Hello Galactic Survivalists! Last week we made our first announcement on version 1.5 (read here). The main content of this update is quite code-heavy, which means a lot of things are going on behind the curtain without offering a good way to do a nice visual representation. But while our programmers do their work to prepare the game for future feature changes and additions, quite a few things happen on the art and content side of things as well. For example we will be adding a new NPC faction with tons of POIs and an own galactic territory, created by spanj and a lot of creators, contributing POIs and vessels: the Brotherhood of Farr! (Temple of Farr) In case you want to read more info about the new faction or even support the creations, join the discussion over here: https://empyriononline.com/threads/the-brotherhood-of-farr-needs-you.97421/ Speaking of factions and POIs: those that have ventured into deep space might not only have run into the Colonists faction and even more Pirates, but also in the always-hostile Warlord faction and its various sub factions, like the Skaar, Tresari and others. Thanks to the contribution of the community, these factions have seen a serious upgrade in their lineup. So watch out next time you aim to warp to a seemingly non-claimed solar system. (Tresari Frigate) Both the Warlord and the Colonists NPC factions will gladly welcome any contribution to their lineup. Visit this forum and send in your builds or workshop links: https://empyriononline.com/forums/showroom-submissions.108/ Besides those named, most of the established and recently added factions, for example the Pirates, Tesch and others, got new ships and POIs as well. Most of these factions, their bases and vessels, might play a role when the game's main story arc is concluded later this year. (TESCH Battleship) What are your thoughts about the current composition of the galaxy, its factions and the POI and vessels you ran into? What are you missing from the lineup or would suggest to add? Let us know! Enjoy the weekend & read you soon. -Empyrion Dev Team
You absolute Legends! Thanks passing on the great news to my discord. All the builders will be over the moon
Spanj's main feature is not the introduction of a new faction, but his famous phrase in narrow circles "Elion, please fix".
I lack the most important thing - the T5 processor level to create beautiful warships for PVP with a good study of the internal compartments and the hull detail within reasonable limits. And from the practice of shipbuilding more than 3500 hours in creative mode (and in general, this is clear to everyone who understands PVP shipbuilding and has design skills), it is clear that the size of such ships can not be lower than 7.50-10.50 (since the placement of internal compartments requires space, which in turn = an increase in the external volume of the ship and its weight), but no more than 13-15 size class in order not to disrupt the balance of "armor-number of turrets" with a ship weight of 30 to 100 thousand tons. Tons, which will obviously require more than 10kk CPUs are more suitable only for PVE ships. For military ships, PVP requires a minimum of 15kk to 20-30kk CPU. And you don't have to say "you have an unlimited core" - it doesn't exist!!! Server administrators cut Advanced core out of the game!!!! either make it useless, or even sell it for a sum of money that is a multiple of the cost of the game itself, and at the same time, the core can be lost without recovery.... Advanced core is only suitable for a single-player game, where even without it, you can simply turn off the CPU consumption to create on the death star. For servers, it is not suitable, for servers, the CPU threshold T5-T6 is needed with a reasonable limit of 20-30kk, but no more than these values, so as not to violate a reasonable balance. Some might say that's a lot and so on, but you can at least try to create the Krait Mk2 ship from the famous game here at Empyrion. And to realize visually suitable back thrust engines for a warship suitable for + - for PVP. in terms of physics and mechanics of game combat, you need to make it heavy and multi-layered in the bow, and only the rear engines 3x3x6 in the amount of 8 pieces will absorb 533k X 8 => 4kk CPU ... But you also need side ones from 2-3-4 for left and right sides of the vessel, + vertical and reversible ...., which in the end = + - 13-15kk. And that's just so that the ship has a minimum combat maneuverability of 25 degrees per second ... even taking into account the use of xeno blocks between the outer and inner skin of weapon steel. Here only one empty ship's body will weigh 10-20 Ktonn ... Think about it and do not write nonsense like "my PVE ship consumes only 2kk CPU" ... Mine devours from 6kk to 10kk and is capable of not falling apart in the first minute like yours, when it is attacked by a loot ugly PVP brick that was built in 30 minutes in creativity. I cost more than 500 hours of it, and in general I spend at least 100-150 hours on the creation of the alpha 0.0001 version ship. Flying and ugly bricks for PVP you will never remove from the game, because people will always want to attack other players, and I agree with this - space should be hostile and there should be danger not only from stupid NPCs, but also from many other players. And the realities and laws of the game say only one thing - the nose of your ship must be multi-layered and contain closed turrets, engines and generators so that the enemy fires at it, and not at your real generators, turrets and engines. And at the same time, the ship must be a ship, not a flying toilet, must have at least a minimum - a bridge, a hangar, a warehouse-factory, a vegetable garden, a kitchen, which automatically = a weight of more than 20K tonn and a size of 7.50, but at the same time not inferior to flying toilet smaller and lighter cabins consisting only of layers of armor and 1 pilot room. I think that within 30 days I will complete my work of ~ 1200 hours on the creation of 4-5 military vessels for PVP-PVE with internal compartments within the size class 5.50 - 12.50 and classification - patrol vessel, corvette, frigate , destroyer, battleship and within the weight range from 20k tonn to 110k tonn, so that people who are not familiar with PVP