Hey all, Feeling a bit sad about how what was initially a fairly epic battle played out, all because certain core game mechanics really don't work at all well. Playing the Reforged Eden scenario and taking my now fairly decent CV up against a Zirax CV in space. It started really fun, fire exchanged and I quite quickly figured out that my shields had the edge. My turrets were set to strip the enemy ship's turrets, so its DPS dropped over the cause of the battle. The ship called in LOTS of Space Drones to help it, literal swarms of them around me, but I had other turret (Minigun) set to shoot those guys. They did a good job, turrets seem to be more responsive in space, go figure. While trying to manoeuvre, the enemy CV rammed into an asteroid, this was amusing as it was literally the only asteroid for at least 5km in every direction lol. It appeared wedged at this point, unable to free its self - a simple reverse would have done it, but perhaps those thrusters were dead. My ship them went to work killing the remaining turrets, but my own turret's targetting was forever getting it wrong, choosing to shoot at turrets the other side of the ship, rather than the ones slowly whittling my shield down. Daft. I had to keep manoeuvring to ensure that the closest turret was always one with LoS, even though, oddly enough, I cannot see through the enemy ship to see what's on the other side. Lots of ammo was wasted, a bit frustrating. Anyway, after a few minutes, all Space Drones were long dead and the enemy CV was neutered, unable to move due to being stuck, incapable of backing out, and unable to fire due to all turrets being destroyed. During the conflict huge chunks had been blown out of the enemy vessel, allowing easy access to the inside of the ship. However, this is where things started to really go wrong. Some parts of the ship were totally open to space, and I could see various Zirax Troops inside. Firing my weapons saw the shield effect displayed, so, even those gaping holes in the ship were still somehow covered by the ship's shield. Daft. I made my way into the ship on foot - more precisely, on jetpack of course - through another hole in the hull. Many such holes were totally impassable. Once I landed on the interior deck in one area of the target enemy CV, I turned off my Jetpack to take advantage of the still functioning gravity. However, I continued to hit invisible walls and was totally unable to proceed. Ship boarding does not exist, even when a vessel comes to a total halt - there was none of the random twitching crashed CV often exhibit. What a shame to have such an epic, but not issue-free, battle just fizzle out into a "no gameplay remaining" moment. I've downed PV's before and, once grounded, they'd often be able to be walked around with the odd glitch, suddenly falling through the ship as it twitched for a moment. This stationary space CV however, totally broken. Now, I know it's a big deal to have any degree of walking around on a moving ship - which is, as I understand it, the reason enemy CV's are so badly glitched, even when they're crashed and stationary. However, isn't it time that getting this working was worked on as a priority? This is part of the reason the late-game fizzles out for me as the "boss fights" in the form of CV vs. CV combat simply don't work well. Sure, you can blow the heck out of an enemy CV, but when you go to claim your prize - not that the game lets us claim a defeated CV, another sad fact - collision detection utterly breaks, robbing the player of any more gameplay interaction. I'd LOVE to be able to board an enemy CV - especially when it's still moving - and defeat it from the inside. Many of these enemy CV's - certainly those from Reforged Eden - appear to have been designed to be boarded by players, having working internal defences, NPC spawners etc. However, no disrespect to the designers of these exceptional vessels, that's wasted effort currently, as the game simply cannot support it. To add insult to injury, even if the player is able to defeat a CV - on planet or in space - and the thing doesn't glitch out, it'll self destruct after a few minutes anyway - at least in vanilla. Like many before me, I've spent significant resources taking out an enemy CV and supporting Drones. It was a little glitchy, but quite fun. However, now I'm stuck. I cannot interact with the ship I've just disabled so there's no gameplay left. I cannot loot any of the cargo boxes. Cannot find and destroy the Core, cannot recover any remaining valuable equipment. What was the point? Feeling salty after this encounter. It's rare I get to the stage where I have a decent, combat capable CV with lots of resources and this is a major reason why. I want to board an enemy CV, I want to wander around the corridors, dealing with Sentry Turrets, Zirax Troops etc. like any other POI. I want to find that Core, blow it and replace it with my own before towing that knackered enemy CV back to base - or at least a safer area - to be stripped down or even fixed and added to my fleet. That'd be fun. What do others think? Do you, like me, reach this stage of the game and lose interest as things simply don't work well? I do wonder if there's any way to work-around this issue. I.e. if a ship is stationary for a few minutes, turn it into an immobile object, locked in place, so "boarding" gameplay can proceed. A different phase of the engagement if you will. The enemy CV recognises it's disabled, be it through no drives or a crash as in my case, then it become locked in place so collision has at least a chance of working. Rather this than start a self-destruct timer which offer precisely ZERO gameplay. Interestingly, the enemy CV in this instance hasn't triggered a self destruct this time. I actually just flew near another enemy CV earlier in the game, before I was up to defeating it, and, without firing a shot, I got the self destruct warning. Odd as the thing kept on flying around just fine, so I don't know what the issue was. Note: Collision is super weird when it glitched out like this, even God Mode (no clip of course) can't pass through parts of the ship. Edit: I want to add that, via use of console commands and some luck clipping through through ship in places, I did find the Core and blow it up. Once done, I placed my own core and was able to explore this ship at my leisure. So much work has evidently been put into this vessel, it's a real beauty, and while I cannot take over it (Security Protocols prevent blah blah) when placing my own Pilots seat, it did not self destruct (Reforged Eden thing?) so I was able to loot and salvage at leisure. I'm happier now I've been able to loot the ship of course, but I missed the internal fight for the ship as intended by the designer. Scoob.
