For consistency and balance in survival mode. If hardcore survival mode isn't your thing, well, that's presumably what Freedom Mode is for: to use the combination of game systems that is most fun for you.
How exactly do you find consistency and balance in a sci-fi game? And freedom mode looks pretty stupid. I want everything about survival mode, without weight/volume. I get it. Some people want that, and as long as I can turn of that feature in survival mode, it's all good I suppose. It seems like it's more a technical and statistics nerds wet dream, than a fun game feature.
In general, by basing game systems on real-world systems that are already consistent and balanced (this is particularly the case for physics). Now, you do have to choose the right level of abstraction to turn complicated real-world systems into workable game systems, but, if you do it right, you retain the consistency and balance of the original system. More specifically, you can obtain consistency and balance for mass and volume by computing the mass and volume of every single item based on its recipe. One can go even further by computing things like hit points and weapon damage based on block and bullet recipes, respectively. Freedom mode is in its infancy at present, so I don't think any of us know what it's going to evolve into just yet. I'd hope to see a massive number of toggles and configurable options (along with some sensible presets) that would allow players to fully customize their experience from straight survival all the way to creative. So, in your case, you could select the survival preset, but then toggle off mass and volume. Meanwhile, if this happened, I'd expect survival mode to have substantially fewer options (maybe just difficulty, even); it would deliver an uncompromising survival experience and serve as the balance point for all game systems.
I never wanted to say that alpha 8 was more realistic, but i've read that those weight/volume system was introduced to get more realistic and i wanted to show that this new system isn't more realistic at all. I don't need that much realism in game.
Ok, we know that you Geostar want a simulative game but this is not a game anymore, its frustration. Stop defending this insane inplementation. WE want to survive not play a simulator with stupid volume in it. We care about volume and we can spawn ships out of the pocket. Yes i want to keep the game easy, carry 10000000 of blocks and spawn stuff from my hat. To developers: stop wasting time and efforts on this.
Please quote generously and give voice to my larger point. The compromise is too steep! I specifically mentioned that I was having to compromise on reasonable armored vehicles. A lot of my designs are single skinned steel not hulking combat steel gun and cargo carriages. Ok? and if it only effected CV's would that make the point any less valid? You still be careful of the placement of CC's and that still changes a lot in terms of design. For example corridors from the back to the front of a HV will now be impractical in a lot of cases unless I'm willing to build a lot bigger (a design compromise) or am willing to balance the load of the HV everytime I add cargo or go way overboard with the hover engines (another design compromise). I admit I was being a little hyperbolic here, but in aid of a point! You will have to be much more conscious of design choices because yes the little things will add up especially in larger builds and yes even the choice of carbon blocks over steel is a design compromise since armor can also be decorative with single skin hulls and while carbon blocks are lighter in HV's/SV's it is definately not by an order of magnitude, I think they're around a 4th of the weight. (nice word for ten times lighter by the way(a reference to CV blocks) it makes it seem much more dramatic! ) As to your point on aesthetics of course they're important why do you think I'm annoyed by these changes and the fact I'll have to make these choices? Death cubes will exist pretty much as they are now. Maybe they'll carry a little less ammo or be a little lighter in the armor department but they'll be largely unchanged and will have an even bigger advantage over ships that are having to make much bigger compromises to stay useful while still keeping to a design they find visually appealing. You seem to constantly misunderstand this, Combat cubes are efficeincy enbodied in this creative enviroment we have. As I said before the only ships this will significantly effect are one that are made to look nice while having moderate armor coverage because they're trying to balance the extremes of the fringe builds against people that just want their stuff to look cool while they go about their game. Did you even read the quote you link to this statement? In fact did you really read and understand my post as a whole?... You know what I give up! I'll just make make combat cubes. They'll look ugly but It'll be practical, cost effective and able to do everything I need it to! I tried that before in experimental and you told me to build a trailor for my mining HV so I can fit enough cargo expansions.... I don't really need that kind of design "advice".