and its realities within the game can get an idea of what is a say. P.S. Please, dear developers, do not make the game only for PVE players !!!! PVE game gets boring quickly !!! Various missions, NPC fights between themselves and the player are interesting, but all this is just a general environment, a background that creates the feeling of a living and dangerous space, where other players must live and most of them must be hostile. Do not make a space simulator out of the game, where everyone is friends and goes to visit each other to eat a pie and continue to fly, fearing only "terrible and invincible" NPCs. The game should be interesting to everyone, both PVE players and PVP, and space should be really dangerous, because now there are no threats in it, except for the stupid Zrx and Lgc ships whose ships subside in 2 minutes. Once again, I emphasize that it is good that now space has become more alive thanks to the many NPC factions, and their ships have become a little more dangerous, but please do not forget about PVP players who want to engage in piracy hunting other players and fly on + - Sci- Fi ships, not on toilets from a single room lined with layers of armor and no internal compartments. But without the T-5, T-6 limit at the expense of CPU expanders = from 20kk - 30kk it will not work. You can't remove flying bricks from the game without internal compartments, I think they will always exist in the game even if the CPU limit decreases and becomes 2kk. But without the T5-T6 limit, which extends the limits to 20-30kk CP, it is impossible to make a full-fledged warship with a detailed bridge, a small hangar, a warehouse-factory, hydroponics, a canteen and an engineering compartment. At the moment, ships suitable for PVP and built + - in the spirit of science fiction with compartments can never exist without an Advanced core, which administrators remove from the game, pluck like a chicken, in every possible way, or make useless or inaccessible in other ways.
There is the problem, hidden in that sea of words... Get on these server owners, or why not start your own server ? Lazyness is not a virtue.
What servers do is their choice and pvp is such a small part of the game you can't really balance the rest of the game around it. It's up to pvp servers to create the type of game play that they want. If that means disabling the advanced core then that's up to them. Now I think the advanced core is really bad for balance but not because of pvp. Also he was asking about npc factions, not pvp ships.
It's just a magical potion, it's not to be used all the time by everyone. That is, for those who play with default CPU values. If it's the ultimate end game treasure, why not. It's only problematic because in Empyrion there is this tendency for players to ask for every power and ability not far from the start. Was the same for the ability to have a huge CV in the starter system, and it took months for some players to adapt to this new game state. One thing that bugs me is that admin core ships can't be controlled by players, and there is no alternative to make invulnerable ships (ex. police faction on a server). The advanced core could be used for this, with a few other... tricks... not allowed for players. I'm still curious to see why you say the advanced core is really bad for balance though, since you didn't give much substance to your statement.
Oh yes, that's a great idea! sarcasm. Instead of balancing everything at a basic level, let's shift this task onto the shoulders of left-wing people and get engineers, where you need to build a new ship for each server, because the game is simply mired in mods and insane chaos is happening there. Previously, from there, people came to the empryon and said "how good, that you don’t have it, I’m tired of wasting a lot of idle time adjusting ships for servers ", but you stubbornly offer to step on the same claymore and get in the forehead. A small part of the game is to fly out of the starting planet in a PVP ship in a week and put the entire galaxy in a comfortable position, scattering NPC like leaves under your feet. Another week to spend on pointless stuffing on the limit of the next box of epic weapons. In the best case, another week to colonize the moon by forcing it to protect the towers, and then delete the game because everywhere the space PVE and all the mice stuffed their pockets hid in the corners of the vast universe. Perhaps this is your ideal game, when in space only stupid NPCs make you **** your pants, but this is far from reality, very far away. If tomorrow you are given a ship and sent to Alpha Centauri, why do you think that other people or aliens do not come to rob you there just on the basis that you are peace-loving? The developers gave you a fairly huge world, adding solar systems to it, so you will have to look for another player for hours and it is far from a fact that in the conditions of 30-40 people on the server you can find anyone at all. But you persist in shrinking in fear of being hurt.... Then why are you fighting the NPCs? Be friends with everyone! And even better, play the Sims growing tomatoes and strawberries, you will definitely not be offended there! Space is not a place that should be friendly, and you'll find that in a sci-fi movie/book/TV series/game, too. In this case, I would say that I want an NPC faction that will take over the solar systems on their ships resembling the Borg race, yes, exactly Borog cubes! And so that these Borg cubes have the dimensions of 250x250x250 construction cubes, and the weapons were = 70 rocket turrets on each side of the cube, + 100 plasma, artillery, anti-aircraft and laser turrets. To have these Borgs pulverize your pathetic PVE ships in an instant with the power of a thought. Perhaps then, PVE space will seem to you really dangerous, cruel and harsh. And maybe you'll finally crawl out of your turtle shell and become ninja turtles, not just a turtle in turtle soup in friendly pve space. Perhaps this is the only thing that will make even a PVP player tense up and think about how to destroy such a threat and make something so long to build in the creative to defeat such a monster. For everything else, 1 light military CV is enough, even within the 10kk CPU, to destroy all NPCs in general.
