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Neddy Seagoon
Oct 12, 2012

"Hi Everybody!"

deadly_pudding posted:

The ability to opt your server into some kind of peer-to-peer pseudo MMO would be really cool, actually. Every server is a single star system, and you can warp between them using the Wormhole Drive or whatever.

It would give people a reason to make infrastructure with deep-range beacons and stuff if they want to entertain guests, rather than having everybody just rely on GPS bookmarks.


You mean like this?


I'm also steadily upgrading the Avalon. The twenty broadside OKI 230mm quad-guns are gone.


Instead there's eighty of Mexpex's Heavy Defense Turrets (and yes, the upper-angled guns have enough clearance to safely join in broadside firing). They're grouped in five vertical "Rings" from fore-to-aft, divided by the armored jackets between them, so different Rings can deal with multiple targets. Rings 2-to-4 might be burning a carrier while 1 and 5 deal with fighter craft, for example, or intercepting incoming cannon fire. The're also much hardier little buggers, so a round going off accidentally near them doesn't immediately destroy'em. I also regrouped the Mk.3 Cannons into their own Rings 1-3 respectively as well, just for similitude.

The CIC has an upgrade to make it actually functional too, thanks to the Configurable Automatic LCD Script.


No DRADIS yet, sadly :sigh:. I did give the Radar mod a go, but it doesn't save tracked objects on an LCD. Instead it just flashes them for a brief second.

edit:

Also a bugfix for the bugfix week;

quote:

EDIT 07/17/2015
Update 01.091.011

- fixed infinite welding
- fixed crash - Game.Entities.Character.MyCharacter.PlayFallSound
- fixed Scenario 02 crash when playing under different localization
- fixed added null checks for steam service

Neddy Seagoon fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Jul 17, 2015

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Spookydonut
Sep 13, 2010

"Hello alien thoughtbeasts! We murder children!"
~our children?~
"Not recently, no!"
~we cool bro~

Neddy Seagoon posted:


You mean like this?


I'm also steadily upgrading the Avalon. The twenty broadside OKI 230mm quad-guns are gone.


Instead there's eighty of Mexpex's Heavy Defense Turrets (and yes, the upper-angled guns have enough clearance to safely join in broadside firing). They're grouped in five vertical "Rings" from fore-to-aft, divided by the armored jackets between them, so different Rings can deal with multiple targets. Rings 2-to-4 might be burning a carrier while 1 and 5 deal with fighter craft, for example, or intercepting incoming cannon fire. The're also much hardier little buggers, so a round going off accidentally near them doesn't immediately destroy'em. I also regrouped the Mk.3 Cannons into their own Rings 1-3 respectively as well, just for similitude.

The CIC has an upgrade to make it actually functional too, thanks to the Configurable Automatic LCD Script.


No DRADIS yet, sadly :sigh:. I did give the Radar mod a go, but it doesn't save tracked objects on an LCD. Instead it just flashes them for a brief second.

edit:

Also a bugfix for the bugfix week;

The Radar mod could really do leaving the contacts up until the next radar sweep.

There's a modification to the blueg_radar somewhere that's script friendly and would allow you to list contacts on an lcd.

Neddy Seagoon
Oct 12, 2012

"Hi Everybody!"

Spookydonut posted:

The Radar mod could really do leaving the contacts up until the next radar sweep.

There's a modification to the blueg_radar somewhere that's script friendly and would allow you to list contacts on an lcd.

Looking at it now and I think I might be able to do something with that, cheers.

Section Z
Oct 1, 2008

Wait, this is the Moon.
How did I even get here?

Pillbug

DaveKap posted:

Sorry for the stupid-posting but I need an informed answer.

Are there any actually fun-to-play scenarios for either game yet? Do they require multiplayer to enjoy? I sandboxed both games to death and am now looking forward to coming back and having some goal-oriented gaming in these engines.

I do not think so on the scenarios front. Eventually that could be kinda nice because it would also give those of us who are loving terrible at these games something to trick ourselves into thinking we've accomplished much of anything. I admit when I'm super loving terrible at trying to slap patch a gravity funnel onto the yellow survival ship, all the deeper stuff like control console scripts intimidate me when I'm terrible at building even 2D log cabins in Terraria.

No loving way I'll have "Oxygen Required" toggled on the next time I take a stab at survival mode in this.

