fact that merging blocks would have a LARGE effect on performance.
You surely did not have time to read all this thread, and you are not fair to suppose that this idea appeals only to the author of the thread, since many others made suggestions and positive comments. I see your answer as biased by MP concerns only, and this shows you don't understand the purpose behind the idea here.
I have responeded to @Mortlath previous statment that a 100 meter ship wasn't visible anymore at a certain distance in space, whereon i stated that merging and de-mergine would free up resources to create much bigger ships and a much greater view range. There's no need to get rude or agressive and no one claimed that it is YOUR fault or has anything to do with YOU. Thank you.
Sorry if I sounded rude - I'm just a bit edgy after this whole deal with Kassonade - he created a problem and presented the solution then proceeded to hound me when I did what he wanted. Plus I tend to be a bit blunt to begin with. Aggressive I can't do anything about it's my nature; however I apologize none-the-less.
I can't imagine that after doing all the work to determine exactly where the ship was hit, that it is much more work to figure out which block in a grid was hit. The work to detect the hit on a large ship with tens of thousands of triangles likely dominates the server time.
I think the biggest bottleneck is the presence of several thousand individual blocks that need to be calculated individually when hit. So its more like 10000 or more individual structures, instead of one slightly more complex shape. Other games seem to handle complex shapes quite easy imo, i think merged structures in EGS wouldn't be different from that.
A ship shouldn't be represented as individual blocks to the physics engine nor to the graphics engine that would be very slow. You only have to worry about individual blocks when changing the ship.
Empyrion's Voxel data structure is *probably an Octree. *assumption, unsafe, but balance of probabilities suggests this is the most likely (widely used) solution for storage and processing of voxels. Draw your own conclusions.
I don't play popularity contests. Sorry to bother you with "fairness"... At least you retracted a statement you found rude yourself, so my point got through nevertheless. Maybe my expectations for a mature exchange were too high... Anyway, on topic : if a "total merge" is not the best idea, at least having the possibility to merge some corners where 4 or 6 blocks take the same space as 1 cube could save a lot on the whole ship. For designs with long slopes, for example, it could mean a significant number of blocks that could get merged, without making any of the "new merged shapes" bigger than a cube or two. Maybe another simpler solution would be to have some compound blocks to replace what we usually make with slopes and corners... There could be large arcs or parts of spheres that could be used in a design as 1 block, because now we are limited to very rough curves made with whatever we are able to fit just to have a somewhat correct "curved" shape of big dimension.
Late chiming in on this. Love the idea of merging, but not for combat vessels. The merging would be super useful for building huge cities or giant freighters or simply have large fleets without the game getting unbearably slow (glitchy). But maybe in that case you would need a different class, a BV maybe (battle vessel) and if you merge you can't enter PvP space.... In any case, anything with an admin core should be reduced to a 1 block, so at least we make custom scenarios with huge cities and giant space stations!
Maybe the way to go is to have each block gain strength based on the number of / composition of neighbouring blocks, and some of the damage being 'spread out' to the surrounding blocks. Benefits: Focused fire still works Layering of armor still works, but only to a point Might mean that your small blocks like wedge tips are less likely to be completely destroyed; replacing these is a pain right now Thinking of a block with 1,000 hp, it might have a 'structural integrity' of 10%. This would mean that is gains 10% of the hitpoints of each adjacent block. This would mean that a block that formed a part of a 1 layer thick armor plate would actually have 1,800hp, depending on whether you deal with blocks that share a surface or an edge or corner (Or you could make it 5% per corner or something). If the armor plate was two thick, you'd get to 2,700hp. Here's where this idea gets clever (even if I do say so myself). If you stick a window in an armor plate, you don't just create a vulnerable spot; you lower the structural integrity of the entire plate, because not only does the window have lower HP, it is giving less HP to the adjacent blocks. It would also make small windows less of a risk as they are strengthened somewhat by their frame. Windows that were bigger than 1x1 would be an even bigger liability because less strong blocks would be contributing to their strength. Just my two cents.
The first idea introduces a whole problem to solve. Textures. Your single massive block would either only have one texture for each "facing" or you would have to track and define the various facings in smaller sections. The savings probably not much better than current reality. Even though you now have one pool of hit points for the block, all the original pieces would have to be tracked just to keep the intended texturing. The second idea sound great, but it really wouldn't solve the matter of vessels 10 layers thick. Two vessels both employing the system, the vessel 10 layers thick is probably going to still be tougher. Sure, it would balance things if only the vessel with one or two layers employeed the system, but you would have to figure that both would use the system and thus no great change in the balance.
Didn't read everything to see if this was mentioned. One compromise to the idea, while still allowing individual sections to be destroyed, is to introduce new "blocks". In fact, I wish these were already in the game (makes building simpler and faster too). Let's say you want to make a 3x high 10x wide set of blocks. Before you'd have to make 30 blocks. What if, you could make a "Block" that is a single block, with dimension of 3x10? I'm aware of the ability to make a plane of blocks, but I think this would still be nice (and capture some of the spirit of the original post, reduce vertices and whatnot). Maybe have this wall have 30x the hp of a regular single block also. Though, some would argue that this would certainly prolong many fights and maybe too OP in terms of sheer amount of HP (2000x30 = 60,000 HP for a 3x10 combat steel "Wall")
I could see arguments for some larger blocks with the same shape (2x2x2, 3x3x3, and 4x4x4x cubes), but having rectangular blocks would almost certainly make combat revolve around piling as many giant plates as possible on one's ship. Unless you could blast holes in a large block without having to completely destroy it, I'm not sure any performance increases would be worth the cost in gameplay.
