Violet
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Posts posted by Violet
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Presumably to mine deep into the planet is going to require digging out a lot of rock and dirt, that needs to go somewhere and refining ores should not be a 100% efficient it should produce a waste slag at least at lower tech levels so that after a few days of operation you are going to have to start dumping waste into the world or build warehouses to store all of your junk.
Burning coal and running refineries could create pollution as well that works like an expanding area that changes the colour of grass and makes the ground less fertile if there is going to be farming
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He means the territory claims.
Devs stated there would be a Territory Unit that would have to be protected, so if a territory had been abandoned eventually the shield/energy would run out so it would be vulnerable and someone could break in an destroy the TU.
We dont't know how expensive TU are going to be but I suspect that most territories would be controlled by medium to large organisations due to the cost, maintenece and defense required to keep them going. I suspect individuals will either build bases in the wild and try and keep them hidden or rent space in an organisations territory.
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If you have realistic g forces that's going to put serious limitations on how fast you can accelerating which will make intrasolar travel boring as hell hope everyone is prepared for multi hour trips to the moon
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Also when you build a station you can only place the static core module if you are in a orbit that does not go below the atmosphere and once deployed you cant knock it out of orbit either by accelerating it or crashing into it. As much as it would be cool to see an 8km ship crash into a city I think it would be game breaking
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You don't have to realistically simulate gravity to create realistic orbital mechanics. Yes if you wanted ships and stations to exert gravity on each other it would be a huge problem.
You could have the planets and moons on a fixed orbital track and rotations and then have ships just be effected by the closest planet they are near to (or the nearest star between planets), other ships and other planets would have no effect. With just one source of gravity simulating and predicting the course of the ship would be easy for the servers.
If you have a construct that is not accelerating just in an orbit that is stable you would not have to physically simulate the ship or send updates to clients you can predict for any future time exactly where it will be.
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Could do some handwaving with a magic hand (ha!) replicator. Your on person inventory is converted to energy on stored in your battery (I haven't thought this fully through).
Another point in low gravity you can store more mass because the weight is the same. And zero gravity you can store as much mass as you want, acceleration becomes more challengine though.
I think for the suit inventory it should have some sort of multiplier effect, say that if you put 100kg in your back pack it only counts as say 10% so effectively 10kg so you could theoretically lift several tons in 1g but there should be a limit otherwise people will abuse this and transport huge amounts in the suit inventories.
This is a balance issue that will have to be tweaked until a good middle ground is found.
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I would really love proper orbital mechanics.
I think the technical problems that dev's mentioned is that in games you need to have an absolute system of measuring somethings positions if the ground is moving then everything is moving every tick and players and constructs are jumping across world partitions all the time creating huge server load.
What you need is to have zones where position is measured relative to the biggest thing (large ship, space station, planet), this is what games like KSP do with their spheres of influence. So in the planetary zone the planet is static and any thing not moving is static and unmoving and the rest of the universe is moving.
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Really tricky, swarms of drone ships would be so OP it could ruin the game but I'm not sure how it would actually play out.
Making a bot that can fire at the nearest hostile target is one thing but being able to use tactics and defeat intelligent players without glitching out and falling in random ways is a really hard proposition especially without perfect information.
What is possible and what is practical really depends on the APIs that NQ decide to grant players. Having a script that makes a ship move is useless unless it has a
destination, knows its position in the world and has plan to get there.
Writing efficient code to do path finding is super hard in a cell based game like minecraft where you can "see" the world in terms of block type at x,y,z.
IRL You would need
- Radar/ladar system to gather relative world telemetry
- Positioning system, so it knows its current location
- Complex programming that build a "model" of the world that learns where things are from its imperfect vision of the world
If I was EQ I would be very cautious about introducing new LUA API functionality, you cant really restrict movement controls but I would be very cautious about giving DPU too much information about the game world and I would defiantly include some sort CPU limits/costs that makes it worth writing more efficent code.
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Taking over long abandoned bases or salvaging debris from space battles should both be valid strategies, it would reward players for exploring.
It should never be impossible to attack someones base outside the the safe zone but it should be sufficiently hard that people who haven't pissed off a major faction can feel relatively safe once they have built an energy shield. The energy required to take down a shield should be a lot more than it takes to power it.
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This aspect is one of those things that is going to have to changed based on how players actually use it. Its an exciting game feature but it potentially very over powered.
