Can Debris last longer?

Yes, exactly. Players didn't want to believe it was a problem until that picture was shown... ^^

 

I ask now, do the blocks that currently fall have collision?

 

That was myself and two or three friends. We killed every patrol ship on the server in the spawn of maybe a couple hours. The Void turned into a lag bomb. A fun hobby was finding stuff in the game that absolutely would be a problem if scaled and then doing it. My first full season i made a class 400+ base in survival, CPU came out the next alpha lol.
I'm not sure if there are ship or blueprint limits now, but that would've been our abuse as well; spawning 300+ ships in a single playfield in a few minutes, or undocking 50+ ships from a huge carrier at once.
"Don't do that, the server can't handle ittt"
Bah, it's in the game, it's in the game. They won't know how to fix (or even bother) broken stuff until someone takes it to 11.

Eleon has come up with a lot of good solutions imo. I thought CPU was a good update, more thought had to be put into ship builds (though SV needs rebalance, too expensive).

 

nope. you can phase right through those bad boys.

 

Yeah, I thought that was what I was doing while trying to gather them.
So then why would extending their existence for a short time in a SP off-line game session cause such a problem for other players? if it could be done, which it can't

 

Like I wrote previously. No collision = other blocks fall in = exploit (1 click picks a lot). Bonified gratification for being careless. It also may impact performance depending how long time is extended, and other issues could cascade in like I described. For 5 more seconds I think the devs might not see it worth all the trouble, and for longer delays other problems have to be considered.

Also the principle that if developers yield one inch, they will be asked for a foot later. I doubt they would happily open that can of worms.

 

So the original post asked a simple enough question: Can debris remain accessible for a longer period of time?

I don't think anyone here is asking for some monumental exploit to the system that will allow them to collect all the rare goods just by severing the ground floor links to everything above it. That usually doesn't get you what you were hoping for anyway. Every time I've ever collapsed a structure in this manner, loot boxes become unavailable. So there's nothing to be gained except filling up my ship with basic metal plates and carbon substrate.

It's a viable tactic in the game to cause a structure to collapse. So I'd be pretty happy if spending the time to collapse a structure allowed me a little more than a scant few seconds to collect the basic scrap it will result in. Even if it's just a bump from 5 to 15 seconds that would be more than enough time to grab as much as your connected containers can hold.

If it wasn't intended to be able to harvest debris in this manner, then there was basically no point in developing an entire structural integrity system to allow for it.

 

I'm not about to step in the middle of Kasso/Spoon joust here, but I will offer up this much:

Physics, especially simulated physics, can be an extremely intensive process. I've run physics simulations for places like SANIDA National Laboratories and Lockheed Martin, with computer data centers that make Amazon look amateur, and have seen these sorts of simulations take dozens or hundreds of hours to complete. For PC games, this level of physics simulations would simply not be playable. Havok is one of the better physics systems used industry-wide for gaming, largely because it tends to be pretty lightweight, but that comes at a price, and that price is very often accuracy of physics simulations for the sake of framerates.

I have done quite a bit of modding for many games in many engines, some that use Havok, some that use other packages, and some that simply go it alone. Largely this is due to budget constraints, but it can also be due to consideration for the target audience. Trying to implement something like Scanline's Flowline 2 fluid dynamics solvers into a PC game... well, it might give the the best looking, most realistic water, fire, clouds and other fluid-dynamics systems you've ever seen, if you don't mind building an i9 18-core PC with 256 GB of RAM and a couple of RTX 3090 cards... I mean, what else do people have $10k sitting around for, except to play games, right?

Can in-game physics here be improved? Sure, no doubt. Will they ever be even 2/3 accurate? Probably not. Will they be "good enough" for the majority of people? I'd have to give that a big yes. Will they be "good enough" to make everyone happy? Not a chance.

 

That is kind of what I do anyway - just make sure I have already linked my inventory to my ship. Take away that option and I probably wont bother to salvage at all as it is just too laborious in this - scouting, mining + processing becomes easier.

 

Agree to all ( and congrats) but honestly you (and I ) are wasting time explaining this here. It's obvious no one wants to understand, probably thinking that playing it "dumb" will make the devs change their mind...

