I'll take that as you arguing that more $$$ will be bad for Empyrion. At this point it is obvious that Eleon lacks the resources needed to acquire the coders that can solve the problems that are plaguing Empyrion. The main problems are a lack of Physics with matching vessel AI and Optimization. Two thousand Steam players at $10.99 a pop is not going to cut it. With their current staff even minor updates will take forever, and they are not able to tackle the main problems, opting instead to go with much easier non-solutions such as some new blocks for flair, extra grind to make up for the lack of quality vessel to vessel encounters, and counter-intuitive CPS to force smaller builds. The biggest attraction of a space game is the promise of epic space and planet battles. If this is done with player designed vessels that have interiors all the better. But Eleon opted to disable space weapons on planet by default. This eliminates half of the game's main attraction. Orbital Patrols have no AI and are therefore severely lacking for space battle purposes. The drones work OK on planet and in space, but that is not enough to make a great space game. Space Stations offer some decent combat, but they are only 1/4th of the vessel to vessel combat package. Space Engineers has halted single player development, and I am not aware of any other gaming studios that are developing anything within this space building niche. There is a vacuum in the gaming community with respect to this niche. So there is a good chance that the first viable game to be released in this genre will be successful. A correctly applied infusion of cash is the only thing that will move Empyrion towards a viable state at this point. This is done with crowdsourcing. The first cash infusion should be designed to bring the game to a state that will exponentially increase the Steam Early Access player volume in order to expand conventional revenue generation. Future crowdsourcing fundraisers would hopefully be able to be directed towards larger tasks and overhauls that bring the game to a releasable state. From there Eleon should have enough cash to make Empyrion Galactic Survival II into something much closer to Star Citizen's league. (Star Citizen is setting the new standard for gaming, and it will even pull in all the ex Second Life players who quit SL because of stupid development choices, like making it a server based system with terrible lag and very limited grid size so they can charge for prims via prim permissions) The best way for Eleon to begin crowdsourcing would be to initiate a series of Q&As with the various streamers like Spanj and X-Caliber where they would discuss what needs to be done, what can be done, and how much it will cost. Ideally these Q&As would include guest coders who specialize in gaming Physics, AI, and Optimization for starters. Through this process Eleon would be able to get an idea of how many players would be willing to contribute to a crowdsource fundraiser, as well as build a consensus for where the money needs to be spent. Eleon clearly needs more coders, and they probably need more software licenses as well. The more the consensus meets the desires of the players as a whole, the more players will be willing to donate to a fundraiser, and the more they will donate individually. If the first fundraiser yields the expected results, Eleon will be able to do more larger fundraisers in the future. Hopefully this simple equation will assist the naysayers in wrapping their minds around the reality of the need for $$$. Eleon + more $$$ = the big overhauls that are needed + much faster improvements and release of Empyrion Galactic Survival I. Since 2012, Chris Roberts' Cloud Imperium Games has raised $200 million from fans in a combination of crowdfunding and sales of game packages, monthly subscriptions, and in-game ships (some of which cost more than $400, and many of which cost as much as a full retail game or two). Their initial Kickstarter raised $2 million. In order to raise that much, Eleon would need 20,000 players to donate $100. The development of Empyrion is already well underway. What it needs is for the fundamental elements of Physics, AI, and Optimization to be brought up to an acceptable threshold (luxury features like talking NPCs and rag doll dead NPCs can come later). This will make every feature the game already has exponentially more appealing, thus generating a lot more Early Access Players, which will mean exponentially more monthly income for Eleon and exponentially better updates and speed to final release of Empyrion Galactic Survival I. This will also mean Eleon will be able to raise the performance of the game in order to support necessary, epic game play instead of whittling the game play down to suit the limited performance that the game's current software infrastructure supports. Let's do this Empyrion Survivors.
