I'm trying to design a CV in creative mode (in orbit) and I can't even place the warp drive (behind the starter kit) because the placement distance is too low. It will, at best, only go on top of the blocks, which is not what I want. How do I increase that limit? And can I constantly move faster?
The drive has a specific size and shape (5x3x2) but it can be rotated using the del key to select axis of rotation and home/end to rotate it clockwise and counterclockwise based on the selected axis. You need to have a "bay" that is 5x3x2 to drop it in. It also has a very powerful heat and rad field all the way around it for a distance of one block so you need to account for that in terms of the livable area in the ship. The basic setup of the game is stored parametrically in the ecf files located in the /Content/Configuration directory off the games root dir in /steamapps/common ... BlocksConfig.ecf has an entry for "WarpDrive" with everything called out including the energy, cpu, pentaxid costs/unitDistance etc. Messing with these values is a black box sort of experiment- change something, start a game, place the device, see if it still works. Conceivably you could say you want the "SizeInBlocks" parameter to "1,1,1" and make a tiny engine with a squished model but I've never tried that. After you're familiar with the vanilla game, comparing ecf files with what is done by a scenario like Reforged Eden can give you a real leg up on what works and what doesn't. Acceleration from normal engines is capped at around 120 m/sec to deal with graphic limitations- the process of spawing entities in is expensive and moving slower throttles that. The cap value is hard coded by the dev team so you can't mess with it. Bigger engines let you reach the cap sooner.
Good to know, but I didn't want to change the size of the warp engine but increase the distance from the drone or myself at which I can place it. Why are force field emitters not showing up in the devices list in the control panel? I want to wire them to turn them on/off as needed. If the windows of the bridge get destroyed, the force fields should at least keep the oxygen in, so I'd switch them on when enemies are about to be encountered ...
Drone operation distance is another hardcoded limit ... for a while there was a bug you could use to bypass it. I greatly regret reporting it. Not all devices expose signal logic but in this case, the forcefield is actually just a basic block (not a device) with an interesting visual model and only 80HP regardless of size (ie "bigger" means bigger target but still only 80 points to blow it away) ... think of them as decorations to achieve visual effects. There is a shield device (high tech level, more resources/cpu/power) that prevents any damage to the blocks/devices in your ship until the shield power is exhausted but forcefields are really just a deco thing. The shutter door gives you a similar visual when open, more hit points, and can be controlled with signal logic to make it open/close but in practice most of us handle the problem you describe by making sure we never take the helmet off; it gets really whiffy in the suit when you wear it 24x7 but thankfully they don't model behaviors around needing to take a shower with the suit off. 8^) After an encounter with a Zirax patrol vessel it isn't unheard of to find yourself piloting a depressurized hulk with half the bridge simply gone. When you are in a vessel using the "V" key switches you to an outside view- some larger ships take advantage of this and the ability to place multiple pilot seats to create a "battle bridge" setup- an armored section of the ship, typically toward the rear and without any windows.
A block or devices airtight property can't be switched on and off. The current code doesn't allow for it. It is always airtight or not no matter its power setting. So in this case if they had a power switch in the control panel it would allow players to switch them off while still getting the airtight field, which would be a power exploit. A very minor power exploit since they only use 1 watt or power unit, but an exploit all the same. So since they can't/shouldn't have a power switch for exploit reasons, and they have no other properties, they don't really need to show in the control panel at all. Unfortunately we can't mod basically any aspects of the player F5 drone. Its interaction distance, along with what it can and can't interact with, is completely cut off from us. The devs haven't exported anything about it to the configs.
Still praying that one day, the wi-fi extenders allow us to extend the range of our drones. One day maybe!
It's way too short for building CVs. The drone keeps going out of range. No, it's a forcefield that keeps the oxygen in, and it switches off when you turn off the power. You can see that. And the emitters are pretty small and thus hard to hit, so it makes perfect sense to have them installed so that they can protect relevant parts like the bridge. Windows are destroyed easily. And they even require resources hard to come by. I removed them from my blueprint to lower the required amount of Neodymium. I'll have to put them back later. But you can't see through these doors. And how come that they don't require Neodymium? They obviously have a forcefield emitter built in, so they would need just as much. I usually have the helmet on, but that doesn't prevent the oxygen from escaping the vessel when the windows are shot. The supply the suit has doesn't last long. A battle bridge is probably a good idea, and maybe I'll add more cockpits later. Even with minimal thrusters, no weapons at all and the only equipment being two fridges and a food processor, it's already over the CPU limit. Why did they make the CPU limit way to low? I don't have the resources to build extenders.
I stand corrected- the ForceFieldEmitter is classified as a "Device" in BlocksConfig.ecf, but as you noted it isn't in the devices tab tree. I'm not sure if you can make them visible & controllable by updating their entry.
You are in creative mode, why on earth are you trying to build with a drone ??? tap G for godmode so you can fly and float anywhere u want to build your ship, even clip through the blocks. Drones are a waste of precious time in creative. The whole point of creative is so you can build stuff properly without the survival aspect against you forcing you to use drones etc.