This is utopia, there is no amount of balancing that can satisfy everyone. That's why the developers gave us tons of options to make the balance we want ourselves, and that is what both ravien_ff and I pointed you towards. "Lazyness" refers to the fact you could invest a fraction of the time you take to write your ranting into contacting a server owner or even in making some little .ecf adjustments all by yourself. No you can try bullying or "get good" tactics, we have seen this regularly from PvP players who think they own the Truth regarding gaming. Frankly, lots of players also have a life outside of the game, so why don't you get one too ? The problem with some of the PvP players is that they exhibit the same behavior here as they would like to see and exhibit on servers. That's just too bad, lots of people hate confrontation and pissing contests, and just want to have fun with a computer game.
Maybe then the owners of the servers develop the game at the same time? Those CPU limits that currently exist only for single-player games, PVE games, and in general, in this case, it is not clear why they are needed, if in a single-player game you can simply turn off the CPU system and leave the weight system. And for servers, where players are supposed to collide, it doesn't fit at all. In the same way, its purpose for PVE servers is not at all clear, just like the meaning of playing on them, when to play with friends it will be enough to launch a server closed with a password for 4 people and enjoy life.
The only reason for CPU is to reduce strain on hardware by imposing (another set of) limits on builds. That could have already been solved prior to CPU with simple and proper balancing of mass, energy usage and thruster power. There was also ship class which was the same kind of tool, trying to limit the amount of devices per ship, because these require more processing power than simple blocks. Windows were also bad guys because they cause performance issues, but the only way to limit them was to flag them also as "devices". Obviously it is on the server owner's shoulders to adjust their game to what they intend to have as playerbase. For PvP oriented servers, there is no need to have all the bells and whistles of PvE, unless they want to attract also PvE cannon fodder for their PvP core players... Not sure that is a cool idea, but it's not forbidden. It sure shows the intent though, but from the last quick look I had on server lists there were less than 20 with people playing, and less than a handful with more than 5 or 6 players. This game performs way better with smaller player groups, because of its nature : voxel ships/ bases and terrain, everything can be modified in realtime, and not running on a notoriously fast network system with Unity (for now). I can only guess that CPU and other limitations were introduced to help reducing the number of bugs and glitches reported regularly from the multiplayer crowd, because the game is very demanding on average hardware, and Eleon still has to check if reports concern genuine bugs, of if they are simply problems induced by hardware not fit to the task. Many of the multiplayer bugs/ glitches are reported by clients, not by the server owner, and it's quite possible that the server has no problem running the game but some of the clients still experience lag and glitches. That is a problem that can't be avoided, as clients may have lower end hardware that struggles running the game smoothly when too many ships around, with lasers and projectiles flying everywhere + turrets trying to get some juice to do their thing, etc. On the server side, there is no rendering to be done, and this represents a major portion of the bugs and glitches, apart from sync issues. This is what the clients see, not the server owner, and it may explain why some of them don't see the need to optimize their game with the options Eleon gave us. Even in singleplayer some devices have hiccups, so no wonder it does so in multiplayer. Even with CPU on problems can still arise on loaded servers, and there are still ways to alleviate these with proper game setting, but the server owners will need to get their nose in the playfield templates and reduce the amount of deco in there, and may also want to mod weapons so less are required. It's a very simple equation in fact : 1 player may represent 50+ players just by weapons count because ships can be covered by weapons, and honestly there is no need for this. In the vast majority of games, the scripted AI is one of the worst offenders regarding computing strain. Turrets are all AI driven, just as a hint why turret numbers can become a real problem down the road. Try any game with 50 critters around the player, and you will see the AI kicking in and dragging performance down. Now instead of animals or goons, it's 'turrets" and they each run a script, 50+ times per ship. Multiply this by the number of players/ ships, and it will give a better idea of the number of "players" represented on the server, just because each player induces tons of scripts to run at the same time. If it was a game where each player can only use 1 weapon at a time, the game could support hundreds, no problem. .