EDIT: Note to self, see if the workshop has vanilla scenarios that catch my clueless newbie fancy.

Section Z fucked around with this message at 09:04 on Jul 18, 2015

Spookydonut
Sep 13, 2010

"Hello alien thoughtbeasts! We murder children!"
~our children?~
"Not recently, no!"
~we cool bro~

Section Z posted:

I do not think so on the scenarios front. Eventually that could be kinda nice because it would also give those of us who are loving terrible at these games something to trick ourselves into thinking we've accomplished much of anything. I admit when I'm super loving terrible at trying to slap patch a gravity funnel onto the yellow survival ship, all the deeper stuff like control console scripts intimidate me when I'm terrible at building even 2D log cabins in Terraria.

No loving way I'll have "Oxygen Required" toggled on the next time I take a stab at survival mode in this.

EDIT: Note to self, see if the workshop has vanilla scenarios that catch my clueless newbie fancy.

There's a few that aren't bad, assuming you don't try to break them (it's stupidly easy to break most scenarios)

Rhjamiz
Oct 28, 2007

There needs to be a scenario/Game Start where there aren't any asteroids with resources, only a field of scrap and derelict ships where you need to scavenge to survive.

Neddy Seagoon
Oct 12, 2012

"Hi Everybody!"

Rhjamiz posted:

There needs to be a scenario/Game Start where there aren't any asteroids with resources, only a field of scrap and derelict ships where you need to scavenge to survive.

That'd require the game to not poo poo itself around a large number of blocks :sigh:.

Verizian
Dec 18, 2004
The spiky one.
Low visibility range and some form of nebulae skybox with random electrical storms? You'd have to setup some form of long range sensor to navigate with visible range limited to a few hundred metres while the orbiting sun could be replaced with a volatile plasma storm as a shifting light source.

This game can look immensely creepy with all the deep shadows in DX11. IF only you could get the rivet gun from Event Horizon and create a proper spinning jump drive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qlYqqAYUJc

Spookydonut
Sep 13, 2010

"Hello alien thoughtbeasts! We murder children!"
~our children?~
"Not recently, no!"
~we cool bro~

Rhjamiz posted:

There needs to be a scenario/Game Start where there aren't any asteroids with resources, only a field of scrap and derelict ships where you need to scavenge to survive.

There's at least 3 of those in the workshop that I've played.

Neddy Seagoon posted:

That'd require the game to not poo poo itself around a large number of blocks :sigh:.

Is something that was a slight problem, but not as bad as you'd think with the level of detail scaling (assuming some distance between them)


Edit: What's the limitations on block sizes? Can I make a block that's like 20x20x20?

Spookydonut fucked around with this message at 11:18 on Jul 19, 2015

Neddy Seagoon
Oct 12, 2012

"Hi Everybody!"

Spookydonut posted:


Edit: What's the limitations on block sizes? Can I make a block that's like 20x20x20?

The largest I've seen is Darth Biomech's Deep Space Transciever, which is 7x7x9.

DaveKap
Feb 5, 2006

Pickle: Inspected.



Please post whatever nice workshop scenarios you find that would be good for the dummy like me who wants to play something goal-oriented. Or should I actually trust the star rating system and not need informed SA opinions on the matter?

Mrs. Wynand
Nov 23, 2002

DLT 4EVA
Just getting back into this game after half a year or so.

How does one find the "exploration" content? Is it just super rare thing while asteroid hopping? Or does it show up the same way cargo vessels do? Is it usually free-floating or by an asteroid?


Also, is there an easier way to switch between remote-controllable ships? I have a mining drone I use while asteroid-hopping (god it took for ever to find Nickel, and now the nearest Silicone I know of is ~80km away) which I'm happy with, but I have to hit F, drop down menu, click drone, click remote block, hit control. And often I need to check back in with the mother ship and every time I do it's that whole spiel again.

Mrs. Wynand
Nov 23, 2002

DLT 4EVA
Also, I found a thread saying that the rotating sun does NOT affect where asteroid come from, but I swear I've only ever seen them coming from exactly where the sun is at all times :/


Alllsooo, are there any mods that that help with navigation at all? Specifically I would really appreciate having any sort of directional vector display, a range finder, and anything that can help with intercepting cargo ships.

Neddy Seagoon
Oct 12, 2012

"Hi Everybody!"

