I think for me if the AI was good enough as a single player, I wouldn't mind running a cargo craft as long as I could have one or two fighters escorting me as well. Or even a few fighter drones to keep the enemy's occupied while I get away. Guess I'm thinking X3 like tactics. But as it stands right now you need to be in the jack of all trades ship. Guess the thing that has bothered me the most is. The game has now turned us into nothing but miners. That's really the only job you can get in the game. The game just doesn't have enough in it to support any other job but mining. That's not even to build up funds but just to support your need for resources to keep repairing or making new ships. You can't even sale large amounts of ore to other places. what little traders we do have only deal in small amounts. I feel like I'm taking my stuff to a pawn shop. Wow I just raided a poi and got all these guns. Quick let's run to the ONLY trader on the planet and sale just a small amount of what I have to them. Wait a couple of more days and sale some more. LOL Who knows maybe in a couple of months I might be able to sale it all. No such thing as a wholesaler So for now we wait and see what the game becomes. Who knows with the service stations more jobs will open up to make funds so we don't have to mine as much.
I was around for Mass/weight update and CPU update. I sided with the Devs on both updates as they cited that there is no rush to leave EA and work on this game won't be rushed. Let me add the CPU update? people were calling the devs names and straight-up tantrums of anger and lots of rages. That was hostile to me, this is more concern and disappointment? Everyone just wants the game to do well and skipping Beta alone? sounds like something isn't right with the devs and maybe we can help? I have no problem donating to a Kickstarter to carry Empyrion where it needs to go to be what is should be. I bought several keys and given them to family and friends because the game is good and I have no problem supporting it. I can not support it when if they won't let me and by going against their "We won't rush Empyrion" and dev members uninformed of major decision? I think it is only logical to have some concerns?
Russian mafia connected backer threatening to remove body parts I would guess... For me the signs have been here for ages. I actually pretty much described this happening in a couple of months ago because it happen alot with early access games created by a talented, but inexperienced dev team without anyone who is taking a strong dev process lead role. Too many hacks over too much time leads to spaghetti code. Eventually people realise they cant actually fix it any more and start to state as much internally more vocally than just a lone voice from one of the devs. Testing of course is pretty much non existent anyway and just becomes increasingly so as access to isolated bits of code for unit tests becomes pretty much impossible. Dev schedules start to slip badly, and eventually they have to accept the truth. They have far too much code maintenance debt to have any hope in hell of doing the intended targetted beta rewrites, new features without massive risk to most of the whole code base as basically it is far too entangled and none can remember the details anymore. The couples with pressure from financial backers and the result is pretty much inevitable. But what happens next is where it really starts to hit us - many of the devs probably had high hopes for a beta phase where they could fix/finish their half done work but now that out of the window, so in disgust some of them will start to leave taking their talent with them. Financial backers still need a return on their investment, so guess what - support for cosmetic DLCs where most of the future work can be undertaken by a single modeller and a junior dev will be the final major feature. The game of course stays alive for far longer than it should because of community mods, but that only happens if they have the foresight to support a decent modding API, which currently we do not have to the extent that say SE has. We do at least have some access via config, but collectively i think the community has already pretty much explored the limits of that. Steam is sadly littered with examples of this scenario playing out as depressing as it may be.
Heya, just my 2 cents. Joined (bought) the game in late A11. So I ventured in just as a solo. It was at maturity. The tutorial really sucks even after A12 but it was eventually more than a concept and solved 80% of my early A11 questions. That said, the tutorial is still pos for a beta. When playing the plain game I don't feel like i'm in an alpha. It almost never bugs. Bugs are visual and or minor. Go Beta go ! And keep space for tweaking and servers. You could have achieved more a platform than a sp game. Choices about this will determine the essence of your business model. I would like to think it as open. The game lacks of either a strong single player story or a community feature that will make unbeatable. There is a strong community but many members are hostile to make their playground live. It's part of the thing. I warn you : look at everything that made Elite Dangerous both fantastic and terrible. They know the truth about both sides but never been able to solve the thing. Listen to the community, always, but keep the game attracting to new players. Not by trying to turn it absurdingly to a casual game. It is not casual. It can be casual by play time frequency, but not by complexity. Make it easier to inferior minds like me, but not more. And please, please, add the ability to the multitool to see/state, above the type of block, what bloody shape it is. Do not undermine the building part, help it. Removing the building part of the game, you'd be toasted already. It is at least 50% of my own personal interest in the game, the building part. I'm not alone I know, but I spend time on EGS because it is its very difference. On top of all the very promising things you've been developing. Cheers !
Id say if its a monetary issue then fine, release the game after its polished to perfection with its current mechanics and then release dlc's and expansion packs with additional content and mechanics. Id rather have that then "done". But thats just me.. Ive got money to spend and i always want more content for this game... Its my fav game.
