Feedback Required v1.12 - New Blocks / Devices

I like the new barriers and energy walkways. Also seem to work fine as far as I can tell so far. Could we maybe (Pleeeease?) have those colorable?

 

So, this is what the engine room of a frigate of mine used to look like. This is a pic I used on the Workshop page. This greebling is fairly representative of a lot of my work.


Here's what it looks like in 1.12.

Makes it kind of impassable. Doesn't do many favors for the lighting, either. It's a giant cube.

I did what I could.

I tried working with it, offsetting it, plugging pipping into it. Ultimately, I had to just dig out a spot in the wall (well, ceiling in this case) and tuck it away there, like a furnace in a utility closet.

I can't figure out a way to make it look nice. This isn't a fun or pretty block to use. It's a brick. An eyesore. I expect it's usually going to be shoved into an inaccessible armor box in an out-of-the-way place, like fuel and oxygen tanks often are, or shoved into a hollow in the rear of the armored engine room. I'm certainly going to have to spend a great deal of time extracting shield gen bricks from all my CV designs machinery spaces and implementing one of these solutions just to make sure you can still get into the zogging room.

If anybody's had better luck working with this device's new aesthetics, I'd love to see it.

 

I think it looks awesome, you can do a fair bit with it with the right blocks

Edit: To clarify what I mean, the pic below shows the type of connections you can use that fit precisely to the model itself. Just done very quickly so it's not extensive of course. Sure there might be some builds that are effected by it but by and large this is a far superior model that can be made to fit a much more varied set of shapes that we ever could with the old model.

Personally I feel like I can finally do something with the shield whereas previously it was highly restricted and usually got hidden away in my builds.

 

My Engine Room before:




Now:



It's just a brick. Not more. Its beautiful heartless brick.
Its will be perfect to fit in the wall or roof and can be added some pipes for design. Its can be perfect for new design of ships or bases in the game.
But old style shield was one of the best looking block in the game.

Imerat Class destroyer before:



And now:




Dear Eleon, please accept - you cant just swap models for some blocks in the game. It's immediately will break aesthetics of design existing structure in the game. Many ships in the game was designed for old style shield. And sometimes is very hard (or impossible) redesign existing ships for new brick.
Please do not replace shield, generators and jump drive.
Please add new blocks, you can do it using "Childblocks" method which can allow to use different styles blocks in popup menu, same I did now.
Or if you not goin to go what way I wanna ask you to keep old models in the resources of game.

 

The old model was one of the few large pieces of machinery you could walk around safely. It was a part of the ship's inner workings you could touch and feel, so to speak. Where the pentaxid tank, generators, and warp drive had to be hidden behind greebles for safety, the shield generator could loom over you. It had tactility.

The new model is just brick. And it's always a brick. You can't reorient it to create a different effect. You can add greebles to it, but it doesn't work with the greebles to look like something new and interesting. It's just wearing them like a top hat on a junction box. It's no different from sticking greebles onto a 6 meter cube. Worse, in fact, since you can at least paint different textures on a cube.

Now, I'm not going claim the old model wasn't overwrought, because it certainly was. The spinning bit was nice, but having collision that rotated and pushed you around? That's silly. But even so, we've been building floor plans, lighting schemes, and armored citadels around it for almost six years now. This is going to be tantamount to a save break for a lot of designs. A lot of architecture is going to be headed for the trash bin. So if changing the model for something less opulent is necessary, it could at least be one that fits in the same living space.

 

I honestly thought the old model was one of the worst, couldn't do anything with it to make it truly work with one of my builds

 

I found a lot more success when I started doing the inverse and making my builds work with the devices instead. It was easy to imagine the shield generator as oscillating the entire vessel in weird tangent dimensions that caused it to interact with physical forces less directly. So I tipped it over parallel to the ship like an interspacial reaction mass. Added a cone greeble to be a sort of magnetic spindle, run conduits between it and the pentaxid tank, etc.

I want players to forget for a moment what blocks are functional devices and which are decorative carbon hull blocks, basically. I don't want the greebles to just look like cool sculpture in a room. So I'll stick the detector in a sensor array or a signal processing lab, build little workshops around constructors and storage containers, run power conduits between the generators, core, and warp drive, and work CPU extenders into a central computer core. I try to make them look like they belong where they are doing what they do.

But the brick tells me nothing. What does it do? How does it function? What are its needs? Its responses are typical for a brick.

 

The old model was a part on its own. You couldn't do much in terms of integrating it into blockwork, but it looked kinda neat on itself and it had a nice spinning animation. It also gave Engineering rooms a nice detailed part to add some tech flavor.

The new model doesn't have that. It might be easier to integrate into blockwork if you are doing something really big around it. But when placed on its own as a centerpiece, as we often used the old shield model, its just worse.

I am not a fan of the new model. For such a big model, I think the old one worked better for building.

 

Now that you mentioned it, are there any plans to increase the sum IDs ? Or should we wait for Empyrion 2 for that?

 

Made one more attempt at using the new shield model.

Try as I might, all I can do is hide it. The old model was like an old console radio you'd be proud to display in your living room, decorated atop with a potted plant or family photos. The new one is more like the sort of ugly CRT televisions people would stick in ornate tv cabinets for the same effect. With the former, you're trying to enhance its beauty. With the latter, you're trying to cover up its unsightliness.

On a different note, the CV jet thrusters are pretty cool. Nice to have more use for aluminum and platinum. The way they're loosely correlated to standard thrusters instead of direct upgrades will be interesting to manage I think.

 

If you're running out of ID numbars through an early oversight then could you convert the current table to Hexadecimal?
10000 decimal would be 2710 in hex and 1000o in hex would cover 65536 in decimal.

If you onyl have 4 figure spaces this would give 9999 decimal (270F in hex) where 9999 hex would allow you to have 39321 ID's

As for Empyrion 2, hell yeah, I'd throw money at you for that! (I just checked steam, 4600 plus hours on this Empyrion)

 

Ok!

 

Doesn't it uses block names instead of IDs in game saves and blueprints?