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Cheith

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Everything posted by Cheith

  1. Yeah - beta why one is putting out ideas - so, yeah beta. Who knows on how they store their 'holes' or missing voxels basically. As I mention above you could change it completely and remove 'holes' if you wanted - but I am pretty sure that is a major rework. Nothing needs megas and if ever there was a boring mining mechanic megas are it.
  2. I wouldn't argue with any of that but there are much better solutions that mega nodes. Mining should have some level of difficultly to it and mega nodes are not that - they are just an extremely tedious and boring lot of mouse clicking with basically no interruption. Now that makes mining extremely boring. Make the mining mini-game better, make fewer nodes with denser resources rather than lots of small nodes and a mega node; make the direction finding work at longer range - would certainly create less tunnels; if you do the automation make the ability to find the ores from the surface and set up your miners there - possibly no tunnels at all; lots of things could be done. None of them require mega nodes - indeed mega nodes may even get in the way.
  3. I parked my base on a semi-random tile on Alioth and it and the four nearest unoccupied tiles all had their mega node removed plus any big Tier 2 elements but all of them still had more than 1ML of ore left on them (one almost 2ML left). Just my experience. I am happy to mine them out - just personally think the focus on the mega nodes is harming the game. Not a fan of - but if we remove this X will leave argument - otherwise nothing would ever change because there is almost always someone who will leave if you change X.
  4. Right now people are obsessed with Mega Nodes just mining them out of a hex and moving on. By all means have variable amounts of ore per hex - all for that - just remove the huge single nodes in a hex so that folks actually have to move around a little and mine out the different kinds of ore. For whatever reason there is some bizarre idea that because there are less mega left nodes on Alioth the ore has run out and this is just crazy. Mega nodes give an unhealthy resource focus - kill them all!! Once we get automated mining this will be especially important.
  5. Either add copying and pasting of elements plus voxels or allow non-core blueprints. A number of things I have in my base are repetitions of the same voxel and element groupings and it would be great to either blueprint them or at least copy paste the voxels and elements. Right now I can only copy the voxels and can't keep that permanently somewhere without it being attached to a core. This is especially true (for me) for voxels + glass panes but would also be handy for replicating industry layouts and things like rooms in a base - you could even give out (or sell) blue prints for room layouts using this mechanism.
  6. Too late for me - but core/item swap in place would be great.
  7. this - and join up static cores so we can move industry stuff between them!!
  8. I'll slightly disagree with you on the mining thing - in the end the quickest way to burn out is the game making you do too much of something you don't enjoy to get to where you want to be. If mining is your thing then there is no reason why it is a burn out - unless of course maybe it is the only thing and that would be the issue. I did a bunch of complexes too - and certainly the top end ones were a different story but then most PvE players would neve see them as they are in, lets see, PvP spaces and running complexes where you can get ganked can be somewhat risky as then you have players plus rats - but that is somewhat off the point. PvP may be a joke in DU (don't know, not done it) but unless you like to build and tinker with things or set up factories just because you can as a break from mining (which fortunately for me I do) then PvE is pretty much a joke too.
  9. We get to shoot rocks And let's be honest if the PvE is like EVE rats then it is not that much different than shooting rocks unless you are careless!!
  10. Interesting - do they handle damage calculations the same way? If not then it is still a lot more work and then you have multiple layers of voxels. Obviously as one can't see the code only guessing!!
  11. EVE also has 'rats' to fund your PvP with - and in nullsec the rats can be pretty tasty.
  12. Nice - but the issue there is (as you probably know) that you then need to hire the graphics folks to work on that - and to do a good selection of assets is non-trivial. One of the reasons (imo) people go for player made content is that it is cheaper to build from a graphics perspective and in some ways you actually get a better variety of outcomes. Players also have different expectations for the look of ships they have made themselves as opposed to the supplied variety. I might just be overly cynical here, but I suspect not. You are probably also right on the 'other issues' - as I have said ad-nauseum building this type of game is definitely non-trivial on the server side of things. I work on moderately high throughput distributed server systems (5-10,000 events/second or so) so I have some idea of what they are dealing with but I think this, in real time, is just another challenge. Figuring out what the acceptable trade-offs are must be a nightmare in itself and then there are the whole host of network unknowns to deal with - especially for lag. Is the server bottlenecking, is it too much data for the client, did one if the ISPs get slow, is Level 3 having another bad day? Too many variables!!!
