Fifteen Seconds

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Scoob, Oct 8, 2023.

  1. Scoob

    Scoob Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Sep 22, 2016
    Messages:
    1,459
    Likes Received:
    1,897
    Hey all,

    Fifteen Seconds. That's how long it's taking the Sentry Turrets on my basic CV to initially acquire targets. This is simply not good enough. The issue with long delays with turrets acquiring each target has been around for as long as I can remember. It's a massive, game-breaking issue when you really need your turrets to just do their job! I've lost count of the number of times I've taken damage or lost a vessel that laughably outmatches what it's facing, if only its turrets fired promptly.

    The latest example for me is I'm landing my CV - a mobile base, not a battleship - in Zirax-controlled territory. There are loads of ground troops - most NOT rendered when flying the CV in external view, nor from the cockpit view. This CV has lots of Sentry Turrets, specifically for clearing a landing area of troops or hostile critters. Once they actually shoot, they make short work of enemies, but it's waiting for them to shoot that a major issue.

    As the CV has shields, I can tank damage for a little while, long enough to observe how long it takes for turrets to do anything. It's still quite ridiculous though that a handful of Zirax troops can actually endanger a giant, shielded capital vessel that's bristling with anti-personnel turrets simply because those turrets don't bloody shoot!

    This issue seems to impact ALL turrets at once. It's rare for some turrets to respond while others with LoS do not. My CV will go fifteen seconds with NO turrets shooting, then, suddenly, all with LoS will wake up and shoot the closest target. Then there's another fifteen seconds wait until they all engage the next target. And repeat.

    I've tried to reproduce this issue but a save doesn't actually reproduce the game state in this instance. I.e. I can save the game in a situation why my vessel's turret are CLEARLY not firing, yet the instant I load that save the turrets are responding. However, keep playing for a few minutes and turret response will slow again. It was only after a short play-time that they slowed to fifteen seconds for me.

    It's about time the devs got to the bottom of this problem, it's been far too long. It's been reported a lot and can readily be seen in Youtube videos such as those by Spanj and others.

    Getting to the stage of the game where you have well-armed vessels is great. Having them simply not work is not.

    I wonder if it'd be possible to gather a "hit list" of issues like this is Empyrion, annoyances / baffling design choices / confirmed bugs that have been around for years and have the community vote on what we'd like worked on. I know there are the things you like / hate threads, but they're free-form. Something with fixed options we can vote on might help focus things.

    For me, the big annoyances are:

    - The Turret issue.
    - Melee Critters dealing damage way outside their visual attack range & not even having to face the player.
    - POI "spawn delays" where scripted "surprises" from the POI designer go wrong, and end up spawning ON the player (clipping).
    - HV hover physics BAD!
    - Mass increasing drag. Even in space. Daft.

    Look, I love the game else I'd simply not bother spending time talking about this stuff. However, these issues are typically always the thing that just makes me abandon a game in progress as the annoyance factor overrides the joy factor. It's also the reason I don't recommend the game to friends of mine, I know they'd likely be even more infuriated by these issues than me. I've built up an "Early Access" tolerance through playing a number of titles before they're ready for formal release. Empyrion IS released, and has been a while now, but these issues still feel very early-access ones to me. New content for the game is great, but work is still needed on core game elements.
     
    #1
    cmguardia, Khazul, A Mueller and 6 others like this.
  2. shortName

    shortName Lieutenant

    Joined:
    Oct 12, 2023
    Messages:
    106
    Likes Received:
    4
    Have you checked the utilisation of the CPUs of your vessels? I've been reading overstressing CPUs can result in delayed responses.

    There's no drag in a vacuum other than gravity. Increased mass requires more force applied to the mass to alter the direction of the movement of the mass. That's simple physics.

    I haven't tried HVs other than in the tutorial. Those didn't really hover. That includes the hoverbike. They are way too low above ground to actually hover, it's like they can only cross even terrain, like roads or water, but the bike is awful on water for no reason ...

    There's a reason why ground vehicles need ground clearance. That goes for those on wheels as well as the ones without wheels. Long time ago, when carts and wagons were invented, and were drawn by humans and animals alike, we already figured that out, among a lot of other things related, and a larger wheel rolls easier than a smaller one over obstacles (and brings the drawbar up to a useful height so the person or animal drawing the vehicle can pull straight instead of upwards or downwards, which is kinda crucial when you don't want the wagon to go up into the air or drive into the ground, thus unnecessarily exhausting them. That's also simple physics.).

    Apparently the lessons and experience from that has been forgotten in the future, and we can't make suitable ground vehicles anymore. Or perhaps physics changed, and HVs are still experimental.
     
    #2
    Last edited: Oct 12, 2023
  3. shortName

    shortName Lieutenant

    Joined:
    Oct 12, 2023
    Messages:
    106
    Likes Received:
    4
    So I built my first HV today and it looks to me as if the terrain height detection doesn't work right. Even with hover engines for decent ground clearance, the HV gets stuck on the terrain too often. It can even go under water, at which point it's a bit difficult to get back to the surface. Apparently, the hover height above water is lower than above ground, and it shouldn't be.

    We should be able to build submarines.

    The terrain height detection probably needs to be worked on. How about letting us adjust the hover height to a desired level? It won't solve the problem and could make it make it more obvious.

    It would be a nice feature --- and it would be extremely helpful not to get stuck on the dead trees and other relatively small obstacles. After all, these HVs are designed to cross difficult terrain. I guess I could add more Thruster Jets and run the trees over, but I don't want to destroy all the trees, and it's not a good solution, either ...
     
    #3
  4. Insopor

    Insopor Commander

    Joined:
    Oct 17, 2021
    Messages:
    147
    Likes Received:
    121

    First HV?
    Okay, a couple things you might want to know. Your post reads like you already know this, so please ignore if this is old info to you.
    Repulsor engines (the green ones) have a lower max hover height than hover engines (the blue ones).
    Repulsor engines go up to 1.5 meters
    Hover engines go up to 3 meters.

    I'm not 100% sure, but I think at one point repulsor engines did not hover over water. If that is the case currently, then you can swap to hover engines.

    The other thing to know is hover height is affected by the position of the hover engine in relation to the ground. So if the front of your HV is going up a hill, but your hover engines are in the middle, they won't detect the terrain until it's under them.

    Also, the more lift you have, the quicker it will react to changes in terrain, so if you keep bumping into hills, try more hover engines and closer to the front of your HV.

    And don't bother with jet thrusters on HVs.
    Bad power to weight ratio. LT2 are the best thrusters to use.

    But at the end of the day, HVs are kinda trash in general. They have the weakest weapons of anything. And even no matter how well you build an HV, if there are a bunch of rocks on that planet, you're gonna get stuck.
     
    #4
  5. shortName

    shortName Lieutenant

    Joined:
    Oct 12, 2023
    Messages:
    106
    Likes Received:
    4
    No worries ... I've watched a tutorial video, and it was either mentoned in the video, or it's the description of the devices. So I put both types of engines right away.