Everything in this game is underwhelming. So many great ideas followed by (almost exclusively) bad implementation. If there'd be one thing i could force upon this game then it would be to force the devs to play their own game in a 200 hour session before continuing to work on it just so they can experience some of the stuff they're doing. The only reason for me to even reach this stage of the game is Project Eden and even there it is other parts that interest me more, like discovering different things (i do not mind running the same Abandoned Bunker for the 100th time in 3 minutes). And i think that's sad. Awesome CV on CV fights could be THE selling point of EGS but we got what we got. We got turrets that shoot the other side of the enemy ship even though there are enough turrets on the closer side hammering onto my shields. We got X "different" weapon systems which all feel like they're the same (and for the most part they do the same). We get our loot disappeared after 20 minutes of mindnumbingly shooting the enemies turrets/thrusters. We get turrets that can't hit their target because they're firing from 1.5km range which is far outside range, even in space. Just give EGS a rest if you feel like it. Grab another game for a few months and check periodically back with EGS. Maybe something will have changed until then, maybe not.
Regarding the first issue there is now a game file parameter that can be used to increase the despawn time "DelayBeforeSelfDestructionMinMax" In RE I believe it's still set as standard if not mistaken but can be increased so you can have more time to look around the ship The bad part is, it needs to be changed in each of the Playfields files that as a PV or OPV set Regarding the other, the issue is two fold, before we had a problem in which we could fly through a moving ship, it was game breaking as we would not colide we would just fly through an enemy ship in combat, the solution for that was to implement moving colliders, it has issues but still better than before and currently the only solution is to just exit and reload the game after the ship is stopped
In Eden most patrol vessels and freighters are set to a 1 hour despawn timer which should give you plenty of time to loot and salvage. I too have encountered these invisible walls. Sometimes they fix themselves after a minute but obviously like in your situation they do not. It's frustrating to read the many complaints and frustration players have with patrol vessels especially in the scenario. I want patrol vessels and freighters to provide a challenging but ultimately rewarding experience and you're right that the builders spent a lot of time making these great ships only to have the experience soured by a bug. I'm sure it's not an easy problem to solve and that it's on their list but you're far from the only one who has ran into this.
What a Text Wall... The MAIN-Problem is that a 'moving in a moving object' can't be solved over night. It was stated a hundred times how difficult it is to make this 'Wishful thinking' reality. And a constant warming up of this 'issue' won't help anyone. Of course it would be nice to do it. But as a SP ... what should I do with such a flying Hole in Space? Besides of looting a take over is out of the question as I can pilot only ONE Vessel at a time. Given, I have also my frustrating Moments/Issues. After a time of vent my anger and frustration with 'certain changes' I get over it and hang on. As I really like to see the FINISHED PRODUCT! And if I can contribute to that Goal... the better!
He's not trying to board a moving vessel. He's trying to board a disabled one. You can have multiple CVs and dock them together to take them somewhere, or take out the one that you need. Being able to take over a captured NPC ship would be neat. Not game breaking, but it is immersion breaking and counters what some player's expectations are. They feel disappointed. Scoob is just lucky he was playing a custom scenario. If he was playing the default game the patrol vessel would have despawned on him after a few minutes and he wouldn't have even had the chance to get anything.