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You can explain any sort of system with sci fi hand waving the main point is to strike the balance between fun and challenge. My feeling is that how its described in the lore piece is a bit "easy" if you can carry massive quantities of material in your suit and produce anything via magic there is going to be little challenge
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I don't like the idea of things decaying, but out in the world away from safe space there would be scavengers and enough people playing bandit that anything that doesn't have some sort of (powered) shield or defensive system will not last long unsupervised.
Its a real toss up between realism and "fun", I do think that people should have some security when they log out, even if its automated defenses.
Around the arks there is going to be some sort of safe zone so presumably there will be some sort of land management that gives you rights to build and you are totally safe.
In less civilized space people will pull together to create secure places. Sci-fi equivalent of self-storage
you keep everything in a hanger guarded by local organisations. Its safe from pirates but if a full on faction war breaks out you are out of luck and might loose your stuff.Going way out into the depths of space should be scary and risky as hell without back up or a really good plan.
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I think the game should restrict onfoot weight only in so much that it effects player fatigue but is still fairly generous. On ships you can put as much mass in ship inventories as you like so long as it fits the volume (m^3) of ships inventory elements (just a number) but the flip side is it makes your ship really heavy and you will need to use more fuel/accelerate slowly/not be able to get off the ground.
There is a huge range in densities and there is a fairly (at least there could be) consistent correlation between value and density. Ships that carry ore or water or other common metals will very differently designed to ships transporting valuable parts or refined rare metals like iridium or gold.
http://www.simetric.co.uk/si_materials.htm
Another bonus is that it will make pirate getaways interesting as your nimble space fighter turns into an overloaded shopping trolly, and jetsoning your heavy cargo might be a good tactic if you could out run them otherwise.
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How are inventories going to be limited in game?
How much will I be able to store in my ship or my suit?.
This has huge implications on game play, on one hand you could make it totally realistic you can only carry like 20kg of anything in your backpack. like in real life or you can go the minecraft route and be able to carry 300 million tones of gold if you fill every slot with a 64 stack of gold blocks.
Since you don't control the creation of ships you need to put design constraints on ships, I suggest that items should have a realistic mass and density, want to ship 300 hundred tons of ore? You should have to craft a sizeable "cargo bay element" that would be big enough to hold the volume and mass of your construct would change based on how much was stored in that inventory at any time.
Cargo ships should have to be massive to be economically viable in terms of profit margins versus fuel costs. Slow lumbering ships should be more vulnerable to pirates and when the individual cargo bay elements are damaged they should drop their contents as 1 dimensional sprites a'la minecraft
Stations would have to be massive sprawling constructs with huge enclosures for cargo bays that service the market place. Major planetary settlements would have a reason to have large structures apart from vanity houses and public art (not that they cant be both). There could be a mechanic where if you get close enough on foot to a pod you can scan it to find out whats in it, so you attempt a break in or blasting it from space.
Refining should be "realistic" in that it should be slow and require massive (and vulnerable) refineries (at least to get the best efficiency), and have waste products that need to be disposed of even if its just dumping slag piles everywhere, similar deal with building elements and other products.
Really excited about this game, I have enjoyed the Dev diaries. I'm really interested in "systems based" approaches to game design as that is how you create great emergent situations. Two of my favorite games of the last couple of years RimWorld and Prison Architect are based on this idea and I'm really pleased to imagine it in a multiplayer environment.
Balancing this game is going to really tricky, make things too realistic and people will not want to play but make it "fun" in the wrong way and you will have real problems with economics and the individual power of a new player versus an established veteran or everyone would get super rich and not have to do anything
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I want to build a frontier trade outpost and saloon. It would be cool to bring people together in game and start a township on the edge of explored territories and watch it grown and progress overtime, fighting off bandits and eventually developing our own customs and politics.
The way I see it, without NPCs or fast travel the only place to get equipment will be the ark and the only place to get resources will be the frontier, people will be forced to work together or spend hours and hour hauling inventories of unrefined ore back to the auction houses at the ARK.
- elDunco, Anonymous and GalloInfligo
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LUA - Factories, Automatic conveyor systems and Nukes!
in Builder Forum
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Good day to you too
I really hope what you are saying is true, ever play Factorio or Buildcraft MC. Would be amazing to have to plan out logistics and have it require skill to be efficient.