TL;DR: This is 100% a pie-in-the-sky dream covering everything that I'd like to see in a big update to make playing with multiple people on the same ship more useful & enjoyable. It includes being able to walk around inside of moving vessels, drones, launch/vehicle bays, and various control stations to provide other useful activities for passengers. A number of these also have uses outside of multi-crew vessels, but all of these things have specific use for multi-crew vessels. 1. The ability to walk around inside of moving vessels. Some of the things I'm going to list in the thread are also trying to be specifically designed to be doable even with this feature not present, it's a technical hurdle that will probably need to be dealt with in order for some of these things to be possible. The ability to walk around inside of a moving CV and even make modifications to it while it’s moving would be damn handy. Harvest crops, build constructors, repair damage, etc… give us the ability to do things while we’re traveling between POIs. 2. The ability to fly/reposition vessels inside of moving vessels. One of the most common things I want to be able to do when someone is flying a CV around and I’m a passenger, is simply to be able to make modifications to one of my existing ships. Even if I can walk around, repositioning a vessel is often a prerequisite to making some modifications to it. Thus… really having the physics inside of vessels (CVs in particular) be good enough that you can even take off and reposition while in-flight would be a huge benefit. This also has some other interesting implications for scenario design and PvP (not that I play PvP, so my personal interest is more in the scenario design possibilities). The ability to actually punch a hole into a CV, fly in and get out of your ship, and begin fighting the crew sounds like an amazing time. 3. Ship’s drones. The idea here is to be able to place down blocks that can be access to spawn a drone, functionally identical to the player drone but tethered to that block instead of the player. The drones may have some other differences, such as maybe having a set hot-bar that utilizes ship resources instead of player resources, but that’s really optional. Even if it literally just a player drone that is tethered to the block location instead of the player location, this becomes really useful. This would probably require the ability to walk around inside of a moving vessel to really be useful, since a lot of the time the use here is to be able to drop down a drone at a remote (or even a complete inaccessible location that there are no access doors to) location while moving to quickly do repairs. You could even face the drone blocks towards the exterior of the ship in order to deploy drones for looting of POIs as someone else with a ship tool turret uses it to salvage a structure. Another cool option here is to spawn, with some resource requirements, actual combat drones. Controllable weapon drones for both attack/defense both internally or externally has really cool scenario and PvP opportunities. 4. Slave ships. Similar to ship drones, but instead of spawning a drone it either spawns or takes control of a ship that has been fitted to act as a slave ship. There are a whole bunch of implementation details here that I’d probably be happy with regardless of how they were implemented. I’d be good with having to pre-build ships that are docked to the controlling vessel and have ‘slave modules’ in them and are linked to a ‘slave-control’ block. I’d also be happy having these blocks create their own small ships and spawn them when they’re activated, with some form of resource cost to recreate them if the spawned ships are destroyed as opposed to being returned to the slave control block. There are a lot of different ways to implement this, honestly all of them result in some really cool game-play options. I love the idea of a CV pilot engaging a big base, while other players activate slave control blocks and spawn fighters to engage with the base defenses up close and personal. Some other uses include spawning HVs with tool turrets to perform repairs or salvage operations, spawning mines or suicide ships equipped with explosives. This, I feel, has the opportunity to help bridge a bunch of the gaps in the ‘CVs should be used for space combat’ mentality, by still requiring SVs and HVs to be used in atmosphere, but having them spawned from or controlled by a CV ‘carrier’ or ‘mothership’. 5. Ship’s toolbars & stations with an assigned set of tasks. Toolbars on everything could be doing soooooo much more. They could even use being added to bases via various blocks that are currently purely cosmetic. The long story short is that nearly everything in the CP should be able to get placed on a toolbar, and every seat with control capabilities should have it’s own toolbar that is remembered separately from the other seats. Most notably, this means that every switch on a control panel (custom group toggles, signal toggles, individual device power switches, etc...) should be able to be toggled from a toolbar (with toolbar feedback on the state of those switches) and every device that can be accessed should be able to placed on the toolbar. So if you go over to a seat that was setup as a logistics control center, you’d have a toolbar that would open up constructors and containers. If you went to a tactical seat you might have shield & weapons controls. Combined with more things for passengers to do, and you’ve really got a streamlined and powerful UI that lets multiple people actually handle different parts of a ship. A mining vessel with two seats could have a tool turret allocated to each seat. One of those seats is a pilot’s seat that lets the person control the vessel, and the other seat has constructors on the hotbar to begin the process of converting rocks and ore into various materials as you move between resources. Both seats have the radar available, letting the players assist in navigation and finding resources. One or both seats could have outward facing utility drone spawners that could be used to go in and extract the last little bits of ore if they happen to be just beyond the drill turret’s range. 6. Shield Controls. A method of making shields at least a bit more dynamic. There are a few different ways that I can see doing this. There are two that I think I’m a fan of. The first is the ability to orient the shield such that some portion of the shield is stronger, takes less damage when it takes a hit, and some portion weaker and thus takes more damage. The specific controls here are up for a lot of debate. A simple method would be to use view orientation to control it. You just rotate your view, and the shield is the strongest in the direction you’re looking and the weakest on the other side, with the ability to tap the alt key (or whatever key look around is mapped to) in order to look around with reorienting the shield. The second is the ability to specifically strengthen or disable the shield in certain areas via the placement of sphere’s that show up while in a ‘shield control view’. You basically click on a section of the ship and it created a sphere at that spot which reduces incoming damage or can alternatively select the option to place down a sphere that disabled the shields in that section in order to place blocks for in-combat repairs (especially combined with the ability to control drones that can be spawned in close proximity to areas needing repairs) I can also see an alternative form of shielding, lets call it a force field generator, separate from the current shield generator, that would allow for shield ‘blocks’ to be spawned. These blocks have a limited amount of health just like other blocks and spawning them requires power from the force field generator. This allows for a ship that has invaders to place force fields internally to stop or slow down the invaders or to spawn force field blocks to temporarily patch a hole in the hull. 7. Turret targeting controls. The current turret controls are good for single player. You can’t really manage the targeting of individual turrets while trying to pilot a vessel, but what about a block that is connected to a set of turrets and allows you to specifically tell it’s turrets to target one single, specific target. You can literally click on a block/device that you can see on an enemy ship, get feedback on what you targeted to confirm you got the right thing, and then click a button and all of the turrets specifically attack that one block/device. ------ On a personal note, I wish that you guys were hiring, I would happily send you guys a CV and examples of some of my work. I feel fairly confident in my ability to make all of the above work once I got to know my way around what you guys have already built in unity. Sadly, the last thing I was about to find about you guys hiring is from back in 2017 and it’s link now leads to a 404 page which makes me sad.