    They do that now, just lower than on land.

    Does that apply to each engine individually, and if so, how does the rotation of the vehicle come about that results from this?

    It's probably part of the problem because when you have to make it so that the thrust from each engine points away from the engine, relative to the engine, always in the same direction, regardless of the rotation of the engine, the vehicle becomes very difficult to balance. It becomes impossible to balance when the engines do not adjust the amount of thrust as required for keeping it leveled, and the vehicle will roll over eventually since adjusting the thrust is the only way to keep it level.

    I think that probably explains why, or how, the HV sometimes becomes unbalanced. And I'm guessing that the developers did something 'unnatural' or 'unphysical' to prevent the HVs from rolling over uncontrollably, and that works only so well and needs to be worked on. It's just not a good model. It's maybe because the engines do not work together in that their thrust doesn't get coordinated; doing that with vehicles which can be put together by players in various ways with varying numbers of engines is probably not exactly easy. Coordination probably would work for like 85% of the cases, but then you suddenly have unpredictable special cases in which a HV is uncontrollable and players don't have a way to understand why and no means to prevent it. So as a developer, you don't want that ...

    I'm not so sure about that. The HV I made had a mass of about 7.5t empty, and it always reacted the same, no matter if it's empty or if it had 50t of ore in the cargo hold. I was waiting for when it won't be able to move anymore because it became to heavy to lift, but that didn't happen.

    So when the HV stays sluggish the same way no matter how much weight it carries, it can't be true that more lift would make it react quicker because the ratio between thrust and mass would change when changing the mass or when changing the thrust. Since the thrust (i. e. the engines: maybe they do adjust their thrust) didn't change when I added more mass while the behaviour didn't change, something else must be going on. If there were a maximum mass for the vehicle, you could reduce the thrust according to the maximum mass to achieve always the same behaviour. But what is the maximum mass?

    Hmm, right. I guess I didn't have the recources to build them. I got them now and I'm about to change my HV: replace the armored cockpit with a lighter one because it seems top heavy --- which is strange because the engines are all at front and rear and it shouldn't matter --- replace the jet thruster with the lighter one (which I won't upgrade yet because it requires so much Cobalt which I don't have much of) and maybe try to get the center of mass farther back.

    I took it for a short test drive, and being lighter and perhaps less front heavy seems to be better. I'll have to see.

    Well, I love the HVs! You have too see where I'm coming from: The tutorial failed when I was supposed to learn HV building and it didn't seem to continue. So I started my first 'normal' game. Resources were hard to come by; there was a lack of iron, and only copper was plenty. That creates limits to what you can build. I built a nice base and have been basically on foot, with only the hoverbike, going all over Akua, visited the swamp planet (and learned that you must not go there when your suit has lost its armor), scouted the snow planet all over to find some Cobalt for like two days unsuccessfully and finally used a template to build a Shiv. I made a mistake by accidentially picking another template before that required Cobalt which I had only 4 pieces of ore by then, and when I noticed, I had already put ressources into the factory --- and there is no way to take them back and to abort the order once given :(

    So it took quite a while until I had enough resources to risk loosing what I had put into the factory, and it turned out that you can not cancel an order, but the order gets replaced and the resources can be used for that instead. So I could finally build the Shiv, but the mysterious guiding voice said I need an EVA booster. You can't build one with only 3 pieces of gold ore. I figured that I should be save without one since vehicles are supposed to be kept at nice temperatures, like bases, and if not, it might get colder when going higher; and after having survived -100C on that snow planet, there should be enough time to go back down if it gets too cold. As long as I don't leave the Shiv while in space, I should be ok ...

    Before I started, I put a sensor on the Shiv which I had built earlier to see if it would work in my toolbar. Doing that was surprisingly easy, and I made a trip to the snow planet and finally! found a rather small amount of Cobalt. That was a major breakthrough! After that went so well, I thought it can't be too difficult not to use a factory template (most of which require too much Cobalt ...) and decided I'd try to build an HV myself. I never thought it would that easy!

    Do you have any idea how marvellous, convenient and ridiculously comfortable a HV is after all that? It drives awesomely compared to the hoverbike and is very fast. You don't have to go back to base all the time to put the plant protein, meat and everything else you scavenged into the fridge before it spoils. You don't get soaked and cold in the thunderstorms because you can relax and wait them out in your HV. You don't die of hunger anymore because the food you carried unexpectedly spoiled because you can keep it in the fridge of the HV. You don't need to sit out a blizzard over night in a freaking tent at -80C in the middle of nowhere, trying to survive with hot beverages and portable heaters, hoping that'll be a little warmer during the day. Just wire your HV to have a standby option which only keeps the heat and the fridge running so you don't run out of fuel too soon, and you can put a whole bed into your HV and have nice trip instead. You can finally find things because you can have a decent scanner on your HV. I'm now surprised how much I didn't find even after spending days on Akua ...

    So I do really like HVs. They are anything but trash, they're fun. They could use some work to handle better, but they uplift you from the stone age. I like driving them; drive according to their limits, test and optimize, and it's not too bad.

    And the jump booster is very nice. Only I need to configure it so I can trigger it with keypad_5. Shift+Space I can't reach while driving. How could I do that?
     
    #5
  6. shortName

    shortName Lieutenant

    Joined:
    Oct 12, 2023
    Messages:
    106
    Likes Received:
    4
    Hm, let me add this:

    I put both types engines on the HV, not realising that you're probably supposed to use either bulldoze engines (so-called repulsor) and the hover engines (so-called hover). Then I wired the thing so that it can do two differnt hover heights, which gave me the so-called bulldoze mode. The bulldoze mode is useful when you need to be lower and when mining meteroids. When the meteroid has shrunken some, you switch to bulldoze mode because otherwise, the drills are too high to hit their intended target.

    Now I checked the descriptions again and realised that what I did is probably not intended. And some experimentation seems to show that I got distinct hover heights because either more or less engines were active at the same time.

    So I got it all wrong and have to change it all ...
     
    #6
  7. Scoob

    Scoob Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Sep 22, 2016
    Messages:
    1,459
    Likes Received:
    1,897
    Urgh, didn't get reply notifications for some reason...

    Even the most basic vessel with Turrets suffers from the targetting delay issue. Empyrion is very light on PC CPU resources incidentally, as is multi-threads very well. There's some internal issue, where turret response just breaks down. It's been like it as long as I can remember.

    Yes, that's my point. WHY is there "drag" in space as my ship gets more massive? It's ridiculous and not physics. At least, not the physics of this universe.

    Even on planets, mass does NOT equal drag. Before the changes, having a vessel - particularly an HV - running a little heavy was hilarious. You could still get up to the top speed, but it's take longer, and changing direction was more of a challenge. With hover being frictionless, there was no drag based on mass, just a limitation to acceleration and the speed cap.

    This mass = drag change basically made the game a bit silly. In order to hit top speeds now, I have to add more and more thrust, which has the silly side effect that vessels that can hit their top speed still, are super nimble, which is silly.

