A9 - Discussion : Volume and weight limitations

As i mentioned already, i would love to see volume as a optical/graphical way to display cargo space using a slot based system with different slot sizes and stack sizes. And the weight system as a calculation/list type of inventory (no slots, just a list). Both systems would have their fanbase and benefits for the desired playstyle, and being different enough to not be "the same system in another look".
But that is of course just my opinion.

Edit: oh it looks like i am the first to reply.

 

Overall impression:

I like it very much, but HV/SV with large volume consume too much power.
When HV with 16000 volume units consumes 128 power units passively, a CV consumes only 2 power for same volume, it does not make sense.

Also it is easy to continue mining once container overfills, indicator (to warn player) or sensor (to turn off drill) is needed.
Perhaps vessel drill can show free space instead of ammo?

P.S. I strongly suspect that owning large CV-bases will become complicated, since landing CV is expensive, yet we will need to move large amount of cargo from planet to CV, and SV's are not up to the task due to power consumption.

Update:
- HVs need access to bigger thrusters (jets), because 80KN M-trusters and 90KN jets do not provide much thrust and make vessels with high cargo capacity look like pincushions for thrusters.
- Some HV prefabs might need a check, their balance might be off when loaded with cargo.
- Due to longer 'ship-progression chain' we now require ability to automatically deconstruct vessels much more urgently
- Good Combat CV can no longer be a good Carrier+Cargo+Base CV, so ability to dock CV to CV also is needed much more now.
- Workshop support by itself needs a bit more love - it takes a while to find lighter vessels among all those designs. P.S. Perhaps filtering by presence of warp drive for CVs/SVs? Such vessels will be lighter

 

in the current version i don't like this new volume and weight system.
For realistic reasons: i was walking around with more than 2000 kg and after visiting the first Alien POI i had more than 12.000 of 500 volume with (for me) no visible penalty.

that you need more energy for hv/sv or whatever if you add a lot of heavy things sounds good to me, but i would change that system to something like: With a cargo box you get 25 "blocks" for items, and heavy things like a complete constructor would take 4 blocks or something like that.

and then you could say that a empty cargobox weights maybe 100 kg and if its full of items it weights 10.000 kg or whatever.

 

Volumn and mass aren't limiting factors yet as they're not properly implimented but once they are you won't be able to go above what your inventory or cargo boxes can hold. Say you're mining and you go over 500 the ore would start falling on the ground. Or with mass if you put to much weight in your SV you won't be able to take off.

 

okay then i would definetly say that they have to decrease the weight of ores, cause otherwhise you will start running between the next ore and your base.

 

Since the experimental release i've been forcing myself to play with the Weight/ volume enabled to get used to building with that in mind. I know it isn't balanced (because cash cards took up 10L of volume each lol) but I think I have a general feel of weight distribution for the HV's although I'm still figuring out how to adapt some of my old designs to handle the new set up. So far I love and hate it at the same time.

That being said, once the system is tweaked and properly balanced it would be great to see some kind of "engine stress" and or damage if you try to launch/ land while overloaded.

 

At the top of the page it says that none of the values are final. That said they've already tweeked the wait of ores and ingots once, In experimental you could only carry about 25.... So I don't expect them to change dramatically from this point on.

Personally I think this whole approach to mass and volumn is a mistake that can only take away from the creative freedom we currently have within the game. Unfortunatly there's a portion of the community that agree with the design team that this is a vital step to introducing balance in the game forcing people to make "tough choices" in ship design! Though that tough choice seems to be to discard any ideas for a creative builds and cover your basic ship design with either armor(blocks) or crates....

 

After quite a bit of testing, I'd recommend all of the following:

• ore volume set to 1SU, ore mass set to 1SU * ore density
• ingot volume set to 0.5 SU, ingot mass set to 0.5SU * metal density
• recipe inputs increased, particularly for large blocks and devices
• mass and volume for blocks and devices set based on their recipes
• voxel mining output (ores per unit voxel mined) increased while mining speed decreased for low-tier equipment
• number of SSORs in a deposit greatly increased while number of ores in an SSOR decreased
• player inventory capacity limited to 100SU
• terrain-placeable storage containers

The net effects of all of this changes would be to enable players to carry reasonable numbers of ores without also carrying excessive mass, allow excess materials to be stashed in easy-constructed terrain-placeable containers, make SV/HV containers feel like the upgrade that they are compared to the player's inventory, make all masses and volumes consistent, make large blocks and devices cost appropriate amount of materials compared to small blocks and devices, and make late-game mining faster without decreasing the effective speed of early-game mining or exceeding the maximum terrain deformation rate.