Was explained several times and eventually you can try this yourself...RCS alone can m o v e Vessels so they must be destroyed as well. And as the Gravity was still active shows that some or all Generators were still running. No Gens, no Power, no Grav.
When you destroy the rear thrusters of a patrol vessel, they stop moving even if they still have power, RCS, turrets, or other thrusters. This essentially tells the game that the patrol vessel or freighter is "disabled" and to come to a stop and no longer move. At this point you can board them to take out their core and salvage the vessel.
In my experience (admittedly, using Reforged Eden) all that's needed to stop them is to save and reload (in SP) or exit-enter the playfield in MP. What I've noticed is that this is nearly always because the ship is still moving - sometimes almost impercetibly so. I wonder if adding a miniscule amount of friction to space would fix the problem?
I don't know if you will ever be able to move your avatar in a moving ship, but what I did already in 1.2-1.4 is: after disabling a ship I fly away out of sight and when I return I have infinite time to loot the ship, when I return it will be moving despite having his thrusters destroyed, but it will stop when I go behind it. I then can board the ship, loot it, core it - but not fly away with it (*). With this GO-AWAY-AND-RETURN trick at least the SP experience is ok, but it's obvious that I should not rely on tricks to make the game work acceptably. (*) What you can also do once you have cored the ship is simply make a blueprint of it which will save it in its current state, and spawn it later with the factory, that way you have a replica of the ship able to fly if you repair it.
I know this isn't an issue that can be fixed overnight, but it's also not an issue that's been addressed in five years either. Sure, it's likely not been a priority during those years, which is fine. However, it is becoming more urgent as time goes by. Progression won't seem complete without it. Unlike vanilla, where a fully functional enemy CV might despawn in mere minutes - they certainly have for me, no time to loot - I've not had any of the CV's I've defeated in this Scenario despawn. I've Cored them, which took time, placed my own Core, then looted / salvaged at my leisure. Sure, that process has been glitchy and required the console / random luck to achieve, but once Cored, interacting with these CV's has been totally fine as they're not moving. I've then flown away - having removed my Core - and the ship has persisted for hours as a stripped wreck. This is good, I got to claim the goodies from my prize. I get that there's something in the core of Emprion that means anything in motion has real problems with physical interaction and fixing this is a big deal. Hell, I can be standing on my own stationary CV parked on a planet at times and I'll randomly fall through it. However, if this worked it'd be a total game changer, massively enhancing gameplay. Imagine buzzing a PV with a buddy (MP) taking out the upper Turrets and making a hole, before one player drops down to board that otherwise fully-functional ship. Battling well-placed internal defences to make it to the bridge and, potentially, fly away with your prize. That'd be bloody epic. I've had a few encounters where things sorta worked, bar being able to pilot the ship of course. One time a PV crashed while attacking my base, I think my turrets must have taken out enough engines that it couldn't fly any more. It crashed into a swamp area near my base, which was dead cool in its own right, and somehow wedged into the ground, totally unmoving. This enabled me to stand on and walk through the downed PV pretty much normally. There was the odd "wobble" where I'd fall through to the terrain underneath, but it generally worked. And was fun. This is despite it being an older (vanilla) PV that had no internal design, just stuff to be salvaged. CV's in Reforged Eden for example are in a difference league. This is why I ask if there's perhaps some work-around to this issue so, once disabled or stuck, the ship doesn't even try to move any more, simulating it being "crashed". Let's face it, in several instances now, once an enemy CV crashes - be it into the ground or an asteroid - it's not going anywhere. Same as if all engines are blown, it's stuck. Might as well formalise it by setting a "Disabled" state, setting all manoeuvring sliders to zero and turning the thrusters off, so it can't go anywhere, allowing the player to interact with it. I think this might be achievable within the current engine limitations. It's not walking around on moving ships of course, but it allows for that boarding gameplay, so all the work put in by Ravien and other CV designers can actually be experienced by the players. I'd love to see a scenario play out thus: - Player engages an enemy CV. - Enemy CV is "disabled" either by forcing it to crash or taking out the engines and RCS (tricky). - Enemy CV is then marked by the game as "Disabled" and can no longer move. - Entering this "Disabled" stage activates onboard defences. Spawners become active, as do any Turrets and sensors. - Player can then board the ship - likely via a hole made during combat. - Player can explore the ship like any other POI, facing the usual internal defences. - Player can Core the POI, placing their own core to freeze any self-destruct