    Regarding hover, they don't have physics as such. I.e. a Hover engine does not appear to apply force to push the vessel away from the terrain. It may be intended to work that way, but it simply does not.

    Imagine a typical starting HV with a Hover Engine in each corner. As that HV goes up a slope, you'd expect it to be roughly level with the terrain right? No. It simply does not do that when travelling at speed. At rest an HV will eventually level with the terrain, but it'll take a while - several seconds. Watch it, you'll see. The HV does not respond promptly to the terrain when moving. At all. It's this that often leads to an HV snagging on terrain when going up a hill, and flying potentially dozens of metres into the air when going down. It simply does not work well, and never really has.

    If you manually anticipate terrain slope changes - pitch up / down - and HV performs GREAT over varied terrain. However, it will not remain level with terrain while travelling at speed, unless the slope is really mild.

    Adding mass to an HV, let's say you've loaded it up with heavy loot, can cause quite wild things to happen. Again, with your typical Hover Engine in each corner design - as simple as it gets - weirdness ensues. You will find that despite no friction with the ground, your top speed will drop, That's not physics. You'll also possibly notice (this one is random, my HV's can go either way) that steering is a bit more sluggish, that makes sense, cos physics. However, often, I can only assume due to a bad calculation somewhere, my heavily-loaded HV's become super twitchy and turns SIGNIFICANTLY faster. A basic empty (of cargo) HV might turn end to end (180) in say three seconds. That same HV when loaded with cargo will do it in a fraction of a second. Literally the slightest steering input causes it to flip. It becomes super sensitive. I got into the habit of turning DOWN steering sensitivity, as I loaded up an HV.

    "Physics" interactions between and HV and the terrain can also be weird. You'll find yourself "hitting" things you clearly visually missed - you'll get into the habit of leaving extra room to avoid this. I did. Also, when the game does think you hit something, that tiny tree - that your HV destroyed on impact - will suddenly act like it's 100x the mass of your HV, sending it spinning - and not in the direction you'd think much of the time.

    The game is fun, can't deny that, but there are some long-standing issues that I find quite irksome, and can be very confusing to new players. I mean, when games have physics you expect it to be at least an approximation of actual physics. Close enough to reality that we're naturally comfortable with it. Empyrion's "physics" however are often quite far from reality.

    What was intended when a lot of these changes were made was good, and met with positive anticipation when announced all that time ago. I mean, it sounds GREAT to have a better physics simulation and things like air resistance and aerodynamic lift. However, the implementation was bad in my view. We lost the feeling of fast but weighty vessels because they decided that mass and thrust ratio = speed, rather than acceleration. We call it "drag" for simplicity, as the game acts like there's additional drag on any object the more mass it gains - either via ship mass or cargo.

    This works great when you see a heavy vessel that struggles to lift off a planetary surface, but less so when you realise that same vessel now has a huge speed cap in space.

    I used to like my "space only" Mobile base CV's they were heavy and sluggish, but could still hit their top speed...eventually. Try to chance vector or stop them though...well, that was part of the fun.

    Now, my CV's that fit the same role are either super nimble, as I've added enough thrusters to maintain that top speed due to space drag, or they travel so slow as to not be able to warp. The issue is, that we now have to spend more on thrust to have a practical vessel that can still move. This means we have to spend more on CPU to support that extra thrust, which sometimes makes vessel design tiresome.

    When Empyrion was still early-access, I could overlook these issues. However, as nothing has changed since the release of the game, I've sort of lost heart that it will change. That's not to say Eleon aren't busy, they're certainly constantly adding to the game, they just don't seem prepared to look at some of the basics, and issues that have been around literally for years at this point.
     
    #7
    Wellingtoon likes this.
  8. shortName

    shortName Lieutenant

    Joined:
    Oct 12, 2023
    Messages:
    106
    Likes Received:
    4
    I think I know what you mean. With ony one turret on my HV, sometimes I was wondering why it doesn't shoot right away but takes like half a second before that. Perhaps it's worse the more turrets you have. Did you make a bug report?

    Are you sure? When looking at top, it's between 260 and 350%, which means it's using mostly less than 3 and always less than 4 cores (of the 56 my workstation has), and the FPS rate is quite bad between 20 and 30, mostly 25--30. I had to tweak the graphics settings and I can live with it. It's fast enough and still looks great, though I wish the FPS rate were higher. Strangely, when I use a lower resolution, it uses more CPU. Perhaps it means that my graphics card isn't fast enough. It's also something they need to work on.

    But I was referring to the CPU of your CV. Maybe it's overwhelmed.

    What if you make a test and disable the CPU limits in the settings? Does that make a difference? If it does, that might give a hint as to where to look to fix it. Perhaps it takes too long to figure out how the CPU limit is impacting the turrets and once that has been figured out, they start shooting ...

    Are you referring to the strange graphics in the statistics in the control panel? According to that, my HV can't lift at all ...

    More mass requires more force if you're gona change its direction. Perhaps that's what they mean by 'drag'?

    Ah? I keep wondering why mass isn't considered at all, and contemplated making a bug report/feature request that it should be considerd. As conveninent as it is, I much doubt that my HV could move with the 128t of cargo in its hold which I gathered on the snow planet after I spawned there from the factory --- which then I put into my backpack to carry (gosh I'm strong!) them with amazing ease over to my base through the teleporter.

    All that's considered is volume, and I turned that off. It's like a hardcore feature, and it kinda breaks the game because it holds you back tremendously. Yet all it does is making things unneccessarily difficult and slows you down. You'll do what you want to anyway, it only takes longer and is more complicated. We somehow have unlimited access to a whole magic factory at any time, which produces anything we have a blueprint for, and then we can spawn what it produced at any place we can get to. But you have volume limits? How silly is that?

    Hm. I experimented and found that the hover engines work quite well, and the bulldoze engines suck unless you want to bulldoze. So I got rid of the bulldoze engines for my HV, which allowed me to equip a lot of items I couldn't add before because of the CPU limit. Then I found that moving the drills further backwards to make it less front heavy greatly improved handling because it doesn't drive into the ground so much anymore. The disadvantage is that it is somewhat difficult to use it to dig out deposits because now it needs quite some convincing to dig into the ground. I wish there was a way to angle the drills, or to lower them down. I don't have the resources to build mining turrets yet.

    Not necessarily. 'Hover' doesn't have to mean that you keep a vehicle off the ground by pumping air underneath it, and trapping the air with some kind of curtain preventing the air from escaping immediately but thus creating a cushion, between the underside of the vehicle and the very ground, in order to force the cushion to carry the very vehicle upon it.

    There are gravity generators, and when you do have that, what speaks against that you might have hover engines which manipulate gravity, or create 'antigravity', somehow to carry the vehicle? When you have those, it won't make sense to keep the vehicle level with the terrain. It would be much easier, more comfortable and more praktical to have the vehicle remaining level despite the terrain being sloped. Your cargo won't slip off the bed or tumble around so much when the vehicle is always straight.