The thing is we are taking about "hardcore survival mode" in what I've considered to be the very beginning of the game. Something that isn't even that meaningful in the overall scope of the game. I don't think the devs envision this as being something like Rust or dayz or any of the other games in that genre. We are talking vehicle creation, space ships, traveling to distant planets, supply routes, HUGE things. When you consider the grand scope of the design, worrying about how much someone can carry at the beginning of the game seems like a massive waste of time
Eleon, you might be overthinking the whole volume thing. Another way to handle this; 1) Have various size prefab cargo boxes. You have this to some extent but I'm thinking sizes from a locker all the way up to shipping containers. Each container would have X amount of space. A small locker might have 1x3 squares. A footlocker maybe 1x2. The square boxes maybe 2x2. The rectangular ones 2x4, the thin rectangular ones 1x4, etc while a shipping container might have 15x40 or something. This is key for the next step. 2) Represent volume by giving items a footprint based on logical size. For example right now everything takes up a single inventory slot. You could have it so small things like a medpack use a single inventory slot while something like a constructor might use an 10x10 sized space. It would be too big to fit in a locker. You'd have to use something bigger. 3) Weight values. Everything is assigned a weight value and players can only carry so much weight so even if they have the inventory slots to carry a constructor they might not have the strength to do so. Keep the logistics system for accessing inventory and moving things around.
It is meaningful - it adds nice progression) It prevents you from carrying infinite ammo and supplies into wilderness. It prevent you from mining whole mine early on. From raiding POI on a bike and packing it all into your inventory. But it also needs lots of balancing and polishing. Especially learning curve - it needs to become shorter. Half of angry comments are born from people who can't place a constructor. P.S. I would really like virtual toolbar to work only for F5 drone. And externally bigger CEs. Like Container S, M, X, XL... You mean like subnautica does? That's one really hardcore game in relation to sandbox inventory. Making Empyrion one item - one slot, will make thing even worth, while adding stacks into equation of this system might work, there are too much of disparity between item sizes and amount - single credit card keeping as much space as oxygen tank clearly won't work. But if it will keep lets say 0.1 of tank, artillery turret will have to keep size that won't fit on the screen. Besides stacks simply don't fit well into sci-fi games, volume is worth it just for avoiding stacks to a degree. Large things do need to be more expensive and that means player will need more resources. But from my point of view normal mining won't cover it. Some kind of mining progression to complement progressing needs will be better. You start by mining manually -> you need more ore -> you make better tools -> you need more ore again -> autominers/you make vessel based miners -> you need more again -> you start mining asteroids/gain ability to detect and mine deeper veins(autominers only) -> mining drones(space variation of autominers)/scan space outside of planetary range for richer asteroids, and warp to them... P.S. Whole resource system at this point is too planetary based (space contains only some common ores and nothing unique/rare) and rather crude. Raw resources cover only solids (sans water), and most equipment requires only iron (which magically turns to steel), copper and silicon.
Exactly. It's an approximation of volume. Eleon probably discussed it before deciding on the current system but something like Subnautica's system is how I'd do it.
Sorry you can not make the 8k cargo box you need with survival constructor or move the 2.50ksu large constructor in it you need to make a 8k container first that can be done in an HV constructor but not in survival constructor then you put the 8k container into the base then you make a large constructor with the survival constructor then you put the large constructor into the wireless link between you and the base box in your building bar or have to survival constructor make the 8k cargobox controller
Do you realize that scrolling alone will take forever in such case? It's worst possible system for Empyrion. And 'credit' card is supposed to be thousands times smaller then artillery cannon, how are you going to show this difference with subnautica-like inventory system?
Like I said it would be an approximation. Inventory slots(personal backpack, cargo boxes of various sizes) would have limited slots. Your personal backpack might be 20 slots. A locker might be 1x3. A small cargo box might be 3x3. A huge shipping container might be 10x40 or something. You wouldn't be scrolling so much as switching between different inventories. The scrolling would come in when you're sorting through a list of containers which is how it is now. Volume would be controlled by the size of the container(which would be reflected both in it's physical size in game as well as the number of storage slots which are a logical reflection of its size) and the size of objects(how many inventory slots they'll occupy being a reflection of their size). Small items can make bigger stacks than large items and you need large containers to store large items. That way you don't need modular containers or a volume stat.
In such case inventory will hold either only 20 stones, which is too small for Empyrion (we are used to thousands...) or it is stacks all over again, it will be even more ridiculous when you will put 1 credit card, 1 bandage, 1 pill and 6 different bullets into 3x3 cargo box and it becomes full. And will be even less convenient then current system. Now you at least can store all in one place.
