Being a bit of a magpie I'm always irked that I can't get to all the dismantled 'debris' when cutting a wreck up, the larger ships provide great opportunities for scrap merchants, but so much can be lost simply because it de-spawns in just a few seconds. So can I configure this somewhere? or is this done simply because... reasons?
I think @Peter Conway is on about when you dismantle a structure and parts of it fall. You only have a few seconds to pick up bits the that fall before it disappears.
Ok. Because "despawn" happens to many things, and "wrecks" is a word used for many POIs. Patrol Vessels also "despawn" when disabled (core busted) but that's not the same as blocks falling from a wreckage (POI) when you are salvaging it. There is no way to make the fallen blocks last longer, because this is part of the structural integrity "feature". You are supposed to use some care when dismantling a structure, so not to cut parts from their support or else they will be "broken" and fall then disappear. Previously they just vanished after the "crumbling" animation, but after some players asked for it , some of the blocks could be picked up if the player was quick enough to get to them. But that's still bypassing the requirement to use care when salvaging. Structural Integrity is either completely on or completely off, we can't adjust the animations parameters/ blocks despawn delay. We can only adjust blocks' "structural strength" in the materialsconfig.ecf file, so we can make longer unsupported spans/ bridges, arches, etc. Normally we can have 12 blocks distance from a vertical support before the whole thing breaks, and cutting the "link" between any block or part from the rest of the structure will cause it to break/ fall. If you want to circumvent this feature you will either need to use the game console/ options or modify playfield files, so honestly save yourself the trouble and just use the console to get whatever you lost from the itemmenu.
Thank you Kassonnade for explaining it to me. My gameplay style is perhaps odd in that I try to get as much as I can for as little as I can, offset by self inflicted limitations like 'no starting gear' and no 'magic making' by rubbing a couple of bits of ore together to create a complex construction machine, as consoling anything in is really a no no for my mind I'll just have to be more careful when dismantling the crashed hulks adorning the planet. It makes for unusually slow start but I like it that way... and I have so many starts.
The "ruined landing pad" lends itself to a quick, if somewhat wasteful, teardown since so much of it is vertical. Slice connections between a vertical section with the multitool and prepare by making sure you have a logistical connection to as empty of a container as you have. Remove a block or two at the bottom and several hundred steel plates will fall at your feet for fast grabbing. This can be really helpful when making new multi-charges is a reach in the early game. It sounds like the factory doesn't fit well with your play style but if it does you can pretty quickly take care of the iron requirements of most lightweight constructions (and a good chunk of the time required for the build) this way. Likewise, the portable constructor makes a pretty good short-term bag of holding if you're playing with weight 'n volume turned on ... a few iron ore and you can drop one at every salvage site.
Maybe no way WE can make it last longer, but Eleon could choose to if they were not deliberately trying to make salvaging almost as annoying and tedious as possible. I would like a means to carry bits of a ship/base back to a bulk salvaging system - like in SE. Manual salvaging one block at a time is something for the desperate only. In this, I may only ever salvage one sometimes two bases (one for loads of steal for a larger mid game vessel and maybe another for a load of sathium for my first lvl 25 vessel). After that - so much faster to just mine the raw materials. I don't even bother to salvage my own used ships beyond sometimes cherry picking high value components to speed up a build. On the other hand in SE because it has decent mechanics for picking up, carrying and central savaging and especially with mods like nanite build and repair then the vast majority of my resources come from salvaged ships/bases. I know salvage tools can be modded to be slightly better at the cost of being more buggy/picky about target angle.
Yeah, I understand, it's a choice of gameplay that I've chosen... not to play the game from the start to the end and say I've completed it, but to enjoy and milk every thing I can that pleases me, ending a game has never pleased me. When I first saw a large chunk fall after being cut from a crashed hulk in my mind I immediately saw a picture of a Walled junkyard hundred of yards wide filled with parts and derelict skeletons of kit and ships long dead, but the chunk of debris just disappeared while I gazed at it in wonder, the next bit I was quick enough to catch and I realised the problem with my daydream... it had been reduced to it's component parts. Whether this will change in the future or not I don't know, and to be honest I doubt it, after all so very few people play and the in the manner I do.
I think it's more an attempt to keep blocks count low on playfields for performance reasons than it is a plot to piss off players just to make them write bad reviews. Maybe the guy working on performance issues and the guy working on water effects are on different floors though. ^^
I don't know @Kassonnade , just now I found myself using the drone and suddenly getting attacked and between the <ESC> and the console provoking ' single quote being so close to each other and the whole "It's time to play modal dialog roulette! How do you want to die today? Now with adrenaline and gunfire!" vibe I sometimes wonder why they hate me... ;^)
Well I understand that, but given how tedious salvaging actually is, then I cannot imagine a server being exactly flooded with debris even it it lingered around for 5 minutes...