    With gravity engines, the vehicle might even go up somehow high, at least for a while before the engines overheat because they have to work harder when away from the center of gravity ...

    Right, that's what I've been saying to begin with, that HVs are having issues with detecting the height of the terrain and don't adjust accordingly. And the faster the HV goes, the further ahead it needs to detect the height of the terrain so it has ample time to adjust its height in advance lest it runs into the ground. That is what needs to be worked on ...

    Is there a way to adjust their speed? I can only make it go full power or not at all :(

    Right --- and it doesn't have to (or shouldn't even) be level with the terrain (but only level), it only needs to go high enough to not run into the ground. I wish we could make the HVs go up and down within their height limits. They would be easier to get into and to disembark when they're lower, and to use harvesters. For overcoming distances, we could set them to go higher, like up to 300 or 400m so we can use the dectors better.

    That would easily solve their problems. And it's probably easy to do. They can already bulldoze and if going rather slow in bulldoze mode, they could easily level with the terrain. (Why isn't there a bulldozing attachment to level terrain?) When going higher, they don't neeed to adjust to the terrain but stay level. Everything for this is already in place, it's only a matter of adding the height control to HVs.

    To prevent breaking existing things, simply add another category: GVs, gravity vehicles. I'll add that to my feature requests ... And, of course, submarines.

    Hm, I haven't observed any ill effects with 128t in my HV, but I haven't payed attention to its top speed when loaded with cargo. It's strange though that it is nearly as fast (slow) as my little space ship. The SV is only 10m/s faster. That's only about 176 vs. 212 km/h. I've had cars going way faster than that. With cars, fast starts at 240km\h.

    And the space ship is as fast as the HV when flying through the atmosphere. A HV that goes as fast as a space ship? Hmm. If it would only go high enough, the HV could leave orbit.

    How much did you load? I haven't noticed what you describe. Only it annoys me that both the HVs and the SV I have, turn equally slowly, way too slow. Perhaps I can add more/better thrusters to improve that?

    Yeah I uprooted some moss patches despite the HV is supposed to be 3m above ground. You can't even pick them up and they disappear too quickly. Same goes for trees, except they're higher and thus could get hit. If things really don't grow back over time like they should, the planet will eventually turn into a desert just by driving around in a HV for a while :(

    Yes and no ... It all depends on the player, like I find it weird that mass isn't considered while it would either make things very difficult, or great changes would be needed to consider mass. I wouldn't want it to be too difficult. The distances and speeds also don't make sense. It doesn't bother me too much, though. Someone else might not want to play at all because it's way too unrelistic. In general, so far I think they found a good balance.

    I don't know about the changes. They don't sound bad to me, yet that can be due to my lack of understanding of how this works.

    IIUC what you're saying, I could, for example, build a HV regardless of its mass (which equals size), and it would work as long it's not too unbalanced (which also doesn't make sense becaue it doesn't matter how unbalanced it is when mass is irrelevant), and if it goes too slow for my taste, I can simply add more thrusters to make it go faster?

    Is that such a bad deal? It seems to me like you gain a lot of freedom in what you can build, and the only thing you loose for that is, that vehicles don't accelerate excrucingly slowly, which is something you might not want to have anyway --- and which you might counteract by adding more thrusters. Adding more thrusters then yields the same result you got now, only it's more complicated and totally hinders you in hauling cargo.

    You mean they now can take off just like that and only can't go as fast as they used to (unless you add more thrusters)? Isn't that an improvement?

    It's more unrealistic, and I'm sure a lot of engineers would wish physics were like that. Try to imagine what they could build then!

    Why don't you turn off the CPU limit? Your ships would be swift.

    Hmm, they really should look at such things. I can imagine it's not easy to do anything because it might break so much of what already exists. That doesn't mean that some things don't need to be worked on, like the HVs --- or be made obsolete by improved versions like GVs; thusly, derelict things could be removed eventually.
     
    #8
  9. shortName

    shortName Lieutenant

    Joined:
    Oct 12, 2023
    Messages:
    106
    Likes Received:
    4
    BTW, I just connected an xbox controller, and it's great. It makes driving a HV much better, it's more like flying now. Of course, you can walk, use the drone, fly a SV, etc. as well.

    I don't know if you have one; it might be a worthwhile investment. It's way less straining than using trackball and mouse for movement.
     
    #9
  10. Slam Jones

    Slam Jones Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Oct 16, 2015
    Messages:
    651
    Likes Received:
    1,062
    Now I haven't looked at the settings since turning it to 'on', but aren't mass and volume tied together as the same option? It's a relatively new feature as of only a few patches ago, so maybe they decoupled mass and volume since then and I just didn't notice.

    But personally I recommend turning it on. It adds to the realism and forces you to make more considerations rather than just blindly picking up every object you find (not that you do that, necessarily, but enabling mass & volume removes the temptation to do so).

    Yes. Hold 'ctrl' while accelerating to activate cruise control. You'll see a little triangle chip with a percentage next to the speed bar, which shows the speed your vessel will try to maintain. I often use this when attacking POIs with an SV to maintain a smooth but low speed when diving towards the target.
     
    #10
    Last edited: Oct 16, 2023
  11. Scoob

    Scoob Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Sep 22, 2016
    Messages:
    1,459
    Likes Received:
    1,897
    I see a fairly even CPU load when playing, the render thread can be a bit heavier, if there's a lot on screen, but I've always been quite happy with how Empyrion utilises CPU. I hit GPU-limited situations more often. Heh, I remember when Empyrion ran ok on a Q8200 and GTX 275 with 4GB of system RAM...low settings of course, but it ran acceptably. Then there was an engine upgrade...

    @shortName - as you play more, you'll come to understand many of the quirks of the game. For me, the physics (Hover) can be irksome as it doesn't approximate real-world physics so well at times, which makes it jarring to beings who're used to living with actual physics lol.

    Some of what you're saying suggests Mass and CPU aren't turned on, or your vessels is so over-engineered (surplus thrust) that you don't notice it. While I complain about Mass and CPU (with extra mass, there's need for more CPU to counter it of course) I'd never play with it off any more. I like that there are limits to things, I just don't agree with top speed being limited due to mass. That's not practical physics. I also get frustrated when an HV does something silly, and the fact that Hover Engines don't seem to work like "repulsers" / ground effect engines at all. Really, driving an HV should be quite similar to a wheeled vehicle, when it comes to following terrain. We set a "ride height" above the terrain and there's a degree of spring, so when the ride height is reduced as the player goes up a slope, it's jarring. A heavy HV being forced down due to the thrust vector makes a degree of sense of course, however, for a light HV not to adapt to terrain is bad. I mean, you can clearly see how slow the levelling is at the best of times. Simply take an HV to a slop, press "o" to level the HV (not relative to the terrain of course) then watch how long it takes to settle level with the terrain. When it takes that long and the vessel is moving at speed, you can see why terrain collions / flying up into the air occurs so often.

