gyurka66

I think the problem is lying in Space Engineer's scripting being run server-side.

If you were to be offline and having scripts be run by the server, that would cause massive lag.

DACs enabling offline Lua functioning = borderline Pay-2-Win, almost reaching botting levels of cheating.

You can assign delegates to run the Lua script while you're offline. As an example, that may be a First Mate for a ship.

What if you could set up the power cores balance?
 
For example if you build a ship you have to integrate a power core.
 
So what if you could do a set up saying the power core does these stats as a standard setting:
33,3 % shield energy
33,3 % weapon energy
33,3 % acceleration / top speed
 
If you could change the power balance freely for your build ships e.g.
50 % shield energy
25 % weapon energy
25 % acceleration / top speed
 
Or if you would like to build a real fast spy ship:
0 % shield energy
0 % weapon energy
100 % acceleraion / top speed
 
So I think this would be very interesting and every ship would be nearly unique and exactly that kind of ship what the builder wanted to create. This idea gets really exiting if you choose to put 2 or 3 power cores in a one-seater.
 
I think it could be a really cool tool.

Well, having research only in the sense that the developers add in new items, is of course a possibility. I already outlined the advantages I see in having research in the game, but in the end, this is just the idea box forum, right? ;-)
 
As for the changing recipes: It depends on the crafting system.
If you immediately go from ressources to finished product, it is no problem:
Say a laser weapon takes 100 iron ore and 20 unobtanium to make. You can then have the rule that every damage time your tech increases the damage of the weapon, you increase the iron ore requirement by 1%. So after the 1. increase the recipe would cost 101 iron ore, after the 2. increase 102.01 (rounded down to 102).
The fun thing is, the player does not need to know these rules, so they can be way more complex. All he sees is the new builing plan for the improved laser weapon, which lists the ressources it needs.
 
Now what if a a laser weapon recipe instead needs an emitter, a weapon base, a ball bearing, a tracking computer and 2 cans of oil to be build?
In that case I would not make the laser weapon recipe itself improvable by research at all. Instead you could tech up the recipe for the emitter (increasing firing speed, damage, and energy draw), and the tracking computer (improving tracking speed and electronic warfare resistance).
 
Almost, but not quite.
 
If somebody just texted you the symbols of the tech in the game chat - that just won't be enough information to do anything with (well not quite, it might still be usefull in reverse engineering, see below).
 
If you got your hands on a building plan (either by buying or by stealing it), then you have everything you need to build the item yourself - these are the detailed instructions after all!
 
But what if you only captured an item? That is reverse engineering, which I did not explain in my first post, because that is an addon to the basic concept (additional work to implement, and not needed for the framework to function).
The way I imagine reverse engineering might work, is that you have a scanner you use to analyse your item as well as possible. Depending on your own skill, the quality of your scanner and maybe the amount of time you spend, you would get a data package of a certain quality out of that (the data package is an item). So you don't even have to aquire the item - A spy with enough time alone with the item could smuggle that analysed data out!
 
You would put that data package into a reverse engineering machine (ain't I grand at naming things? ), together with a building plan for a different variant of the same item (so still a laser, but with +10% firing speed instead of +10% damage).
Now the engineering machine goes to work (endlessly), and if you are lucky, at some point it will spit out the building plan for the item your data package came from. (Optional: Even if it has not managed to give you the building plan, after some time it will start to figure out the symbols of the tech used to make the item whose data you are analysing (Not all at once, one symbol at a time), allowing you to look for a closer technological match to feed the machine.)
 
What does the difficulty for the reverse engineering machine depend on?
-The amount of commonality between the tech you are analysing and the comparison item you gave it, as determined by how long the tech DNA strings stay identical before diverging (this should be the deciding factor - if the analysed tech is only a minor variation of tech you already know, it will be way easier to figure out compared to if development forked of a long time ago).
-The tech level of the item it is analysing, the higher the harder
-The tech of the reverse engineering machine

This game is about a community in one massive megaserver. Its the main feature

This game is about a community in one massive megaserver. Its the main feature

This game is about a community in one massive megaserver. Its the main feature

So I have not heard anything about in game research yet.
Now I am not saying that research is a needed feature for this game, it is not.
But then again, this game tries to emulate our universe in a computer, and give us the means to build up a new civilisation.
In this grand context, and especially in a science fiction game, I think that research would add a lot of depth, believability, and gameplay options and goals.