  13. Interesting - well I'm not surprised. Voxels are problematic and if you are going to treat each voxel individually in a battle then you have what you have. I suspect none of the other games have that particular issue. If all you are doing is broad surface calculations it is a lot easier and the rendering is a lot easier too so both the server and client load is significantly less. Glad I am not trying to solve this - it is certainly not going to be easy and, to be honest, I suspect you would have to ditch the whole voxel aspect of it to get acceptable performance in a large battle unless it was all done by radar. Most computers would struggle to render a large voxel battle, especially if it was the closer range battles people are asking for - assuming you could even get the data there fast enough and never mind the updates. I am wondering if the voxels actually need to be 'welded' into groups for this kind of activity so that they are no longer individual small entities but much larger single entities. Then you could do the more normal surface kind of damage calculations. Basically normalize the voxel surface. Anyway totally speculating. Been interesting and we'll certainly see what comes out of this.
  14. It was a question - what is the end goal. I get they are not there now but what the end point is makes a huge difference to how you design it. If the goal is small scale combat then you can design it for some level of player skill based activity and probably active projectiles when it is finished. If your goal is EVE like epic battles then likely not a chance of any player skills involved other than trained skills - lock and fire would likely be it .
  15. I am not after top tier gains - I don't think mining any ore is a top tier gain and I don't think exploring the various worlds is a tp tier gain either. I am not even sure from a builder/manufacturer perspective if top tier is even meaningful. Economics wise maybe in terms of money gained - but then a good industrialist should always out earn all the PvP players in the game as PvP should not really be profitable except for the very few who avoid getting blown up regularly. One of the reasons most games have 'rats' is so the bulk of the PvP players can earn some cash to rebuild their ships. Your average builder/miner will not wish to play the role of the 'rat'. I would argue (there is a shock ) that PvP has a very small life in civilization building. Relative speaking it is there at the start but then it gets 'regularized' into armies, etc. So yes and no. Not the free-wheeling PvP of ambushing haulers - that gets relegated t a few pirates - but the PvP of pitched battles would still exist. In that scenario you know where the war zones are and maybe you have issues going there while there is an active war but in peace time not so much. Let me rephrase - unregulated PvP is anathema to civilizations. Probably and I certainly had few issues in EVE when I wanted to skulk around and there is always the don't fly what you can't afford to lose theory. My big issue tends to be the inconsistency of views (imo) - one sentence civilization the next randomly blowing stuff up. It just doesn't mesh. Frankly in the games I have played with PvP in them if it is not well controlled (and I consider EVE well controlled) you just end up with a cesspit. Played one or two PvP centric games with the promises of player controlled/managed this and that and it didn't happen - it just degenerates to a griefers paradise until it implodes. Don't get me wrong, though, if I am kitted out for combat and looking to fight something or going somewhere I should not then I have no issues losing a ship. It is not that. I just don't want that to be the default for any interesting content. We shall see what happens - as I have said before if it works out then great, if it doesn't well it is one game in a crowded market of games, though to be fair not too many like this in terms of the building and creative aspect - plenty of other shoot it games though.
  16. You should read the terms and conditions for things like Kickstarter - it is all best effort. The other part in the funding game is that new money always trumps old money - having gone through that particular aspect of things before it was quite educational! I understand. Not worried about it - we are all entitled to have forum discussions. In the end whether they make any difference is questionable. I am always interested to hear the other side even if I don't agree with it. Maybe part of the issue is the loose definition. As I have said I personally don't feel any significant non-PvP content should be locked behind PvP activities. I want to be able to roam around the galaxy if I choose, I want to mine whatever ore I want to mine, and I want to build wherever I want to build without someone turning up and deciding they want to shoot me for reasons of their own. Now, as always, there are compromises to be made but you have to start somewhere and if you start with the compromise it is never where you end up. One, for example, might be high end ores that are only ever used for highest tech weapons and ammunition could be in a PvP zone - I would be fine with that assuming we don't have NPCs to shoot and even then you rarely need the best to kill NPCs. I don't feel the civilization part is meaningful or even thought out as some kind of PvP counter. There would need to be mechanics as civilizations are the opposite of PvP anarchy. In civilizations you put the PvP in arenas, charge money for watching it, and allow people to gamble on the result. Now that would be something I would support - whole lot of game play around that!!