    I don't know if others notice this too, but I find My HV's tend to suffer more physics gremlins when they're under attack. I.e. I'm driving along relatively flat terrain, a Minigun Drone tags me and the HV flips. Neither Thrusters nor Hover Engines destroyed - which would of course explain it - just another weird physics glitch. Perhaps linked to the engine working on other stuff - i.e. those weapon collisions.

    Anyway, back to the original topic. I can load a save and a vessel will have very responsive turrets for a few seconds, then it will rapidly degrade. I can save the game when they're in a degraded, unresponsive state, only to load it and they're working perfectly once more. Degradation occurs within a few minutes of loading a save, and gets progressively worse. The "Fifteen Seconds" in the topic title refers to a pretty badly degraded session.

    To be 100% clear, this is nothing to do with Game CPU, the number of turrets or system resources, as the same vessel works PERFECTLY for a few minutes when a save is loaded, but degrades quickly over time. This becomes a significant issue where however well-armed your vessel or base might be, it can always be caught out when the turrets simply don't fire promptly.

    My CV, should mow down troops in no time. If I only count the turrets when they start firing, they're very quick at killing ground troops. However, when they delay fifteen seconds before firing, and the same before engaging the next target, that's a problem.

    I long for the day Turrets are consistently responsive.
     
    #11
  12. shortName

    shortName Lieutenant

    Joined:
    Oct 12, 2023
    Messages:
    106
    Likes Received:
    4
    I pick up everything I don't have an abundance of. Unfortunately, there's no more Cobalt, so there's no point in picking up anything. But still, what I can use or have fun picking up, I pick up. Why shouldn't I?

    The game would be torture if I had to consider the volume restrictions because the only thing they do is making everything ridiculously complicated. I simply wouldn't play it. What would be the fun in being able to, for example, pick like 10 iron ore and then having to go back and forth between your base 35 times to get the rest of it? You'd have to waste like half of the resources you find on building bazillions of cargo containers to store stuff, but you'd get stuck quickly when the CPU limit kicks in and you can't build CPU extenders because the resources for that are unavailble. That's no fun but torture.

    Also, with volume restrictions turned on, I could still carry tons of stuff in my backback (some things are more heavy than voluminous), which is totally unrealistic. I have currently 1223 volume in my backpack which weighs 2.84t. I'm not really carrying anything at all because I'm in my base and have my inventory cleaned out except a few standard items, contemplating how to proceed since I won't be able to leave the starter system ever because the required resources are unavailble. With volume limits enabled the game would be unplayable to begin with.

    I don't know if turning off the volume restrictions affects mass considerations. I've only found that adding more thrust counters slow speeds and that the mass of the cargo is being ignored. Docking a vehicle to another one affects the vehicle the docked vehicle is docked to, and the mass of the cargo carried by the docking vehicle doesn't seem to count either. Perhaps the developers figured that the mass of the cargo can be neglected because the volume limits are so low that you can't have much mass anyway --- and if it did count, you'd need more thrusters which then interferes with the CPU limit; and after all that, everything would have to be rebalanced or otherwise we could build only vehicles that are pathetic and that wouldn't be fun, either.

    That's only kinda working, the chip behaves rather randomly. With the xbox controller, I can go the speed I want by moving the joystick more or less its way of travel. So I use the controller when flying, sometimes when foraging and otherwise trackball and keyboard.

    I can't aim with an xbox controller. It simply doesn't work for aiming. It either goes way too far, or not far enough. It has the same problem when connected to an xbox.
     
    #12
  13. Slam Jones

    Slam Jones Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Oct 16, 2015
    Messages:
    651
    Likes Received:
    1,062

    Since they've introduced the option, I've always played with Mass/Volume enabled. It's not unplayable, but can be difficult if you're not already experienced at the game.

    The way I deal with mass/volume in early game has a few steps. I've got about 2,200 hours in the game so a lot of this seems like common sense to me, but I can understand that a lot of it is not explicitly explained, and must be learned through trial and error.

    The Portable Constructors that you can place on the terrain have no mass limit. You can store as much as you want in those so long as there are slots available. For very early game, I set up a little 'camp' with a few of these next to a survival tent, then mark it on the map so I can get back to it easily.

    Run out of slots in a portable constructor? Make a few more. I avoid making a base too early since that attracts Zirax attacks on most planets, which is something I might not be prepared for yet.

    I usually then build a HV 'sled' as soon as I can. Mostly, it's a mobile storage box so I can get around to sites quicker, use hand tools to collect stuff, and store it on the HV. Best of all is if I can build one with a turret which can defend me (from predators and drones) when I'm gathering stuff.

    Then, when able to, I would attach drills or harvesters to it and use that to gather stuff quicker, always returning to camp to offload anything I've found into the portable constructors.

    I tend to keep my backpack inventory empty besides some clips of ammo, biofuel for chainsaw and mechanical drill (do they still have those in vanilla?) and maybe a few med items. I'd keep everything else in the Portable Constructors or on the HV.

    This last playthrough, I didn't even build a base. Just mined stuff with the HV, and dumped it all into the Factory to build an SV blueprint, then use that to salvage and/or mine the stuff I needed for my CV. This tactic only works if you have blueprints you plan to build. For me, creative mode is 70% of the game so that part is not an issue.

    You may need to peruse the workshop, or just build and blueprint a starter HV of your own in Creative mode. I know some people like to free-hand build in survival, and while that is an option, it's not an option that I've considered timeworthy. You are, of course, free to experiment and come up with your own tactics there.

    As an important side note: don't underestimate the power of salvage. If you find salvagable POIs (crashed CVs and whatnot), then look carefully for things like thrusters, as they have a lot of good salvage in them, including cobalt. I've found in some cases (but not always), salvaging gets you materials much quicker than mining does.




    Two ways to use it:

    From a stop, hold ctrl, then start accelerating. The chip will keep pace with your current speed. Just let go of ctrl and the direction key when you reach the intended speed.

    The other way is to be already accelerating, then press ctrl. I forget which you key release first to keep the speed, but the chip will be pinned to whatever speed you were already going.
     
    #13
  14. shortName

    shortName Lieutenant

    Joined:
    Oct 12, 2023
    Messages:
    106
    Likes Received:
    4
    It doesn't even use 4 cores. It's probably a software issue in that some software isn't using the graphics card like it should. Either the game doesn't scale to more than 4 cores, or it figures it doesn't need more because the FPS rate is low. Maybe the NVIDIA drivers aren't helping, too. They currently have a bug that prevents Starfield from running altogether.

    @shortName - as you play more, you'll come to understand many of the quirks of the game. For me, the physics (Hover) can be irksome as it doesn't approximate real-world physics so well at times, which makes it jarring to beings who're used to living with actual physics lol.
    [/quote]

    Hm, I'm fine with the hover engines, other than that they need more ground clearance. Only 3m is not enough by far.

    CPU limits are enabled, volume limits are off. There doesn't seem to be a setting for mass consideration.

