It doesn't matter what units are used, the underlying physics remains the same. You can relabel speed, but the velocity of everything can be related to the speed of a player on-foot. You can relabel length, but the length of everything can be related to the height of the player. You can relabel mass, but gravity is still near Earth-normal, and the time it takes to fall a certain height can be measured in-game, so mass can be determined. You can relabel force, but knowing the relationships of velocity, length, and mass to normal units lets you obtain the relationship for force. You can relabel power, but you can estimate the power consumption of lighting and derive the relationship from there. In short, you can still do calculations even if all the units are different, and determine if the in-game physics is implemented correctly or not. Deliberately trying to hide/obscure incorrect physics is a recipe for undermining player trust, and will be found out eventually because there will always be those that check for it.
Eleon can call it whatever made up units they want, that won't change anything. Math is still math. They can change the values so that if I walk 5 meters in game the game tells me I walked 5 kilometers, but my brain still knows I only walked 5 meters. I still know the scale of blocks in game and I still know the player height compared to those block sizes, so my brain would never believe those made up values because the math doesn't check out. Everything has to scale correctly in order for it to be believable.
Think this is what frustrates me the most. There is just to much earth normal in the game. Come on earth couldn't have brought all those earth type thrusters along. Or the 50mm cannons. or 15 mm why do the aliens all use the say type of weapons. Yes there might have been a number of them that wound up in alien strong box's that we loot. Alright we learned from the crashed ship how to make some of this stuff. So why do all the earth ships have food processors that craft alien food? We would have never known what it was yet. Where are the alien ships? Wouldn't they be different then ours? There is not enough of a divide between what earth brought and what we have found here. Wouldn't we have saw how the equipment worked and then apply earth normal's to it and make food we would use, ores that we know of. Please don't tell me we designed the food processors and the aliens liked it so much they use them too. The food processors on the earth ships should have been putting out earth normal foods. And the Meds come on. There needs to be more alien then earth on these planets. Ok maybe it's my need for a real story here with lore to back it all up and make it all sound logical. I think this is where NMS had the right idea and even X3 you had to learn what was there. Look at the ship you ejected from and crashed on the starter planet. How in the world did earth find the raw ores that are needed to craft some of that stuff. It wouldn't have been on earth. I know this is all still a WIP but come on. I just feel we should be testing the stuff we find and see if it would be a good replacement for our own foods, med's. So aliens must have invented pizza too cool. Ok I'm done off my soap box sorry for going off topic.
Your problem is you think you are the one to meassure against. Don't underestimate tje power of high numbers on an average peoples brain. ;-) You think to much in known meassures and values. If it would be as you described you are right. But that doesn't count for imaginary values. You could walk 50 meters but how would you know that it is 50 meters if all the game told you was "the distance you travelt has been 31,5 PDUs"? I see, some unimaginary, non creative people here that are strictly bount to deep into real life. ;-)
I've got tons of imagination. That isn't the issue. Let me make it clearer. If I'm traveling at 5m/s in my SV, the devs can change the scale and values and it won't matter one bit. They can call that 5m/s something like 16734 dinglebats/dingleberry and the player will still not believe it's any faster than the 5m/s that it is. You are still going to naturally compare it to known scales such as how long it takes to fly from one side of your base to the other. It doesn't matter what the values and units are, it's still not going to seem anything different than what it is compared to the scale of the game. They can tell me the distance between the planet and the moon is 100,000,000 miles or kilometers or lightyears, and it still won't matter because I'm going to compare the speed of my SV to something known like base blocks and I won't believe the scale. Everyone will do that without realizing it or not.
It's pretty straightforward: Measure the player character's height in blocks Walk a set number of blocks and record the in-game distance in PDUs Assume the player character is roughly human-height Obtain the conversion between PDUs and meters As a bonus, if you time the walk and assume the player character has a similar on-foot speed to a human, then you can get the velocity conversion too. Anyway, we're rather off-topic at this point. For the topic, it's still the case that a modular system would have been the simpler, easier approach; the current implementation adds completely unnecessary complexity.
Because I've walked 50 metres and know how far it is? It doesn't matter if some people say I walked 165 feet, 55 yards, 0.02 nautical miles, or 287 whizbangs. And if I ned a more accurate count, I can take something I have confidence in and lay it out along my route and count that I walked 25 block lengths.