  17. I guess my question is what your acceptable level of scale is - is it EVE scale with 1000 vs 1000? Or is it a couple of dozen? This does get important as you even try and build it and whether or not you are calculating trajectories for potentially 100,000s of objects if there is travel time for the objects (which in the skill version there would be). I understand the predictive side, but that would not work for intersections of ship/projectile if you get your skill based option - the last minute twitch would never work - but as you say it is a trade-off. I am also not sure, from what is said, whether or not any of this predictive stuff is client side - I would hope not as that is where the cheating comes in and it always done. Client side code is the easy way to shed a lot of calculation effort but sadly all players cannot be trusted to play fairly and there really is no good way of stopping it (just making it more difficult). Also client side anything is a great desync route.
  18. No, I do get it, but sometimes you just feel like feeding the trolls. As I have said numerous times I am not discussing the existence of PvP just the implementation of PvP and how it interacts with the rest of the game - which you seemed to miss at least in your above comment. Paying my money entitles me to voice my opinion (as I said). Whether that influences the direction of the game or not is out of my hands and I know that and did not claim otherwise. It is, in that respect, no different from your opinion. The harking back to Kickstarter does amuse me though - a five year old marketing presentation and general direction for a game is, while instructive, not necessarily a definitive guide on where one will end up. Five years is a lot of time and many things change. Assuming there are other private equity investors now involved they will have a lot more say on what happens than anything in the Kickstarter pledge.
  19. Not sure it really matters how fast auto-mining is. Unless you happen to sit your autominer on a mega node most mining time is spent getting to the next node anyway. Casual players will not be sitting on mega nodes most likely so I doubt it will really make that much difference to the market - it will just let you do something else while the node is mined. Now, if we are completely changing how mining works - no mode nodes or something - then maybe it makes sense. Then the question is what does manual mining look like?
  20. It is interesting. The MMO industry standard is definitely to favor the long term player over the newcomer and I think you ignore that at your peril, but I do have some sympathy for the natural skill angle (even though I will never be that person). In my opinion you would ideally make the skills compensate certain things to simulate an 'experience' advantage but not to the extent that it would completely negate natural skill. Things like the g-force would be a 'trained' skill but then if the system can cope with point and shoot then that maybe just stays pure skill based. The hard part of the technology as you scale up though is certainly things like dynamic projectile calculations. If you get a big battle that could be a problem. I suspect that is partly the reason why they have what they have. I would also say, not even including space, large ships tend to not be line of sight when fighting - just look at battleships in WW2 never mind what happens today. This is supposed to be advanced tech. Pretty much any Sci-fi book would have you fighting at thousands if not tens of thousands of miles (at least) apart!! Still interesting discussion - hard trade offs to be sure.
  21. As far as I can tell I am perfectly entitled to try and change what has not yet been implemented. I pay my money, I get to voice my opinions and have forum discussions. If you don’t like it maybe you should avoid the forum. As to what was advertised I have seen opinions that are different from yours. In the end it is still a game - I’ll play it while I enjoy it and stop when I don’t whether there is PvP or not. My time may just be shorter if it impinges on my gameplay.
  22. Now that is quibbling - there is no traditional instancing in the game where you can have different views of the 'universe' depending on what shard you are on. An instance in of itself implies that there are multiple copies of a single 'template' (much as in object oriented programming) each with their own distinct data. If we have to quibble on details. So, technically, EVE does not have instancing. EVE has multiple servers sharing a single very custom RDBMS - not the same thing at all. From what I remember an EVE server hosted a variable number of solar systems depending on their expected population. One of the reasons why the GMs typically wanted to know where large battles were going to occur so that they could pre-set those particular systems up.
  23. Do you even know what a single shard is? All it means is that there are no instances. It has nothing to do with game mechanics at all. You can box PvP into a single hex in the entire game and it would still be a single shard. Geez.
  24. Ah wormholes - largely after my time. I was out of nullsec by the time they arrived so no help to me. There were also no tools to tell you who was camping what then either. At the time I originally went in there was an alliance that didn't shoot everyone on sight and that is how we got in and helped them out on occasion in return. By the time I was finished they were gone.
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