    The mass of vehicles is considered, and other than slow turning, the mass doesn't seem to matter for HVs. SVs go slower or faster depending on thrust. Cargo doesn't matter.

    As to overengineered, I've build a SV that can haul my HVs to other planets after I found out that the description of the docking pad is wrong. The HV weighs like 20t and I added quite a few thrusters after I finally could build a CPU extender for a SV, and I had looted like 26 thrusters from a derelict ship. The SV weighs also about 20t and, according to statistics, it can now lift 116t. But the weight distribution does matter. I built something like a drawing bar attached to the SV so I could dock my HV to it, and the whole thing became very long, like a camper being towed behind a car with the camper almost as long as the car. Despite able of lifting so more than enough weight, the weight distribution made it so that it couldn't lift off, and I had to provisionally add a pair of thrusters to the end of the drawing bar to get it moving. The whole combination became wegded in between a wall of my base and another HV on the parking lot while I had been trying to make the HV dock, moving it into the right position. So I revised the design and turned the HV by 90 degrees to make the combination shorter, and with that it worked fine.

    So the lifter is overengineered. I did add more forward thrust when I found it maxed out at 25km/s. It now goes 75. I haven't tried it without the HV docked to it yet.

    Today I took a trip to the trash moon and had to leave soon rather soon because some drones were shooting my HV to bits. The turret placement wasn't good, and I was quite surprised that like a single hit makes the little blocks disappear. And that was only some drones. I need to come up with something that's more resilient and can defend itself better. But I don't have the resources to build more than one CPU extender.

    More mass needs more CPU? I didn't know that. Since I have only one CPU extender for the SV, the CPU of the HV is very inefficent. Turrets need a lot of CPU. Yet even at like 48% it still works fine.

    Without limits, there would be no game. I don't mind the top speed being limited. The effect is basically the same because when you take some time to get up to speed, you have to slow down just as much. When forward and reverse thrust are both the same, you can accelerate only half way and then you have to slow down again. That can take just as long, or longer, as it takes to accelerate and decelerate quickly and being underway for longer at lower speeds.

    If you have ever played Elite Frontier back then, you'll probably remember that combat was basically impossible because the high speeds prevented ships from coming close enough to each other except for a single shot in a month or a year perhaps. It was too realistic.

    It would sure be nice if it was a setting so you can decide which model you prefer ...

    That's assuming that hover engines somehow depend on, or adjust to, the height of the terrain. How do they work? They work in space where there is no terrain, and in a vacuum. There is no reason to expect that they would adjust to terrain like a vehicle on wheels would. Adjusting is undesirable because it would make the ride very bumpy, and sitting on a steep slope in a vehicle can be uncomfortable. If not, you still likely spill your coffe.

    The only problem is when the terrain isn't level. The vehicle will run into a slope or remain in the air eventually. Making the vehicle jerk up and down through more timely adjustments will not only spill your coffe, it'll get you sick, too. There's reasons why roads are kinda flat.

    Without roads, give it more ground clearance for more wiggle room (of the ground), make it adjust fast enough but only when necessary, and always keep it level because that's more comfortable. That's what 'hovering' means.

    Hm, that's bad. I've been stationary when attacked and get flipped when driving under attack.

    That's cool because you have it reproducible. Perhaps you can send a copy of the savegame with a bug report so the devs can figure why this happens and fix it.

    I haven't had this problem yet. Perhaps my vehicles are too simple. I could try it out with one of your savegames if you'd send me one. That would serve to verify if it's something on your end or not.

    Well, in my game, there are insufficient resources to build a CV, so I don't have problems like that Z~P

    But if you have one, that really sucks. Are all kinds of turrets affect or only a particular kind?
     
    #14
  15. shortName

    shortName Lieutenant

    Joined:
    Oct 12, 2023
    Messages:
    106
    Likes Received:
    4
    It's not difficult. It serves no purpose and only means a lot of grinding. For example, I think I got like 16000 steel plates and some other stuff from salvaging the com tower on Akua. My backpack has a volume limit of only 600. A steel plate has a volume of 1.25. My base is about half the planet away from the tower, and a round trip takes a while.

    Assuming that you have necessary supplies in your backback, about 200 volume is always occupied. Transporting 16000 steel plates would have taken 50 round trips on my hoverbike. You can't explain to me how that's supposed to be fun. And that is only one example. You can't even build a base because you can't carry enough concrete blocks for that. It totally gets in the way.

    No. I don't want to have hundreds of contructors placed all over the moons with hundreds of landmarks and a database to keep track of them so that when I need a resource, I can query my database to find out at which landmarks I had to leave them behind and then, however long that takes, make as many round trips are required, updating the database after each trip. By the time it would take to get together the resources to build something, I'd have long forgotten what I wanted to build.

    There are no hostile forces on Akua. Tal, Pol and Aby are all friendly. Those are the only ones I've found so far. On Akua, there are only Tal.

    That's good because I put a couple turrets at my base, but it probably won't last long in an attack. There's a CPU limit that I can not overcome due to missing resources, and turrets need a lot of CPU. And I have no idea how to build anything that doesn't come apart right away when hit by a few shots.

    I took way too long before building a vehicle. The tutorial failed at that point.

    Cargo boxes on vehicles are uselss when the volume limit is enabled because they hold only 125 volume. Put more containers and the vehicle gets heavier and requires more CPU. That makes vehicles for transporting cargo a bad idea because there is a big discrepancy between the resources required to build one and the tiny amount of cargo they can transport.

    So why would I build a vehicle?

    Seriously? It takes only a few seconds before the volume limit is reached.

    Yes, but the drill requires charges, and that requires Promethium ore, which is quite limited, and you might never find it because it's hidden under water. Even if you can find some, you need resources to build a drill, and those were also very difficult to find. And the drill will wear out. There is almost no Cobalt in the starter system, and it's required for the drill. I have 40 Cobalt ore left and that's it. There is no more.

    Why do you carry a chainsaw? It doesn't work any faster and doesn't yield any more wood than the survival tool. But it occupies two inventory slots, one for the saw and another one for the fuel, and they eat volume when you have the limit enabled. Plus you have to keep cutting trees to fuel the saw, and it runs out quickly.

    You mean blueprints you made in creative mode? I thought of making some, but there's no point when I make a blueprint I end up not being able to build because don't have the resources. Since I don't have the resources, I keep recycling the vehicles I built to make better ones.

    So you've explained how you deal with the volume limit. You haven't explained what the advantages of enabling it are.

    I like doing that. I've never been in creative mode yet --- is building somehow faster in that mode?

    That's assuming that you do get the resources from the thrusters. I got mostly steel plates from salvage and tiny amounts of other stuff. I salved 36 or so thrusters from a derelict shipt and used some for my SV. Look at the blueprints, a CV starts at 800 Cobalt ingots plus other materials I don't have at all. 800 Cobalt ingots would require 400 Cobalt ore. I have found about 130 and have 40 left. There is no more Cobalt, I've been to all the moons. None of them have meteors that would bring Cobalt.

