A9 - Discussion : Volume and weight limitations

And, as we all know, size does not matter...how about trying the SAME experiment with Combat Steel or Concrete Blocks?
Iron Ingots, even a Stack of 1000 a piece, don't take up the same amount of Space as 1000 BLOCKS.

 

Oh, and about volume...Liter as definition for Volume when no other Item uses the same term...we don't store liquid's in CC.
Therefore a formal change to dm³ /DCM would be in place (equivalent to 1 Liter)

 

I edited the scenario file, but either it didn't save or something else happened because it didn't work on my save and it was disabled again the next time I checked. I looked at my gameoptions.yaml file but it doesn't have an option for enabling weight, it just has what looks like the difficulty settings I picked when I started up.

Do I just add it to that file? Or do I need to edit the weight enabling feature into every playfield now?

 

Ideally, inventory slots should never be a limiter on the amount of stuff you can store, for the most part. Volume and weight should be the limiting factors. As it currently stands, this is not the case at least for many common items. That might mean increasing the stack size of blocks as well to make sure you can fit them all into a modular container to fill up the container's volume.

 

Lets wait what the Devs have in mind with this "slider" on the outside of the Box before we call for Changes that MUST be done, will we?

 

I'm excited to see what they have planned!

 

As they stand, fuel tanks have no concept of varying fuel energy (PU) or physical (SU) density (based on fuel type). Depending on the fuel and its properties, fuel tanks may be better or worse than putting the fuel items in generic cargo storage. @geostar1024 is pushing for this to be balanced appropriately (probably resulting in an odd shift back to using slots for fuel types, making fuel more like the current ammo boxes), though as ever I find so much realism to be a bit overzealous for Empyrion...

 

Oh please no. Just like in ARK. I see things need to be limiting but i actually don't see any fun in Mass integration yet. Because it simply is no fun to be crawling around at slow speed when playing a game.

But i still hope this mass and volume stuff is a proper presented game option to be set and/or switched on/off when starting a game or setting up a server (not the inappropriate method of changing game files).
Then more than one group can enjoy the game.

 

I think mass affecting ships makes sense, but the player already can't carry too much anyway so I agree with you for the player inventory.

 

Player Mass could be done as a status affecting stamina, food and or air consumption. Then leave standard moving speed alone. So if you need to load down for a quick shuffle for some reason, like hauling out from a POI, you can still move around fine, but it's not really sustainable.

 

Well even for ships i don't really like that. Not at current speeds and not with the restriction it puts on building so i personally hope its an option, a real checkbox/slider option.
I am just not too thrilled about having to build vessels with walls of thrusters in every direction. But that is exactly what i said years ago when they came out to present thrusters being needed in every direction unlike the first trailer they pitched. Integrating mass will only make it worse.
If only we had thruster nozzles as a directional output but the force being applied by modular thruster engineblocks (like modular cargo containers are working currently) it would help big time.

 

It's worth keeping in mind that acceleration is what decreases with increasing mass, not speed. And the cruise function makes handling ships with low acceleration a lot easier these days.

 

@Arrclyde was talking about players moving slowly, as is the typical implementation of the "over-burdened" effect in games.

@7HzHetrodyne 's suggestion that it could increase stamina use instead is...interesting.

I'm reluctant to admit it: I could see that working. ... But it's still just #MoreMeterManagement.

 

We'll talk some more about realism, just wait a sec to set up my WiFi cos I have some copper ore to transmit...

 

I enjoy the term meter management!

Here's the challenge with that. Meter management has been a staple of gaming for 50 years. D&D is probably the first massively published game that featured things like HP and exp. It's a core feature in any RP since. To your point, most of the best games have maybe one or two stats to keep track of.

At some point new status bars just get redundant like in WoW, the only point of any new stat is to keep players paying their subscription. It's all the same... kill a bunch of stuff to increase the arbitrary score, to get the whatever item.

To me, I'm ok with something else to track, but the method of changing that slider should add a game element that is separate from whatever else is soaking up the time played.

It seems to me that volume/mass could add that if done correctly. It adds a new puzzle to solve. They could probably do to remove some of the status ailments. Temp and radiation, for instance, pretty much both do the same thing. The main stats all add their own element, because each operates differently, and a different solution is required to fix.

When it comes to building and designing a vehicle, the way physics is currently handled is broken IMO. I'm hoping that the volume and mass are tied in to that mechanism in such a way as to provide self balancing for aspects like acceleration, max speed in atmosphere and attitude handling.

I hope that volume puts a damper on the game playthrough rate. Right now it's too easy to get to end game (but I think I that's intentional in early access.) At the end of the day, its perhaps a better way to extend game hours than the traditional "kill more, and bigger stuff" grind that just gets old.

Especially in the survival/ sandbox genre. It's hard to add a challenge that's meaningful after a certain point. Not much point to just go explore a new procedurally generated desert planet. Theyre all the same. That's any game.

Sidenote.. one game that I love for procedural generation is Nethack. Each level is similar, sure. But there's a reason to work through each one.

Sorry for the digression lol

 

Personally I'd be fine with the idea of being "bogged down" so you can't sprint, but not at a "realistic" level of what I can carry in real life, more like "Conan level" where I only get bogged down if I carry more than a ton or whatever. I prefer the limitation of walking slow when being overencumbered, as opposed to not being able to pick stuff up at all.

Thrusters and RCS balancing made no sense before the mass changes. I think everyone knows the prototypical example, that the SV small thruster jet is the best one and everything bigger is useless (except as decorations) because it produces less thrust for its size. Or the fact that the SV having no T2 RCS, but the CV having a T2 RCS, means that it is easier to make a nimble battlecruiser than a nimble fighter.

I think they know all that, but they had to get cargo mass in the game first before they bothered to rebalance the thrusters. So I'd expect them to increase the thrust of many thrusters, particularly larger ones, so that there's actually a reason to build larger thrusters, and you do not need to make walls of thrusters to get effective movement. (At least I hope.)

I do hope when they rebalance thrusters that they either implement whatever limitations on having open intake or exhaust that they plan to impose along with it, or abandon the idea of requiring space for exhaust, so that we don't have to redesign all thruster configurations twice.

 

SUGGESTION: Volume Capacity for Backpack/HV/SV/CV/Base - rebalancing

At present, the HV/SV capacity p/cargo box seems to be even less than the backpack (backpack 500 and cargo box 250?). In comparison the CV/base cargo box is 8000..! This really needs to be rebalanced as the capacity for SV/HV is almost unusable at present. It would be almost impossible to build a decent HV mining vessel of any use with these restrictions. My suggestion is to increase the SV/HV cargo volume to halfway between the backpack and the CV/Base capacity - this would seem to make far more realistic sense.

 

SUGGESTION 2: Collecting large items from the floor

I recently dropped a Large Constructor and, having only 500 space in my backpack, could not move it from the floor to the cargo boxes, resulting in the loss (early game!) of a vital piece of kit. Can we have a system to move things dropped on the floor direct to connected cargo boxes?

 

You were connected to a container with enough free space, but did you have the Connected Toolbar active (switch with T)?