As far as mass limits for the on-foot player are concerned, perhaps the player's acceleration and max speed could be progressively decreased with mass when the carried mass exceeds: 100 kg (no suit), 200 kg (light armor), 300 kg (medium armor), 400 kg (heavy armor), +100 kg per carrying capacity booster (new booster type)

Nothing would stop you from decorating a ship with low-mass decorations and paneling, using carbon composite blocks for example (aside from the moment of inertia increase if the bounding box gets increased by the decorations, of course).

 

I still think having both mass and volume limitations is not needed, and would prefer simpler.

Mass is a useful limitation as it affects how vehicles handle. You shouldn't be able to load a small SV with thousands of ores without it having an effect on the handling. Mass is also fairly easy to balance somewhat realistically.

Volume is a less useful limitation. It is not that realistic to enforce a volume limit while imposing an arbitrary rule that cargo must be inside a cargo box. The truth is that you do not actually need to put all cargo inside boxes. There's no reason you can't stack it inside the hangar, for example. Or put stuff on top of the cargo box, or next to the cargo box. When you're carrying stuff, it doesn't need to actually all be in the backpack, it could be hanging on your belt.

This does not mean you can't limit how much a base can contain using only mass, you can. You simply impose a mass limit on how much a box can carry. For example, each cargo box can only carry 50 tons. Yes, in theory this means it can carry fewer items that are denser (it can hold more wood blocks than steel blocks) but does anyone care?

The only time a volume limit differs from a mass limit is when dealing with materials of significantly different density. It does not seem that most users really want a pure physics simulator here, it would be unrealistic to build large space stations all by yourself with those kinds of rules in place. So if the volume limit is kind of arbitrary anyway, why not just limit by mass? Then there's just one number people need to worry about.

 

So I can compromise practicality for aesthetics? But that's the issue! I had the creative freedom to make a nice looking reasonable well protected vehicles. With this change I have to make compromises, do I want protection or capacity? I have to build my interiors making sure that cargo controllers are central and i have to decide if I want more than one since I'll have to balance them by hand if I have them either side or spread around a build so they don't upset the balance.

How decorative is the interior of my vehicle? Because I'm not sure I can justify the weight of that railing etc since every little is gonna help. And I have to compromise compact builds because they are no longer compact and they're definately not practical anymore! All this to balance against things like combat cubes (that'll still exist just as a heads up.) I'm building nice looking and practical so I get screwed way, way before the people those that are building flying bricks that do all the stuff they need it to do!

You seem to think that design freedom only accounts for the exterior of a vehicle but it encompases every aspect of a build and the more hard limits and impediments that are put in its way the less freedom we have. As far as supposed balance goes all my designs that this update (and the future mass updates) invalidate are specialised builds designed for one job. The are small, nice looking, have all the bits they need and nothing more and now they are impractical in the name of balance....

I lose all that design freedom because people can put all the bits they need in a very small well armored box? Thats what I'm being balanced against? screw that! I like this game but if it continues down this road and I can't build the way I want to then I've got no compuction in dropping this game like a bad habit!

 

Yes, that particular tradeoff is part of the point, that armor and cargo containers (which could be holding bullets or fuel or just cargo) compete for space on a ship.

Only for HVs; SVs and CVs are unaffected by this. And granted this would be a potentially nontrivial problem for strongly asymmetric builds. On the other hand, you can play a lot of games with the position of CCs, since they only need be connected to their storage arrays by a single line of adjacent CEs.

If decorative components are an order of magnitude or more lower in mass than even unarmored steel, then they're going to be a small part of the ship's overall mass. Sure, every bit helps if you're min-maxing your ship, but, if you're doing that, then maybe its aesthetics aren't so important.

Yes, death cubes will still likely exist in some form, but the gap between their capabilities and those of non-min-maxed ships should be reduced.

While you likely won't be able to optimize a ship for every purpose, you haven't lost much in the way of visual design freedom. Dealing with mass is easy enough: simply switch building materials (carbon composite is quite low-mass). Does that reduce the combat survivability of a ship? Yep, so maybe add back some armor, but only in key areas. As for volume, well, transporting lots of cargo is going to require a larger ship (the amount one could stuff into an SV before alpha 9 was truly ridiculous), so that is perhaps an unavoidable loss of design freedom. Otherwise, non-cargo-carrying designs should still work just fine, they'll just have very limited cargo space.

Out of curiosity, could you give some examples of some of your specialized designs that you feel would be unfairly impacted by mass and volume?

 

I don't like the system, exactly as it exists now. As I've said elsewhere I wish they'd stick with just mass. If volume is used at all I'd prefer it was just slot and stack sizes (e.g. what @Arrclyde, @Philipp and others have suggested). This solves the problem of not being able to put seemingly infinite objects into one box, for example.