What I read there was your take on things and what you feel is the reason. Not the developers reasons. Please don't try to pass your ideas off as what the developers are saying. I'm sure they can speak for themselves if they choose to. Which to date they choose to be mute. So answer me this in your concept why if we already have a max speed that can't be gone over would they need to limit the speed more in space? It's can't be because of the size of the ships if it's being done to a small SV in a single player game. If my computer system can handle the max speed that is already built into the game then why must a further limit be imposed on a single player game?
There were video Q&As too, and if you watch those you will see a first, spontaneous explanation by "the devs", and in a later video another, more "damage control" version. In the text, you can see at the beginning of the thread that Hummel recognizes CPU will have performance impacts, then again with some reserve. If you read the "merge blocks" thread I gave the link for previously, you will see that there is no questioning the direct relation between "amount of blocks/devices+motion" and "computer & network performance". If you fail to grasp this, I don't see how I can help you understand why the developers are so hell bent on seemingly "arbitrary limits" on blocks and devices. The reason I can interpret information is because I don't indulge in conspiration theories and rely in reading and seeking the info, and I want to find answers. If you think an explanation is not reasonable, then you are free to elaborate on what could be your version of a "reasonable explanation". What about you ? You mentioned you were in game development some time ago. How come you are unable to connect the dots here ?
Mate I'm not disputing the CPU nor about the merging block. Bottom line there is simple too many polys and it all comes crashing down. Gawd knows I have brought a few systems to it's knees. Yes I saw the damage control on the CPU. My biggest problem is the max speed being imposed in space notice the key word here is space. So what right now the max speed a SV can reach now in space is 100 add mass to it in it's cargo boxs (Now remember adding mass is not the same as adding polys.) and our speed drops how is this effecting anything other then your ship why is this being done in space. The original max speed was what 115 in space and it was never effected by mass. So to me this has nothing to do with cpu. Oh and let's not forget in god mode we can travel far quicker then our ships can. So please as you say connect the dots for me as to why cpu is the reason we now have limits to our speed because of mass
And drag in space. One explanation I see is that end results can be easily edited/ capped (top speed) but the basic function has to be the same across the board. Physics engine limitation ? Lazyness ? Can't say. Look at the state of Structural integrity... The new flight system also takes some additional juice regarding physics calculation, while before it was only 1 device (rcs) that made a ship steer. But for CVs, it sometimes required a lot of them, and with the advent of cargo mass it would have required even more. It's possible that in the exchange, they shaved a bit of performance by switching that task to thrusters placement vs 100 rcs to keep track of. It's also possible that they make an hypothesis, try it and realize it doesn't achieve what they expected. So even with the best intents, they may end up in a worse situation. That doesn't invalidate the intent, right ? It may have nothing to do with CPU, but it surely lessens the burden for weaker computers. If you start from the premiss that CPU is logical, it is a way to support specialization and bring in some realism like device failure past a certain usage %, then... why do structural blocks all have CPU points ? And why drag in space ? Same answer as up here. I never supported the speed being affected by mass or CPU or whatever irrelevant reason. I supported and suggested a linear and angular acceleration cap, and argued for this enough to see that, at that time, players just didn't care. But it was obvious the developers had to do something, and were going to do something. I can speculate that finding an appropriate formula to cap acceleration in relation to mass was more complex then to simply tweak the speed cap in relation to mass. That would be the "obvious" explanation. But if the objective was to slow things down at all costs, just capping acceleration would not have solved that. Mass is not taken into account in godmode, also for flying a ship with huge mass in inventory. Godmode can't be triggered in multiplayer, it's a "developer mode" or debugging tool, not an implied game mechanic. It doesn't matter if terrain chunks flicker or graphic artefacts appear in flight in god mode because of higher speed, because players in a normal game setup will not see these at lower speeds. They could have named it anything, if the objective was to reduce speed, that's what it does. We all know it did not make sense, physically and technologically, but it "served its purpose" regarding slowing down the flow of events. They did try to augment the top speed to 150 in space at some point, but they backpedaled quickly, and I am not the one seeing the numbers behind the scenes here, but reasons were given regularly on this topic : game engine limitation. This may be a blanket statement, but the physics engine is part of that too, and the network code also, or at least some parts if they cooked an in-house net solution from the ground up. But let me be a bit skeptical on this last part... Unity has been notorious for bad network performance for years.
@Kassonnade LOL So yes we agree no one really knows why they are doing the things they have done. So we can guess all we want. Yes they did slow things down while traveling in space. It's just made people want to get out of their seats and do something else other then to sit and wait to get to their next destination. Oh how nice to get out and do some crafting or moving things around and role play a bit they are really on a ship in space. Doing the evening dishes after they have eaten. It's all good mate we wait to see what our next adventure will be as we move out of Alpha into what?
I forgot one key point : if we build small or "light" then we can reach top speed. But given the nature of the game (mining and salvaging the whole universe) we can assume ships will not be empty very often...