    The thrusters are M and don't seem to contain Cobalt. The game must be rigged so there's no Cobalt.

    I'm considering to quit playing since there's no further progress possible. The other option is to build a warp drive for my SV and try to get to Omicron. But that would cost resources, and what would be the point. I still won't be able to leave the starter system, and without that, I can't find the missing resources.

    It kinda works for going full speed, but it takes a couple tries before the chip goes to max. When it's at max, the SV may still go slower. Sometimes it behaves randomly, like the chip getting stuck and/or the speed gets stuck somewhere where I don't want it. The xbox controller works fine and when I go longer distances, I fiddle with the chip to let it go at full speed which takes a couple tries to set. Full speed is the only thing I need it for.
     
    #15
    Last edited: Oct 19, 2023
  16. Slam Jones

    Slam Jones Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Oct 16, 2015
    Messages:
    651
    Likes Received:
    1,062
    Yes.

    You don't need to worry about surviving first of all. No food or oxygen requirements.

    You get to use 'godmode' (g) to move around quicker and clip into/through blocks. Makes matching interior/exterior stuff much easier since you just just move through it rather than go around. And you can move faster this way that you can in a ship.

    You get access to the 'item menu' (h) where you can spawn any resources/blocks/devices that you may want or need.

    The ability to fill in lines or rectangles of blocks has a higher limit. Combined with symmetry, you can build large things very very quickly.

    You can remove blocks with right-click instead of using a multi-tool. Sounds small but its a huge time saver.

    Will answer the rest of this a little later when I have more time :NewThumbsUp:
     
    #16
  17. shortName

    shortName Lieutenant

    Joined:
    Oct 12, 2023
    Messages:
    106
    Likes Received:
    4
    That sounds good. I'm not worried about survival, that problem is already solved. I have plenty food growing around my base I can pick up and a couple plant pods in my base. The base is solar powered and noone intends to attack me. I have all medical stations and I could live out the rest of my days like that.

    Building faster would be good. But how do I know if I have the resources to build what I make a blueprint for? There's no point in blueprinting something that I can't build anyway.
     
    #17
  18. Slam Jones

    Slam Jones Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Oct 16, 2015
    Messages:
    651
    Likes Received:
    1,062
    One important lesson is that you don't need to take everything you find. Steel Plates are like the easiest thing to find in the game, thus you don't really need to have that many so early on. I can't imagine even getting into this situation in the first place: I'd choose to either build closer to a group of POIs, or only salvage nearby POIs.

    I would never consider transporting 16,000 steel plates via hoverbike to be a viable strategy, especially if I don't even need them yet. I'd either trash them and keep the good stuff, or dump it all into a blueprint in the factory.

    This is also why you want an HV early on: to carry more stuff than you can in your backpack.



    Why would you place them all over the moons?? I suggested having a few (as in like 6 or less) all placed together next to a survival tent as a makeshift camp before you build a base. Maybe I didn't make that clear enough. You won't need hundreds, and you certainly shouldn't be just slapping them down every chance you get. Make a few, put them in a central location, and make trips back and forth.




    This is one of many reasons why I use blueprints: you can dump your resources into the Factory and not have to carry them around anymore. Got a ton of steel plates? Dump em into the factory and use them later.

    This may not work if they ever implement a physicalized factory, but since you're not using volume limits anyway, you might as well put stuff in the factory. Only note is: once you put something in the factory, it stays there.

    You can't withdraw anything from the factory (besides completed blueprints, of course), but you can deposit as much as you want. Putting in completed components (motors, blocks, advanced electronics, that sort of stuff) will even cut down the build time. Currently in my online game, I've got something like 19 hours of build time removed from my next blueprint due to this tactic. I can spawn my next ship instantly once I pull the trigger on production.




    Check out the Container Controllers and Container Extenders. You place down a Container Controller, which acts as a storage box. Then you can place down extenders adjacent to it to make the box bigger. You can have extremely big boxes this way. For CVs in RE you can have up to 640,000 L of storage in a single container. SVs and HVs I think max out at 64,000 L, but that should still be a massive improvement over 125 L.

    I don't think it should be too different, but in RE at least container controllers and extenders are very easy and quick to build with low resource requirements. I use them almost exclusively. Never would I consider a regular cargo box for any sort of serious cargo hauling.



    Yes, seriously. There's two ways around that volume limit problem: either stop harvesting and transfer the stuff to a bigger box, or (far better option) use the Harvest Controller with several Container Extenders adjacent to it to make a bigger harvest box.



    In that case you won't need base turrets, unless you piss off the Talon and they start attacking your base. I guess that means you can build a base right away if you really want one.



    The chainsaw must be terrible in vanilla then. In RE it is much faster than the survival tool. (Plus in RE you can choose Engineer class which makes it ever faster)



    They make the experience more lifelike and fun for me. You don't have to enable it if you don't want to. But for a subset of the playerbase, a touch of realism, however small, is appreciated.

    If I could carry everything I ever found in my backpack, I think that would be a super lame, boring, and unimmersive experience. But hey, to each their own! That's why we have the options to choose what restrictions we play with :)



    I mean, this game is not for everyone. I like to learn and experiment as I play and figure out the answers myself, but I understand others do not want to do that.

    The devs absolutely set up the starting systems with enough resources so you can progress through the various vehicles you will need, it's just a matter of finding it all. It's definitely out there.

    This game just has a very steep learning curve. Lots to learn really quick. But as a sandbox, you can take your time and learn lessons at your own pace.



    I tend to build a lot of ships that I never actually use. I think 70%+ of my blueprints never get used in a survival game. But I enjoy making them, and to me that's (mostly) all that matters.

    Just because I can't use a ship right now doesn't mean I won't design it. I tend to design for what I aim to do in the near future, not what I can do today.

    You can use creative to refine your builds so you can design something that is useful, but won't take all your resources. That's what I do at least.



    Good gravy is that a lot of text!!
     
    #18
  19. Scoob

    Scoob Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Sep 22, 2016
    Messages:
    1,459
    Likes Received:
    1,897
    Hmm, for me, I see the game using far more than four cores, though the load is pretty low. I just fired up the game quickly to confirm this and, standing on my CV which is landed on a planet, I can see game-related CPU load on ten out of my 16 threads. Load is VERY low,under 5% total CPU utilisation, with only tiny loads on each of those threads. The load is so light that most of my Cores are running at under 300mhz, with one at a whopping 8-900 mhz. This is on a 5800X3d.

    As I wander around my CV, I can see the render thread (the one that was making the core hit 8-900mhz) jump a little based on the complexity of the scene. However, overall, CPU load is pretty even and very light. That Render thread is the "big" one, and we're looks at a peak of 25% load at under 1Ghz, so really really light.

    The landscape around my CV is fairly empty - it's a Barren Planet with foggy weather, lots of rocks and some grass. There are also a number of POI's visible. My CV is pretty large, and has two vessels (HV and SV) docked to it internally. I've limited the fps to 60, and GPU load (3070) hits 70 occasionally at my 1440p resolution with mostly higher settings.

