Wicpar

if you talk about bad crafting systems, yes, else we are more like helping discovering new molecules, and possibly reinvent starlite.

i agree unavailability of damaged components is too harsh because it can happen all the time. Maybe do a system in eve, where you can increase power in exchange of damage, or add repair modules that use resources to maintain broken components in a running state, so using broken components uses a lot of materials, and then if you don't have anymore, they stop running, this can give you the time to get out of battle or replace them manually.

i want a hand held one use laser canon to punch through 10 meters of steel to board a ship

i think repairing physical voxel damage by hand is ridiculous because that precision is non-achievable... what should exist is a repair dock to repair damage according to the cores blueprint, and will replace defective components, and possibly send the damaged ones to some bay where you can recycle/repair them.

i agree if we can have control over it: like a stat, determined by build quality and skill.

Hello, In DU there is a lot of potential. Despite being a sci-fi game, DU can have a lot of scientific material in it, and this is what it is about: add science based mechanics, that could potentially be used to do IRL research. The mechanic is simple in concept, but adds a ton of complexity to the game. All material crafting should be done with material combinations or chemical reactions (material combinations being alloys, assembly etc...) chemical reactions would be made in a chemical reactor, where you input molecules in certain proportions, and it outputs the realistic output. during that process, it either absorbs or emits heat according to this concept that can either be used to produce or needs energy to work. different energy levels can mean different outputs. the crafting system would be quite like in reality: you get the ore, crush it to improve reaction speed and efficiency, put it in a chemical reactor to extract your wanted material into a solution, extract that material from the solution in another reactor, let it dry to get a powder of it, and melt it in case it is a metal (last step not required, but needed to use it as block). Additionally, that would allow for scientific like discovery of compounds in the game (it is to decide if it remains fictional or is realistic to cooperate with material research labs irl). if we go with the scientific discovery one, a physical simulation of the reaction will be made on 3 of the client's computers, so it can be validated. all three of them will get a reward for it: the compounds but also the rights of exploitation in case of discovery. these mechanics should be worked on a bit more tho. I hope this makes it into the game as it would make it quite educational if not a benefit for science, and would add the required complexity to the game to make it worth specializing in such fields. EDIT: how would these new compounds interact with the mechanics: 1: they can be used for further reactions 2: have their IRL properties 3: if 2 is non existent, as if not discovered, it will deduct its properties from composition of the groupings it is composed of (like all alcohol molecules will burn, or will have the color, or be explosive etc...) globally each molecule has different stats. In crafting, you do not need a specific molecule, you need a molecule grouping, for instance for fuel you can use any carbon chained atom, and the more the molecule has carbon atoms in it the more power it will produce when used as fuel. Procedural texturing could be used to generate the alloy textures depending on the impurities and compositions of alloys, and on the colored molecule groupings.

not even industrialcraft will do. not even gregtech. what will probably do the best is thermalExpansion and its popular addons. ThermalExpansion does that thing where every machine is based on a chassis and that chassis has different tiers (in DU the number should be infinite) each machine can then have different stats depending on the chassis (the better the chassis the better the stats) than you have a certain amount of upgrade slots that let you specialize in certain domains, and you can use upgrades of a certain tech level with chassis same level or higher.

I agree that building a ship should be a difficult enterprise, but not a frustrating one. A way to do it would be to add aerodynamics, which would require quite a bit of aerodynamics calculations/testing to be able to launch a flyer in the atmosphere. Alternatively, space thrusters could be 100% electric but would not give enough force to liftoff from the surface, thus requiring to use a fueled thruster that requires chemical manipulation and some ammount of of skill to build and fuel. that point passed, you would require a material only found on asteroids, but commonly, to be able to build higher tier electrical thrusters to be able to lift off from a planets surface.

Hello, I would like to streass a point about hardness. there are two kinds of hardnesses: hardness on factors you cannot interact with, hardness on factors you can interact with. The first would be rarity of a material, that has many usefull uses. This makes the game frustrating as you cannot interfere in it, this is the bad kind of difficult. The second would be the complexity of the production chain and its optimisation. this makes the game frustrating in itself, but if the production chain is very simple to make, but very complex to make an efficient one, then it is fun because you have a sense of interaction and progression. these are nuances that discern a good from a bad game.

Maybe building a chassis around the area you want to be able to buld a ship in would result in that, like the star trek ones.

yes, ok, well i agree, but how would you carry those then? use non physical transfer with a object transfer spacedock? a teleporter you have to have? maybe that is better than restricting the building, the trnsport being restricted would make a lot more sense: you would have different tiers of cargo bay that can hold different volumes, and then you can use a teleporter that can itself move a maximum mass in newton at a maximum range (both stats independently modifiable depending on research/material/template used.) and then when you build you need a ship with the component in transporter range.

i believe you should be able to make a 200 km long wood plank without needing a shipyard... What in reality would stop you from building anything in space? nothing. because size doesn't matter in space (it matters on the planets surface tho even if some whales tell you otherwise). but it seems you meant in module size, this could add up with my idea of scale as a stat (that can be changed by the producer) and would be quite intuitive, but you will never be able to make that 2km laser from the death star with that system, unless the size grows in the Fibonacci sequence, or exponentially.

they did show it with the big station if my memory is correct.

i think there is a very simple way to balance it: you can make copies of the blueprint of your ship only if it doesn't match at 75% with the original one (assuming you bought it). that is quite simple to do as you just have to overlay the voxel grid and compare. when you create a blueprint, you cannot finish creation as long as it is 75%+ similar to another design, or be left without being able to make the blueprint. Two ships distincltly made will almost never have more than 10-20% similarity when overlaying grids (unless they use a ton of armor at the same places but that should be unwelcomed)

i dont see another way to achieve this reasonably without having a tier system where only tier 0 modules (meshes) can be placed by hand, and then need an anchor module from the tier or over the components you want to place.

i dislike having the space stations to be different than ships. An easy solution would be to have a construction module that requires the ship to be still and having no weapons/thrusters/defenses online to be able to build a space station. It would work like an anchor, and once it's done it would release the station. such module would be exponentially expensive the higher tier the components get.

pre alpha decisions may not stand forever

withe the script system they plan i doubt people will stop at a ship. it will be one man fleets, that can be controlled purely with scripts you buy on market.

your points are good, make repairing readily available, but at a cost of drones/modules, and enable building only while landed on the surface or docked at a spaceport, or when disabling all power sources which disables the ship. What i would like to see too is the merging of voxels: you can slam together two voxels, thus allowing to void-weld things together in space (could be prohibited with a deflector module). this would allow to do this: or do something like merge blocks.

nope it wasn't

here are some early drawings of my ship designs, quite complex, i'm not sure if i'll be able to handle them...:

the likely thing that will happen is that only the arkship will be instanced, but the surroundings that are not will be seamlessly blended in, thus allowing everyone to start off with the same things, and have a safe heaven (could only join on invite).

DU already explained that by telling us they do texture+mesh baking to optimize the efficiency of the rendering. every time a voxel is changed, only the relevant polygons and textures are modified, thus keeping it quite fast.

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 )

DU already has a some amount of tools that you can see in their building demo, that allow you to make many shapes.