count-down* * count-down, if it exists at all, should be very generous, allowing the player to enjoy raiding the ship rather than just rushing to take out the Core. Fun first. Of course, the player could elect to blow the poop out of the now disabled vessel, that's a personal choice. Personally, I want the loot and salvage...and hopefully the entire ship if ever made possible (game option please! ) I don't know if this can be done. I don't know if it's even possible to dynamically set a ship's manoeuvrability sliders all to zero dynamically. I know the game does this to me from time to time, zeroing all sliders on my ships so they cannot turn. However, they can still thrust if thrusters are present. So, IF sliders can be set to zero to prevent ship rotation and IF thrusters can be turned off to prevent movement then, on theory, it will be fully possible to walk around this now stationary CV. All I know is that a "twitchy" enemy CV full of invisible walls becomes a normal, fully able to be interacted with on foot, vessel once the Core is dead. It's while it still has a functional core -even if it's not moving - that all the issues exist. My suggestion isn't perfect, but it has the potential to add a LOT of gameplay if it can be achieved within the engine's limitation. It would be great if Eleon could give us (well, the talented modders) the ability to do this. Having an "Immobilised" flag to ensure all attempts at movement stops, to allow the boarding phase to start. I know I'm waffling to excess on this topic, but I do believe things can be improved hugely within the existing engine limitations. I had an encounter last night with a CV "Freighter" in space. I took out its single large rear thruster and it did come to a halt. However, I couldn't properly interact with it until I took the core out. It seems, from what I can tell, that any possibility of movement can cause weird issues when attempting to walk around the ship. I've had ships with no thrusters left at all that kept "twitching" and throwing me out as there were RCS's still intact. To be fair, things can be quite inconsistent. In many ways this is encouraging though. It seems the "disabled" state as I describe it is an intended feature, but depends solely on the state of the rearward facing Thrusters. Even with those destroyed though, it's not consistent with the "disabled" state. Having a variety of "disabled" states would be preferable, such as the "stuck" state where the vessel has tried to move but failed for a number of minutes. This would cover crashing into the ground as well as other obstacles, such as the asteroid in my example. I think any valid method that gets the enemy CV to stop and it cannot move again should count as "disabled" allowing the ship to be boarded. With Planetary Patrol Vessels, disabling some of the downward-facing Thrusters was enough to cause them to crash, yet that'd not count as disabled of course, causing issues boarding. Is it at all possible to allow such enemy CV's to be fully taken over by the player in Reforged / Project Eden? Is there a console command (other than save BP, spawn BP, destroy original ship) to enable it? It'd make for some fun gameplay. At the end of the day, certainly in vanilla, taking out and attempting to board an enemy CV leads to frustration. In my experience, which is quite a lot now, things tend to not go so smoothly in vanilla. You can disable a CV by taking out its rear-facing thrusters, but you'll either fall foul of the self destruct count-down prior to finding and destroying the Core. Navigating to the Core can be a real issue due to invisible walls / being thrown out of the ship. Even if you place your own Core the count-down, while slowed, still proceeds quite quickly. High value devices seem to pop very quickly, even when the ship as a whole is still largely intact. Reforged Eden seems to hugely improve on this regarding self-destruct - no CV has self destructed for me thus far, and I'm not particularly fast - but the invisible wall issue persist. I will of course keep boarding enemy CV's as best I am able, but it does frustrate to have to revert to the console to help. Apologies for the Wall of Text(tm) but it is, hopefully, a nice, relevant Wall Scoob.
Well any object "sharing" the same space will twitch and wobble, even with power off, because the game/ Unity will not allow colliders to share the same space. We see this when trying to land and there's a piece of something else intersecting with a block's "empty space" (ex. half block, door opening, tree...) and our ship will obey our commands, and when we let go of the controls the ship tries to adjust to get that object out of its own space by making *subtle* changes to its position/ rotation many times until it gets it. So in each of these attempts, the ship loses its "normal individual blocks colliders" and reverts back to a "moving ship colliders" then snaps back to the previous state and checks if intersecting problem is solved or not. Rince and repeat. After "disabling" the freighter, how did you proceed to board it? Where was your ship, CV or SV ? Any asteroids around ? Drones ? I still remember you mentioned not long ago that part of the gas giant's rings next to you was not rendered, same for the asteroids in that part, which you still collided with. Knowing this, how can we be sure that there is no other, "invisible" object causing a problem ? Or even.... GhOsTs !!