It is also something I have spend a good bit of time thinking on over the years - how you could represent it in a game with maximal flexibility (the way this game handles Organisations for example).

So let me try to describe the framework I would utilize. I can always explain certain aspects in more detail, if people are interested, and I would very much like to hear about weak points in the concept! :-)

For the purpose of this concept, I am going to assume that functional elements in this game are crafted gathering the needed materials, and then assembling them (how else would you do it?).

My concept:

The buildingplan of any functional element (weapon, cockpit, shields, armor, electronic warfare, ...) has a component called "build pattern", which gives the building machine the precise instructions on how to construct the result.

==Science machine==
Now we add a new machine to the game, lets call it "science machine".
The science machine takes a "build pattern" (see above) as input. As it's a big bulky supercomputer, it also needs a lot of energy, and possibly other ressources to run.
What it does, is that with a very very low probability, it throws out an improved version of the build pattern (think on average once every 10 years). It just runs continously until that happens or it is turned off.
That improved version has one of the stats of the previous version improved by a little bit (1% or 2% maybe) compared to the base values of the input build pattern. (I think it is very very important that this improvement is multiplicative - many games make the mistake of making them additive. If you make them additive, later improvements will matter way less than earlier ones, which means that improving everything equally will be the obvious best strategy, killing variety.)
There is also a chance that a different stat has gotten worse be a small amount.

==Represenation of science developement==
Now there should not be very many possibilities for new versions from any given base "build pattern" - you could for example have 1 of 5 different metrics which could improve, and 1 of 5 different metrics that could get worse as a trade off -> 25 possibilities.
If we make sure the possibility space stays about that small, we can express it with a single symbol (letter/number)!
That means, that on close examination of the build pattern / the functional element build with it, we can show that string of symbols to the player (if he has the right skill).
If that player compares two such strings, he can even see at what point in the development process the two components diverged! That is a pretty cool feature. B-)
That compactness should also make the server side storage very manageable, while still keeping the door open for future possibilities like merging of different technologies, or reverse engineering of stolen hardware.
If you want to make this system even more complex(!), you can even let every advancement modify the building cost of the component. I would not randomize that though, but only make it dependent on the current improvement, how complex the technology already is, and possibly also which improvements came before (e.g. how often you improved into the same direction). That way, you keep the number of possibilites the same, and can still express this more complex variant with one symbol per improvement. Increasing ressource usage can also be a good way to balance the improved stats of the functional elements a bit. :-)
 
By the way, getting the same symbol when building upon the same base building plan (same symbol string), literally means that you just made an identical improvement. Which means that different players can by chance make the same improvement to a technology - which I think is a very cool thing. :-)
You can think of that symbol string as a very compact form of representing the DNA of the tech in question.

==Scientific progress==
Another thing this representation is very useful for, is guiding the science machine by the game server.
I said earlier that it will only succeed very rarely (you just let it run endlessly). Obviously it would succeed more often the lower level the base tech is (=symbol string of improvements is short).
But the server could also change the probabilites of different improvements based on the history of improvements already made.

So if it takes so very long for the machine to have a success, how do we as players get our hands on new technology before 10 years have passed?
Parallelisation! A big alliance might make a big building with 100 science machines, which all search in parallel for an improvement on the best tech the alliance could get its hand on as base technology.
And every time an improvement is found, you'll have to weight the pros and cons of using it as the new base technology for further research: Yes, you just made the tech better, but you also just made it more complicated (symbol string got longer), so any further improvement will be just a little bit harder.
That might not make a lot of difference for a single improvement (the work should only become a few % harder for each improvement), but it does compound, and at some point you might just have made a technological dead end which can't compete against a different technological strain whcih has been kept more efficient. :-)

==Effects in game==
So now that I have outlined (hopefully halfway understandibly) how I would handle scientific research, what effects would that have in game? We (hypothetically) just spend a good amount of work to incorporate a fairly complex mechanic, so there should be a payoff ingame for that, right!?

