While this is true for some features of the game it can also have the opposite affect as well. Good example is this thread, the despawning of ships. One big reason why why did this was due to the amount of 'junk block' (call it what you will) in orbit in multiplayer, affecting the performance. This is unlikely to affect single player games as much, but we all got the blanket feature.
Exactly, can't deny that. That's why they gave us the option to edit the timers in the yaml, but since the problem is mainly "multiplayer related" no need to remind everyone here how some server owners are (too) often more prone to complain on forums than to take the time to set up their games themselves. We know the game can support anywhere from 2 to tens of players, but obviously many server owners, having some related expenses, also run other games to attract players, and they may not have the time to set up the game correctly after each patch - easier to ask the devs to do it for them. They may also report an appreciable volume of "false positive" bugs reports because they don't understand the strain they put on their servers when not configuring their game adequatly, i.e. content vs # of players. The case Taelyn showed on another thread also shows that on heavily populated servers, there has to be some amount of "automated cleaning" because doing it manually is not realistic. And I also often criticized these guy's decision to opt in to experimental while running a server, but go figure...
Bullshit. This game is not suited for the type of PVP it seeks to provide and it never was. I have very strong opinions on this topic. I have nothing against PVP as a general rule. But designing "for PVP" has, In MY opinion, done far more harm to this project than any other issue.
"Multiplayer" is also "PvE" (coop), and we need PvE content there too, but also performance. I mentioned "multiplayer", not "PvP".
Magick the Gathering is "GOOD" PVP design and experience. Chess same. Play by email games offer some excellent MP design and experience too. Moving more into the realm of this particular game: EVE Online does a shockingly good job of offering a portion of what this game intends to offer for PVP, minus the highly-naturalistic camera and interactive first-person environment. How does it manage that? I cannot say with absolute certainty but certain points seem fairly obvious: it is built in it's own "engine" in python, and it is NOT saddled with extraordinarily "heavy" graphical assets, much less multi-voxel constructions about which a gazillion calculations are being done every millisecond . . .
This is a beautiful, wondrous, visionary game, and it is extraordinarily well-done. But the "Design for PVP" ethos is the worst scourge of the whole project. The life blood of this project going forward is clearly to add meat to those features which enhance singleplayer and small-count coop play, and stop imagining servers with multiple factions of humans each with scores of players logged on doing medium sized--much less "massive" fleet skirmishes.
Well if they didn't wast time making the "Offline Protection Device" and all the coding for anti-grief features, "can't build - too close to X" and such, they could have invested this time elsewhere. My bet if that PvP, if not heavily supported with creative server owners like Rexxus, would quickly fade into history... So for Eleon to keep getting player input and forum activity here and on Steam, they have to give us PvE content. Look at who is active now on forums, making "constructive suggestions. PvP players ? Naaaan... They only want nerfs and buffs. Well not all, but too often that's all we see. Oh, and "fix your damn game Eleon, or I'll tell all my buddies to review bomb your game"...
I suspect that even Star Citizen cannot, at present, offer the sort of gripping, massive, epic cinematic, Star Wars episode IV gigantic space battles experience which it seems was entertained as the culmination of this particular game. They (supposedly) have "invented whole new types of software tech" in order for that game to get to where it is (and oh boy it IS amazing in look and feel, I can tell you that!) after what? 10 years in development? $500 million in production costs? Somewhere in the ballpark? I'd look it up, but I'm sure someone else knows the exact and up-to-date estimates. Until that game REALLY IS "persistent" AND the "two types" of in-game currency function effectively the same way as they do in EVE Online, I have no desire to participate in it, no matter how amazingly pretty and astounding it is visually. ADDIT: I couldn't resist and googled "how long Star Citizen been bilking da whales . . ." 2010 was when project started. They passed the $300 million in funding in June 2020 . . .
I play either single player or on servers with only a few players. The first time I took a patrol vessel out of the sky my joy was huge. When it despawned after only a short time, the disappointment was even greater. It was just frustrating. This is a moment in the life of an Empyrion player where you either say, okay, that's annoying but I can live with that and keep playing, or you say fuck this **** and turn your back on the game forever and maybe leave a negative review on Steam. For single player, or smaller coop servers this mechanic feels more like a punishment, than anything else. Capturing enemy ships would be a massive selling point for PvE-Players. And no, not just rush in and loot a couple of crates while you have time, but take over the ship completely. Of course I also understand the point that on heavily populated servers there can't be too much junk lying around. Suggestion: Connect the complete despawn mechanism to the POI respawn setting. If POIs respawn, patrol vessels despawn, but please with an acceptable timer, not one that feels like a punch in the face. If POIs do not respawn, the patrol vessels should not respawn either, but they can be taken over completely. Or alternatively keep them completely configurable, with a global value that is the default for all playfields if they don't have a value of their own. I have wet eyes again, just thinking how great it would be to capture a CV. And since the question came up here in the thread why one should do that: 1. because you can. 2. with a SV you can also crack some fighter ships. And if you don't have a CV at that point, it's definitely worth the risk.