Mr. Wynand posted:

How does one find the "exploration" content? Is it just super rare thing while asteroid hopping? Or does it show up the same way cargo vessels do? Is it usually free-floating or by an asteroid?

Get Midspace's Scan mod (link's in the OP), it makes going hunting for ships much easier. All you have to do is type /scan3 into the chat bar and it'll log anything within whatever your visual range is set to (ie; actually loaded in-game) into GPS listings. I also recommend the Endless Factions mod (also in the OP), as it had a whole lot more ships made with vanilla blocks and in the requirements for Exploration selection by KSH. Those ships are pretty old now though, so don't go expecting Oxygen in them.

Spookydonut
Sep 13, 2010

"Hello alien thoughtbeasts! We murder children!"
~our children?~
"Not recently, no!"
~we cool bro~

Mr. Wynand posted:

Also, I found a thread saying that the rotating sun does NOT affect where asteroid come from, but I swear I've only ever seen them coming from exactly where the sun is at all times :/


Alllsooo, are there any mods that that help with navigation at all? Specifically I would really appreciate having any sort of directional vector display, a range finder, and anything that can help with intercepting cargo ships.

Yeah they come from the sun. They also still specifically target vessels. Add a block to an asteroid and it'll start getting hit by meteors.

Rhjamiz
Oct 28, 2007

Mr. Wynand posted:

Also, I found a thread saying that the rotating sun does NOT affect where asteroid come from, but I swear I've only ever seen them coming from exactly where the sun is at all times :/

Also confirming they come from the sun even with rotation. I set it to a 1-minute day and meteors were coming from everywhere around me as the sun spun about.

Spookydonut
Sep 13, 2010

"Hello alien thoughtbeasts! We murder children!"
~our children?~
"Not recently, no!"
~we cool bro~

Rhjamiz posted:

Also confirming they come from the sun even with rotation. I set it to a 1-minute day and meteors were coming from everywhere around me as the sun spun about.

1 minute day would make solar panels easy, on a rotor at 1rpm.

Neddy Seagoon
Oct 12, 2012

"Hi Everybody!"
Well I upgraded the Avalon's thrust output juuuust a little.


Those are Sektan's Imhotep thruster and each is about as powerful as Darth Biomech's Titan.


It's lost a chunk of it's rear end in the process as I had to scale back the hull until it was broad enough to encase the new engines in two layers of armor. The windows are also gone because frankly they kept getting shot out and causing the interior to get gutted any time I threw something at it for fun (windows are a structural weakness, who knew? :v:). I replaced them on the inside with LCD screens displaying decorative scenes of nature.



It's also gained some forward guns that aren't either very slow-moving or hilariously oversized and unwieldy against anything moving.

deadly_pudding
May 13, 2009

who the fuck is scraeming
"LOG OFF" at my house.
show yourself, coward.
i will never log off

Neddy Seagoon posted:

(windows are a structural weakness, who knew? :v:)

I should really finish and upload my space Winnebago. You'd like it, it's like covered in windows :v:

It was one of my first tryhard projects, where I tried to stuff a functioning base into as small a craft as I could, while still also staying true to the original "giant metal brick" source aesthetic. With its little mining companion docked onto the roof, my girlfriend says it looks like a garbage truck. So, mission accomplished, I guess. Comfortably houses a crew of four for lackadaisical space tourism.

I haven't touched it in a while. I'd have to go in there and try to find room for airlocks now. It's a pretty tight fit in the interior, since it's made of Large Ship blocks.

deadly_pudding fucked around with this message at 14:14 on Jul 20, 2015

Neddy Seagoon
Oct 12, 2012

"Hi Everybody!"

deadly_pudding posted:

I should really finish and upload my space Winnebago. You'd like it, it's like covered in windows :v:

Windows aren't bad, mine were just in very bad places. I'd put blast doors in the floor of the quarters behind each, with the theory being that when the ship goes into an Alert state (weapons all go on, anti-missile/meteor turrets start targeting small ships, and the lights swap for dramatic low-level red ones) they'd raise up and provide some degree of protection. They did not. Especially when the basic design of the ship is it sits there and says "gently caress you" to anything to trying to beat on its (mostly) triple-layer armor while it makes them Go Away with 20-to-40 turrets. Most of the other stuff I've done to it on the inside is just simple cosmetic things it was lacking like a bathroom. What makes me chuckle is the toilets I used are functional passenger seats, so I just like the idea of riding out FTL jumps on the shitter :allears:.

