How does having fewer planets make exploration repeatable boring dullness? Surely going through 200 planets that have the same stuff on them is much more repetitive. I guess if you're just exploring planets and not POIs it could be boring. @ravien_ff I agree that you can make some cool looking playfields with some skill. That does make visiting the planet itself and exploring interesting. The problem I'm talking about is POI exploration. Once you've gone through a POI enough times to know exactly where everything is it's no longer fun to visit that POI. There's also no loot unique to POIs. Containers no matter where you go have the same loot. It's not like Zirax Fortress has any special loot that you can't just find in some other place. The same could be said for unique enemies.
If you ever play scenarios with few planets, you will get bored in around a week or so. Specially when respawn is active. If you try to play 200 planets you have to explore every single one of them to know whether or not they are all boring.
That's where adding in POI variants comes in. Create, for example, 6 different copies of a POI but change up where the core is located, the enemies, defenses, secret rooms, etc. You can also add custom loot to POIs but it requires using an admin core and setting all the necessary blocks to be able to be destroyed which takes some work to do. I've advocated for regular alien cores to allow custom loot before and I hope they introduce it since it would allow POI makers much greater freedom in the kind of loot found in their POIs. For example, my scenario has 3 variants of a smuggler's hideout that is built into an asteroid. One is abandoned and contains basic loot. One is guarded by Zirax and a couple of drones. One is infested by alien bugs. The basic POI is the same but each one has slightly different interiors (the infested one looks... Infested). The positions of the hidden alien containers is also different. The threats players face is different. Creating the base POI was the long part, creating variants is easy and is an easy way to spice up exploration because it keeps the player off-guard and interested in raiding a POI even if it's the same type they've already done before. Add in custom loot that is different for each variant and you reward players for exploring.
Nothing wrong with 200 planets if EVERY planet has DIFFERENT POIs on it and a different landscape, and as I built that scenario to have BOTH of those features all it really means is that you always have somewhere new to explore if you get bored. Your free to not explore all of them but then you wont see all of the great POIs people have made on Workshop that I converted into POIs but again its your choice, but if the scenario has just 20 planets then exploration really is limited, what I see all the time now is 100 to 300 planet maps where all the planets do look similar, I havent found a scenario to date that was as diverse as the Lost City was, itsa real shame I cant just convert those planets but in EA games we must expect these sorts of hickups. I still have ALL the planets and all the POI assets saved for a version where I can revive the scenario and refresh it but I do believe thats a very very long time from now. I started on a new scenario, The Outer Rim, and the stupid Hard drive died and I lost the entire thing as it had not been backed up yet, and I usually have a good back up system but my complacency cost me there. More is always better if they are unique. More is always worse if its all the same. Playing a space game, not expecting it to be huge, and thousands of planets when game is finished, I think is unrealistic, Empyrion was never intended to be a small space game like SE, Empyrion aims to be a large player base game in space, kinda like a mini version of EVE so to speak so Empyrion is, was, will always be slated to have alot of planets. So unfortunately this scenario doesnt work on 8.0 or versions after it. To convert 200 planets manually will take about 6 to 12 months. I havent started that yet. The reason for that is, each planet to get truely unique I have to edit teh yaml, start game load map spawn on map, fly around map check biome shut down, edit yaml rinse and repeat usually around 120 times to complete just ONE planet. The scenario took 9 months to build the first time, thats the true cost of having so much unique content in one game. We are talking a min of a 6 hour day of working on the game alone, everyday for 12 months basically. To match that on version 8, now planets are even more complex, I estimate around 12 months to convert everything, any volunteers ?
Its not all lost, all the POIs Im slowly updating, the planets I still have and will slowly convert over 12 months I think, by then alot more stuff will be set in stone and I will look at bringing all these assets back all updated and funky like into a new scenario, its a little disappointing but the game is young and the devs are putting big efforts into trying to get a map generator that can create diverse landscapes they have had some dramas but there getting there, a year from now I think scenario's we make will start to become capable of lasting the tyranny of time. I was one of the people that has pushed for a very long time [2015] for teh devs to really put a big effort into how the games maps generate and I would feel guilty if I was to critical of there efforts now, I think they have put alot of energy into it and it hasnt played out perfectly but there tackling the problems with it pretty nicely and were starting to see ways we can manipulate the SSG to better effect as users also, so I really appreciate the effort the devs have put into the SSG as I was especially loud on there forums about all of this for a very long time now. Long run, I think they did themselves a HUGE favour creating there own SSG which makes modding the game a kind of game in itself ! I cant say for others but Ive spent literally thousands of hours building planets and POIs, its kinda like having a game to build another game making the whole process enjoyable.
The part of this game that excites me the most is the possibility to add my own planets, pois, traders, etc. I'm excited to see what new functionality and tools they come out with!
One major parameter that needs to be in the minds of everyone, developers moders and players is balance. Balance on everything, specially time consumed to create and play. Because if balance is not kept there is a danger the game to become more like a second job, something that obviously it is not fun. In theory, it is nice to have tons of planets different from each other to explore, but one that loses his/her self into this exploration might find it tedious and not fun in the long run. Randomization and diversity are mandatory as long as they does not break things up. In no way.
Well what I try to do is make the scenario drive a reason for doing something right down your throat. Starter planets are slow to get ore from, and lack the right ores so your leaving there asap anyway, its currently very hard to embed a story into a scenario because were missing tools like a placeable PDA players can pick up to read messages, think subnautica PDAs, we need that, and we need the ability to run scripted sounds when we like. Those two things will give us the ability to create a scenario that immerses you into the game just like Subn does. Those two tools give us the ability to keep the game time relevant and encourage you to go do on the fly missions with a real goal that slots into the storyline perfectly. We really need them asap. In the Lost City your searching for Atlantis, you discover the Zirax have beat you to it, shot down one of your spy ships, theres missions to go find and recover data from the ship you cant find the secret Icarus base without doing this, well you can find it by random chance but as theres 200 odd planets them odds are more realistic than any default game with 20 planets. Randomization is only ever going to be able to go so far, and in my opinion no SSG or random seed scrambler will ever be able to produce as diverse a planet as a human can manually. They make lots of planets easy but not so diverse. Manually I made 200 odd that are so vastly different from the current SSG plants they cant even be converted in the SSG, it just randomizes everything back to bland average features. Nothing beats a hand made unique planet when its done right. We also need the ability to create SPLAT maps so we can add unique features and shapes to the games maps for our custom map building. If I could make a splat map, maybe really cool cliffs are possible, things like that.
I wish we could make custom stamps. You can use POIs made out of voxels to do some terrain stuff (mostly spires or caves) but those don't really give you the freedom you need because they are limited in size and a pain to make and they can't have overhangs without texture bugs. I'm hoping we get the things you're asking for and more! Custom scenarios have a lot of potential but we need more tools.
Hi. Is this a Multiplayer only scenario? It is located in multiplayer section but description sunds more like single player scenario.
There are 2 versions a dedicated SP version and a dedicated MP version BUT the bad news is its not updated to 8.0 version so its NOT playable anymore. I will likely update this scenario when a few key features are added to Empyrion, like the ability to control sound, until these other features are added its not worth updating, it took 9 months to create and will take months and months to update every single planet to the new map system. So Im basically waiting for all the features I need to do a complete scenario, but being its a very large scenario with a huge amount of planets and custom POIs its very time consuming, so its a way off yet sorry.