Can you not see what an exercise in futility that is? You are wasting a lot of time editing every device so that it will be compatible with your non-intuitive CPU system that nobody wants. You could be spending all that time developing the Physics/AI and Optimization. This game has a lot of dedicated players who have individually put more than 1,000 hours into this game. Players with that level of dedication will be willing to crowdsource for good results. Once you get enough players who are that dedicated, the sky is the limit as to how much $$$ you can crowdsource. Star Citizen filled a vacuum niche in gaming, and Empyrion Galactic Survival can fill another one. (I often wonder why Keen decided to leave Space Engineers in an unfinished state and shoot themselves in the foot)
I don't know for sure, but I can speculate that they had some egotistical people leading the dev team and they decided their way was best and how dare any of their players think differently. I can only hope that Eleon doesn't go that route, although with this unwanted/unneeded/unhelpful 'CPU' system, it sure seems like they are. I ask again, where is the specialization promised? Penalizing people for not 'specializing' a ship is not good game design. From Google, definition of specialization: This means that a ship would get a bonus to particular stats if built for a particular purpose or a special upgrade module was used.
Not to mention Brand can be a tactical concern as well, as sometimes Code can be biased towards Intel vs AMD or vice versa. Has that changed in recent times? I've disregarded SE's existence for over a year now... i'm totally outta the loop on how its fared. (I wouldn't put it past those Devs to have given those damn Evil Griefer Bomb Dogs Jetpacks so they could fly off the Planet to murder you in Space...) Personally EVEN if someone bought the game for someone else it'd still be a jackass thing to do to act like a Iron Fisted Dictator towards that peep the game was bought for. If ya give someone something but then try to control it for them & steal their freedom, I wouldn't feel sorry if that giving hand got bit... Ya make that sound like a bad thing. I miss having this as a possible option personally.
Not hardly. I think they're doing a fine job creating the product they want to create with the resources they want to apply to the effort in a sustainable way. I can only hope that arm chair quarterbacks like you and I aren't sucking all the fun out. They'll make a mint if they keep the drag down while shipping incrementally better product. Kudos. I'm overwhelmed by your loquacious nature gm. To be fair, it's taken me years to try and overcome a similar inclination; it's like a twelve step program. Commit yourself and don't let failing at that either silence you or encourage backsliding. I have confidence that anyone with something worth saying realizes that keeping the F to a minimum helps when it comes maximization of D as far as W=FD goes ... being appropriately lazy is what programming is all about, less is more, etc. (and to the pollster who thinks that programmers dislike throwing away stuff they worked on- pish-posh! I've never met a programmer who didn't enjoy throwing away 12 pages of if/then and replacing it with a new data structure and six lines of code!!!)
Agreed... probably feels kinda like kicking off Truss & slathering on the gorgeous Shiny Metal Combat Steel.
Rockstar Games promised that GTA V would run at 1080 on low end machines without lag. After a couple updates it did. This is called Optimization. The performance of Empyrion has gotten worse since 7. Top end PCs lag while flying a starter SV in SP. Shots also cause lag spikes. The game currently has inferior graphics and physics yet it requires a Quantum Computer to meet the "true standards" of the game. When you Tab out to desktop the music keeps playing, the game does not pause, and all your desktop apps are laggy. I can play any other game and Tab out and you would never notice the game was running. The purpose of optimization is to provide a scalable level of graphics that will guarantee top performance from the lowest recommended spec PC to the highest, with the corresponding graphics settings. As it stands, you can't even get rid of the lag if you lower your resolution to 720. Empyrion will still lag with an Intel Core I9, a brand new Nvidia RTX card, and 20 GB of Ram. The way you solve this problem is Optimization, which takes $$$. Lots of it. People don't invest in top end PCs so they can play inferior graphics games, especially if they still lag. There is a minimum threshold of Optimization that is necessary in order for a game to become viable to most players.
Sure, but that should require a highly specialized build to achieve. At present, if hard device count caps were lifted, it wouldn't.