There was a similar issue with patrol vessels littering playfields, and at that time when they made them despawn rapidly (which generated a 11 pages thread) Taelyn showed a screenshot of the state of one of the official servers which spoke a thousand words. It may not just be a question of blocks quantity, but also the complexity stemming from this apparently innocuous animation with blocks falling randomly. If blocks have to stay on the ground for some time then they will require minimal collision properties, in their mangled/ jumbled state, and next blocks to fall will collide with them. Stepping in that chain of events looks like opening a can of worms to me. I can see a whole citadel being rendered as numerous piles of rubble peppered with "drop boxes" from destroyed containers, players struggling to clear the way to these before they despawn too, players breaking limbs because they were standing on top of the pile too long and it despawned when they were 30 feet high, etc. Then also comes the next logical step : if fallen blocks stay for a long time and other blocks fall on the first ones what will happen when the first blocks disappear? Another simulation but this time with the rubble ? And again as long as blocks and despawn delays remain? I could understand why someone would prefer not to open that door. Collision is already sketchy with ships, I doubt they're going to stretch their efforts on rubble...
That is just way overcomplicating the matter. The devs could just extend the time from it's current time of approx 5 seconds to 1 minute and don't change anything else regarding the blocks.
I personally can't see why adding 30 seconds to a minute time delay for falling blocks would be detrimental to an off-line game, I see the point about large servers and such where a squad of determined griefers might cause a problem. As for the difficulty of programming of such a change, I don't know, perhaps it's simple enough to for a dev undertake while two others are light-heartedly reminiscing about when Grandad fell down the beer cellar.... I just don't know!
Yeah, been there, in the 3-400 hours I've had in game I've argued many times with my screen, "yes, yes, shut up I'm being eaten" "damn, stupid console button"
With all the people involved in this conversation, it had to be coming from an observer... Why am I not surprised anymore... 5 seconds will not do past X amount of blocks, and it's not a delay "worth the trouble", and 1 minute is too long to simply have ghost blocks all over the place. Let's just say that too any times players are over-simplifying issues to make the devs look bad if they don't agree to do something. And here specifically, my questions remain unanswered, and brushing them aside doesn't shed light on this topic: if delays and collision happen, what' next ? Please make an effort to read this with the eyes of someone who will have to face the consequences and possible further demands. And as a simple player, I do care about the game becoming slowly but surely unplayable on (my) middleware. I also happen to know that simulating falling piles of blocks and spawning the physical result is far more demanding than making a simple "fake" for the sake of visuals. The "animation" is not a "true" physics simulation ran on the real blocks, as can be seen when big sections of a POI are involved. This is the typical case of trying to compensate for lack of real physics for passive objects on ships/BA grids to add a bit of eye candy instead of simply making the blocks disappear at once when the player is careless when salvaging. Asking for a longer delay is asking for gratification for being careless, at the unneeded costs of performance and implementation complexity, opening the door to other problems. What is "over complicating" things here is jumping over parts of an issue (or parts of an explanation...) that don't please us because they are not helping our point of view. But that's not how things work when dealing with the actual problems.
here is a "note" written at the top of the ItemsConfig.ecf : # LifetimeOnDrop: float = specifies in seconds how long an item will live after dropping it. Default is 200 seconds. Please only increase this time if ABSOLUTELY needed as lots of items can bring down the performance of a server, but also in SP. This concerns the small dropped boxes when we drop stuff from inventory or when a container is destroyed. These are very simple models, with LODs and no fancy parts, yet we have a warning that they can cause performance issues on servers and in singleplayer, when too many for too long. The same could be said about LCD screens : we have had multiple similar warnings about how these degraded performance, and that we should avoid using them all over the place. Of course, players put them everywhere, they put NPCs all over the place, and then they start having strange behavior in game, glitches and stuttering, etc. Now someone wants to add fallen blocks to the party, and common sense would indicate that this will make things worse, and not only that but it may also prove to be a problem because blocks will fall on blocks, and all these have to be rendered separately, with some way for players to click on them (yes, "colliders"), but out of the left field comes the guy who knows better and brushes all of these concerns aside with a suave "if you disagree that it has no consequences then you're just dumb". I think there are many ways to help and answer questions, but insulting others is not in the helpful toolbox.