Klyith
Aug 3, 2007

GBS Pledge Week
A 1x1 window has 60% of the component integrity of a light armor block, so yes they're a weak point. Especially if the comparison is surrounding it with heavy armor. For the super military ships I feel like someone needs to make a mod block that's like a small window section in an armor wall.

But sometimes the windows are even more of a structural weakness because you place them in ways where they're only actually attached on one side, meaning even minor damage will make a chunk fall off.

Azuth0667
Sep 20, 2011

By the word of Zoroaster, no business decision is poor when it involves Ahura Mazda.
Is there any push to motivated the devs to do an optimization patch? I cannot get back into this game when a any moderate amount of blocks causes the thing to stutter.

Neddy Seagoon
Oct 12, 2012

"Hi Everybody!"

Azuth0667 posted:

Is there any push to motivated the devs to do an optimization patch? I cannot get back into this game when a any moderate amount of blocks causes the thing to stutter.

You mean aside from everyone repeatedly saying "this game needs an optimization patch?". It's something that really has to happen sooner rather than later too, otherwise it just keeps stacking all the features they have to adapt to the optimized code rather than have them be built using it naturally.

Mrs. Wynand
Nov 23, 2002

DLT 4EVA
No, this is the way to go actually - features first, optimization last. You don't actually know where the bottleneck will be or what sort of system-wide limitations you'll run into by the time you're done. E.g. I imagine a generic MP optimization patch would have largely been invalidated by the new infinite world feature, for example.

We still really have no idea about how the MP game will shake out after planets and more pervasive physics and automatons and so forth. Exactly how much all that crap ends up contributing to network traffic is very important to know before you set about to fix it.

Neddy Seagoon
Oct 12, 2012

"Hi Everybody!"

Mr. Wynand posted:

No, this is the way to go actually - features first, optimization last. You don't actually know where the bottleneck will be or what sort of system-wide limitations you'll run into by the time you're done. E.g. I imagine a generic MP optimization patch would have largely been invalidated by the new infinite world feature, for example.

We still really have no idea about how the MP game will shake out after planets and more pervasive physics and automatons and so forth. Exactly how much all that crap ends up contributing to network traffic is very important to know before you set about to fix it.

We're not talking about something as high-tier as multiplayer though, we're talking about the basic rendering process for the Blocks themselves. That needs to get fixed sooner rather than later or it'll just break a whole lot more than it would now.

deadly_pudding
May 13, 2009

who the fuck is scraeming
"LOG OFF" at my house.
show yourself, coward.
i will never log off

Neddy Seagoon posted:

We're not talking about something as high-tier as multiplayer though, we're talking about the basic rendering process for the Blocks themselves. That needs to get fixed sooner rather than later or it'll just break a whole lot more than it would now.

I imagine we'll see something come of it once planets go live. That's a shitload of voxels.

Neddy Seagoon
Oct 12, 2012

"Hi Everybody!"

deadly_pudding posted:

I imagine we'll see something come of it once planets go live. That's a shitload of voxels.

Yeah, that's what I'm hoping too. I've seen some of the BIG 1km "planets" people have made and those are not nice on the CPU so god knows how they'd try to get multiple planets. Not to mention potentially 1-3 1km-ish Moons in close proximity.

Mrs. Wynand
Nov 23, 2002

DLT 4EVA

Neddy Seagoon posted:

We're not talking about something as high-tier as multiplayer though, we're talking about the basic rendering process for the Blocks themselves. That needs to get fixed sooner rather than later or it'll just break a whole lot more than it would now.


Same logic applies.

That said, I've not had any issues with rendering at all, and my machine is about 3 years old and I play with msaax4 and afx16. Game looks gorgeous.


Does the slowdown come with number of blocks? Because that's far more likely the physics sim.

neogeo0823
Jul 4, 2007

NO THAT'S NOT ME!!

Klyith posted:

A 1x1 window has 60% of the component integrity of a light armor block, so yes they're a weak point. Especially if the comparison is surrounding it with heavy armor. For the super military ships I feel like someone needs to make a mod block that's like a small window section in an armor wall.