"Oh, but it's just 1 second..."

lol

 

Not true. There is no buggy consequence of modding any of the drills (the multitools are classed as drills). I've been modding them for years.

Exactly. One minute would be plenty adequate.

As an aside, at least the too-brief despawn timers for dead NPCs (and drones) are exposed and can be modded. Now I can take my time when murdering Zirax territorial patrols and not have to worry about losing loot.

Has it never occurred to you to remap the console to another key and leave the tilde unmapped to anything? I would suggest the numeric keypad's [/], but if you never even use it then just leave it unmapped.

 

I have not yet entered here, so I have not abandoned all hope yet. There might still be one person out there who goes "Oh, I hadn't thought about it like that."

 

The OP just wanted to know if the time could be extended. Now he knows that in it's current state, it can't.
Again, as I have said many times, give the player the choice. It could be possible to give the player the the ability to change the time for how long they want the debris to be there (within reason). This will hardly affect single player with performance issues. Same goes for servers. All depends on how many play on the server, tweaking of the time would sort out any performance issues, if there are any.
Sound like some are saying that the game is going to be unplayable if the time is extended.

 

Agreed, I noticed that being near water reduced my FPS to a sea-sickening level... so, I reduced the water quality to 'low' and got better performance there (all on my own) I still have the water 'walls' with steep inclines but it's not likely a settings issue, and I don't really care, it'll get better I'm sure,
So bearing that in mind, and added that there's a config file the individual would be able 'as you rightly point out' to choose a performance/satisfaction balance her/himself.

@ VulcanTourist... NO, I hadn't thought of that, but I'll do it now, thankyou for the nudge towards common sense,
But... I'm the 'odd' player that doesn't use the AWSD side of the keyboard, I prefer the direction cursors and numpad side, so I'll find something to the left..
ta.

 

I fail to see why a simple request to extend the despawn time has to be seen as someone asking for a massive rewrite of the physics engine in the game. NOBODY is asking for that.

 

That is not the point anymore. If the OP had not asked "why it works like this" I would have left Spoon answer it... ^^

Then if someone argues that some reasons are irrelevant (ex. performance issues, implementation complexity and risks of domino effect on other functions etc) I disagree and explain why.

Hope it clarifies. And "massive re-write of the physics engine" is exagerated, but it doesn't mean that because this "change" does not require a whole physics engine review that the devs have no reason not to jump into this clapping hands with joy.

Up to a point I'm playing the "devil's advocate" here, and it mostly exposes what the players really believe what the developers can do. Be aware that players exposing their cards like this is just giving the developers the means to win that little game, with the least effort possible. So if players really want some changes, I guess the best way to get results is to learn a bit of the same language the developers are speaking. Just "pretending to know" is quite easy to spot for them.

Fix structural integrity, which has been requested for eons by lots of players, or just add another layer of cheesy patching over the broken version we have because some players want to stare at blocks for hours ? This is like putting tape on a window we know we want to change anyway.

And who doesn't want better physics in this game ? Seriously, let's waste another round on band-aid fixes ?

 

So can we at least all agree that what was asked for didn't warrant 4 pages of back and forth accusing one another of ill intent? Asking if the debris timer can be extended should have been a simple thing to get an answer for, but not now with a bunch of people answering things that were never questions being asked.

 

Seems quite silly, doesn't it?

I think it's more of an issue of balance than an issue of performance.
Extending the time debris sticks around by another 10-30 seconds isn't going to really hurt performance. People will still rush to pick them up as soon as they fall to risk not losing it.

If it's about game balance, well yes it is much faster to make a POI fall down and pick up the debris than it would be to multitool the entire thing by hand. Even in RE where you have AOE multitools that make salvaging literally 5x faster it's still faster to bring down the POI and pick up the debris. You get a bunch of basic steel, sathium, etc really fast this way after you've looted or salvaged the valuable parts.

I guess, sure, you get the equivalent of an iron + titanium deposit from doing this. That's not really unbalanced I think if the debris last a bit longer.

 

My point was simply that this may be a can of worms the devs might not want to open. I'm not going to lie just to please players and say "it's just a digit change".

What is silly is saying basic game objects like colliders have nothing to do with the matter, and that structural integrity is irrelevant. If the objective it to try to make the devs look bad if they decide not to change anything, at least some players know better.

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