This grumble grumble on the Patrol Vessel change is getting some traction here in the forums. I'll put in my peace as well. I don't like the fact we can no longer how Hummel puts it "salvage" the destroyed ships anymore. I have been able to salvage one ship probably due to a bug but I don't like that we can no longer salvage AI CVs like we could before Alpha 12.3. I hope this gets changed in the future.
Thanks for the update. That's a bit better. Ultimately what'd I'd like to see (and I think you're close) is the following for ANY ship - Ships do not auto explode parts right after we disable it - Self destruct timer (after we disable a ship) is adjustable - Destroying the core does not cause the ship to auto explode immediately - Destroying the core and/or adding our own core should disable the self-destruct timer - Despawn timers should be adjustable Now on capturing vessels or being able take them over, I'm mixed on this. I totally get the need to clean up playfields, especially on servers. You don't just want a bunch of wrecks people have plopped a core in, half salvaged, and then buggered off, floating around in space. On the other hand if I fight a ship and really like the look of it, I want to be able to make it my own. So, I don't know if there's a solution here. Maybe the decay mechanic can apply differently to CV's where it's much more aggressive.
This game, for a fact, runs in a multiplayer environment, SP and MP and Co-Op. It is much more ''efficient'' to code for one system than two, the reasons should be really obvious with a 5 man coding team. We can not code for SP and have it work for both. Subnautica comes to mind, who had the same problems and they went SP only. PN desperately tried to get MP into the game but failed because they set up there game more towards a SP environment. Both are Unity games. But if we code for MP dedicated server style, we can achieve both with one format of code with a few tweeks here and there for SP or MP whatever it maybe. So none of that should be hard to grasp. Which makes it a complete no brainer as to why Eleon did it this way. It doubles the playerbase / funding....... You can accept that, or not, nothing much we can really do about that, because its 2020, and the games development started in 2013-ish, and I cant see how its possible to change it now in any case. MP v SP for performance. MP utterly SMASHES it in Empyrion, why, because Eleon would not have bothered to put as much work into the backend, where the game uses Unity and Enlighten to split threads up to 8 times across 4 cores to get the most out of Unity and its abilities, go back and look at PN or Subnautica again, they do not take advantage of this system any where near as much and it absolutely shows in the performance, those games are not capable of processing what Empyrion can. 2015 was the year of testing most of this crap, that was like 5 years ago now. I would argue, that it being 2020, and the fact we are still using that system, a system most other games still to this day dont take advantage of, is evidence that Eleon did a pretty good job on that. Right, lets attack this idea that PvE features are bad for PvP. Thats an utterly backwards notion, PvE and PvP compliment eachother. The only people Ive found to really disagree with that are soley dedicated PvPers that say they never PvE, but I find that hard to believe in Empyrion, as the game is geared to PvE in your rank up...... Do you want direct evidence ? Do you forget all the surveys Eleon have done for game features, do you remember where PvE ranks vs PvP for them surveys ? PvE is MILES more popular, meaning PvE is not a futile waste of time or a detriment to PvP. Game over. Its a matter of opinion what one ''you'' like better. But its a pretty much established fact in Empyrion that PvE, compliments PvP and guess what, PvP also compliments PvE. Everyone who has ever set up a server or built a scenario knows this. I find some of the arguments in here about PvE being a detriment completely laughable. Empyrion is as popular as it is today, in a HUGE part due to the PvE side of this game. Remove all PvE and post in here whats left of the game. Its laughable. And its called SE....yea I know they tried to add some PvE and it turned out pretty, meh. There is a game with a MP dedicated server system very similar to how Empyrion does it, yes they saw everyone jumping to Empyrion for the PvE and added MP to SE, go look at the timeline of when SE added MP, its freeking so funny. So its a great example in the end of a SP style built game, pushed into a MP environment, a game designed for SP, adapted for MP also and what a mess ay, what a mess ay. Empyrion on the other hand was designed from day one to be a MP focused game, are you starting to see the HUGE performance implications yet ? SE, one CPU core for the first 3 years of its existance, KEEN did not expect it to need more processing power than one core AND the physics engine, HAVOK, not owned by them, at the time did not like multithreadng so SE had some serious issues in its development also, they ended up on one core until I believe it was Microsoft that owns HAVOK updated