i think would be nice at some point if you add the possibilty to leave the ship on "auto-pilot" and be able to room on the ship while it moves , besides NPC crew ( for weapons / harvest / filling Fuel / etc ) or maybe the chance to build a robot or some kind of IA to run the ship or base , would be nice . ps : for last some kind of "drones" like zirax has , would be nice to defend base or CV - Also you could add some type of weapon to wipe out planets but only with help of others for example : gather at least 15 CV and place them on certain locations to shoot the planet. ( could be balance by being expensive ), plus it would help make alliances and other stuff with players love the game so far , keep it up !
Hi. Totally agree I just started a dedicated server again to test the new version. I would like to see the possibility to log in/out while in space, and a possibility to alter the need to eat all the time either with a mod for the armour or I a server config. In my opinion “THIS IS KILLING THE GAME” playing as a single player there is so many things to keep track of. At least tribble the time you have before you need to eat again. PS: hehe found some info about DiffFoodConsumption: i will test "not easy to find"
Moving around while the ship is flying is one of the most requested features, especially for multiplayer where there is not much to do while your friend is giving you a ride somewhere. I understand it is planned for the distant future but there is significant technical/implementation problems related to the game architecture or possibly the engine. AI is another good suggestion, but at the moment we are still waiting for very basic AI like patrolling enemy ships to be perfected. It's a fairly small dev team (who do an amazing job), so I think depending what you're thinking of auto-pilot that can navigate a complex 3d space with asteroids and planets might be a little way off. Probably in short-term we can best hope/ask for passenger activities along these lines: better signal logic, using tools while sitting down, functional consoles/computers/screens, a buff for mining turrets (its almost never used but its kinda fun with a friend), and maybe being able to sit in a docked SV cockpit instead of a passenger seat, so you can deploy as say an escort fighter or maybe even a mining SV.
Then someone made some really questionable design choices (though maybe the fundamental problem choice may have been unity). Same with the bizarre restrictions over not having docked vessels when you dock and yet it seems they continue to ignore this, hack around it or whatever rather than think it through and do whatever needs to be done. In co-op this quite rapidly seems to shoot up to be the number one annoyance (not being able to move, cant stay sat in in a docked ship etc), never mid how annoying all the ship juggling you end up with when docking something that itself has something docked. IMHO as this isn't on the plate for A12, then they really have to make this the entire point of A13.
i can understand what you all mean , for one side they have to add more posibilites for crew members to do stuff ( even if it its while they are sitting ) , you should be able to do "productive " stuff while other one is driving ( like harvesting or like you said "deploying for scolting (love the idea btw) also a AI crew that really helps would be more than nice ( being able to rank them too or recruit some npc from bases to patrol or stuff ) also i like the idea about computer and decoration stuff to has his use for example : comunication with other players ( like being able to speak with them with the mic in a close channel with an "antenna" and a "comm center" it could be set by logistics and allow you to talk with your "friend" or "player you meet ") or to "see " through your drones prespective or eighter deploy mini versions of them to live scan stuff or a planet ( beside the one you use with the F5) also about the AI could be like a "voice " of your ship noticing you things like : whe are aproching that stuff or enemie bases or "you need " that resource or suggest some course of action ( all set up by logistics , would be a pain to configurate that but rewarding ) could be usefull eighter alone or multiplayer for last about "moving while the ship moves " it could by like this : if your max speed its lets said 100 mts , reduce it to lets said "half" while the function of moving its workin ( your moving around space so if your not headed anywhere you can room freely without to much to worry ( or crashing with something ) and about de AI , what about this : work setting by a signal logic with things like : if your CV detects something within 10 block of radious it would turn direction, if it reaches certain distance with a "planet ,moon , etc." turn the other way or start fireing if needed . how can it works? vi the light detector signal , you can set the radius of the triggering , so you could put it outside your ship and configurate it ( again would be a pain buy rewarding doing it , you could move free and you solve the "crashing " with stuff and more then again its all suggestions , still loving the game so far . ps : not related to but , if you want a "voice " for something in the game , i have a deep voice so ( not cocky ) gladly ill do it for free !
I'm not sure of the exact problem, but I imagine it might have something to do with the way locations are updated in multiplayer. For example, if you're travelling at 100m/s and a location update for the character is delayed for 0.1 seconds while the ship moves 10m you've got a significant problem when your character is suddenly 4 blocks into the floor. I guess this should be solved by using physics that places the characters position as being relative to the ship, but perhaps that's a major change in the code's logic and might involve making major changes to pieces of code all over the place (probably lots of things rely on character position). Good code encapsulation can reduce this sort of problem but realistically most large projects cut a few corners in that regard. Perhaps they're using part of Unity or a physics library to do that stuff, so it may be a Unity or external thing like you say. Maybe they could make the player stick to the floor when they walk on a moving ship, then the physics calculations would be a lot easier, although you couldn't jump. Still moving around the bridge would be a start.