Also as far as placing your warp drive, simply place temporary blocks for it to connect to so it has to go where you want it, then remove the blocks afterwards. The devices work on a snap-to basis, if for a larger device you don't have a large enough area to snap-to, it wont snap-to where you want it.
Maybe I could, but I wouldn't know how to. And it's probably not the best idea to modify these files without knowing what one does. Perhaps they get overwritten by some update and things might break ...
The drone doesn't move any slower than the player, so why not use it? It fits into small places and underneath things the player can't look into. Going through walls isn't too useful because you end up inside the objects you want to look at and easily loose your orientation. I can rotate sideways only with the xbox controller, and since I can't aim with it, I can't use it for building. Randomly getting rotated all the time isn't helpful.
You literally can't rotate in godmode. It locks you to the playfield's orientation while active. Godmode also allows you to move extremely fast, much much much faster than the player drone is even capable of dreaming of. In creative mode, godmode is far superior to the player drone in every way. I never use the drone in creative.
Well, from my perspective your building with 1 arm tied behind your back, while hopping, by using a drone in creative. The drone pointer is cumbersome and always drifts past the point you want to place the blocks. Every learned builder in empyrion will agree with me on that. When I build in GM I drag and drop sheets of hull at a time in symmetry, a drone only makes it much harder to control those drags and where I want to drop them. I would like to suggest that you watch some videos on youtube for empyrion "creative building tutorials". You will learn a few useful things. I would like to make some tutorials but I build far to fast and talk far to little. You would literally see a full SV-CV develop in front of your eyes in under 10 minutes, and you would not how it happened... I have read some of your recent posts and you seem like you are enjoying the building process in empyrion, for that reason alone I am taking time out to answer your post, because I want to help you make better use of the available tools you have. It sounds like you are making things harder for yourself. Trust me when I say, forget the drone in creative, let your player become the drone with gm. Watch some creative videos of others doing the same. One of the key parts of building right, is too place yourself at the right position to angle the blocks in the direction you want, you can use gm to move your player to learn and achieve this position a lot more precisely than with a drone. Some creative tips If your building in space make sure gm is active before you drop your starter block or spawn your build else it will be spawned at a strange orientation for when you do hit gm. gm fixes your rotation to the playfield in space like on land, up is up down is down etc. You can easily take the helm of a vessel and hold O to level it out to the playfield axis anyway if it is not already. If I remember these shortcuts right (I never look at what I press, its like changing gears when driving for me, it just happens) 1. you can delete blocks you place by holding shift and clicking the block you just dropped. 2. when placing blocks you can hold shift and then drag a line of those blocks additionally hold ctrl and this will allow you to drag a sheet of blocks by using the mouse pointer to angle in different directions, just don't hit a direction key while holding those buttons because you will zip away. 3. you can move fast with gm holding shift, you can move faster holding ctrl You can move faster still by holding ctrl then shift, you can zip round the planet quickly with this xD If I think of any other useful tips I will share, I have just woke up !
Turn off your keyboard repeat? I keep moving a lot further than intended when it's not turned off. The game has an issue with that and uses its own repeat. Why? Because its moving further than you want it to? And if so, how come the player doesn't move too far as well? I watched some and I think it's one of the things you can only learn by doing it yourself. It takes about a day for me. I'm unclear about how it should look like to begin with, and even if I knew exactly, I wouldn't be able to make it that way because the blocks are unwieldy. There are 3 different types of blocks that kinda make sense to me and all the others don't. I'm getting a little bit better each time and I'll probably never get any good at it. Then there's the question of where to place what, like where do you place fuel tanks so that the whole ship doesn't get blown up when one gets hit, or crucial things like generators you don't want destroyed. In my current CV, I'll have to take out most of the fuel tanks and instead keep fusion cells in the cargo to keep refilling the remaining tanks. They were troublesome to begin with and with more equipment being added, these tanks are becoming more hazardous, and you can't build a ship big enough for them. Yes, building is fun. I mostly modify existing vehicles rather than creating new ones though, and I don't go into creative mode for that. Going into creative mode interrupts the game, and I can't just replace the existing version in the game with the one I came up with in creative mode. I use both the player and the drone and I don't want to go through walls. And I'm lazy, so instead of walking or flying somewhere myself, I rather have the drone do it. That probably doesn't make sense because it's not really a difference, but it feels different. It's much more difficult to decide what to build than it is to place the blocks. Thanks, that's good to know. The shift keys don't work right because the game makes the distinction between left and right shift, and some things can't be configured. For example, how do you change Shift+Space (and IIRC it's left shift and not right shift for that but I can't really remember because the booster only sometimes works) for the jump booster when you have one in your HV? Even picking up stuff doesn't work right because I have it on keypad_7 and pressing either shift key and keypad_7 doesn't work to pick up a container. I still have to press right shift+F for that, and that's really awkward to do. In any case, when I press any shift key, I can't move. I can aim while pressing a shift key, but not move. There is no way to configure a keyboard for that to be possible unless I