OK this is going to be harsh and rude intel I5-4430 3.0 dual core 12GB ram 1070 video card Graphics at full blast no lag whats wrong with your computer
Wouldn't have commented on this if not for Grodark's post, but my PC is about 4 years old and I have zero problems with lag or bad performance.
well now that silliness is over 1.3M for a base hmmm that's rely rely low I mean considering your still charging CPU for hull blocks 10M for CVs I thought the idea here was to get away from the giant I can do everything CV looks like it's still there so what will bases become maybe a little thing with a gen solar panel a few capacitors and a deconstructer or will it be a 1 time giant spawn point for the ship oh I know a little tiny repair station space base the numbers are a bit better but the whole execution is still BS from the view of someone who just bought the game and starts a single player game how will they first know they can go buy the parts for the extenders or the extenders themselves once they hit the t3 level they will be stuck for a while and you will have to be friendly with POL how would they know not to get them upset in the first place I can see a lot of frustration from this then when they find it they look in their wallet and go damb whats this dust doing here how do I get credits? oh I need gold wheres gold what none on stater planet now what oh sell stuff oh you mean all that stuff I can not move cause it's to big/heavy and I do not need it to build a (CV,BA,SV,or HV) and they need 2*(what ever high price they will cost) can't make heavy armor so needs to hunt that to sell might make guns but I need that metal to make ammo (a lot more frustration) and that means more raiding already 25th level stuck with a tier 2 ship it's been 2 weeks raiding and no luck finding parts almost got enough credits for 1 of them (looks on line finds "Not find-able on stater planets") I can see some people uninstalling right there see you are forcing them to buy the parts and taking up there playtime and not rely advancing anything just a grind to grind to burn there time that's just wrong if I am spending time grinding it should be cause I want to find something RELY special not just credits or something that's a Block to moving forward (need shields to take out rely good POIs on my SV so I can get start raiding the POIs that have the parts in abundance) if it is that slow and it is that frustrating new players will leave they will pass the word along that this is super hard tell them what they went through this will spread and soon none will want to play but the die hard players soon you can not make new content die hard players start falling off game closes what CPU is costing for players and frustration 1 having to rely on a reputation and not know it till it's to late 2 a feeling of not progressing but just credit grinding is bad has to be more or at least look like more (quest to get X items and bring them back to X person from (talon or zirax) reward 1 t3 extender 3 not having the parts being able to be looted on starter planets makes a lot players feel cheated cause they are forced to pay credits for them what it costs on the objects they effect 1 MASS (SV&HV drastic, CV not so much) 2 SPACE they are forcing larger physical builds simply to make room for the blocks this adds other things as well 3 POWER the power they take up means more fuel tanks 1 more generator for SV&HV and a extra constant drain in hours on a base so they need A LOT more fuel tanks to make up the drain from the extenders this in turn uses up more CPU + more of all 3 if all of this could be shaved down to 0-5 on the 1 and 3 then just make it so we just need 1 of each of the extenders and have them all 1x1x1 I still think that the numbers need balanced out most people seem to say remover CPU from hull blocks I got to agree leave that to class size to be a factor if they reach max size class in just a shell then they have nothing inside this could bring about interesting looking ships you see this HUGE lovely looking ship but it has to move on like 6 large thrusters the pilots chair , fuel tanks , Generator, and a ventilator see now it's all pretty but the size class 7.34 Hull only can take so much more Hope this all makes you think about this better
You must be so used to the lag that you don't notice it, and running it on very low settings. That tends to happen when you put 2000 hours into a buggy game. Spanj recently got a Top End PC and he was so excited to try it out in Empyrion, thinking it would finally end the lag. So he jumps in a small HV and starts driving around the wilderness in vanilla and lag lag lag. And his consoles still take forever to open. The maps all take a few seconds to open, much to his frustration. Spanj illustrates lag free Anthem game play on his new Rig at top settings. First video with new rig and you can see the lag. Spanj says, "You're still getting the occasional lag jump and jitter, which is, I think, I don't know, I think it's an engine thing. I don't know. But... It's... kind of annoying. 'Cause if I hit my F8 I'm gettin' smooth, a smooth with a capital "smooth," 60 frames per second, so," at 11:57. Spanj complains about the lag in every episode since then and he's running a Top End Rig. It plays Anthem on top settings with no lag, as he illustrates in the first video of this post. But it lags in Empyrion when he is driving a starter HV in Single Player in the wilderness. The player base will never expand under these conditions.