So, what would make the compromise less steep for you, while still keeping mass and volume? Well, I'd also be ok with cargo mass being added at the ship's existing center of mass. Ah, that's true, I was thinking of CV blocks when I wrote that. Well, perhaps carbon composite blocks should be even less massive relative to steel blocks than they are now to make fine-detailing (both inside and out) have less of an impact on the ship's overall mass. In thinking about it, I think you're right that death cubes are an optimal configuration for combat and may always be so. That doesn't mean that they're necessarily optimal for anything else, however. Mass and volume mean that the process of optimizing a ship solely for the purpose of combat ends up excluding other roles like cargo transport, mining, and (eventually hopefully) remote sensing and research/exploration. Also, with enough low-mass decorations, a death cube need not be an ugly brick, either; if the mass of the decorations is low enough, say 1% of the overall mass, then I'd expect any decrease in overall performance to be within the day-to-day variability a player's skill. Yes, I understood your post. Essentially, mass and volume will require ships to be redesigned to be larger in order to have the same functionality as before, meaning that a lot of existing compact designs will no longer be practical. But here's a question: if you weren't familiar with the way things were before mass and volume, would you still feel the way that you do? Consistent and balanced handling of mass and volume is needed as part of the foundation for all of those activities. Resource gathering is critically important for shipbuilding, the consumables that can be stored on a ship (and the mass that they add) is critically important to traveling to distant planets, and supply routes are important precisely because moving around large amounts of material is a nontrivial problem (and requires specialized ships, possibly along with escorts). Subnautica's system is ok when dealing with small amounts of materials. It quickly breaks down once you have dozens of lockers filled with materials because stuff doesn't stack. Yes, the subnautica approach runs into issues when you have items that have vastly different volumes (which is not the case in subnautica).
I'm not talking about an exact copy of Subnautica's system. That's just the basic idea....containers have slots. The number of slots varies by container size. Items take up X amount of inventory slots based on size. Like I said, an approximation of volume. What would be different is that 1) Smaller things could be stacked and 2) Eleon could expand on the type and size of containers all the way up to massive shipping containers. You can't really build a warehouse or a shipyard full of containers in Subnautica but we can in Empyrion. Anyways, that's my 2 cents.
Geo, you are describing weight management as being needed, and "critically important", but I don't think you understand in terms of overall gameplay, how trivial that is. If it can easily be shut off, how critically important is it? If it is modded out of lots of games, how is it needed? The game has progressed so far without the need for weight management. The only thing it can possibly add in terms of gameplay, is the need to make multiple trips to fulfill resource requirements, the need to make bigger ships bound by this b.s. "realism" that can never be achieved, instead of giving the players the freedom of creativity, and fun that comes with that.
1. We are talking about survival game with FPS elements, where not being able to put whole spaceship into your inventory is pat of a challenge. But unfortunately mass doesn't affect player yet. 2. In alpha 8 you could put a lot of medicines into your inventory and just go into POI all rembo/gun blazing, completely overlasting anything and everything... it is a bit harder to do with volume limitations (if only jetpack was affected by mass!) 3. Volume limit is really important for combat simply because small and agile vessel should not overlast hulking monstrosity simply by the fact of having 'unlimited' ammo. Same for mass - even if we add volume, it will both weight a lot. (volume increases physical size, mass forces to add more thrusters) 4. We build ships, we want those ships to work and feel alive and for that we need both mass and volume, otherwise trader ship is no different from combat raiding ship. Traders kinda have to be heavy and forced to be large. 5. You fly empty ship and you fly full ship and you fill!!! the difference. Isn't that enough reasons to have volume?
I knew that these problems would arise with "volume" the slot system is already fine foe that purpose. The weight system should be implemented but not in this way without other gameplay systems supporting it (such as tech tree, rcs, thruster overhaul). Now, in order to tackle the early game weight problem, either Eleon will have to make hover thrusters extremely efficient (putting them in a huge advantage compared to SV, and creating more imbalance) or find a way to create a new "cargo vehicle" type. This is the **** that I had in mind when I suggested tracked vehicles, it was inevitable. NOW, regarding the "units"... I don't think it's a good move, it will create more confusion than solve. Speed is expressed in m/s, distance in meters, weight in kg, force in N and etc... Volume should be M^3 and energy Watts for consistency's sake, the values themselves can be just waved away with the "space magic" excuse.