- Not all components are the same! Without research, all lasers of a certain size in the game would be functionally identical (maybe with some small bonuses for being exceptionally well crafted). With research, you might buy lasers that fire 10% faster, or instead lasers that do 10% more damage per shot, if both variants have been researched.
- Not everybody has access to the same stuff! Without research, as long as you crank your skills up high enough, and gather all the ressources, you are able to build all the functional elements in the game. Now with research, everybody can still build a laser, but if you don't have the build patterns for the variant with +10% damage, then you can't build that variant. And maybe the alliance that developed it is jelously guarding it and only using it for its own ships? Now you need spies to steal it! :-D
- There is a sense of progress! If you are in a current state of the art warship, and you fight against a similar ship that has not been upgraded in the last 3 years, you will probably come out ahead - Your shields are better, your weapons do a bit more damage! This gives players more to do, and feels very scifi-like to me...
- It opens up additional game play paths and goals like building a research center, collecting a scientific library, having a monopol on certain advanced tech, stealing tech, trading tech, and more.

Stuff not touched upon in this post:
- How you could implement reverse engineering and merging of tech (I'll just state that its possible to do within the framework outlined).
- Pseudoscience to explain all of this in game (think simulation/evolution, but I'll gladly go into detail if there is interest)
- Effects on markets. How can you have a market for lasers of a certain size if those lasers have different tech levels? I don't have an answer for that one yet, but would love to hear more details about how markets are going to be implemented. I have a hunch that this kind of problem has already occured elsewhere in developing them (e.g. if you think about lasers getting bonuses due to high crafting skill).

I am really curious what people think about all of this. Please poke holes into it!
I'll update this concept post as I get suggestions to improve it (if I decide to take them ;-)).

This way piracy would lose its meaning because you cant get anything from victim but a tasty debuff.

Hello i am wondering if it is planned now or in the future to have any type of first person shooting aspect within the game/added to the game and if so would we be able to engage others in zero gravity shootouts? and also will we be able to exit the ship mid space?

Around mark 7:45 of the Kickstarter vid, Jean-Christophe says, "...combat will be a lock and fire approach..."
"The ship battle system will be a lock and fire system, as well."
 
It could be a translation issue, where they are translating the French term for tab-target as lock and fire when they speak English..
But, for me tab-targeting is using the tab key (or some other key) to cycle through nearby targets rather than some form of manual aim.
For instance, in NMS, there seems to be a lock assist. I don't have to be precise about my aim to lock onto a target, but I do have to move the reticle reasonably close by.
With tab-target, the enemy could be behind me. I don't have to aim at all. I just hit the tab key and cycle through whatever is near me.
 
If you know of a different moment where the devs mention tab-targeting specifically, please share.

People also expected Star Marine to drop within a week... 2 years ago. Just sayin' :V

It's a sandbox. Why punish killers with debuffs? Why not just setting up a player run police to kill those people first? Why not defending your dudes yourself? Why not accepting contracts miners set up to protect them? Why not hiring Mercs? Why not being smart and think about safety before you go mining?
 
All above can be copy/past to building stuff, mining, running around, exploring, etc.
 
With debuffs on the killer you only generate a society that will attack in waves or with such huge numbers that those debuffs don't count. PLUS you are killing EVERY emergent gameplay! So no, that's just a totally bad idea and against the whole idea of a sandbox with emergent gameplay.

Death without penalty is meaningless so it would be cool to get some long lasting effect on death. Ideas below.
 
Resurrection timer: after 3 deaths you would have to wait 60 minutes or so. of course you could play an alt character until.
 
Skill penalty: i think i dont have to explain this
 
changed appearance: i mean scars and such things

I doubt you'd find many players enjoying the idea of having to alt because of some game mechanic.
 
You are free to come up with crazy death penalties but realistically I dont think NQ will go for it. If you have the time, there are a few youtube interviews with JC. In one of them he speaks a little about the death mechanic. From how he explained it I did not get the impression he wants to introduce crazy hardcore death mechanics.
 
As I explained in my previous post if you combine all consequences of death I dont think it needs to be more punishing. But you are free to disagree.