For a fun game mechanics it sometimes is better to bend, break or invert/reverse real world physics. Best example is artificial gravity. Would it be possible in that way today? Just a device that makes you walk on a ship in space? No. But the way it is brought to the game makes movement more gamy, more arcade, more easy in space and therefor more fun for most players out there. So nit picking aside, using real world values is cause for many many many critic posts. Distances to short, vessels to slow, planets to small.... and all that jazz. Right now it tales you less than half an hour to go around a planet in a vessel. A vessel that has a top spead at 50 m/s. So people complain that 50 m/s is to slow and feels slow. But there is no way you surround our planet earth in atmosphere in less than half an hour. So naming speed and distances different doesn't change the math behind it, but the psychological effect is that it feels vast in distances and fast on the speed-o-meter. Also you can simplify the game for its audience by simply stating: Max speed 15000 Acceleration 120 mass empty/max 1100/2400 It is obviously better/more advanced than: Max speed 12300 Acceleration 95 Mass empty/max 1500/2200 You could display more values describing firepower, production effectiveness and so forth. Point being you don't even need to display value names, and it is easy to compare with one look, for everybody. And sitting in a cockpit going 23721 feels definitely faster than 50 m/s, especumially if distances are named different too since speed and distances are always relative to each other: the smaller the distances the faster the lower speed feels, while in reality it is actually not all that fast with real world standarts. And using such a system, you can bend physics to fit more into the intended gamemechanic and the feel. Is it really such a hard concept? I mean, all those demands for physics and realistic calculations that everyone can look up brought the game to point where it is right now. But team "physics" fanbois will, of course, blame it on poor implemntation and not on the overly complicated and unneccessary complex implementation of a system in favor of a much more simple system. KISS is very successful in all kind of cases for a reason. ;-)
The only reason I've come up with for avoiding a modular system and going with 3 mutually exclusive tiers is to force a player along a path of stretch goals. This big and no bigger until you've got the raw material to build a T2 extender. Now one (1) structure can be made this big instead! Isn't that better?!?! You want bigger, well you need to jump through a different hoop now! Collect no less than two (2) of T3 extenders! Here are your three choices of method: raid a zillion POI, find a new structure with them in it currently and take it apart, or find a vendor, get friendly, and become a farmer/salvage expert and earn enough credits! See everyone could do it! Now one (1) structure can be made bigger. Oh you want even bigger? Well, you're asking a lot but we still got you covered. Remember what you did last time? Now you need twice as many T4 extenders at 10 times the cost! Better get raiding/searching/farming!
:-D you know what it makes you if you doing THIS instead of, i don't know, just PLAYING a GAME? Its commonly called "geek". You are being called that way for actually being interested in stuff like that when playing a game. ;-)
Playing a game and checking on its physics aren't mutually exclusive. Also, I'm happy to be both a geek and a nerd; I'm not sure why you think I'd take that as an insult. <shrugs>
Actually, you're doing this in order to understand the game enough to plan what to build, and how to act. If you are told your rifle has a range of 287 whizbangs, that's fine and all, but how close do I have to be to shoot something? My ship guns fire at 1312 whizbangs, 12 rounds a sarlac. OK, what's that in terms I understand and can plan for? Will I need 12 rounds of ammunition per minute of combat or 1200? How close to the enemy do I need to get?
As soon as it is no longer considered an achievement/side effect of having fun and becomes necessary work. Somewhat subjective, obviously, but I would contend building a system where these hoops are necessary for every larger structure crosses that line for most people.
Well, it wasn't meant as an assult. I would do it the same way, just without painting a target and a kick-me-sign on my back. Thing is that a game is meant to be made for a big variety of all kind of players. Those physics discussions are not interessting to most people. But key is: in a good game you don't need to understand physics or the underlaying math of that game. In return, needing to unterstand the complex underlaying math and physics of that game makes it a bad game. And those too are mutually exclusive. And i don't talk about my self or hang in details. I am talking of the bigger picture, the whole thing. And past has shown that the most simple games are the most successful (in terms of numbers, not if individual people like it). Minecraft is a prime example. The next game Notch atempted to make was this 10xtimes something that never took off. Why? To special, most didn't understand, and it was a failed concept from the beginning. So it never got finished. So to spare this fate maybe it would be a good idea to make this game to be playable for a 6 years old, without that child havingvto study physics textbooks in order to be able tonplay that game. Your beloved physics actually cause all that mess. Evwrything from vessel handling to serverstress/calculating and everything in between. Sure you can adjust the values, but it will only shift. I would like the game to be real life speeds and distances. Love to see people crash landing in the desert, spending 3 real life weeks to get to a more resource loaded area, dying a lot while never seeing anyone else. That sounds so much like fun. Or flying to the moon for two month real time, using cruise control. ;-)
I like whizbangs, and sarlacs. :-D The point being is not to prevent people from calculating. The point is takingvout the neccessity to calculate for basic things like building or firing a weapon. So building is more intuitive. Intuitive is the absence of calculating/planing. For your firing example of how close you have to get to the enemy in order to hit that? Honest simple answer? Move towards the enemy until the crosshair turns from red to green. It really is that simple, and most people will intuitively use this system without running any kind of math. ;-)
They already did change from Watts to generic power units. I think it was in response to various discussions of Power scale and the lunacy of things like 1 kW motion sensors controlling 1 kW interior light bulbs. We still have the lunacy, but we don't talk of Watts.
HWS will have a test of CPU this weekend. I have been trying to get enough parts to upgrade some PVP ships for a planned activity. As yet I have not found enough parts to upgrade my PVE equipment nevermind contribute to the PVP effort. I have found 3 large and 3 small bridges and 1 small matrice in 17 pink and 32 red containers. (edit) update to the # I did some more and corrected the # of reds on my spreadsheet had the incorrect # for one of the POI (too low) I have found 6 l bridge 3 s bridge and 2 s matrices doing 24 pink and 61 red loot containers The grind is real. I am sick of the grind. Apparently with the additions of the optronics they took the opportunity to reduce the overall value of the drops of the containers. This is most obvious in pinks.
@stanley bourdon You're saying you have to loot POIs in order to progress CPU tiers? They didn't make the CPU extenders craftable with advanced resources? This game makes less and less sense over time.
You can create T2 extenders, but you need some rarer ores (neodynamium maybe?). T3 and T4 can be acquired by (a) finding them in rare alien pods, (b) potentially taking them from new POI -- some builders expressed interest in incorporating them, but I'm not sure they are present currently, or (c) buying them from a Polaris vendor in orbit. Last I checked one T4 extender cost more than a million credits and only functions in groups of four.