Sure, but these kind of things are quite straight forward to resolve for an experienced developer. Whether unity will get in the way of that is another matter that someone who knows unity would be better placed to comment on. As for jumping, relative movement etc - there is no reason why all of this shouldn't be straight forward to do. If anything, making all movement relative (for all associated entities - ie docked/docking/undocking ships as well as players) while within a zone of influence may be an easier way to do this. Space engineers for eg has a relative damper mode when you are close to a ship such that your jet pack and even drift movement occurs relative to the ship instead of following the usual absolute positioning rules. The transition between relative and absolute appear to be seamless. Desync of position updates is only a problem if they all do out separately. If they can be batched as multi-entity state deltas, then that problem wont apply either (as another potentially simple way to deal with this). Maybe the problem here is unity. If so, then I guess this game will grind to a halt and be forever crippled. The only other unity game I have knowingly played is eco, so I cant think of any good references that show what is possible.
I think that depends on what the existing internal code structure is and whether there is proper encapsulation, or if there is other bits of code that assume its non-relative. Impossible for us to say for certain imho, it might be harder than we are imagining if the code wasn't written with this feature in mind. That seems like a sensible way to structure things. I can't think of any situations where a walking passenger would need to be calculated separately (at least between updates). I guess there might be some minor issues when a player transitions between relative and absolute positions (at one point are you actually separate from the ship), or moving between one ship and the next?
I am not sure how space engineers does this, but it works well enough. I suspect there are many games (from the feel I get during the transition) where there is an interpolation between absolute mode and relative mode. Think of it like a zone of influence that get stronger the closer you are. This game already knows if you are 'inside' a ship - think of that as the 100% zone. Outside the ship, then influence inversely proportional to distance until a zero influence boundary is reached. I am sure it is, but the question is did it need to be that hard, or is it suffering from spaghettification making doing pretty much anything too hard? They have already indicated that the existing architecture makes a bunch of thing people keep requesting impractical at this time. I have worked in many small software companies and seen first hand what a hard feature drive does to the code base when the business considers code maintenance and proper design and architecture to be a waste of precious time - right up until they realise implementing the simplest feature becomes a nightmare and/or half the dev team leaves in disgust, often starting with the main talent.
Couldn't agree more that management support for this is vital. It's a pretty small team so probably the separation from managers and code is pretty minimal I don't suppose they'll tell us but perhaps we'll get this feature at some point anyway.
There is always someone holding the purse strings and pushing the argument that we need features yesterday to keep some money rolling in and not to 'waste' time on code design, code maintenance or units tests. It is an approach that tends to only work short term until the tech debt piles up so as to become unmanageable. We get to see that as slowing updates, huge number of bugs, old features being badly broken by new feature implementation etc, and worse maybe never getting fixed along with heaps of major long standing issues. Separation or rather and buffer between manager and developers tends to be a good thing. When money person keeps telling junior devs to do the wrong thing, there tends to be very little resistance and also tends to just undermine any efforts by the lead dev to run some kind of process. Seen it far to often over the years from the inside and the outside.
Please keep in mind that even with a custom built game engine that focused on physics, it took Space Engineers with about 10x the staff near the end of beta to get walking on moving ships working. Empyrion has about 1/10th/20th the staff, the game isn't using a custom engine built specifically for physics, and isn't an engineering/physics focused game. Walking on moving ships is very hard to do in a voxel game. Not many can pull it off in any kind of workable state from what I've seen, regardless of game engine used.
Well given that state of patrol vessels, you may well be right in which case this game is pretty much doomed.
I think you've got some good points, but I think saying that the game is doomed without walking on ships is a wild exaggeration? It would be great and I hope they do it, but if they just add a reasonable range of activities for passengers and perhaps allow sitting in docked ships too, that would also be enough to keep most players reasonably happy.
No - its just one of a probably related set of lacking and/or broken things that I guess will never get fixed/implemented and one day we will be told that alpha X isn't going to happen and instead its actually the final release and no beta where all the promised fixes were supposed to happen.
with time i think they will find some kind of middle point between "moving around the vassel " and to be able to do some stuff ( control the turrents while other is driving for example ) , im not a programmer or anything but could be a solution that the ship consideres you as part of it while someone its "docked"? , instead of considering like a your "character" it consideres you as part of the ship. as someone said its one of the most requested features for this game and it would change the multiplayer ( at least being able to do some little stuff would be a great for later (i hope) being able to roam on the ship
like having a passenger controlled mining turret (or gun turret) perhaps. ? We could finally live out those Star Wars dreams we had as kids in the Falcon. (if this is a thing already forgive me as I am still a noob)
The easiest implementation, without large changes to the underlying code would be to put the ship into a kind of "warp" mode, where it does not exist in the reals world environment. The ship stays stationary in respect to the game mechanics, but renders the world outside from a separate camera moving though the world, and maybe some warps effect added. It pops out of this mode at the destination. It cant be manually steered while in this mode, and player cannot leave the volume of the ship (or die falling off). Other ships in MP can only see some placeholder effect moving along. Within all that setup, the normal current code for first person control and block interaction can be used.
You're forgiven In a CV, a seated passenger can access a turret in the control panel and manually fire it You'll have to edit the config files to do the same in an SV..