That's not true. CPU was created specifically for PVP in order to encourage smaller ships, in order to reduce lag, in order to prevent connection problems. It also does not matter if the developers got rid of CPU, because ships are still divided into size levels. So server owners would just prevent ships over a certain size level from being built on the server in the server configs.
The 1st live Q&A with Eleon and xCaliber around the release of v10 experimental : https://empyriononline.com/threads/alpha-10-6-q-a-with-eleon-and-xcaliber.87150/ The Youtube link : Around 2:00, mention of "eliminating lagshot" as result of latest features ; After 7:30 - Discussion about CPU, precise mention of performance after 9:45, with several specific mentions of performance for the game and servers, and the need to set these limitations. That's not one or two random sentences : these are many minutes precisely describing the feature usage, and the problem it was aimed at solving (even if only partly). ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The second Q&A with Eleon with Spanj : https://empyriononline.com/threads/live-q-a-with-the-devs-friday-october-25th-8pm-bst.90780/page-2 The youtube link : ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unless being deaf, we can't miss the obvious shift of focus of the discussion between the first Q&A and the second Q&A, but it's quite obvious from the first Q&A that the subject was clearly explained and answered, and the only reason for this shift of focus was most probably a "public relation" move to avoid backlash from players who don't give a damn about performance problems. Another hint to show the flagrant switch of focus is the fact that the whole v10 phase of the game concerned "optimization" and this topic was included in each patch version. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Then forward in time to version 11 of the game, this very "modest" acknowledgement of "performance impact" : https://empyriononline.com/threads/alpha-11-cpu-points-and-tiers-how-does-it-work.90876/ In the Q&A, post #3, there is this bit : Q: Is the CPU system designed to improve the GAME performance? A: No. There possibly *might* be a slight performance gain, in terms of players might place fewer blocks, but this is not more than a side effect. The measurement for GAME PERFORMANCE are still the SIZE CLASSES. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Note : I'm trying to refrain from having a very wide smile when reading the "politically correct" answer here above. To put this in context, one has to go back and read all of the 68 pages of the thread where discussions raged on regarding the silliness of using CPU to limit sizes of builds... One thing remains sure : when developers invest hours to make a feature to limit ship sizes - and it shows its efficiency by preventing one of xCaliber's ships from lifting up - the original intent can hardly be described later on as "there possibly *might" be a slight performance gain" and blabla... That is simply trying to downplay the original intent, and they backpedaled to the extent that even some of the original players that viewed the possible utility of the feature as originally designed was now moot, because the availability of extenders and the "updated CPU values" following community outrage still allowed for builds large enough (if in numbers) to drag performance down on servers. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ So... not being deaf myself and being interested in reasons behind the work some people put in a game, I easily understood the topic as soon as the 1st Q&A, and understood the reasons behind it, and mentioned this several times afterwards, some players preferring the Unicorn version of "the game needed specialization, not optimisation" rhetoric. So, @stanley bourdon , do you need more "documentation" to back up this assertion, or does this satisfiy you ? .
Smaller ships for pvp are no longer ships, but toilets - this is their type in most cases. At best, it's a big fighter or a small patrol ship ... in a game where you can cost corvettes, cruisers and aircraft carriers, the scale has sharply narrowed to flying toilets ... and This is not correct. Dimensions of building blocks and size devices the transitions between the lines so that they look harmonious and the realities of damage in the game say only one thing - a minimal military vessel with some hull detail and a few internal compartments will bump your head against the ceiling at 10kk and ask for a little more, depending on the design concept. And this is a minimum for pvp ship minimus size class = 5.50. Moreover, indeed, the owners of the servers can and could prohibit ships above the gold standard of the size class = 10.50. Above this, it is already really difficult for the server to digest the battle between 10 ships over this size. And no one says that you need to get rid of the cpu, it needs to be finalized to a logical ending. A lot of players have long been asking for at least bonuses in the presence of all CPU levels, not to mention the T5 level. You don't need 50 or 60kk, because it will be overkill for servers, but you need a golden middle, 20-30kk will be enough. And in general, in my opinion, the weight system was more than successful initially and did not generate a boil of forums, disputes and burning asses on both sides. While the CPU system initially caused all this with its extreme ambiguity and dampness.
As a result, we came to the conclusion that even with a cpu system, players still build a bunch of turrets and slow down the servers, which means that players need to take turrets from the players altogether and distribute 1 shovel per person XD