The Freighter was in open, empty space, nothing nearby other than myself. I parked my CV fairly close, but nothing should have been that close from a collider perspective. The issue did seem less severe than with my prior encounter, where the enemy CV rammed an asteroid. However, this freighter didn't have a full interior like that other ship, just cargo "pods" closed off with shutter doors with cargo/ammo boxes inside. These did not cause me problems, but I'd taken the Core out by then. The Core was quite exposed on this particular vessel and I found it easily. While I couldn't walk/fly into the ship easily - there was a sort of bridge area, but no connections (corridors) to other areas of the ship - due to invisible walls, I was able to kill the Core from outside, after shooting through some glass. I'll try to be more mindful during my next encounter with an enemy CV and see if I can stop it just through killing the rear-facing thrusters. CV combat can be a bit chaotic with sporadic fire, hesitant turrets etc. I removed the fixed weapons (missile) on my CV as they were pretty hopeless. 100+ hits on parts of an enemy CV and zero apparent damage, even once the shields were down. Sometimes I've noticed that things don't work properly when shooting a moving CV. Damage done by Turrets seems to be ok, but damage done by direct fire weapons can be a bit hit or miss. Scoob.
In 1.2-1.3 version of the game I once saw a Ilmarinen-type ship moving and stopping to the space station, my interpretation now is : its patrol route was so that it had to 'collide' with the space station and stopped moving as a consequence. When I tried to step inside the ship I was falling through the structure, and AFAIK this will happen with all ships that move or have their rear thrusters not destroyed. IIRC, the bug was: I then saved and reloaded the game and was able to stand inside the ship, but I didn't attach much importance to it at that time. Now it could be that this 'preset patrol waypoint' was chosen on purpose by the devs to make the illusion of a docking, only a dev can say it; I have also seen some freighters in space being blocked by asteroids, but until I see the ship doing some activity like using drills on the asteroid I will just interprete this as a simple collision, not a 'freightrer moving to an asteroid and mining it'. The normal behavior as for 1.5+ is: For stepping inside any vessel you need to destroy the rear thrusters, and as I said above, going away out of render range and returning will still cause the ship to move, but it will stop moving once you get nearby (and bypass any self-destruction, no need for any console commands), I didn't see anything different and if moving ships seem to 'crash' or 'dock' it just means that some obstacles are in their way during their patrol route waypoint, all this except planetary patrol vessels or war ships in space sent as reinforcement. But I'm not the programmer of the game, so I cannot tell for sure, I can only observe the game effects, a dev can tell you much more . I propose that you exactly try to replicate my post #11 above while playing so you get the exact idea, and hopefully this will be in accordance to what you want in the game, this until Eleon makes changes to the mechanic.
I reach a game stage where I give up out of boredom/frustration with some poorly executed aspect of the game. It has been a while since I managed to get much past level 15 or so and past resource collection grind for making a bigger ship. Or the two hour repair time where I go AFK and later just quietly shut it down and never fire it up again... Sometimes I make it to 25 and after trashing a few bases and PVs I just get loot fatigued (the chore of clicking on containers and removing contents - yes - I could stick a core on I guess to get at some of them). Mostly I just find the ship combat in this utterly underwhelming and ship destruction deep unsatisfying. Actually all combat in this is somewhat unsatisfying with all the buggy wierdness (ref: melee combat thread, game stalling when you are about to shoot something, enemies shooting through corners etc). Turrets in general seem completely stupid (which random out of sight object is it going to shoot at this time...). I used to tolerate all this while it was relatively novel and I was still finding my way around (maybe that is why I keep feeling I had more fun back in A11 type time frame - it seemed to progress better then too), but there comes a point where I stopped seeing a game and instead just see this endless sea of bugs, glitches and laughably cheaply done mechanics. I really wish I could take the POIs, enemy factions, more variety of blocks and texturing etc into space engineers with the mods I run in that as in many ways that is so much more of a satisfying game when it comes to ship combat (assuming modded weapons and shields etc - not what in the vanilla game which sucks) and especially destruction and boarding ops etc. Sometime I just fire up SE and spawn a bunch of stuff so I can jump in one of my ships and go blow **** up - its fun