were to build one myself. They don't make keyboards for left handed use. So I don't know how useful pressing the shift key would be to remove blocks. Huh? Do you mean I can change the direction in which blocks are placed while dragging them? I can't press either Ctrl or Shift while moving on this keyboard. Pressing Shift on any keyboard while moving isn't possible, though I could press Ctrl (Ctrl is usually 'Jump') while moving on another keyboard, provided that the game can handle that. Moving on this keyboard is on keypad 8, 4 and 6. On other keyboards, it's Home, End, Del and PgDown (plus Insert and PgUp to turn left/right). That means that Ctrl and Shift are too far away on this keyboard to reach them from the movement keys, while on other keyboards, Ctrl is conveniently placed close to the movement keys so it can be pressed. On this keyboard, I can not jump. I can go up and down with keypad_0 and Enter, but for jumping it won't be fast enough because I kinda have to bend my fingers to press them. On other keyboards, I can't go up or down. Pressing Ctrl together with any of the latter usually works in games. Obviously, I can't press Shift while moving because the Ctrl key is in the way, and I don't want to remove the key cap. Playing games on this keyboard that require fast movement is probably not possible because using the number block is somewhat awkward for movement, and I have to use the number block with keyboard because the layout of the usual movement keys is unsuitable on this keyboard. (This is a 122 key buckling spring USB keyboard from Unicomp. It has extremely useful additional keys I wouldn't know what to do without with.) That's assuming that I can steer. I could 'move' pressing Shift and/or Ctrl with the left hand, but then I can't really steer. I have to have my left hand on the trackball for steering. Even if I'd 'steer' with the keyboard, I could only turn left/right but not up/down. So I don't know ... I don't see how that could work for me other than maybe making Shift and/or Ctrl lockable, but the "Sticky Keys" setting in Gnome strangely doesn't have that option at all. Keyboard configuration with Wayland is a complete mystery and it forces me to use an US layout (which the keyboard I'm using fortunately has) because it's impossible to configure a German keyboard (which I would otherwise have) to be usable. It used to be easy with xmodmap ... Enjoy your day
Your already getting good at it if your getting a little better each time, I used to mostly just edit existing builds when I started out. One day I figured out how a certain few blocks go together and from then all my stuff had some nice angles. I was playing with a default small sv stripping it apart and putting it back together to try and figure out how the angles were formed. I forgot I had made this short tutorial video of me editing the same small default SV much later as an example with angle blocks and how those few blocks can all work together. I am still earning myself as there are newer block shapes I have not even used yet.
This is video shows one of the problems I have: The blocks look all the same to me. (They are actually all the same anyway: cubes.) A long time ago, I wanted to learn a card game. Most ppl knew how to play it back then. To my surprise, I found that after like 10--15 minutes, the cards looked all the some to me and it became very difficult and straining to even tell them apart, let alone remember what they were supposed to mean or to be used for. That card game was supposed to be played pretty fast and everyone was rather impatient while I was trying to figure out what the cards were and to find out which one to play. Once I realised that, I quit learning because there was no point in it. (And I don't like random games anyway, with very few exeptions, because it's all random and therefore pointless. Your only accomplishment is making yourself directly a victim of randomness, and we all already are, only more or less. All self determination is fundamentally random.) I haven't thought about it with these blocks before, and watching your video reminded me. The blocks look all the same. And do I want to use the malformed blocks? They don't have as many hit points as the well formed ones. I build going by functionality and efficiency, not by vanity. Do I want to put vanity blocks? Adding more blocks, for vanity, having less hit points but the same weight (which is not right btw, malformed blocks having less hit points should have less weight!) is totally against what I would want. When it comes to creativity, I'm a programmer. Writing beautiful code doesn't allow for vanity. The beauty is in the creation itself. Vanity is not beauty. Why are there are no beautifully shaped blocks and no beautifully shaped fuel or oxygen tanks or beautyfully shaped generators? That is not to say that you can't build beautiful things with these blocks. At least kinda ... I looked at the Titan in creative mode because I spawned one to figure out where the bridge would be with one of the fragments, and to get back into space from the planet, and ended up totally admiring all the amazing work and planning that must have gone into building it. Who comes up with plans like that and is even able to build it? There's also a SV, 'MX5...' something in the library. I had the factory build one in my game because I wanted a SV to sit at a base on Sienna for going out to maintain the auto miners I placed when I would teleport to the base. It's a really nice design and it ended up sitting the hangar of mv CV now after I found it too nice to leave behind. I switched back to my self-designed SV after modifying it because it's built more sturdy and I wanted to take out some defense towers of a base. I'm not sure what I'll do with it; it turned out it's not ideal for the purpose I built it for because when I stand on the cockpit while accessing the miners, I'm standing in the heat wave from the thrusters far too often. I keep wondering how the creator managed to put a warp drive into it. Maybe I'll take it apart and find out and put it back together ... So you can build great things with these blocks. Only I'll very likely never be any good at it.
Practice makes perfect. But not just practice, you have to do it with the intention to get better at it. Building ships in Empyrion isn't much different than any other skill, programming included. You probably weren't very good at programming your first day either, and you can't expect to be good at building ships your first day. It's a journey that you can go on for years.