Games are optimised in Beta, yes some optimization can take place now and does, but until beta, expect the occasional lagfest
Ok guys..you can voice your concerns about the game or features or - if you need to - about the development process (although this is not topic of THIS thread), but you cannot use offensive language or else. Thx for understanding.
Anthem isn't a voxel game though (please correct me if I'm wrong on this). And Empyrion already runs much better than Space Engineers in many ways, and that's after Space Engineers had their end of beta/release optimization and multiplayer stability focused updates. However, I have a pretty good PC and yes, I absolutely do encounter lag in some situations. It's not an optimized game. It can suck, but it's still playable for me personally. I could see how it can bother others, and I don't blame anyone who gets frustrated with the current optimization especially since it seems to vary so much between PCs. I just refuse to expect optimization from an alpha (or even early-mid beta game). Heck, try playing modded Minecraft and building a large-scale logistics and storage network with automated farms. I haven't played Minecraft in a few years so many things have improved by now, but you could easily kill the tick rate of your server. Even vanilla Minecraft can put the lag on a high end computer depending on what you're doing and your graphics settings. Just try to play modded Minecraft with a max chunk load distance and chunk loaded auto farms and logistics and see how well your PC holds up to an old game with 16 bit graphics.
I'm not even sure the CPU system is necessary at all. You can already limit ship sizes on a server. And why even try to prevent - "can do everything ship"? Let the player build whatever they want, all that is needed is to balance pros and cons so that that super-ship wont' be so super. Mass, fuel capacity, thrust, mobility, weapon range, count and accuracy - all of these things can be used to balance. You just need to be smarter about balancing POWER and FUEL. Make those deco sensors actually do something - like boost weapon range and accuracy (targeting sensors) and detection range (regular sensors)for a hefty power cost. When you properly balance that, you don't need CPU at all. Why? Because that super-mega ship will be so heavy and eat so much power that a more specialized ship could easily out-run it until it runs out of fuel. Add bigger turrets. Give them proper weight. Heck, make big turrets like battleship turrets - make them extend INTO the hull. Lots of mass. Bonus point if the player can access the turret from inside the ship by walking to the turret part that is 2 decks below. Might be better if you make it a two-part. An unarmored lower "pillar" part and the top turret part that can ONLY be placed on it Make fuel cost mass (not just the tanks, but fuel in them). Suddenly, the bigger the player build, the more diminihsing the returns are. Everything he adds adds more mass. Everything requires more power. Which requires more heavy generators. Which require more fuel tanks, which themselves add mass, and filling them up adds even more. Suddenly your ship guzzles fuel like a madman and because useless in a prolonged engagement. Suddenly it becomes slow as a snail when you fill it with every device known to man and tons of cargo containers. It becomes an unwinnable race where a ship simply cannot have it all, and if you somehow manage to cram everything, the monstrosity will have the size and endurance of a morbidly obese geriatric elephant with diabeetus. EDIT: The tack-on self contained turrets could still be there, but they should be significanlty less powerful
One other good way to do the CPU thing is make powered off devices not consume CPU. I could make a 6gat warp drive SV and choose to either have the gatlings active, or the warp drive. And normally, one would never have both active.
The thought alone of "Limitation" is the red rag for too many here. I am sure the Devs had attempted it many times and with a lot different approaches. But what was the result? Uproar, demands, threats and complaining. Just like now. *sigh*