This wall of text looks like an application for a job haha Just kidding I like your ideas, tbh some of them were reported huge amount of times. Like ability to walk on moving vessel. Everyone on the forum knows, that devs cannot handle it atm. They have other stuff to do, so we have to patiently wait, maybe one day. Number 2 seems directly related to #1. Once(or if) they implement proper physics for moving vessels, logically, it should be doable. About your drone ideas, I want to add that if you want to spawn a drone or a ship, or whatever controlled by the AI engine or the player, there should be a Bay that actually keeps these drones. Like one bay has a volume limit to keep 5 drones, but can spawn only one drone at a time. Drones crafted in advanced constructor from advanced materials and kept in a bay. If a drone is destroyed, another drone spawned. It should be absolutely balanced this way. Also, there could be a possibility to place multiple drone bays, for different purposes. But of course there should a be limit too. Maybe 2 or 4 bays per CV. #5 seems a bit weird tbh. I mean, I dont see how it should help the player. We already have a lot of micromanagement in CP, and your idea is to move parts of these to other blocks. Doesnt it make things overcomplicated? Why change seats to access something(even if it has fancy toolbars) when you have access to everything from the same menu? Your shield ideas are good though, but I dont think it is going to happen. All I want right now is stackable shield generators lol Like place different types of generators and have all of their HP to sum up. I know it sounds OP, but it should drain hell amount of a power and pentaxid anyway, and you need huge CPU for this, so why not?)) About turret targeting controls, while I like the idea, again, I dont like, that you are going to bind it to a different block. Changing seats is not a good idea for myself at all. To sum up, beatifull ideas you have there. I posted such things too, and I already checked a lot of similar walls of text full of fantasy and stuff. We have only one issue - we need someone to implement this stuff lol As far as I understand developers are not going to hire or create modding tools and manuals right now, they are focused on something else and I am not going to argue if it is good or not. The game is theirs, so that how it is. Lets be around and watch what happen.
I think I'd enjoy working for them, but they're sadly not hiring. So I have to settle for hoping and poking them with ideas. I intentionally left the details for spawning drones/ships more vague other than the obvious material costs for it. Personally, I'd like to see a drone bay that can be ordered to build drones/ships and has it's own internal inventory. In the ideal pie-in-the-sky world with capabilities to expand the storage, etc... through a system similar to container extensions. But it could be built on much simpler terms and also be really good still. This is also one of those things that can work even if ship internal physics don't, though that'd obviously limit it to spawning ships externally. The goal with 5 is to simplify switching between devices and other common tasks. It's important to note, that this doesn't do away with the control panel. You can still do all the things there. But it certainly feels like pressing 3 and clicking to take control of a tool turret is fast than pressing p, moving your cursor to the devices tab, clicking, finding the tool turret (possibly requiring scrolling and expanding categories for more mouse movement & clicks) clicking on the tool turret and finally moving your cursor to and selecting access. Even if everything is preselected from having just accessed it, 3 and click is still faster than p, move mouse to access button, and click. Unsure what I think of stacking shield generators in general. It does feel limiting though to have such limited choices in shielding. It honestly is just weird given the amount of options there are in so many other things. I certainly feel like something needs to be done to improve the options as far as shields go. I think that there may be a misunderstanding on the seats and toolbars. The idea is to let us, as players, customize our toolbars and actually make use of them. Right now they're just statically assigned by the game and it's just weapons/tools. I'd just like the option to assign any device, switch, etc... to a toolbar and have those toolbars remembered on a per-seat basis. As the pilot, you can put anything you want on your toolbar. But on larger CVs with lots of different options, odds are that other players are going to tailor the toolbars of certain seats to the tasks they do most often. When I talked about having a block that acts as the turret targeting controls, it could then be accessed like any other device through the control panel or if the toolbars were implemented it could be assigned to the toolbar of the seat the player is using. The reason for a block is 1: balance, this is a more advanced and potentially powerful capability. Adding a CPU/power cost makes sense, and 2. UI consistency so that it's just another device to access like any other one. When I post stuff like this, there's never really any expectation of seeing it implemented. The best that I can hope for is that it'll strike a chord in a dev"s head and give them ideas. Maybe let them know that I feel multiplayer is really lacking when it comes to collaborative combat. We watch and wait to hopefully see some cool **** happen.