However, there's a few changes that I expect them to make, which I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt on, and I expect after they're made the whole thing will fit together OK. These changes are:

• The volumes for objects aren't really set right or balanced at all yet. This is where the difference between "keeping things fun" and "tedious physics simulator" will come to play. They've already stated these values aren't set right, and the move away from liters and to "storage units" to me implies they will fix this, by not trying to make the volumes realistic.
• Thrusters and RCS were already out of balance before this change. For example, the best engine for SV is the small thruster jet, everything bigger is useless. Also, the lack of T2 RCS for SV means you sometimes need to add literally hundreds of RCS to get a reasonably nimble ship. This was when cargo was massless! I don't know about you, but in a few of my (unpublished) SV designs, all I need is a T2 RCS and it would free up a huge number of blocks which I could replace with cargo.

It is fairly obvious that they needed to push this change out before they rebalanced and improve the thrusters and RCS. (Well, I think they should have done it altogether in an extended experimental, but I suspect they were trying to get something out before Christmas holiday.)

But it is possible, by tweaking the volume of cargo boxes and cargo, and by tweaking the thrust and RCS, to make the game as playable as it was before. Will they do that? I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt. They do clearly understand that it is not balanced yet, which is why they aren't enabling it by default.

I think mass/volume/thrust/energy can all be balanced in a way that the game is still fun. I suspect new users will deal with it and even expect it, it is mostly an adjustment for existing players. I'm maybe a bit more worried about the logistics UI being a bit clunky, it makes some things unecessarily harder to do.

 

I'd classify it as a bug that all weight is ascribed to the controller instead of spread among the boxes. I'd expect them to fix it at some point.

But I think they should consider not taking cargo into account at all when determining if HV's are level. The reason is because you can easily shift stuff around in a cargo area to keep the HV level, much like passengers on a boat can be balanced out by weight.

 

@Hummel-o-War : Could I request that the ability to enable/disable mass and volume be added as a console command instead of just the YAML option? Right now there's no obvious way to enable or disable it without starting a new game. That makes it harder to test.

I see "gopt" does list the current settings but it cannot change it on the fly. It would be nice to set these in the middle of a game, maybe some couldn't be supported but for most it seems like they should be able to be adjusted.

 

Agreed; they should have done all of this before pushing to exp (let alone a public release). And if they had, I think there would have been less in the way of negative reactions. In any case, if they do the balancing the way I've been recommending (items have solid density in storage), we should see decreased volumes for most items, which should make storing stuff somewhat easier.

+1 for this, too.

 

Ok...just to explain why I deleted my last post; my interpretation of statistics are a little more evolved then what the developers meant by their statement, and would probably just add more confusion.

I have experimented with building some HVs and one SV using the new logistic system (which I hated in the beginning) and found not that much difference (except how much they can carry) in designing. The HVs always have had to be balanced but I still didn't have as much balancing to worry about with the SV.

But, I can see the new logistic system causing a little rage for us existing players because I ended up trashing a lot of my BPs because I couldn't refit the new cargo system into the same amount of room even for a portion of the old carry amount.

 

tbh there is enoughto do without adding this to it, but maybe make it an option for the crazy people

 

OK some simple fixes 1 make HV mobile constructor level 3 instead of 7 so at level 3 we can make a large constructor and start building a base
Logic for this Large constructor can be made in a portable or HV constructor the containers can be made in an HV constructor so you can build 1 box put it in to a base then move using the HVs wireless to the bases box then use your wireless building logistics bar to put the large constructor down to make more boxes so HV mobile constructor needs to be level 3 so we can start building bases simple fix to not being able to move a large constructor from portable constructor and it can be done at level 3 if you do that gives us a chance to start actually building a base

Move all drills on HVs and CVs down by 5 for HVs and 10 for CVs then we can actually start doing stuff with out having to wait till 25th level to get off a planet to mine just in are armors from space rocks for a ton of levels it's hard enough to get the materials to make the drills let alone have to wait tons of levels just cause you guys feel like making it stupidly hard

the faction thing needs to be reworked a bit gathering resources from plants near a faction should not cause a lose it also should not cause a loss of faction points to gather rocks(not drilling drilling) now opening there boxes on there base sure I can see that if we are neutral or lower but if we are friendly no and at some point you should be able to make alliances and with a faction so we never fall below friendly.
but that should only be able to be done with the none bugs the bugs will always hate us anyways.


I do not post often but when I do it's generally important

 

How is that worse compared to Alpha8? Our character could mine and carry a whole deposite, carry a full CV in inventory e t c. Weights and volume otherwise are going to change.

Personally I suggested a BA smaller/simpler constructor with internal inventory. But you can use Survival Contructor to build and place large constructor at lvl3 as is.
1. Place BA container first
2. Open logistics and connect to said container
3. Open survival constructor
4. Move constructor to toolbar...

P.S. Moving HV constructor to lvl3 will help nothing since you still need lvl7 to place cargo expansions onto HV.