Nothing lasts forever. Metal fatigues and rusts. Complex systems break down. Machines have to be maintained. I wish/hope there would be some approximation of entropy in the game as an overall balancing/leveling force. It should not be possible to create highly complex systems and hope that they will work perfectly and last forever - especially if they are exposed to harsh conditions - g-forces, combat, multiple atmospheric re-entry, etc. While a stone pillar can last 1000 years with no problem other than a little erosion, an F-16 cannot fly more than a few dozen hours without extensive maintenance.
 
If there is some way of tracking the complexity of a construct and the materials it is made of, this should be fed into some sort of algorithm that degrades effectiveness over time or increases the probability of a functional/structural failure. Better still if forces, loads and stresses are tracked - then this usually should be the point of failure - where the stress is highest.
 
This would also force people to build redundancy into their constructs. You wouldn't want your vital systems to fail in the middle of combat, for example...

what should happen, is that weapons fire doesn't make particles disappear, they make particles compact into a new material: scrap.
This scrap would then combine the materials inside and could be retrieved to get back the original material quantity.
The more compact a scrap voxel is, the harder and longer it will take to be refined.
This would allow for battles to leave nearly 100 % of their original material, but in an unusable form, and with a wreckage shape similar to the one of the ship. assuming only the planet gen would be reset (refill the ores and regenerate the non artificial undergrounds, compacting all artificial constructs into scrap ruins) this would leave a nice amount of wreckage and scrap to work with.
Scrap would need some amount of resources to refine, since you need to separate all the metals. base metals could be combines into alloys, and any failed alloy would be scrap with the composition used to make it. To separate the metals a chemical process would need to be used, like in reality.
 
This would require a chemical synthesis mechanic, and an advanced metallurgy mechanic, that would give you an advanced degree of freedom to work with alloys and their recycling. for containers, a good idea would be to require certain alloys that to not react with the contained compound to build and use a container for some materials. for instance a plutonium container made out of neutron reflecting materials would trigger a nuclear blast. (i am pro nuclear weapons as we wand absolute freedom even if it means having massive craters in the ground of planets and even then it could be awesome to see a crater from space )

My suggestion is, that when the open alpha comes out, after people have spent a while frantically running around, building ships, cities, houses, mining stations etc. when the game is actually released, convert all of these creations into "discarded ruins from a long forgotten race" by changing all of the blocks used. Like all metal becomes corroded metal, all turrets become broken turrets or removed, power cores become depleted power cores that are useless (if there are such things) and giant space ships become 40k-esque space hulks... dead, broken and discarded. Cities built during the time become abandoned wilds, buildings above a certain height have their top halves removed, random holes in them everywhere, environmental recapture so vines everywhere, bushes and trees breaking through blocks in the roofs and flooring. 
These things could be made to either make them a valuable resource, or have no value at all depending on what the devs want. 
I would be fine with all of this being purely decorative, part of an integrated sub-lore, but something that cant just be rebuilt in the game as they would be exclusive (yet useless) blocks. Something to preserve, as part of this world's legacy. Hell the resources might even have value simply because of their rarity, after all "party hats" were one of the more expensive things in Runescape at one point - not because they are good or useful, just because they are rare. 
 
If you don't like the idea of all this coming from the alpha, I'm sure there's room for this kind of thing anyway that's put in the game by creative teams you might employ. I just think this sort of thing just gives a small bit of...atmosphere to a game that needs it. 
 
Anyone agree?

from what I have seen, they are saying that mining and building both have separate permissions to turn on or off for people.  So if mining is off, can we mine at all or does mining then flag us as an intruder?  
 
They said we can flag who can enter the territory as well but anyone can enter it it just flags you intruder if you don't have permission.  Also if your not allowed to you can open doors either, so you have to attack them with weapons to destroy them....
 
So yes finding the TCU is going to be hard especially if we can place it anywhere we want and not be confined to the center of our tile.  Then getting to it is also going to be hard.  I think thats the point though it shouldn't be easy to go take someones territory.

What would happen if there would not be any intergalactic currency. Player-made currency is the healthiest.

the teritory and piracy thing could be something to note... if it hadnt been addressed already.
 
