Another hauler modification. This time Eve-Online-Charon fit to curry 44,8Mil SUs over 140x320k containers. Rhea (her new name), is capable on carrying various vessels docked in the stern hangar area, modified by me.
Been working on my own storage solution. Mines more of a base add on that perma docks to an orbital base but can be moved if needed My server runs ASTICS script mod so this thing also displays each bins storage on lcd and auto sorts everything
Today I discovered something that maybe everyone else already knew. Apparently, you can only have 5 LCDs active when undocking a SV. As far as I can tell, after lift-off, additional LCDs can then be activated. While I received this info from Empyriongame Support a month ago after filing a CoQ, I wasn't able to digest it at first. A lot of gibberish about TextMeshPro, buffers, renders, etc., that left me like this.... It was only the other day that I tried an unfinished version of the SV in question and found it working fine. I began to "finish" it which included an LCD keyboard and some labelling of equipment. All of a sudden, it wouldn't undock! It took a while before I made the correlation of LCDs and CoQs. For whatever reason, docking is the key. It appears, so far, that you can have all manner of LCDs active on the SV as long as you don't dock. Landing on the ground seems to have no effect. Once docked, however, only a max of 5 LCDs can be active prior to undocking. Maybe this is where decals come in. I still don't know how to use them and until I finish my stuff for the IRS, I doubt I will be getting into it. If this is old news to everybody, I apologize. Just thought it was worth mentioning. Get Veccinated. Wear a Mask! Please. P.S.: FOUR (4) not five (5) seems to be the max active LCDs when undocking.
LCD text is not simple text, each character is made of 2 triangles, to be able to be represented as a "texture" in 3d space like normal geometry. That is why they want/ wish players to use decals instead, as they are much less demanding on memory/ resources. Decals can't completely replace LCDs but for simple text tags and logos they are perfect, apart that they can't be used on a player base because they mess up with structural integrity. But on player ships... well that is possible, but it's a little can of worms by itself because... hem... well they are not like blocks... This is embarassing. Because decals can be so much, and at the same time they could easily be used for exploits, so not going there. But for ships, yes, they can be used for logos and tags. And more. But don't. I didn't write that.
I thought decals were for POI and such. Can we actually use those on a bp we would spawn in from the bp factory on a public server?
Well... not sure what you mean, really.^^ I remember having written not long ago that I made a 4 km long ship and had problems getting on a planet because the ship was longer than the atmosphere is thick, if that is any clue... But that was in singleplayer. I may have written that player bases can't have decals because they mess up with structural integrity. You can see what I wrote here...
Decals are only for POIs due to what you can do with them. They would be completely broken if players could use them.
Someone pointed out that I have never made a mining SV. So.... I named it the Geolycosa after a burrowing spider (after my wife said it looked like a spider) CPU Tier 3 and LVL 20 with a warp drive. I left the shield out because that would have made it a CPU Tier 4.
First, I miscounted. Apparently, FOUR (4) is the magic number not to exceed during undocking. Second, what you're saying makes me think that projectors may be more the issue than the hard signs/screens. Or not.
No, I did not put a link, and those experiments were destroyed with the laboratory to prevent them from falling into bad hands... What do you mean by "broken" ?
Now that's a silly idea. Who in the world... Spoiler Although the decal is defined as 8192 long ( 1 unit = 1 block = 2 meters) it rather looks like 8 km and not 16, so maybe there's a hard limit but I didn't check. Maybe it's just a perspective illusion, it can be 16 km indeed... To get this on a planet, best to go down horizontally to avoid problems. On the other side, they really want to replace LCDs with these, so they have to work out some kind of limit on player's ships that are disabled on admin/POIs spawned via yaml. Until they fix the structural integrity on ships... For LCDs, a simple 100 characters text is 200 triangles, equivalent to more than 33 cubes, so that's a lot of unsuspected geometry that players inadvertantly add to their builds...
For me, this is very interesting and very disturbing. I was just getting the hang of using basic LCDs and even the projectors. Contemplating getting more involved with advanced Rich Text techniques, Decals came on the scene with me thinking this could solve some of my issues. Apparently not! And now I find that those little details added by LCDs can keep me grounded. WTF?!?! While I live in hope that some of these things can be resolved in my coherent lifetime, I shan't hold my breath. I won't speak of crosshairs or bunks for SV/HVs or any other of things I would hope for because there's no point. I will make do with what I have and hope that I can make use of what others come up with along the way. I'm really tired and frustrated right now. Maybe things will look different after a time.
You can use decals on your own ship in singleplayer no problem. On a server, this will require an admin to spawn the ship, but for private servers it's easy to do. No need to fuss around with rich text tags with decals, just put whatever you want on them via any image editor, text or image or animations. You can even make a bigger ship than what your PC could support if just made entirely with regular blocks, because lots of flat walls/ floors can be replaced by decals which means replacing lots of geometry with simple planes. You could, for example, just make the outline of main structural pieces, and "fill in" with decals, with regular blocks all around them for smooth junctions. Even though we can't use decals on our bases without risking structural integrity problems, we can still use the same trick that some players used with projectors : use a large offset so the display is actually shown in a nearby structure, while belonging to an adjacent one.Just writing this should give a few ideas on how to use decals as more than simple text/ image displays. Decals are not airtight, just keep that in mind when designing something though. I understand it can be annoying to see limitations like the one you described for projectors and LCDs, but then we also have max blocks limits, speed limits, texture/ symbols limits, all kinds of limits, because that's the way games and computers are made : with inherent limits. At some point there can be trade-offs but in the end there's only so much that can be done within these limits. Only thing I do find unsettling is the fact that at many points in time, some of Eleon's representatives told players that "all will get in the game" regarding features and player requests, that it was just a question of time. That was purely PR stuff, and completely unrealistic. I think players were a bit naive to believe that in the first place, and a bit misplaced from the developer's part to allow such a statement to be made. Structural integrity is not applied on ships.
@Kassonnade As always, your comments are helpful and encouraging. Could you direct me to the "How To" for decals that I might better investigate their use. I thought I had saved a post or something but i can't find it (nothing new there). btw; I DID know about SI on ships. Just saying. Oh, I see. This is in relation to why decals can work on the ships w/o the problems they can cause on bases. Got it!
You can start here: https://empyriononline.com/threads/v1-3-decals.96511/ I also started putting down more information on this thread, but it is not completed and may sound a bit complicated for starters : https://empyriononline.com/threads/...cks-items-decals-terrains-with-blender.96924/ But I also sent you a private message. .
The decal system is mostly for custom scenarios. And you can do some absolutely amazing things with it. But just like how you can't create your own custom private blocks or your own custom private weapon and then spawn them on your favorite public server to kill everyone, you can't use decals on a server as a non-admin to run an in-game movie night with your friends off your google drive. (but a server admin could).
If we could make our custom skyboxes like Pantera told us some time ago we would be able to, then we could make Dyson spheres around small class 2 lava moons... ^^ Right now it looks a bit moot having a huge structure in space circling the planet, but invisible when on the planet...