But sometimes the windows are even more of a structural weakness because you place them in ways where they're only actually attached on one side, meaning even minor damage will make a chunk fall off.

Are there any mod armor blocks that basically show what's on the other side of the wall? I'm thinking like having a fully encased cockpit, with big screens on the walls showing what's going on outside.

Neddy Seagoon
Oct 12, 2012

"Hi Everybody!"

neogeo0823 posted:

Are there any mod armor blocks that basically show what's on the other side of the wall? I'm thinking like having a fully encased cockpit, with big screens on the walls showing what's going on outside.

There's not a chance in hell of them doing that any time soon, because the game would have to render the world once for every instance of an active screen.

Mortvert
Oct 13, 2013

What?!
This is amazing!
Something you might want to consider if you don't have SE yet or you want to buy it for someone - it's in humble bundle right now for $18. The timer has 13 days left on the bundle on the moment the post was made.

frank.club
Jan 15, 2011

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Neddy Seagoon posted:

There's not a chance in hell of them doing that any time soon, because the game would have to render the world once for every instance of an active screen.

Could someone just cheat it and say make what amounts to a really durable two way mirror for this?

GotLag
Jul 17, 2005

食べちゃダメだよ
Reflections in this game aren't real-time, they are periodically-updated cubemaps.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

frank.club posted:

Could someone just cheat it and say make what amounts to a really durable two way mirror for this?

You could make a special set of blocks that when looked at, are transparent but occlude any blocks behind them, so effectively you would have a window through the ship wherever you place the block. Pretend it's very clever holograms/video screens.

Sort of like astrometrics in Star Trek.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz3CYcjdSaI

OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 04:24 on Jul 22, 2015

Neddy Seagoon
Oct 12, 2012

"Hi Everybody!"

OwlFancier posted:

You could make a special set of blocks that when looked at, are transparent but occlude any blocks behind them, so effectively you would have a window through the ship wherever you place the block. Pretend it's very clever holograms/video screens.

Sort of like astrometrics in Star Trek.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz3CYcjdSaI

Yeah that would probably be doable. All it'd really need to be is a texture surface of what's essentially DO NOT RENDER IN THIS DIRECTION.

DaveKap
Feb 5, 2006

Pickle: Inspected.



Neddy Seagoon posted:

There's not a chance in hell of them doing that any time soon, because the game would have to render the world once for every instance of an active screen.
I always find it weird that people insist this kind of thing is hard when the Source engine, somehow, made it super simple. HL2 and Portal both had crazy amounts of "camera/monitor" stuff that worked perfectly fine.

Neddy Seagoon
Oct 12, 2012

"Hi Everybody!"

DaveKap posted:

I always find it weird that people insist this kind of thing is hard when the Source engine, somehow, made it super simple. HL2 and Portal both had crazy amounts of "camera/monitor" stuff that worked perfectly fine.

Engine A is not Engine B, for a start. The Source Engine is really, really well-built and the SE one is just an offshoot off the one cobbled together for Miner Wars.

Spookydonut
Sep 13, 2010

"Hello alien thoughtbeasts! We murder children!"
~our children?~
"Not recently, no!"
~we cool bro~
Yeah the source engine doesn't have to deal with deforming voxels

Neddy Seagoon
Oct 12, 2012

"Hi Everybody!"

Spookydonut posted:

Yeah the source engine doesn't have to deal with deforming voxels

Hell just shoot for the obvious dumb comparison of "well Minecraft renders a shitload of blocks with lighting without going slower than an elderly driver, why cant Space Engineers?" With the exact same answer - Minecraft wasnt hacked onto a basic shooter engine. I like Space Engineers and all, but the engine really does need a multithread rebuild.

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Verizian
Dec 18, 2004
The spiky one.
Doesn't Source2 have pre-beta level support for deformable voxel worlds? I seem to remember some tech presentation on it where a guy from Valve got up on stage and said something along the lines of "Hey so all these builder games are cool so I decided to add this in, it's not working yet and we have no titles planned for it but in a couple years we'll be able to support fully creation/destruction enabled worlds with random generation."

The only other thing I remember was a lot of people were pissed because the BBC ran a story that it was scheduled for 3pm on the 3rd of March in conference hall three at GDC which obviously meant it was going to be a bait and switch reveal of HL3 instead of the listed presentation on the future of physics and ingame destruction.

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