I can tell you now how much territory the largest orginazation will control, 0%. or the limit as X approaches it. Remember the universe is infinite. Someone have that teritory, move on.
Furthermore as JC stated, with there being no choke points it will be harder to control large territories. you can enter amd exit a given space from anywhere around a 3D sphere.
 
As for piracy, sure it will likely happen on trade routes, so what. Deal with it yourself thats the point of emergent game play.
 
I dont see where someone can control the market, or why it woulf matter. Everything is player made, meaning it comes from what you and others harvest. If no one controls all the teritory you can just mine yourself and make it, or make your own market elsewhere

nah, not really. IF you stay behind the borders, you can still trade within the faction or take hauler jobs, or mine asteroids and stuff You just can't expect to go into the dark territories between factions AKA, A WARZONE and expect to be fine.

I'm not entirely sure this hasn't been covered yet, but I did a search and nothing came up so I wanted to put this in here, a Material Quality system.
 
 
I really enjoyed using this system in past games like Earth & Beyond where all items that can be made by players or dropped from NPCs had a quality value. I believe this would be more appropriate for the Elements side of building but the voxel side could also apply this system.
 
Essentially, a player making an item for the first time will not make it 100% mastercrafted but instead be a rough item with reduced stats or capabilities because of the poor manufacture from a low skilled craftsman/woman. Where a player with exceptional crafting skills manufacturing that particular component would make something with much better stats/abilities and/or have a chance to build something unique with above average stats for it's type. Here is an example of how I see this working in DU:
 
Player develops his/her skills building components for something like a "smelter" for lack of a better word at the moment. This smelter will make metal ingots or rolls with a stat and structural quality slightly better than that of the smelter itself, providing the ability for player to one day use that smelter with the player now improved skills to make the parts for a better smelter that turns out better quality items. Thus encouraging players to better their skills to build better tools or machines to craft better components for better ship or building elements. Components built by a low skilled crafter but using high quality materials might have a slight edge over a component made by a high level crafter using poor quality materials
 
Players would be limited by both the skills they posses at the time and the quality of the tools used at that time, making a market just for professional tool crafters or manufactories crafters. This eventually flows down the line of even the big capital ships; if you have two identically designed ships, but both of different quality levels in the elements or the materials used in the construction process, the superior quality ship wins out with better stats, like power, armor HP, guns not jamming as often, etc. This would also really solidify the builders place in the game world as the time and effort to build these skills to qualities that people would buy, would make those players very attractive assets in player organizations. Player corporations would build a reputation on the quality of their products and not just the designs. And corporations would invest handsomely into having the highest quality forges, smelters, assemblers, and whatnot. Adding to the value of whichever city, station, or planet they set up shop on and attracting more businesses and settlers. Maybe even setting up training programs to help new players who wish to be builders find employment and a way to build up their own skills before striking it out to build they're own reputation.
 
Even if there was a PvP group who bought all of their ships and equipment on the market, having a few highly skilled builders or crafters to handle repairs or make only small replacement parts would be economically sound, instead of replacing whole ships with minor damage.
 
Ultimately, very skilled high level crafters would be prized in any organization and the keystones to building any company or empire. And when builders reach the highest limit of crafting skills, along with using the finest materials in the highest quality equipment would grant a fairly high RNG roll rate for exceptionally rare mastercrafted items that become parts of Legendary ships or stations.
 
Just my two cents.

or, you know, let people put some brain into it before buying a "legondary" ship worth of quality, only to realise the ship is made out of gold and has zero maneuverability whatsover. This "quality" mechanic is screaming "scamm tool" for some smarter people.

as long as its not easier to use those tools than weapons or explosives i have no issues with it, i mean if it takes someone 15 minutes to cut open my ship and 30 seconds to blow it open, let them cut.
 
but it all depends on how the mechanics balance stuff like this out. 

So I was thinking, what if I could use those hovercraft engines and have some kind rail to go with it and use it to make some kind of maglev/monorail system. Imagine an intercity train system that can remove ships off the sky and decrease air traffic. or at least have one going around your city to go places faster so now ships can stop crashing into your buildings. I don't know what do you think?