In terms of the flight system i think the speed is too fast which makes the buildings size like big cv's and stations appear smaller and unrealistic in size. The max speed limit for sv is 130 and 70 in the planet. I would switch the speed in the planet from 70 to the limit of 50 to 70 depending on the size of the sv. A bigger sv would naturally be slower and a smaller sv would naturally be faster. With a speed skill that has a cooldown so they can't be used all the time. This will make using the shorter speed buff a skill for a pilot where they have to use it at the right time. I would switch the space speed limit for sv from 130 to 80 to 100 with the same type of increased short speed buffs. In Star Conflict this is how its setup with some classes of ships having stronger hulls and shield buffs, or lower hull and weaker shields but higher speeds. If Empyrion had gone this route along with a combined Dual-System of Voxel vs Static building Structure i think it would have been a very good game right now. One could have even argued that it could have been even better then Duel Universe. How i see it is that its best to take out the best aspect of every game out there like the "Cohesive Class Structure of Star Conflict" along with the Voxel structure of games like Battle front 2 and star conflict and Duel universe and Elite dangerous. See the biggest advantage Empyrion has over all these games before the implementation of cpu was the creative freedom to design and build whatever you want. The size could be based on cores like duel universe. So depending on the size of the ship it will naturally classify it as sv and what tier of sv or cv and what tier of cv depending on the size. In Star Conflict their are 4 main class types interceptor, fighter, frigate, and destroyer. The interceptor is like a small sv and very fast. The fighter is like a heavy sv and slower. The frigate is like a medium cv and the destroyer is like a heavy cv. And each class has its own sub-roles as well. https://wiki.star-conflict.com/index.php?title=Class https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Xgkql https://www.artstation.com/marketpl...ral&utm_campaign=artwork&utm_term=marketplace
I can't remember the exact numbers, but in the old Xwing / Tie Fighter series of games speeds were much lower than in Empyrion, and combat was much more engaging. There were also no "hitscan" weapons, all projectiles were lasers/ torpedoes, which could be traced and dodged to some extent. So it's a trade-off system here. Either we get more content because playfields feel "empty" and take time to cover and explore, or we get more speed to cover the "emptyness" in less time. But we can't have both without bugs and glitches, that is quite the fact. Between the two, I prefer more content and less speed, and I would avoid hitscan weapons for ships and bases (and drones) because it's simply not fun. No visuals, collision problems because of the game's update speed (30 - 60 fps) vs the projectile speed, and turrets leading combat because of this instead of player skill.
No. A larger ship would naturally accelerate slower than a smaller ship, given equal thrust. The larger would proportionately burn more fuel and take more time to get to speed x than the smaller would. That there's an ultimate speed cap for performance, noone disputes. But if that cap is say 130 m/s for a given vehicle, then it should be 130 m/s whether it has full cargo boxes or not. The mass should just make it accelerate slower- that cargo has absolutely no bearing on polys or any other possible performance factor.
From a "physics" perspective, true. But not from a "let's limit the flow of events" perspective, as the block and devices count is the problem. Big SV is like big CV, only smaller blocks, and compound this with faster speed cap. We don't know that. Poly count is not the major problem nowadays, as GPUs can crunch them by the hundreds of thousands without a hiccup. But voxel grids are more than just "polys", they are "conversions" from a multidimensional array to "poly" coordinates, which also has to retain local coordinates for each blocks because of texturing. To make sure that "full inventory" has no impact on performance when a ship moves at top speed, we have to see how the game keeps track of everything. An empty container may be just one byte of info, but a full one can be as many bytes (or "addresses" - just as example) as there are slots in the container, plus the bytes for the stacksize. Also add that some devices alter mass with fuel and ammo consumption, so periodic checks have to be done accordingly. But we don't know. It's not only a question of "rendering" but also a question of keeping track of everything, and being able to render a frame without dropping all the "non-graphical" data just to maintain proper framerate. On my system, each time I start a game it takes forever to show me the "zoomed" view when zooming with a sniper or advanced rifle. But when it's done, I'm good to go for the whole session. This means that there is now a space reserved in "live" memory (what level ?) for this, but this space is not there for something else. We also know that the game eats lots of CPU cycles, and this can become a bottleneck to feed the GPU in time. Edit : here is an interesting read to help understand memory management in Unity, and how "memory fragmentation" can impact performance: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/BestPracticeUnderstandingPerformanceInUnity4-1.html .
I hope for continued development and success of Empyrion, but none of us knows what the future will hold. Either way, I definitely got my money's worth out of the game. I just refuse to speculate to why they are going full release all of a sudden, or what they plan to do in the future. This is the weekend, so I don't expect a big response from them for a few days.
You do realize they never did say full release only the player's have been saying that. They did say "PS: More info on the contents of the Version 1 release will be following soon." They have only been saying release 1.0 that could mean anything. I did put the question to them directly if this was beta 1.0 or full release 1.0 in another thread. I haven't gotten a response and to be honest I'm not really expecting one. If there is one things we have all taught the developers over the years is be careful what they say. So we wait and see. I too have gotten my money's worth over the years.
It could be Beta 1.0, which would definitely make sense, but from the announcement we have here they said they are leaving early access which would indicate it's no longer an alpha or beta game, but is still going to be in active development. They are just dropping any early access tag.