    Gameplay is really smooth. I'm sure I could find a much more demanding area to test - say a Pol site with closely-clustered POI's, but not near anywhere like that currently.

    So, game is certainly spreading those threads around nicely, but the load is very low. Even the render thread is really light.

    Edit: Oh, there is a weird FPS glitch I've noticed... If the weather is FOGGY and I have the interior lights on in my CV (there are lots of reflective surfaces) my fps does tank a bit. Seems lighting (from vessels and POI's, not the star) interacts badly with the fog effects at my settings.

    Edit 2: I played a little more, engaging a POI in an SV, there were also a lot of ground troops in the area. Over CPU load went to a little over 15%, but thread load remained pretty even. Flew my CV over to the now neutered (no turrets) POI and landed, Sentries enaged ground troops (delays, as per my first post) but eventually cleared the area. Now landed near enemy POI, there's a thick radioactive fog "Weather: Mostly Cloudy". CPU-load characteristics remain the same. They go up fairly evenly when things get busier, and go down when things are quiet. Still clearly see game workload on 10 threads, with some workload on other threads too, but it's really tiny (like under 5% of a Core that's running at 300mhz)

    Edit 3: Turning on my CV's interior lights once it's dark, sees the render thread core hit as high as 2ghz, periodically, thread load under 40% - so, still really light, but a spike over the others threads by a significant margin.
     
    #19
    Last edited: Oct 19, 2023
  20. shortName

    shortName Lieutenant

    Joined:
    Oct 12, 2023
    Messages:
    106
    Likes Received:
    4
    I built my base at a nice place and didn't wait ages before building it. Why wait? Building bases is fun, and what if someone would attack me. The tutorial shows you that you need a base soon.

    I'm not taking everything I find. Most buildings can't be salvaged, and when I want to salvage one, I take it all unless there's something in them I don't want. There's no point in wasting ammo and time to crumble concrete blocks. And I don't want to have to come back later. Maybe I never come back.

    Steel plates are good stuff, especially when iron ore is hard to come by. At first, I didn't plan on gathering so many steel plates. I simply picked up the parts of the building that had fallen down while I salvaged it; and when I was done, I was surprised that I got so many steel plates and was glad to have them because that solved the shortage of iron.

    I didn't have one for a very long time because the tutorial failed when it came to building a vehicle. When you don't have one, you find that it's pretty cold on the snow moon when you're trying to get Cobalt. And if you find some, you of course don't want to make 100 trips or however many it takes to carry them like one by one back to your base because the volume limit is in the way.

    You need resources, and since you can't transport whatever you find because the volume limit prevents you from doing anything, you have to set up as many constructors as you need to store them where ever you find resources so you can make lots of trips to carry them one by one to your base. And what if someone comes along and destroys them?

    That my work if you find all the resources in one place. In that case, it would make sense to build a base there instead of using contructors as a replacement for one :)

    I learned only much later how to make a blueprint of something I built, and I've never been in creative mode. (I plan on it trying it today.) And I rather build something myself rather than using someones blueprint because that way, I'll learn better how to do it, and it will be built the way I want it to be.

    Using the factory like that is kinda cheating, isn't it? You have no volume limit to deal with, you don't need to transport anything at all, you don't need to build a base because you don't need any machinery to build something, and you can just spawn whatever you have a blueprint of at any place you want more or less instantly. Why bother to go into survival mode at all when you do it this way?

    Why have volume limits when you put everything into the magic factory anyway?

    Does it matter? At first I thought it sucks that you can't cancel a build order and take your resources back, but when I finally did it, I found that giving another build order just replaces the previous one, and the resources you put in are all available for the new order. And the ones that were not used remain in the factory for the next order.

    Then why have volume limits? Why have a survival game mode? Why require resources and build time? Just spawn everything instantly.

    Yes, I had one in my base at first until I turned on the CPU limit. There's no point in container controllers with volume limits disabled.

    And they suck because they constanly burden the CPU and, very importantly, you have everything in the same container. Who would want that?

    At least the controllers need to enable you to create categories so you can put what you store in them into categories. I don't want to search through hundreds of items to find what I'm looking for. It's way better to build another simple container every time you need a new category.

    Why would I stuff everthing I have all into one container? It would be a total mess. Why do you have containers? Just put everything into the factory?

    That's exactly what I don't want. And don't want to build hundreds of containers.

    What if someone unfriendly finds my base?

    All the wood harvesting tools are the same, they're extremely slow. That includes the ones on HVs, they aren't any faster than the survival tool. Only when you put multiple on an HV that work on the same tree(s) at the same time, it's faster.

    I keep wondering why they don't improve things like that in the game ...

    Right. So stop using the factory, it makes for a lame, boring and unimmersive experience :)

    Learning and experimenting still require that the information to play the game will be found within the game. Otherwise I can't play the game because I'm too busy reading and writing forum posts and watching videos. Empyrion is pretty good in that regard.

    And experimentation gets you only so far. There will always be things you haven't thought of but others have, and some things I don't need to and usually won't try because the information tells you that's there's no point in trying.

    For example, the description of the docking pads tells you they allow you to dock your vehicle to bases and CVs. So I wouldn't build and use docking pads for my HVs because they don't need to dock to my base, and I don't have a CV I could dock anything to. Why would I ever try it when I already know they're currently useless to me. But by chance I found out that you can dock to SVs as well. So the information in the game must also correct and not misleading.

    No worries, I'm taking my time. Yesterday I decided that I've nothing to loose by putting a warp drive on my SV and took a trip to Omicron and the other moons. I got a lot of Carbon and found a moon that has the other minerals I don't have yet, but there's unfriendly species there shooting at me, and my SV was hit by some kind of missle. That missle did massive damage, and if I hadn't encased the whole SV in a layer of hardened steel blocks after I learned earlier that even a drone will shoot a vehicle to bits with ease when it's made of unreinforced blocks, I wouldn't have survived.

    How do you build a SV or a CV that can defend itself when a single missle takes out 4 rows of steel blocks in a 3m radius around the point of impact? The only way would be to use blocks that are more resilient, which I can't make, or more layers of blocks, which would make it too heavy. The minigun turrets were totally useless because the missiles came from far away. There's no sneaking in undected, either.

    I plan on doing that today. I need to come up with a better design for mv SV, and I can probably finally build a CV. It may be easier to go to another system to get the missing minerals than it is to try to evade or to fight an enemy which is way too powerful.

    I've watched some videos and was told that it's better to place multiple RCS units, like as many as you can, on any vehicle, because that makes it steer bettter. Is that true?

    I thought you place one as required. There's no indication in their description that their effect would stack up, and I don't have any reason to assume so since the steering power comes from the thrusters. You don't place multiple CPU cores on something, either.

    If they do stack up, how many do you need? One per thruster or 10 or 100?[/quote]
     
    #20
    Last edited: Oct 20, 2023

Share This Page