it, years later. So SE is a prime example of a SP game, under powered in its game engine, not because the engine itself was not capable of it, but because of 3rd party libraries that were not set up or designed to run in that environment yet, in 2015 multithreading was still sorta new for game programmers. And just how did SE run on one core, in SP not bad for a week or so until the build up catched up with sim speed. And MP, what an utter disaster. And how did MP start in SE, do you guys remember ? It started with Co-Op and piggy backing Steam network code, and that brings a limit of 4 players max in a game...... And the game seriously struggled with just that. It so desperately needed what Empyrion had at the time, dedicated servers, with code that opens up more processing abilities. And thats what they went and built. As Eleon had already done. See, Empyrion, in SP or MP, both operate in a dedicated server arrangement , in a MP environment, Empyrion is a game that can start SP and still be opened up to MP.....Empyrion. SE vs Empyrion in MP, hands down winner is Empyrion for performance.\ SE is not even in the same ball park. Can an SE server even take over 100 people and not crash, its a serious question. HWS has tested Empyrion to over 140 players at one time, stable. Its not even a close comparison. And it really should be all the evidence you need to know your devs here at Eleon, did it the best way possible to accommodate EVERYONE. And they did not pick a bad game engine, there is nothing wrong with Unity, and people forget Unity could do more in 2013-2015 than most game engines because of its cool ability to separate threads and re-sync them, lots of threads. Are there better engines today, yes. Could we swap, with a complete re-write yes. Would that be fun, pretty much not lol. Take a look at alost every single server of Empyrions online, and tell me, just how many are PvP only ? Anyway, my to bob, enjoy !
I don't understand all this Fuzz about self-destroying Vessels. Whoever is able to fight and make a stand against a OPV has enough Resources and Firepower to do it over and over again. Who wants to capture and own a flying Junk yard? 99% of those Vessels can be found on the Workshop. No SP would have a chance to use of a captured Vessel. What will he do with his own Vessel? "K.I.T.T.! Drive home and wait for my arrival !" Or what?
MAN! @piddlefoot These Text Walls! I am not a native English so I have real troubles to follow your postings! Sorry!
We should not have to go into the yaml files and start altering things. Do you expect that of new comers? You don't to that for graphic settings. As I have suggested in post #33, put the settings for the vessels in the Settings menu. Then it's down to the single players or server owners to see what is the best settings for them. Everyone is happy. This stops all arguments on this feature.
@Spoon The Game comes in a vanilla state, unaltered! If someone likes to mod the Game or to change the values within the yaml.files he or she can do so. No support for that. Each one for him- or herself. Following your suggestion the game will end up with 20 pages of settings which will take you 15 to 20 min to solve by reading all the info what switch does what...
With something like this, I do wish this was something in the options or just a single setting in the server config. As it stands right now, making the changes to timers for this is going to be a PITA because each playfield needs to be changed. (I think?) One thing to keep in mind too when it comes to complaints from sever owners is update fatigue. I for one have spent I don't know how many hours over the last couple of days updating files because both the game and two mods I use got updated. It get's exhausting. It's also one of the reasons why over the course of time I've owned the game (got it shortly after it came out in EA) that I've stopped playing several times. It's no fun when you spend more time in notepad++ than you do actually playing the game.
20 pages of options sounds great. Just don't force anyone to wade through it, and what is the problem? If a new user can simply launch the app, click "Start New" and jump straight in to play without even knowing that there is a 20 page "Game Settings/Options" page in which they could get lost, then what is the problem? Admittedly, there is some work involved in configuring the source code to support the new UI elements and some copy-paste editing of existing U.I. elements but that would seem to be a "small price to pay" for peace and harmony among all users and service providers, no?
The developers contribute greatly to this by failing to inform us of the features they want to put in the game and the mechanics that will support those features. They claim they do not want to be locked in. That leaves us playtesters locked into how it is now not how they see it when it is done, so we test it as it is now not how the changes will integrate into the "current" final vision. I keep telling my clients the more data you give me the better I can turn it into information. If that works trying to diagnose a sick cow it works trying to build a game.
